Communism's Public Sphere: Culture as Politics in Cold War Poland and East Germany 9781501767067

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Takeover: Reconstruction as Revolution
2. Planning: Workers and Cultural Mass Work
3. Nationalism: Public Protest and the Birth of National Communism
4. Pluralism: Individual Choice and Public-Opinion Polling
5. Consumerism: Cultured Consumption and Its Limits
6. Reform: The Promise and Peril of Controlled Revolt
7. Dissent: Normalization and Its Discontents
8. Protest: Spaces of Opposition, Spaces of Dialogue
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

COMMUNISM’S PUBLIC SPHERE

COMMUNISM’S PUBLIC SPHERE CU LTU R E A S P O L I T I CS I N CO L D WA R P O L A N D A ND E A ST G E R M A N Y

Kyrill Kunakhovich

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2022 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 2022 by Cornell University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kunakhovich, Kyrill, author. Title: Communism’s public sphere : culture as politics   in Cold War Poland and East Germany /   Kyrill Kunakhovich. Description: Ithaca [New York] : Cornell University   Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references  and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022006088 (print) | LCCN   2022006089 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501767043   (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501767067 (pdf) | ISBN   9781501767050 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Communism and culture—Poland—   Kraków—History—20th century. | Communism and  culture—Germany—Leipzig—History—20th   century. | Politics and culture—Poland—Kraków—   History—20th century. | Politics and culture—   Germany—Leipzig—History—20th century. |   Poland—Cultural policy. | Germany (East)—   Cultural policy. Classification: LCC HX523 .K7997 2022 (print) | LCC   HX523 (ebook) | DDC 306.3/450943862—dc23/  eng/20220817 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022006088 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/ 2022006089 Cover image: Piwnica pod Baranami, a basement club in Kraków, 1960s. Courtesy of the KARTA Center Foundation, photograph by Bogdan Łopieński.

To my parents

What a crowd shows up for a theatrical performance or the poetry readings of a wellknown poet in order to hear a political allusion, explode into applause, and return home. There is nothing strange or wrong with this; if politics is forbidden it is sought everywhere. —Adam Zagajewski, 1984

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations xiii

Introduction1 1. Takeover: Reconstruction as Revolution19 2. Planning: Workers and Cultural Mass Work

40

3. Nationalism: Public Protest and the Birth of National Communism

72

4. Pluralism: Individual Choice and Public-Opinion Polling

102

5. Consumerism: Cultured Consumption and Its Limits

129

6. Reform: The Promise and Peril of Controlled Revolt

157

7. Dissent: Normalization and Its Discontents186 8. Protest: Spaces of Opposition, Spaces of Dialogue

215

Epilogue

249

Notes 265 Bibliography 307 Index 327

Acknow l e dgme nts

This book has been a long time in the making and I have accrued many debts along the way. The first is to Stephen Kotkin, who inspired the questions at the heart of this project. He encouraged me to think big, pushed me to find the devil in the details, and believed in my work even when I  felt lost. Jan Gross and Anson Rabinbach were expert guides to Polish and German history. Their enthusiasm, patience, and wisdom have been invaluable over the years. When I was still an undergraduate, Laura Engelstein supervised my first attempt to write about culture as politics. It is largely thanks to her that I set out to become a historian. At Princeton, I  was immersed in an extraordinary community of scholars and friends. This project took shape through countless conversations with Pey-Yi Chu, Franziska Exeler, Mayhill Fowler, Michael Gordin, Irena Grudzińska-Gross, Jeff Hardy, Elidor Mëhilli, Anne O’Donnell, Serguei Oushakine, Ekaterina Pravilova, and other members of the Russian kruzhok. It also benefited from the advice and support of many graduate school colleagues, including Henry Cowles, Rohit De, Will Deringer, Catharine Evans, Evan Hepler-Smith, Zack Kagan-Guthrie, Jamie Kreiner, Ronny Regev, Padraic Scanlan, Margaret Schotte, Chris Shannon, and Annie Twitty. The Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Charlotte Elizabeth Procter Fellowship provided funding along the way. Research in Kraków was made possible by a grant from the International Culture Center and its director, Jacek Purchla. Andrzej Chwalba generously invited me to participate in his doctoral seminar, and I am grateful to his students for their feedback. Special thanks go to the incomparable Szczepan Świątek, who insisted I prove myself before letting me into the archive—and then showed me everything it had to offer. My

ix

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A C K N O W L E D G M E N TS

time in Leipzig was supported by the German Academic Exchange Service and Leipzig University’s Center for the History and Culture of East Central Europe. I am grateful to the Center’s Stefan Troebst and Frank Hadler, as well as Beata Hock, Lars Karl, Hannes Siegrist, and Václav Šmidrkal. Thomas Höpel kindly shared his deep knowledge of Leipzig’s cultural bureaucracy before, during, and after my stay in the city. I was fortunate to spend a year at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard, where I learned a great deal from Homi Bhabha, Steven Biel, Jonathan Bolton, and Claire Edington. At the College of William and Mary, Bruce Campbell, Frederick Corney, Emily Gioielli, Laurie Koloski, Alexander Prokhorov, and Elena Prokhorova provided feedback on my work and made me a far better teacher and scholar. For the past six years, I have been privileged to call the University of Virginia home. I am particularly grateful to my colleagues Manuela Achilles, Fahad Bishara, Claudrena Harold, Andrew Kahrl, Mary Kuhn, Erik Linstrum, James Loeffler, Jeffrey Rossman, Jennifer Sessions, and David Singerman. A grant from UVA’s College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences funded additional archival work in the summer of 2017. I have presented research from this book in more venues than I care to admit. Thank you to Patryk Babiracki, Rüdiger Bergien, Jadwiga Biskupska, Andrea Bohlman, Chad Bryant, Nicole Burgoyne, Paul Bushkovitch, Holly Case, Kathryn Ciancia, Alon Confino, John Connelly, Carol Anne Costabile-Heming, Sarah Cramsey, Andrew Demshuk, April Eisman, Malgorzata Fidelis, Scott Harrison, Jeff Hayton, Francine Hirsch, Seth Howes, Mariana Ivanova, Lisa Jakelski, Krzysztof Jasiewicz, Polly Jones, Zachary Kelly, Padraic Kenney, Pavel Kolář, Anna Krylova, Katherine Lebow, Maike Lehmann, Alice Lovejoy, Norman Naimark, Małgorzata Mazurek, Natalie Misteravich-Carroll, Agnieszka Pasieka, David Petruccelli, Mackenzie Pierce, Andrew Port, Benjamin Robinson, Nicholas Rutter, Juliane Schicker, Leonard Schmieding, Edith Sheffer, Marci Shore, Pavel Skopal, Thomas Sliwowski, Keely Stauter-Halsted, Dariusz Stola, Berenika Szymanski-Düll, Kiril Tomoff, David Tompkins, Katie Trumpener, Eric Weitz, and Katharine White for their helpful comments and suggestions. Special thanks are due to those who read all or part of this manuscript. I am profoundly grateful to Rachel Applebaum, Cristina Florea, William Hitchcock, Simon Huxtable, Piotr Kosicki, Allan Megill, and Molly Pucci, as well as two anonymous reviewers.

