Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West (11 page)

From the Eastern-Western battles over memory, we see how the ‘new’, posttransitional version of history triumphed over the real memories of the place or even the people who used to live and work there. If there’s a place in the post-communist Poland in which we can see in a nutshell the results of the capitalist transition and which is currently suffering similar ‘museification’ at the cost of the real people who live there, it’s the Gdansk Shipyards, the legendary site where the union Solidarity was started, and then, as it is told in every history book, eventually overthrew communism.
As we speak, a great museum is being built there, in the vast, so called ‘post-industrial’ space. The shipyards were privatized, asset stripped and gradually sold to foreign investors, who very recently ultimately stopped the very small ship production. Now a great EU-financed building grows there, designed in corten steel, which is to create a ‘living monument’ – designed to look like a rusting ship, which is supposed to be surrounded by hypermarkets and entertainment edifices, now halted because of lack of money.

Just like the other crucial ‘spaces of memory’, the International Solidarity Center is designed to evoke the melancholy of disappearance by its very form. But isn’t it too much, one may say, given that it not only symbolizes the disappearance of work and of the industry, but also of the hands that used to put them into motion? The district around the building is among the most deprived and poorest in the whole of Gdansk, the Lower City, with people living in rotting, dissolving council flats from 70s. It’s a strange thing with memory these days, where the more we focus on artificial concepts, the easier it is for us to neglect the existence of real people.

Where does central/eastern Europe exactly lie? Already when trying to describe its name, we have a problem, before even starting to try to determine its geographical leanings. For central-eastern Europeans, before the World Wars there were often hardly such things as nations. When in the 1930s there was a census carried out on the Polish lands, the answer to the question of ‘Nationality’ was nowhere near certain: when asked to put ‘Nation’, the largest amount declared ‘Polish’, but many declared Jewish, Ukrainian, Ruthenian, Belarussian, and about 15% said simply that their nationality was ‘from here’ - a story often repeated by Eric Hobsbawm, the German-Jewish-English historian, a lifelong enemy of national categories. For Jews especially, the question of nationality was a question of their being or not being – particularly in Berlin, the largest city in central-eastern Europe. At least since the Weimar period, Berlin had a reputation as a capital of moral dégringolade: analysing the literature, pulp fiction and iconography of that era, one comes across a place that is pestilent, ridden with poverty and crime, a swarm of lust, murder and decay. At the same time, Nazism rises, offering the so-desired simple explanations for the visible decline. It’s the Jews, and the Jews come from the East.

2.1 Concrete desert. A view from the Stasi HQ in East Berlin.

Still, the eastern part of any city is regarded a less attractive, poorer and is usually the more squalid and neglected one. In the Weimar Republic, one of the most popular stories within the expressionist period was
Nosferatu:
a decaying living dead being, who comes from nowhere else, but – the geographical east. That was after centuries of Germanic conquest of the east, the so-called
Drang nach Osten
, in which the Teutonic Knights, under the banner of Christianization, occupied and brutally conquered the eastern tribes, and to which, to a degree, Hitler referred in the Generalplan Ost – the Nazi plan to be implemented after the war, where Poland
and Soviet Union were to be ethnically cleansed and populated by Germans. Since the Weimar period Berlin was subjected to contradicting narratives. On one side: the blatant anti-Semitism, the Nazi aesthetics of
Der Sturmer
, anti-modernism, Entartete Kunst. On the other: Neue Sachlichkeit and the vicious caricatures and photomontages of Georg Grosz and John Heartfield, at the same time trying to promote socialist culture with the help of socialist newspapers like
Arbeiter-Illustierte-Zeitung
, whose caricatures and photomontages became the symbol of that time, and an alternative to the Nazi racism and pseudo-socialism. Berlin was never to shake off this schizophrenia, which it carries until today. Levelled and destroyed, divided into four zones and finally by the wall, it was to remain a sick, shaken place. Theoretically half of it was Western, but in reality it was a small island within the East, always mentally belonging there. Even the German punk, the relentless music of Neue Deutsche Welle or the beginnings of techno, where does it come from? There’s something common about the Germanic music: post-punk, techno and Cold War pop. It’s its piercing restlessness and mercilessness, this didn’t come from under the coat of Goethe, dining at the aristocracy of little German principalities. This came to us from the times of the grim Weimar era taking its toll, from the etchings of Neue Sachlichkeit and Expressionists. More than that: it’s not even German as such, but it’s Prussian and its relentless discipline comes from the East.

Berlin is an Eastern city, by geography, spirit, architecture and expression. Yet, it remains half-Western, by politics and history. But even this double status does not explain the role it used to and keeps playing in the imagination of the Western hipster youth of the last four decades. Berlin is a model city to describe what has really happened after 1989. After the unification of Germany, the capital was moved to Berlin as a symbol of the new order, reestablishing the pre-split and even pre-Nazi past. It was an element of the
Vergangenheitsbewältigung
, so called
‘overcoming
of the past’, a term taken from the post-Nazi period and the technical solutions
the Germans applied in another stretch and twist in their gallery of history-changing concept-making:
Modell Deutschland
, something ever popular in a country with a lot to ‘overcome’.

In Poland, where the ideology was most obviously forced, it never really succeeded: tensions between the authorities and the society were always enormous, and exploded in a series of general strikes and protests. In Germany the ideological apparatus and disciplining was much higher and much more self-imposed. It is shocking to compare Polish and German parades and ritualistic May Day or anniversary demos, in which participation was compulsory. Until the very last moments of the DDR, East Germany was demonstrating in the full scale paraphernalia, and with mass participation, while the critical mass within the Polish opposition by the late 80s made these rituals more empty than ever. In East Germany, ideology and the regime, precisely because of the closeness of the West, were no joke.

