Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West (10 page)

Kieślowski was a very prominent European filmmaker, to the extent that this cycle was shown in its entirety on UK TV. But much more present was actually his post-communist cycle, 1990s
Three Colours
, foreign co-productions partly made in France. In fact, they watched exactly the way I imagined
Dekalog.
They depicted Europe post-catastrophe in a much less realistic, less socially engaged, gritty or specific way and in a more metaphorical and in the end, sentimental manner, in the name of the three slogans of the French
Revolution. It was a clear sign that in the new postcommunist Europe we can focus on different problems. In
Blue
we even have a composer, who creates a ‘Symphony for Europe’, in practice the cruelly kitschy music of Kieślowski’s court composer Zbigniew Preisner.

Yet the Black Cinema made its return when the post-89 economic crisis took its effect. Today, its role is taken by the Romanian New Wave and a new generation of Russian directors.
Chernukha
lives and lives well in the contemporary Russia as crime stories, TV serials and novels. It must be said that on surface they strongly confirm the status Russia has abroad: as the country of mafia, crime, cruelty, violence, the abuse of women. But on the other hand, they’re often a social critique of the post-Soviet interregnum and dehumanisation, with in the end a strange relishing of it. From the
Bandit Petersburg
crime stories by Alexandra Marinina, to the political, postmodern SF by Vladimir Sorokin and Viktor Pelevin, and films like the two parts of
Brother
, the comedy-horror
Night Watch
(Nocnyi Dozor) and
Day Watch
(Dnevnyi Dozor), to the Sorokin-scripted
4
, by Ilya Khrzanovsky, where Russia is shown as an endlessly dark, dystopian,
Stalker-esque
post-industrial zone, a society where pigs and young women are cloned for consumption and shady political goals, evoking lost urban myths, especially Lysenkoism and the USSR’s ‘war on nature’.
Stalker
itself, not ‘officially’ set in Russia, is a kind of
chernukha
which disavows it. It managed to create a wholly original phenomenon taking only from the Russian traditions, yet remaining extremely attractive to the (also Western) viewer, partly because it indulges our stereotypical view of Russia.

In the film
Nirvana
(2008), a retro-futurist tale of two heroin-addict girls from Petersburg, the new Russia is a hallucinatory, deadly, tough country easily claiming lives. Shot in the flamboyant aesthetic of the 80s New Wave revival, it is in keeping with the ethos of the ‘Piter’ punk scene, recalling the times of the USSR, where the youth subcultures were a shield against the system. In
the new Russia, pervaded by crime and death, what matters is a shot of the drug, a short but certain euphoria, and friendship evolving between those abandoned by the state.
4
goes further – it’s a fantasy about biological mutation, a fantasy of both Soviet closed ‘science towns’, where experiments are carried out, and the new anxieties of the free market, where a human becomes just a pack of meat.

Chernukha
dominated Polish cinema throughout the 80s and 90s, but it was hard to say whether the brutalization, visible poverty, corruption and violence presented on the screen were a result of a conscious artistic concept, or simply a document of the country’s cinematography falling apart. The 1980s especially were full of malfunctioning youth institutions: families, schools, borstals. We had drug films in the type of
Christiane F.
, on young people taking specially contaminated heroin, so called ‘kompot’. Sinister, dejected dramas about youth drug addiction, prostitution, derailment, lack of scruples, violence and the general feeling of the world falling down, a dramatic poverty combined with the black market, gave the grim effect that “everything can be purchased for a penny”. The youth fall down most dramatically, as the young generation is usually the one that is experimenting the most with their lives.