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S     xi

I have had three wonderful editors at Cornell University Press. Roger Haydon first took a chance on this project, Emily Andrew steered it through review and approval, and Bethany Wasik carried it to the finish line. Thank you also to Karen Laun, Bill Nelson, Mary Petrusewicz, Mia Renaud, and Sandy Sadow. The publication of this book was aided by a subvention from UVA’s College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. A  version of chapter  1 appeared previously under the title “Reconstruction as Revolution: Cultural Life in Post-WWII Kraków and Leipzig” in East European Politics and Societies 30.3 (August  2016): 475–495. Sarah Milov read every draft of every chapter and made every one of them better. Her kindness, generosity, curiosity, and insight have improved my work and my life in countless ways. I owe her more than I can say and am grateful every day for her love and companionship. Our children, Vivi and Lenny Kun-Milov, have been a welcome distraction from this book as well as an impetus to complete it. When I was growing up I dreamed of being an academic because that was what passed for normal in my family. My father, Mikhail Kunakhovich, taught me to trust my gut and keep exploring. My stepfather, Krishan Kumar, continues to model what scholarship looks like. My mother, Katya Makarova, has been a source of support, encouragement, and inspiration my whole life. These are the people most responsible for this book, and it is dedicated to them.

A bbrevi ati ons

FDJ Free German Youth (Freie Deutsche Jugend) GDR German Democratic Republic KOR Workers’ Defense Committee (Komitet Obrony Robotników) KPD Communist Party of Germany (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands) KW Provincial Committee (Komitet Wojewódzki) NES New Economic System of Planning and Management (Neues Ökonomisches System der Planung und Leitung) OBOP Center for the Study of Public Opinion (Ośrodek Badania Opinii Publicznej) PPS Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna) PTD State Dramatic Theaters (Państwowe Teatry Dramatyczne) PZPR Polish United Workers’ Party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza) RIAS Radio in the American Sector SED Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands) SKS Student Solidarity Committee (Studencki Komitet Solidarności) STL Leipzig City Theaters (Städtische Theater Leipzig) UJ Jagiellonian University, Kraków (Uniwersytet Jagielloński) VBK Union of Graphic Artists (Verband Bildender Künstler) ZPAP Union of Polish Graphic Artists (Związek Polskich Artystów Plastyków)

xiii

COMMUNISM’S PUBLIC SPHERE

Introduction

On October  9, 1989, more than a hundred thousand people packed into Leipzig’s Karl Marx Square, between its stately opera house and the Gewandhaus concert hall. Two days earlier the German Democratic Republic (GDR) had celebrated its fortieth birthday, but the festivities were overshadowed by protests. In Leipzig demonstrators had called for more freedoms and rights, and the police responded by dousing them with water cannons. Anticipating an even bigger rally on October 9, city officials called in thousands of troops: soldiers with machine guns, riot police in body armor, Stasi detachments, combat militia.1 As the square filled they began thumping their truncheons on their shields, foreboding deadly force. Then, suddenly, the voice of the Gewandhaus conductor Kurt Masur came over the loudspeakers. “We urgently ask you for prudence, so that a peaceful dialogue can take place.” The crowd seemed to exhale, breaking into spontaneous applause. “It was an immense relief to all who heard it,” an eyewitness recalled. “We immediately formed a procession and started to move.”2 Police had set up barricades to block any such march but in the end allowed it to proceed; a few policemen even joined in. “It was the miracle of Leipzig,” Masur claimed.3 All revolutions have their heroes, and Masur makes an appealing candidate. At six-foot-three, with ramrod posture and an imperious bearing, he cut a figure larger than life. The morning after the rally, a 1

2    I nt r od u ction

Figure 1. A Leipzig “Monday demonstration” seen through the windows of the Gewandhaus, December 1989. The demonstration of October 9 took place on the same square, framed by the Gewandhaus and the Opera House (center). SLUB Dresden/Deutsche Fotothek, photograph by Harald Hauswald.

group of residents arrived at the Gewandhaus with a wreath, anointing Masur the “savior of Leipzig.”4 But how did a conductor find himself in this position in the first place? How did he, of all people, come to address the crowd, and why did his words carry such weight? Masur later described himself as an “involuntary politician” forced into action by a sense of duty, yet that is not quite right.5 For eight years he had led a public conversation series, Meetings in the Gewandhaus, that tackled pressing issues in the GDR—from freedom of speech to police brutality. Through these meetings, Masur met many of the activists who organized the protests of October 1989 and gained their trust. He also built relationships with local officials, who at the critical moment gave him access to the city’s loudspeaker system. What looked like one extraordinary act was really the culmination of a years-long process. Masur played mediator on October 9 because he had done so his whole career, promoting dialogue between the people and the People’s State from his position at the helm of the Gewandhaus. Masur was not alone in this effort. The statement he read out on Karl Marx Square had been cowritten with five men: a cabaret performer, a theologian, and three functionaries of the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED). They knew each other well from years of organizing cultural

I nt r od u ction     3

events, which always required official approval. Thanks to these professional ties, Masur was on good terms with local administrators, including the three party functionaries: secretaries for culture, education, and propaganda on the Leipzig District SED Committee. He called them up on midday on October  9 because he knew them to be reasonable men who would not want to risk bloodshed. The functionaries, too, had good relations with Masur and valued his perspective. One of them even told friends that conversations with Leipzig artists “had changed his view of the [communist] system bit by bit.”6 Although Berlin had issued orders to suppress protest “by any means necessary,” these functionaries’ friendships with Masur convinced them to break ranks.7 Meeting at the Gewandhaus that afternoon, the six-man group—three administrators, three civilians—hashed out the text that Masur read, taking pains “to speak personally to both sides of ‘the barricade.’ ”8 The so-called Leipzig Six practiced the dialogue they preached, a dialogue that had been honed in cultural institutions like the Gewandhaus. When tensions between state and society reached fever pitch, it was spaces of art that provided a middle ground. This book explores the political role of cultural spaces in communist East Germany and Poland. In both states, it argues, such spaces were a public sphere in which many actors contested visions of the public good. For communist regimes, they served as vehicles to spread Marxist thought and shape their subjects’ attitudes and values. Officials ­supervised and funded thousands of cultural institutions—concert halls, theaters, galleries, youth clubs—because they were convinced that these could serve regime goals. Yet states’ attentiveness to spaces of art also transformed them into spaces of resistance. On stage, on paper, and onscreen, artists used their platform to critique government policy and offer alternatives. Drawing on Romantic tradition, many came to see themselves as speaking for the public on matters of public importance—much in the way that Masur did. Audiences, meanwhile, spoke for themselves by clapping, booing, or not showing up at all. Since communist officials treated art as a political matter, its reception became a political act: an opportunity to voice displeasure or articulate demands. Under regimes that banned free speech, spaces of art turned into outlets for political debate. Yet cultural spaces were more than battlegrounds between state and society. As the example of the Leipzig Six suggests, they also played a mediating role, fostering dialogue and compromise. Officials always watched audience reactions closely, looking to see whether state policy was having the desired effect. In both East Germany and Poland, in fact, publicopinion polling first emerged in cultural institutions. Focusing on two