It’s interesting to what extent the contemporary, supposedly ‘edgy’ youth coming to this parody-of-a capital, sticks solely to the center. Their trips don’t usually extend beyond the district of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg. There you can find the typically ahistorical, uprooted relation postmodern man has with history. The CIA spy base of Teufelsberg in West Berlin, squatted for several years, has by now become so banalized it lauded as an exciting tourist attraction even in Ryanair’s in-flight magazine, confirming that any historical artefact can become banal in contemporary Berlin. Nostalgic parties with an ‘a la DDR’ aesthetic are popular among the youth all over Europe. Warsaw clubs took to this fashion much later, and simply borrowed it. In both cases history becomes meaningless against the ‘right to party’.

I checked this by visiting the places connected with the regime in the most straightforward way: the Stasi headquarters in the Eastern district of Lichtenburg, and Checkpoint Charlie, the former
border crossing in Kreuzberg. The Mauer-Museum by Checkpoint Charlie is today a pitiful, private but very popular Axel Springer-owned font of Ostalgic souvenirs. By contrast, the Stasi HQ is located in deep eastern Berlin, which to this day is strikingly different from what is a couple of kilometres west. This eastern part of the city strangely gets hardly gentrified and remains extremely sinister: the tower blocks have not been repaired, there are no signs of nice shops or galleries. This part of East Berlin, more than anything, felt like home. Located between grey towers, the HQ immediately brought to my mind every other military museum in Eastern Europe. Time has frozen there. Sad elderly male guards give you tickets with bored expressions on their faces, and the place exudes the typical smell of an old attic, untouched for decades.

Time frozen – yet, perhaps sometimes to good effect? There was a clear decline in the quality of artistic production on both sides of the Wall after ’89, which proves how the framework of Cold War preserved the modernist approach to making art. Whether teddy boys, mods, popists, new romantics, new wavers, synthpoppers, punks or freaks, young people remained modernists, in their precise and sober approach to art, which was to transform the world, if not powerful enough to change the world around them, then to change the one inside them. They became the ‘explorers of inner space’. This transformation of taste started, if the we’re to agree with Dick Hebdige, with the ‘streamline style’ of the 30s which led to pop-art, from the beginning described with distaste by the upper classes as ‘art of poor taste’. We’ll be understanding pop-art as a complete creation of the Cold War era, made within specific tensions around the fetishism of capital, where youth, even if it becomes an arch-commodity, finds in it nevertheless a way out for itself.

The musician Felix Kubin, involved with the German techn-odance/electronic scene, founder of a label called Gagarin Records with many established links to the previous Neue Deutsche Welle, used post-89 Germany’s combination of smugness and schizophrenia
as an occasion for subversive performances. At the start of reunification he and his friends formed Margot Liedertaufel Honecker, which proported to be the choir of a DDR youth organization Freie Deutsche Jugend, who made surprise ‘patriotic songs’ performances to an unsuspecting public. They saw the hurrah-optimism of the new unified Germany as hypocritical, designed to sweep the old crimes under the carpet. In one improvised flash mob that interrupted some yodelling corporate events in a supermarket, the group, dressed as poker-faced East German Komsomol, bewildered the public, claiming they were really supporting a DDR renaissance. In the early 90s seeing East Germany’s characteristic yellow compass and hammer or the two shaking hands could have been equally scary as a swastika. Symbols, uniforms, performances, all aimed to disclose Germans’ uneasiness in confronting anything other than the artificial ‘model reality”, stripped of anything historically uncomfortable.

Thus, the foundations of modern Ostalgie were established. The term was coined in the 90s after many in the East firmly voted for the PDS, the former communists, in elections - an act, at once of anti-capitalist politics and ideological emancipation. ‘They want to tell us our lives were all a waste’ – went the typical comments of the ex-DDR citizens – ‘and that was the happiest time of our lives.’ Disappointed by the character of post-unification Germany, people refused to suddenly reject all their past, as if in another, twisted-capitalist version of communist era ‘self-criticism’. Despite being ‘masters of the world’ in memory, Germans still, until this day have problems with dealing with the post-DDR reality, and the greatest example of that is the position of Berlin itself, a failed capital.

This Berlin, that we tend to consider a vibrant Cold War city, was initially anything but. The Year Zero saw it completely destroyed, and the social fabric, not even mentioning the cultural one, had to be seriously resurrected. And as Berlin was basically an extended prison back then – divided into sectors controlled by four different national powers - it was an international playground for
the victorious forces. Post-war Berlin deserved a lot of spanking from those with which it is supposedly most associated. On the brink of famine, in ruins, it was called by Brecht, upon his arrival, a “heap of rubble near Potsdam” an “etching by Churchill based on an idea by Hitler”, where he could smell “the stinking breath of provincialism…”

But the competition was launched, and Stalinallee, finished in 1957 (later renamed Karl-Marx-Allee in the early 60s by Khrushchev, who renamed the streets and took all the Stalin statues down), the gigantic Stalinist architectural complexes, and the Hansaviertel, built by all the big Western names, from Corbusier to Gropius, made this torn city’s fabric an ideological battleground. Yet people didn’t want to live next to a prison, where the third world war could start any moment. The city slowly became more and more fractured, with the Berlin Blockade in 1948, and fear of Soviet totalitarianism – upon workers strikes in 1953 the Russians sent in the tanks - until, finally in 1961 the wall was erected. Those easterners who had managed to relocate to the West populated a
city largely abandoned, a situation that led to the arrival of waves of Gastarbeiter, mainly from Turkey, since the 70s.