It was the time of biggest social zombiefication. In
Cargo 200
, telling a story from the 80s, a brutal political satire and horror movie at the same time, women are raped and beaten to death, while human remains coming en masse from Afghanistan in coffins, help smuggle drugs. The gathering horror in the movie was a conscious act against a growing nostalgia of the USSR, but it was hard to say, if it wasn’t also the accusation against the current system.
Cargo 200
started a discussion in Russia about the interpretation of the 80s. If we recall films of this era anywhere, it was sinister also on the other side: proleification of cinema, rise to prominence of directors like Mike Leigh, and not far away the grim trip-hop and new kind of cheap drugs, especially the ‘brown
sugar’ kind of heroin. To this Polish hip-hop also responded, especially Kaliber 44 and Paktofonika, two short-lived acts who lived in the proletarian suburbs of the Silesian city Katowice, whose leader killed himself at 22. Today their legend has come back as a story of Polish social transformation in a grim social biopic
You Are God
(2012), also shown in the UK.

Who are we then, and how could the ex Bloc have taken its chances after ’89? What were the alternatives? Which way could we have gone? Many of the new ways of thinking about public space after the end of the Cold War we owe, as many other things, to Germany. After the reunification, there was insistence on and political programmes stressing the building of new “spaces of memory”, which were to be devoted to the ‘mutual’ history of West and East Germany. In this, already the ‘post-ideological’ trend was brought to the public. A prolific “architecture of memory” in Berlin remodelled the city purged by war, demolishing old and setting up the new buildings, in so doing created a logorrhoea of signs, a new center that had to fill the space full of voids, and the memory of Nazism still contained in the pre-war buildings. Yet, what the new authorities of Berlin did was to get rid of the memory of the DDR first.

When radically rebuilding its representational spaces, in 2002 the German Bundestag (itself, with its transparent copula designed by Norman Foster, an aesthetic just as much as political statement standing as the symbol of the New Germany) decided to demolish the 1976 DDR symbol Palast der Republik and in its place reconstruct three facades of the baroque 18
^th
century Andreas Schluter Hohenzollern Palace. Though the demolition took place, the reconstruction still hasn’t occurred due to lack of money. The Schlossplatz, still a void in the capital center, symbolizes divided German attitudes.

The last two years of protest, the Indignados/15M movement, were significantly more active in the western part of Europe, despite being still more affluent. Yet it’s interesting to see how Berlin, a city among the most politically active, with a long tradition of protest, behaved in this. Attending several Berlin demonstrations, including the May Day, it struck me how ritualized and predictable they were. Organized mostly by the antifascist/anarchist movements, current Berlin’s culture of protest seems misguided and abortive, just as the recent ‘anti-hipster’ movement comprised locals (often also imported, but pregentrification), who blame international creatives and ‘hipsters’ for gentrifying their city. Their theatrically aggressive demonstrations can be compared to student demos in London, which were peaceful, but met with brutal police methods, with the famous ‘kettling’ for hours and truncheons.

1.9 The wall by the Gdańsk Shipyards comemmorating the 1980 strikes. Above it, rising is the new European Solidarity Center, with auto-rusting symbolic facade

One of the reasons for that may be mishandled mythologization of Berlin, which is currently bringing more damage than good to the conditions in which politics can be made. As its public space has been neutralized since reunification, Eastern memory has been
all-but-wiped out in what is in most respects an Eastern city. An inconvenient capital, it has become an illustration of a model post modern city, where ‘past wounds’ were to be evoked by architecture, not left as wounds. The two palaces– two memories competition took a different turn, when the DDR curiosity was provoked by such films as
Goodbye Lenin
though. It’s partly the hedonism of Berlin, the 90s party mood, in which the hedonists would precisely side against demolishing the DDR “eyesore”. Against this is the recent politics of the city, which stopped seeing the clubs as a magnet good enough for the investors and recently is known for letting the most famous clubs shut down.

It’s time Eastern Man felt dignified again, for decades identified with what is the worst about civilization, without shame for what has been. Yet memory is a monster that goes its own peculiar ways. One of the reasons we didn’t quite ‘get over’ communism yet (it keeps coming back in our debates, if only negatively) can be found in the popularity of various parks devoted to the relics of iconography of communism. On one hand, despite those relics, we get the appraisal for our good behavior – you were naughty, but look at you now, you got rid of the old symbols, now you’ve got membership in the EU, a capitalist economy – maybe you’ll eventually even be like one of us.