4    I nt r od u ction

cities, Leipzig and Kraków, I examine how administrators monitored and responded to cultural signals. Encountering the public in spaces of art forced state administrators to adjust the way they ruled and gradually transformed communist politics. However, such encounters changed the public too. Although it failed to meet its goals, communism’s cultural project left a deep imprint on local cultures and identities. Spaces of art were sites in which state and society influenced each other. They illuminate how both regimes and publics evolved under communist rule. East Germany and Poland experienced similar forms of communist rule. Thanks to the architecture of the Eastern Bloc, their cultural spaces came to play analogous roles, enabling a public discussion of public affairs. And yet the topics and the tone of that discussion differed in each country. The Polish and East German public spheres had their particular dynamics, informed by local history and politics. I trace these dynamics from the Red Army’s arrival in Poland in 1944 to the GDR’s dissolution in 1990, showing how they shaped the two countries’ trajectories. This helps explain why the Leipzig Six still called for the “further development of socialism” in October 1989, after Poles had already voted to leave socialism behind. But understanding national outcomes also requires looking beyond national borders. East German demonstrators on October 9 openly referenced the Polish model, and only days earlier a Kraków rally had proclaimed “solidarity with Leipzig.” Poles and East Germans watched, interacted with, and learned from one another. In excavating such cross-border entanglements, I suggest that the Eastern Bloc was a transnational public sphere.

The Cultural Public Sphere The concept of the public sphere is closely associated with the work of Jürgen Habermas, whose book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere was published in West Germany in 1962. The first English translation, however, appeared only in 1989, and many reviews noted that it was “propitiously timed.”9 The book charted the rise of an intermediate space between state and society in which private individuals debated and advanced the common good. In eighteenth-century Europe, Habermas argued, the emergent bourgeoisie set up new venues of sociability: coffee houses, salons, debating societies. These venues lay outside of state control and offered the opportunity to critique it. Through open, rational discussion, all comers could in principle weigh in on current affairs

I nt r od u ction     5

and force states to start acting in the general interest. For Habermas, the public sphere was “a forum in which private people, come together to form a public, readied themselves to compel public authority to legitimate itself before public opinion.”10 It is hard to imagine a better example than what took place on Karl Marx Square in October 1989. Today Habermas’s concept is used most often as an ideal type, denoting a form of democratic politics in which all citizens can participate in policymaking. Habermas called this the “liberal model of the bourgeois public sphere,” but then devoted the majority of his book to chronicling its “structural transformation.” As absolute monarchies gave way to constitutional democracies, the public sphere was institutionalized in the form of parliaments and became an organ of the state. It was soon overrun by lobbying, politicking, and propaganda, serving “the manipulation of the public as much as legitimation before it.” Writing in the shadow of the Third Reich, amid the advertising blitz of the West German “Economic Miracle,” Habermas despaired at the prospects of free and critical debate. Yet he believed the public sphere continued to exist and remained “influential at least as a freedom-guaranteeing corrective to the exercise of power and domination.”11 Even when citizens were systematically misled, manipulated, and excluded from government, they still had the capacity to bring it to account. While Habermas defended the democratic potential of this “powerpenetrated public sphere,” his critics noted that its liberal model was power-penetrated too. The eighteenth century’s political debates, they pointed out, were neither free nor open to all comers; in actuality, they were largely reserved for rich white men. Nor did public authority readily recognize public opinion but rather censored and ignored it.12 In critiquing Habermas’s genealogy of the public sphere, scholars sought to free the concept from his context. If the public sphere never lived up to its ideal type, not even in eighteenth-century Europe, then it was not specific to a time and place. The concept could be used more broadly to describe any site of public engagement with politics, no matter how constrained or imperfect. In Geoff Eley’s words, “the public sphere makes more sense as a structured setting where cultural and ideological contest or negotiation among a variety of publics takes place.”13 This framing of the public sphere is not historically contingent, and scholars have applied it to settings all over the world. In fact, it appears frequently in studies of the Eastern Bloc, though almost always with some kind of modifier. Authors speak of a proto-public sphere,

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an ersatz public sphere, a censored public sphere, an obstructed public sphere, a politicized public sphere, a party-controlled public sphere.14 As Marc Silberman has written, such formulations “reflect the need to acknowledge corrupted or regulated, yet productive forms of communication” in Eastern Bloc societies.15 The public sphere was clearly different under communist regimes than under liberal democracies, since communists explicitly took aim at liberal institutions. They targeted parliaments, newspapers, churches, and civic organizations: precisely the channels through which a sovereign public could form and express public opinion. Yet that does not mean that a public sphere ceased to exist, or ceased to matter. Instead, as this book argues, it took other forms. As civil society atrophied, and as formal political structures fell under regime control, cultural institutions became some of the most “productive forms of communication” between state and society—however “corrupted or regulated” this communication was. Scholars of communist regimes have long agreed that cultural institutions played political roles. In some studies, spaces of art feature as sites of communist indoctrination, echoing the Polish writer Czesław Miłosz, whose book The Captive Mind (1953) laid out a model of totalitarian control. “The greater the number of people who ‘participate in culture’—i.e., pass through the schools, read books and magazines, attend theaters and exhibitions—the further the doctrine reaches and the smaller grows the threat to the rule of the [communist] philosophers,” Miłosz insisted.16 Other accounts, meanwhile, frame cultural spaces as bastions of resistance, defending East Europeans from the totalitarian onslaught. All of the region’s anticommunist revolts, wrote the Czechoslovak author Milan Kundera in 1984, “were prepared, shaped, realized by novels, poetry, theater, cinema, historiography, literary reviews, popular comedy and cabaret, philosophical discussions—that is, by culture.”17 Both views are true, and therefore incomplete. Cultural spaces belonged neither to states nor to societies; instead, they mediated between the two. They channeled both dissent and propaganda, both government visions and popular voices. Eschewing the dichotomy of opposition and support, spaces of art promoted contestation and negotiation.

