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| [A man passing by the “light border” installation along the remains of the Berlin Wall. Photo: AFP.] |
How little we know about
the culture of that 'area of darkness:' Eastern Europe.
Living within
a few hundred kilometres of this region, most of us would be hard
pressed to give the names of more than a handful of directors, actors
or music groups from somewhere as close as the Czech Republic or even
from the former East Germany. Communism blotted out an entire world
of creative expression to those who lived in the so-called free West
of Europe and tastes in cultural fashion have hardly reclaimed any of
it.
Reading Polish writer
Agata Pyzik's recent ironically titled book "Poor But Sexy"
helps to uncover some of what she calls the 'culture clashes' between
the two sides of the continent.
She argues that twenty five
years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Europe is as divided as
ever. Only occasionally using too much post-modernist academic
jargon, she makes the highly convincing case that the Western
'democratic' world has maintained an arrogant assumption that
everybody wants to 'buy into' their capitalist belief systems. As
well as this, she acknowledges that conservative political failures
(including missed opportunities on the left) have meant that market
forces and greed have also triumphed over social or collective
responsibility in the East, just they clearly have triumphed in the
West.
But what Pyzik also does
is give the reader a new insight into the arts in a part of the
planet when all creative action had a political edge to it. Russian
films of the post-war era obviously had a propagandist purpose (very
often) but the Sots Art movement also got away with mocking
'unberaable, ritualised Soviet life' while simultaneously showing how
the average person could attempt a normal existence among the ruins
of the old world.
As well as this, writers
such as György Lukács used a kind of Brecht-like critical realism
to 'inspire and activate the reader.' In his earlier book "Man
Without Qualities" - a superb title - he largely rejects
modernity, seeing 'the tragedy of the modern artist as someone who
lost the ground under their feet.' Surprisingly, he views this as 'an
advance rather than a difficulty.'
Again and again in Eastern Bloc
culture Pyzik points out examples of the contradictions and paradoxes
of the kind that seem to me to be a big part of French thinking but
are so often overly simplified into the black-and-white certainties
of Iberian habits of mind.
Another strength of this
book is that it recognises the unheralded contribution of women in
the East.
It took the feminist film director Agnieska to accurately
predict how female activism in Poland's Solidarity movement would be
wiped from popular memory and when this is combined with how
sexuality was restricted and banned in the movies across Communist
nations, it is alarming how the idea of feminine purity was so dominant.
In a patriarchal Catholic Poland 'full of open sexism' precious few
women characters of equality got through to be seen.
And in
this book there are countless references to the culture from the West
so that we are not lost in unfamiliar names. Everyone from David Bowie
to Ken Loach to Art of Noise gets a mention. There are plenty of
relevant comparisons with contemporary Eastern culture, Pyzik
finds. She ends with the disturbing statement that the populace of
Eastern Europe "so strongly believe we don't deserve the normal
conditions of a social democracy that we hardly fight for it." Let's not make that same mistake in other parts of the planet.
[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, May 2016.]