Poland is one of the few countries that resisted the temptation of establishing a Park of Memory, unlike nearly every post-communist country: there’s Szoborpark in Budapest; Grutas Park near Vilnius, Park of Fallen Memorials in Moscow. They enjoy ambivalent, yet stable tourist interest, yet in the latter the whole idea seems strange, as Moscow to this day has gotten rid of few of its memorials, save for Comrade Stalin. In Poland we have no major Museum of Communism. Does this mean we got over it, or rather that our recent history has been erased?

One could analyze this by comparing the political activity in the post-2008 crisis around Europe. There’s no doubt that my generation, born in the early 80s, were among the most depoliticized – we
were born around the era where the biggest popular dissents were brutally crashed around the world. Solidarity in Poland, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua or the miners in the UK, they were all part of the same popular rebellion against the crashing of the post-war consensus. The recent wave of protests is very unusual, and not accidentally is done by people younger than the 80s generation. This younger protest is mostly untouched by nostalgia, although in any of the groups protesting in Moscow, Petersburg, Ljubljana or Zagreb you could probably find both people interested and disinterested in the past. The fight is the most vivid in the areas where, for historical reasons, the left and communism were less suppressed and are less an object of trauma, like in ex-Yugoslavia.

In his 1996 book
Twilight Memories, Mapping the culture of Amnesia
, the German critic Andreas Huyssen is trying to sum up what was left after the transitional time of 1989-1991. He observes an increase of the work around ‘memory’, which, not surprisingly revolves around maintaining amnesia. Until today, we talk endlessly of the past, but the wrong parts of the past, we could say. This growth of the post-history in the world has increased, interestingly, since the early 1980s, which you could attribute both to postmodernism and neoliberalism. Years of patrimony, devoted to specific events or artists commemorated usually in the most safe, ‘heritage’ way paved the way to something we know today as “Keep Calm and Carry On” austerity nostalgia, retrograde aesthetics and heritage culture. This waning of the notion of history and denial of historical consciousness, partly a result of the Fukuyama ‘end of history’, is standing in shocking contrast to the current reality of the crisis, with daily news about the economic collapses of countries.

Widespread debates about cultural heritage, and the compulsory plans for a museum (of modern art, of memory, of war) show we are haunted by another loss that may come. It was Adorno who wrote on the “freezing of memory in the commodity form”, which provokes this weird amnesia. Huyssen is suspicious
of the German left voicing their fear about the “unreconstructed easterners”. Yet it’s true that the demise of the DDR was a “revolution without the revolutionaries”, therefore it didn’t have elites who could after the unification take up the discussion with the politicians from West Germany. How different it looked in Poland. Was Poland harder to bring down because we had so many prominent anti-communists and strong opposition?

Huyssen’s book is an already prophetic insight into the future of Europe. The popularity of museums we observe today is yet another aspect of that cult of memory, but strangely enough, only the memory that is suitable for the authorities and the leading intellectual current. Huyssen focuses on Germany and observes how in East Germany, unlike in Poland or Czechoslovakia, there’s a lack of discussion over the ‘civil society’ among the ex-East German intellectuals, who gave up their task of democracy and civil society. Also, the extensive Stasi surveillance and the short period of opposition makes the transition different than in Poland. In 1991 the mood of nostalgia kicked in - on one hand, there were those mourning social security and demise of social regulations that used to cover every aspect of life. On the other there’s the nostalgia of intellectuals, who still unrepentantly believe communism was a better way to organise the state. They often were the same who were criticizing the limitations of the ‘really existing socialism’. In Germany more than anywhere because of unification, there emerged the notions of underdevelopment.