Politics through Culture In Cold War Kraków and Leipzig, cultural spaces came in many forms. They included theaters, concert halls, art galleries, and museums, but

I nt r od u ction     7

also youth clubs, discotheques, cabarets, and factory break rooms. Some were as grand as Kraków’s Słowacki Theater, a neo-Baroque wedding cake that sat over a thousand viewers, others as humble as a converted broom closet with a few books and journals. With few exceptions, these spaces were state-owned, state-funded, and state-run, like the majority of public spaces in the Eastern Bloc. What tied them together, though, is that they were all classified as “cultural facilities” (placówki kulturalne or Kultureinrichtungen), subject to their country’s ministry of culture. Even in mid-sized cities like Kraków and Leipzig, hundreds of physical spaces fell under this rubric. Taken together, they constituted what I call the state cultural matrix: the totality of a state’s infrastructure for spreading, steering, and administering “culture.” In communist regimes, “culture” was an established sector of government, alongside heavy industry or education. Both state and party organs at each level, from village councils up to the Central Committee, had departments for “culture,” “art and culture,” or “cultural affairs.”18 So, too, did mass organizations such as trade unions, student unions, and women’s groups. By the 1960s more than one hundred functionaries in Kraków and Leipzig worked in the culture sector full-time. Most had only a cursory familiarity with the arts, since it was common to move between culture departments and other fields. On the other hand, top-level officials often had firsthand experience with cultural administration. The cultural matrix thus received a great deal of political attention, along with significant funding. State budgets always included a line item for “art and culture,” while schools, factories, and even the army had to set resources aside for “cultural expenses.” The speed with which the state cultural matrix disintegrated after 1989 reveals just how much money and effort it took to run. But for all that investment, what was the cultural matrix meant to achieve? This question has received surprisingly little attention. In studies of the Eastern Bloc, cultural policy typically figures as a restraint: a means of bringing artists to heel, or at least censoring their creativity.19 Seen through the eyes of those who chafed against it, cultural policy looks senseless, arbitrary, and malicious. It also varies wildly from genre to genre, or between “high,” “mass,” and “popular” culture. Crackdowns on literature or painting coincided with letups in rock music or film, making it difficult to speak of a concerted policy—or to compare policy

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between countries. Few scholars consider cultural policy from administrators’ point of view, and when they do they focus on one aspect of the state’s cultural project. There have been excellent studies of censorship in the Bloc, of the mass media, of factory-based “cultural enlightenment.”20 But while such works illuminate how policy was made, they risk missing the forest for the trees. In chronicling the politics of culture in particular fields, they overlook a bigger project: politics through culture. In Cold War Poland and East Germany, cultural policy was always social policy.21 For all the time they spent tending to artists, administrators in Kraków and Leipzig focused on audiences. They scheduled buses to take workers to the opera and put on concerts for construction brigades. They made sure that retirees joined painting circles, that school groups visited the theater, that university students went dancing in youth clubs. The cultural matrix needed to be vast in order to reach as many people as possible; “our goal is to involve all residents in cultural life, without exception,” one Leipzig official insisted.22 Directing culture’s production was only a means to an end. The state’s ultimate aim was to direct culture’s consumption—and in the process to shape its consumers. Communist regimes used many tools to mold their subjects, but cultural institutions played a special role. While the mass media could reach millions of people, it was no substitute for a live, captive audience assembled in a concert hall or theater. In addressing these cultural publics, officials sought to reach and influence the public at large. Eastern Bloc states were not alone in this effort. “Cultural policy always implies the management of populations through suggested behavior,” write Toby Miller and George Yúdice. It is devoted to “forming a collective public subjectivity,” one that reflects the “interests of the polity.”23 A  state’s cultural policy, in other words, is an expression of its political mission and values. While the UK pursued “a culture for democracy” through the BBC, Fascist Italy used leisure-time activities to cultivate a “culture of consent.”24 Communist cultural policy thus tells us a great deal about the evolution of the communist project. The changing architecture of the cultural matrix revealed officials’ changing visions of the future, the public, and the state. In Poland as in East Germany, it always encapsulated regime priorities—so much so, in fact, that when the cultural matrix started to collapse, communism’s downfall was not far behind.

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The Artists’ Tribune To staff and operate the cultural matrix, Eastern Bloc states relied on artists. Over four decades of communist rule Leipzig’s art academies churned out nearly 15,000 graduates: writers, painters, actors, dancers, musicians.25 Those who joined artists’ unions received various perks, from special housing to travel opportunities. Above all, they received a platform—to speak, perform, or exhibit in public. The state’s investment in the cultural matrix brought millions of people into contact with the arts, giving artists unprecedented visibility and influence. “Maybe we can’t say all the things that you can say here,” conceded the East German writer Christa Wolf on a visit to the United States, “but, on the other hand, people listen to us much more.”26 Such visibility was particularly striking under regimes that restricted it: besides state officials, few others had the opportunity to address a crowd. In their effort to reach a mass public through culture, communist regimes empowered artists to do the same. Thanks to the cultural matrix, East European artists became public figures. That was why administrators watched the cultural matrix so closely, using both sticks and carrots to keep artists in line. Censor’s offices, culture departments, artists’ unions, and cultural journals all supplied a steady stream of guidelines for creative production. These controls aimed to make artists into mouthpieces for the state, ensuring that the cultural matrix functioned as a smooth transmission belt. But since art had to be politically correct, artistic expression became a political matter. For administrators, artists, and audiences alike, any departure from aesthetic norms acquired the force of a political statement. Observers parsed cultural events for signs of hidden protest or signals of a changing party line. The state’s determination to spread politics through culture meant that the two grew intertwined, turning cultural figures into political actors—whether they liked it or not. For many East European artists, this role was nothing new. When a Western journalist asked Masur, two months after October 9, “why an artist would concern himself with politics,” the conductor advised him to “start with Beethoven.”27 In the German lands, the notion of Kultur gave art and artists a special responsibility for defining the national essence.28 In partitioned Poland, where the word intelligentsia originated, cultural figures saw themselves as guardians of the nation, sustaining its identity and guiding its development.29 Both Polish and

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East German artists reprised these roles under communist rule. Like Masur, many believed that they were speaking for the public and giving voice to its opinions and demands. Others envisioned themselves as “the party’s moral arm,” advising communist regimes and urging corrections.30 As Wolf acknowledged, artists could never say all the things they wanted, but they constantly engaged with, responded to, and commented on public affairs. Within the Bloc’s closed political system, they were among the most prominent critics of communist rule. Scholars have long gravitated toward critical artists, seeing them as islands of freedom in a sea of control. Many distinguish between the state’s “official” culture and an “unofficial” one, also called “dissident,” “alternative,” “underground,” or “independent.” Some studies even speak of a “second public sphere,” comprised of “counterofficial voices” and separate from the first, state-centric public sphere.31 Such categories reflect a search for both “the limits of dictatorship” and spheres of autonomy outside them.32 The trouble is that the line between the “official” and the “unofficial” keeps disappearing from view. State institutions were full of alternative practices, as administrators constantly complained. Nor was “independent” culture wholly independent of the state, since “counterofficial voices” still made use of government spaces and resources.33 There could be a great deal of distance between mainstream and dissident artists, but they did not inhabit separate realms. Until the very last years of communist rule, they operated within one cultural matrix. Rejecting the two-culture model as too black and white, other scholars prefer the notion of a “gray zone,” popularized by H. Gordon Skilling. In 1980s Czechoslovakia, he argued, many artists and publications existed “on the borders of legality and illegality,” blurring the line between the two.34 This concept became widespread after 1989 as a way of overcoming Cold War binaries, yet it remains thoroughly trapped in them. For all the grayness in between, the poles of black and white endure; “official” and “unofficial” cultures remain juxtaposed, setting up a zero-sum game. Greater engagement with the state implies a greater distance from the underground, or even a betrayal of it. While one can move between the two, the poles are fixed, unchangeable, and timeless. Some ideal type of communism forms one end of the axis, and any deviation from it, even by communist leaders themselves, can only be construed as a concession—a step away from communist ideals. Dissidents, meanwhile, are trapped in constant opposition, merely reacting to the state instead of charting their own course. Like all the actors in the gray zone, they are condemned to live in two dimensions and defined solely by their attitude to communist rule.

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This book adopts a different approach. Eastern Bloc artists were neither split into two camps nor stuck on a continuum between them. Instead, they voiced a wide range of opinions in the cultural public sphere, shaping the boundaries of state-sponsored culture in the process. Within the state’s cultural matrix, artists presented visions for society that went beyond simple support or criticism of the state. Instead of black and white, or shades of gray, the cultural public sphere was a kaleidoscope of color. This public sphere was never free from government interference, and officials blackballed, fired, expelled, or even arrested artists for crossing the line. Where the line lay, though, was not set in stone. In raising issues that had been taboo, artists could force administrators to discuss them; time after time, pressure from below expanded the parameters of accepted art. Conversely, artists sometimes used state policy in ways that forced regimes to backtrack or change course. “You never knew where you stood,” one Leipzig rocker recalled; “cultural policy was a perpetual imponderable.”35 The reason for this, I suggest, is that cultural policy was not simply imposed from above but rather negotiated in the public sphere. Despite the real power asymmetry between them, both artists and administrators played a part in shaping—and constantly reshaping—the notions of “official” and “unofficial” art.

Public Opinion Artists and administrators were not the only actors in the cultural matrix. State efforts “to involve all residents in cultural life” brought more East Europeans into more kinds of cultural institutions more often than ever before. These audiences were not passive recipients of government messaging, just as artists were not mere channels for it. They, too, made use of the cultural matrix to criticize state policy and voice their desires. In the 1970s, Kraków theatergoers booed at the mention of the Russian Empire and cheered at lines that referenced Polish independence. When the regime declared martial law in 1981, artists connected with the ruling party were sometimes slow-clapped off the stage. More often, audiences voted with their feet, by failing to attend state-backed events or leaving halfway through. So long as proper cultural consumption was prescribed, any departure from it was an act of protest. Even when audiences could not speak, they still found ways to make themselves heard. While silence was expected in a theater, other cultural spaces encouraged boisterous interaction. In Kraków’s student clubs “a steady din ­pervaded the air,” one visitor remembered. “There was cheap wine and passionate debate.”36 Different clubs attracted different kinds of people. In 1980s

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Leipzig, punks gathered at the Jörgen Schmidtchen House of Culture, goths at Arena youth club, skinheads at the Haus Auensee disco.37 Under regimes that banned unsanctioned gatherings, cultural spaces offered an opportunity to congregate in public. There were few other venues where likeminded people could meet, talk, and develop a sense of community. Although the cultural matrix existed to serve regime goals, its users also made it their own. As the following chapters will show, cultural spaces played key roles in fostering the civic activism behind “the miracle of Leipzig.” By assembling in cultural venues, individuals constituted a public: “a crowd witnessing itself in physical space,” as Michael Warner defines it.38 The thrill of being part of such a crowd, of feeling an extraordinary rush of solidarity, remains a cherished memory for many to this day. “Some tingle of emotion crisscrossed both the audience and the actors,” the actor Leszek Piskorz reminisced of Kraków’s Old Theater in the 1970s. “It sounds incredible today, but that’s how it was!”39 In sharing a communal experience, audience members could feel like they spoke with one voice. When Leipzig administrators abruptly banned a Hollywood blockbuster, frustrated ticketholders responded in collective terms. “If you won’t show the film, then we won’t go to the elections!” someone yelled. “If you won’t show the film, then bring in the harvest yourselves!”40 In this case, as in many others, members of a cultural public claimed to speak for the public at large. To use Warner’s language, local grievances were “transposed upward . . . to a general horizon of public opinion and its critical opposition to state power.”41 The act of gathering in public enabled individuals to conceive of themselves as the public and empowered them to address the state. Communist administrators were acutely aware of this dynamic. All cultural events could become outlets for political expression, and therefore all had to be closely watched. City officials attended at least one performance of each play, film, concert, opera, and variety show in Kraków and Leipzig. They filed detailed reports on audience behavior and also collected information about it from artists, informants, and the secret police. Such reports made their way up the chain of command, sometimes reaching the Politburo itself—the highest party organ in each Eastern Bloc country. They carried so much weight because officials treated them as more than isolated cases. Like protestors, communist leaders, too, “transposed” specific incidents of clapping or booing up to the “general horizon of public opinion,” perceiving them as

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symptoms of social unrest. What happened in cultural spaces had an outsized impact on how officials understood the people they ruled. Especially at times of crisis, the opinions of particular cultural publics were taken as shorthand for public opinion. Capturing public opinion was a persistent problem for communist regimes. Although their power is not rooted in consent, even dictatorships ignore the public’s attitudes and wishes at their peril. Yet they lack many of the tools that democratic leaders use to study what these wishes are—most notably elections. In the absence of meaningful electoral returns, Eastern Bloc states were forced to turn to more impressionistic sources, from private petitions to secret police reports.42 Audience reactions offered one more data point, and communist officials tracked them diligently. Focusing on two polling agencies, the Center for Public Opinion Research in Poland and the Central Institute for Youth Research in East Germany, I explore how interviews with local music fans or cinemagoers were quantified into public opinion. I also show how administrators used this information in making, implementing, and revising policy, including well beyond the cultural realm. The cultural matrix came to be a feedback loop for Eastern Bloc regimes. By keeping tabs on artists and audiences, officials could learn whether their policies were working as planned. Cultural spaces also functioned as an early warning system, alerting administrators to rising frustration or emerging demands.43 All of the Bloc’s major uprisings had roots in the cultural sphere; political ferment simmered in spaces of art before spilling out onto the streets. By the same token, political crackdowns were often responses to cultural cues. Alarmed at growing insubordination among artists, GDR leaders rolled back decentralizing reforms in 1965, before these could blossom into something akin to the Prague Spring. The cultural matrix was a window on society, which is why officials tolerated so much openness within it. It not only gave voice to artists and audiences but also informed communist governance, becoming a conduit between rulers and ruled.

Transnational Socialism Even when they announced reforms, communist regimes insisted that their “general line” remained steady.44 Anticommunist dissidents agreed: for Czechoslovak activist Václav Havel, the Bloc’s ruling parties were “stable and static,” unchanging and incapable of change.45 To this day,

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the standard story of East European communism traces its rise and fall while glossing over its evolution.46 Administrators on the ground, however, had a very different impression. They spoke—often with bitterness—of having to transform both how they worked and how they understood their job. Such transformations went beyond varying levels of repression, or the familiar cycle of “liberal” and “conservative” phases that dominates studies of cultural policy.47 What changed was not simply the quantity but the quality of communist rule. And for officials in Kraków and Leipzig, what changed the most was how they saw the public. The structure of this book reflects officials’ changing visions of society, each corresponding to a new philosophy of rule. Under the first—what both regimes retroactively termed Stalinism— officials set out to remake the public, seeing East European men and women as plastic matter to be shaped. The cultural matrix had a civilizing mission: to mobilize people, reform their hearts and minds, and fill them with enthusiasm for the building of socialism. The second vision, National Communism, involved taking the public and its wishes into account. Administrators accepted that different people had different tastes and catered to these tastes while seeking to guide them. A  diversified cultural matrix was meant to promote popular engagement, drawing reluctant East Europeans into government structures. Under the third vision, however—what the Bloc’s leaders called Actually Existing Socialism—the public was conceived as a potential threat. Officials sought to buy its loyalty with consumer goods while stifling all dissent and expanding surveillance. They used the cultural matrix to stave off unrest, both by providing mindless entertainment and by isolating critical voices. East European publics were behind these changing visions. By subverting, co-opting, or simply failing to conform to communist designs, Poles and East Germans forced administrators to reform the communist project.48 Reports from the cultural matrix chronicled the many ways in which state policy was falling short: people were booing, drinking, falling asleep, and disobeying instructions. But it was public unrest that brought the point home, any time crowds took to the streets and marched on government offices—often while singing. Open protest was a clear sign that communism was not working as planned, and Eastern Bloc regimes responded with changes. Popular uprisings became political turning points, reconfiguring the relationship between state and society.49 In the chapters that follow, I show how that relationship

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was negotiated in the cultural public sphere before, during, and after moments of crisis. Moments of crisis in the Bloc differed by country. In the GDR, they included 1953 and 1965; for Poland, some key dates were 1956, 1968, and 1980–81. Each country had its own political trajectory, yet both went through the same three phases of rule—from Stalinism to National Communism to Actually Existing Socialism. This was due partly to the shared infrastructure of the Eastern Bloc, which set its member states on parallel tracks. Another factor was the role of “Moscow Center” as a directing and coordinating body.50 Just as important, though, was observation and imitation within the Bloc, by state and non-state actors alike. Polish officials kept close watch on the GDR, looking for signs of instability as well as for models to follow. East German dissidents read Polish texts and, at times, pushed their own government to copy Poland’s. When Soviet tanks invaded Prague in 1968, Pravda explained that “any of the links in the world system of socialism directly affects all the socialist countries,” and it was right.51 Within the Eastern Bloc, both public policy and public opinion eclipsed national borders. Writing about twenty-first-century globalization, the philosopher Nancy Fraser has argued that a public sphere is not always coterminous with a state. “What turns a collection of people into fellow members of a public is not shared citizenship, but their co-imbrication in a common set of structures and/or institutions that affect their lives,” Fraser writes. “Where such structures transcend the borders of states, the corresponding public spheres must be transnational.”52 Scholars of the Eastern Bloc have chronicled its many common structures, from friendship societies to Soviet advisers.53 As they have shown, the Bloc was not just a political alliance but an economic unit, a cultural formation, and an imperial space. This book suggests that it was also a transnational public sphere, in which any attempt “to compel public authority to legitimate itself before public opinion” was bound to have transnational effects. That was on full display in 1989, as demonstrations like the one on Karl Marx Square snowballed across the Bloc and spurred its fall.

Kraków and Leipzig To explore the workings of communism’s public sphere, this study focuses on two cities, Kraków and Leipzig. Kraków was Poland’s capital until 1596, and its medieval royal castle, Wawel, still serves as burial

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ground for the country’s heroes. As the seat of a Catholic archdiocese— led for a time by the future pope John Paul II—the city has long had a reputation for conservatism. Its stately center, preserved intact through two world wars, is steeped in history and practically exudes a reverence for tradition. Leipzig, by contrast, is a remade city, damaged by Allied bombing during World War II and then rebuilt as a showcase of socialist urbanism. Developing around one of Europe’s oldest trade fairs, Leipzig became an early hub of commerce and transportation. It was also the cradle of the German workers’ movement, known as “Red Leipzig” for its left-wing politics. Examining these cities in tandem inevitably highlights the contrasts between them. At the same time, Kraków and Leipzig had a lot in common, especially during the Cold War. Both were the “second cities” in their countries, overshadowed and largely administered by Warsaw and Berlin. Both had approximately half a million residents, including significant student and working-class populations; both hosted major international festivals, remaining unusually open to the West. Above all, both were renowned as cultural centers, once home to luminaries such as Juliusz Słowacki, J. S. Bach, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Each city styled itself as a new Athens, teeming with artists and artistic institutions. This makes them ideal sites for studying the cultural public sphere, but also means that they were hardly representative of their countries. Residents of Kraków and Leipzig cannot stand in for Polish or East German society as a whole, if simply because they lived in cities. Nor do municipal administrators exemplify their country’s communist regime. Case studies never capture the full picture, but they illuminate dynamics that get lost at larger scale. One such dynamic is the interaction between residents and officials that influenced them both. Like other local studies of the Bloc, this book highlights the good will, resourcefulness, and flexibility of at least some government administrators.54 Seen from the top, communist regimes can seem impervious to social pressure, but how they functioned on the ground reveals continuous adaptation. At the same time, the impact of encounter ran both ways. Cultural officials did more than censor, ban, and stunt creative work; their role was not only constrictive but also constructive. The architecture of the cultural matrix informed the art that artists made, regardless of their own intentions. In reducing cultural policy to aesthetic rules, scholars have understated its vast impact. Odes to construction brigades and portraits of Lenin were not the only forms of communist culture. Some of the Bloc’s best-known and best-loved works of art, from Polish posters to East German rock and roll, were also products of government

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policy. By illuminating how they originated, I explore communism’s enduring imprint on East European cultures. Communism also refashioned popular identities, if not quite in the ways officials intended. In narratives of anticommunist resistance—­ especially Polish ones—the national community often looks just as static as the regime. It gradually subverts the communist system without being affected by it, the immovable object finally overcoming the unstoppable force. From his exile in Argentina, the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz saw things differently. “Even if communism goes away,” he prophesied in 1955, “it will leave [Poles] other than they were, the same but different.”55 That gradual transformation comes into focus at the city level. The protests that rocked Karl Marx Square in October  1989—or Kraków’s Market Square a few months earlier—were not the culmination of four decades of struggle; rather, they were the product of the many changes those decades had wrought. Even Poland’s famed oppositional ethos developed over time, and in response to communist politics.56 As the following chapters will show, it was honed partly in the cultural public sphere. Surveys of Polish history often cite Stalin’s quip that communism fit Poland like a saddle fits a cow, taken to demonstrate the unique strength of Polish national identity.57 In actuality, the Soviet leader said this about Germany; the confusion, it seems, stems from the fact that he was speaking to a Polish politician.58 And yet East Germany developed into one of the most stable regimes in the socialist world, while Poland became known for its rebelliousness. Scholars have advanced many explanations for these divergent paths, highlighting the two states’ different histories, political cultures, and geopolitics.59 This study adds another dimension: the dynamics of each country’s public sphere. To understand the disparate trajectories of Poland and East Germany, it looks beyond static notions of national identity and asks how this identity evolved through state-society interactions.

Communism’s Public Sphere This book is organized into eight chapters that examine Kraków and Leipzig side by side. The first three consider the Stalinist era, when Polish and (East) German leaders restructured their societies by following the Soviet model. Cultural spaces not only publicized this model but also helped adapt it to local conditions. In the first postwar years especially, administrators relied on artists to promote communist visions and root them in national cultures (chapter 1). With their power

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secure, Eastern Bloc governments then embarked on radical campaigns of social engineering, reorganizing public life through central planning. They treated culture as a tool to bolster plan fulfillment by helping workers visualize the glorious future (chapter 2). However, human nature proved less malleable than expected. First in East Germany and then in Poland, workers rebelled against communist rule, often targeting its cultural symbols. Spaces of art turned into outlets for political critique and nationalist sentiment. But state officials, too, used them to tout their willingness to change and advertise a new, inclusive form of rule (chapter 3). Built to mold publics to the plan, the cultural matrix came to function as a public sphere. The next three chapters examine the attempt to adjust communism to East European societies. Officials began by researching popular desires: in the late 1950s and early 1960s, they turned to public-opinion polling, which got its start in cultural institutions (chapter 4). Based on these findings, both Polish and GDR leaders decided to diversify their programming. By offering the public more variety and choice, they sought to draw more people into government structures. Cultural spaces were designed to showcase the new abundance, teaching East Europeans how to be cultured consumers (chapter 5). Poles and East Germans, however, used these spaces to present their own visions for society. Through the state cultural matrix, they demanded that National Communism become truly accountable to the nation. Officials worked to confine such ferment to the arts, but cultural activity exploded into political activism (chapter 6). To reassert their power, new leaders in both states tightened the reins and limited the public sphere they had created. The final two chapters turn to the 1970s and 1980s, when communist regimes tried to combine control with popularity. Tighter political restraints went hand in hand with higher living standards; rather than dream about a different future, communist leaders focused on the here and now. That left a smaller role for culture, which had been valued for its power to change minds. Both Poland and East Germany slashed funding for the arts, frustrating many artists and spurring dissent (chapter 7). Over the 1980s individual dissent increasingly morphed into organized protest. Cultural institutions gave it room to grow, sheltering critical voices while fostering contact between them. Like Leipzig’s Gewandhaus, spaces of art incubated the popular activism that fueled the revolutions of 1989 (chapter 8). The cultural matrix that Eastern Bloc regimes built up ultimately helped East Europeans bring them down, and nowhere was this clearer than on Karl Marx Square on October 9, 1989.

Ch a p ter 1

Takeover Reconstruction as Revolution

There is a new reality today, and theater, having undergone a fundamental ideological transformation from lackey of cheap public tastes to advocate for social and ethical values, is now known as the architect of citizens’ spiritual reconstruction. —Jerzy Ronard Bujański, director of Kraków’s Old Theater, June 19451 Along with purging the Nazi apparatus and rebuilding destroyed institutions, we must pursue a cultural program that . . . puts the people’s creative powers in the service of a social reconstruction. —Rudolf Hartig, head of the Leipzig City Council’s Culture Department, October 19452

On the morning of January 19, 1945, a Soviet jeep rolled into Kraków’s main square. Street battles still raged in the city’s outskirts; the Red Army’s First Ukrainian Front had just broken in from the northwest, while the Wehrmacht’s Heeresgruppe A retreated to the south. After sixty-five months, Kraków was finally free from Nazi occupation. Residents began to file into the square, cautiously approaching the arriving vehicle. To their surprise, its passenger was not a soldier but a civilian—a short, elderly man with a prominent moustache. A jolt of recognition spread through the crowd. “The old man is back!” “The doctor is back!”3 Dr. Bolesław Drobner was a native Krakovian and a longtime leader of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS). He had been active in local cultural organizations under the Polish Second Republic, and when he returned in 1945 he resolved to turn their visions into reality. Over the next two decades Drobner served as chairman of the City Council’s Commission on Culture. More than any other figure, he was responsible for rebuilding and developing postwar Kraków’s arts scene. 19

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Six months later and 300 miles to the west, a music teacher named Rudolf Hartig took up his new post in Leipzig’s bullet-riddled city hall. Hartig was a decade younger than Drobner, but he too had spent his whole life in politics. He had served on the Leipzig City Council as a representative of the German Communist Party (KPD) before being arrested by Nazi authorities in 1933. Twelve years later, when the Red Army entered Leipzig, Hartig was named head of the Culture Department for the second-largest city in eastern Germany. His experiences convinced him that elitist, nationalist art had prepared the ground for Nazism’s success. To eradicate its roots from German soil, Hartig was determined to develop the kind of culture he had always dreamed of—humanist, egalitarian, and resolutely antifascist. Drobner and Hartig became local actors in a transnational project of cultural reconstruction. Neither man received detailed instructions from above or followed a model from abroad. Rather, the two politicians relied on local customs and conventions, resurrecting the administrative institutions they knew from the prewar era. Yet this reconstruction was intentionally selective; by restoring only some structures and practices, Drobner and Hartig thoroughly reshaped the cultural landscape in both cities. Because none of their initiatives seemed particularly new to their contemporaries, none was seriously challenged, either by artists or by politicians. Taken together, however, they vastly expanded state control over the arts. Measures that seemed to uphold the status quo actually upended it, transforming cultural life in both Kraków and Leipzig. Writing on the eve of European communism’s collapse, Jan Tomasz Gross posited that its rise began before 1945, amid the throes of World War II.4 His argument was a riposte to the standard narrative of East European history, which linked the communist revolution to the spread of Soviet influence, or Sovietization.5 Instead of describing the changes wrought by foreign troops, Gross highlighted the domestic conditions that made such changes possible. He argued that social turmoil, political instability, and economic collapse had all contributed to communism’s success; rather than opposing each other, internal and external factors worked in tandem. Notably, all the phenomena Gross described were symptoms of disorder. In his view, the communist state benefitted from World War II because it was essentially a “spoiler state” that aimed to destroy all autonomous institutions. This chapter builds on Gross’s concept of “war as revolution” by calling attention to the institutional foundations of communist rule. It looks beyond wartime destruction to postwar rebuilding, showing how the administrative structures recreated

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at the local level in the aftermath of war enabled the communist seizure of power. Across postwar Eastern Europe, reconstruction was revolution.

Apostles of a Better Humanity By the time they took office in 1945, both Bolesław Drobner and Rudolf Hartig had extensive experience in socialist politics. Drobner was born in Kraków in 1883 to an assimilated Jewish family and joined the Polish Social Democratic Party at age fourteen.6 He attended universities in Lwów and Berlin but was expelled from both for revolutionary activity; after earning a doctorate in chemistry from Zurich, he returned to Kraków, joined his family’s medical supply business, and became active in socialist politics. Once Poland regained independence, however, Drobner grew disillusioned with the socialists’ pro-regime attitude and led a splinter group that favored a more radical approach. Though his new party proved short-lived, it earned Drobner the enduring enmity of Polish authorities, who arrested him more than twenty times and, in 1938, sentenced him to three years in prison. With the outbreak of war, Drobner escaped to Lwów but was quickly apprehended by Soviet police. He ended up in a tiny village near Novosibirsk, separated from his family and wistful for his native land. “Let nostalgia consume us, so that it can drive us, / let longing burn within us with creative breath,” he wrote in a poem titled Kraków; “It is worth living. Because Poland has not perished, / it is necessary to live. So that it can arise like a phoenix and live happily. . .”7 Following a Polish-Soviet agreement in July 1941, Drobner was allowed to travel to Moscow, where he became a founding member of the Union of Polish Patriots—an organization set up by Stalin to develop a program for postwar Poland. Drobner was appointed the Minister of Labor, Social Services, and Health in the Union’s provisional government; he also helped revive the PPS, serving as the first chairman of its Supreme Council. As the new Polish state took shape, though, Drobner lost both his ministry and his chairmanship. At age sixty-one, Drobner was older than most leaders of the postwar regime and widely seen as an outsider. Another issue was his prickly personality, which one biographer described as “egocentric, stubborn, and prone to megalomania.”8 Finding himself marginalized from national politics, Drobner devoted himself to local affairs. After a brief stint as mayor of Wrocław, he became the founding leader of Kraków’s PPS chapter as well as a fixture in the City Council, where he chaired both the culture and the budget commissions. For a self-proclaimed “child of the theater,” these posts

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offered the opportunity to reshape cultural life in a new vein.9 As Drobner wrote in his Siberian exile, What even reason cannot crack—we’ll crack. We’ll measure out the strength for our designs. We’ll stand so powerful at the gates of a new life that we’ll overturn the old world with one breath.10 Hartig was born a decade after Drobner, in 1893, in a small town outside Frankfurt.11 The son of a miller’s assistant, Hartig trained to be a schoolteacher with a specialization in music. He was also fascinated by expressionist poetry, penning his first verses while still in school: “please burn with me . . . I am filled with fire . . . open yourself to your

Figure 2.  The agitprop-brigade “Greater Leipzig” and its leader Rudolf Hartig (center left, facing the camera), ca. 1929. For Hartig, as for many postwar officials, working for communist regimes was the culmination of a lifelong engagement in leftist politics. Stadtgeschichtliches Museum Leipzig, photographer unknown.

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human brothers.”12 After a stint in the German army, Hartig joined the Independent Social Democrats—the party of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg—and participated in the Bavarian Soviet Republic of 1919. When the Republic collapsed, Hartig spent two years in jail, where he became a member of the KPD. This conversion earned Hartig the admiration of the French novelist Henri Barbusse, who called him an “apostle of a better humanity,” but it also prevented Hartig from finding work in his native Frankonia.13 Upon his release in 1921, he headed to Leipzig to work for the KPD, serving as a city councilor and the director of Leipzig’s Association for Worker Culture. “The revolutionary never rests, never can rest, because the living strength of the evolving new order always drives him,” Hartig wrote in a 1925 essay; “would he not feel guilty, would he not have a guilty conscience, were he too passive, too passionless, indifferent?”14 When the Nazis seized power in 1933, Hartig was arrested and sent to a concentration camp, but ultimately released. He spent the war years in Leipzig, working in an antiquarian bookstore while planning for the future with the National Committee for a Free Germany, an antifascist resistance group. In May 1945, Hartig coauthored the Committee’s appeal for “all spiritually active men” to form “a front against non-spirit and non-form, against violence and oppression, for freedom and creative achievement.”15 He also served on the District Council of the resurrected KPD as the director of cultural affairs and was named head of Leipzig’s new Culture Department when the Soviets entered the city in July. For the first time in his life, Hartig became a political insider with the capacity to influence policy at the local level. Still, his first programmatic statement, issued in August 1945, harkened back to his roots as an expressionist poet: We want men to be like brothers to one another, to understand what others want and feel. . . . We want man to be as he is at the bottom of his heart, as he once was in childhood and once will be in old age—a man of tact, of goodness, of love, of caring, and of understanding.16

A Tale of Two Cities While Drobner and Hartig had plenty in common, the cities they governed were far from alike—especially at war’s end. Kraków had survived the war nearly unscathed after Nazi authorities abandoned a plan to

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blow up its medieval center.17 Though the city fell to Nazi troops in September  1939, many of its social, political, and cultural organizations continued to function in the wartime underground and reasserted themselves after the Nazi withdrawal. In other ways, of course, Kraków had changed fundamentally: of the eighty thousand Jews who lived there in 1939, just six thousand survived the war, and many of those fled after a pogrom in August 1945.18 Their absence made Polish society more homogeneous than ever before, creating an ethnically uniform community that experienced the end of the war as a national liberation. Poland also regained political sovereignty, as the Union of Polish Patriots evolved into a provisional government that wielded power through a network of councils. Kraków’s City Council thus reported to central authorities in Warsaw while appointing its own administrative body, the city hall—an arrangement that gave city officials considerable leeway over local affairs. Postwar Kraków was perpetually abuzz with new ideas, civic initiatives, and artistic innovation. Ten theaters sprang up in 1945 alone.19 If Kraków was a liberated city, Leipzig was occupied territory. At war’s end, large swaths of Leipzig lay in ruins. Allied air raids destroyed 40 percent of the city center, leaving a quarter of the population homeless and the rest fearing for their fate.20 Senior Nazi officials committed suicide as US forces entered the city in April 1945; six weeks later, when the Americans gave way to Soviet troops, convoys of Germans followed the retreating army westward.21 Those who stayed behind faced rape and looting at the hands of the Red Army, which also requisitioned much of the city’s infrastructure—everything from industrial factories to the art museum’s collection of old masters. Under the terms of Allied agreements, Leipzig was administered by the Soviet Military Administration in Germany, which appointed a Red Army commander for the city.22 While the Soviets legalized four political parties and reestablished the Leipzig City Council, they wielded veto power over its decisions, keeping a tight grip on public life. The experience of defeat left the city’s population “indifferent” and “lethargic,” in the words of official reports.23 “We were a people at the end of our rope, exhausted, bombed out, eternally living in basements,” one resident recalled.24 Despite these differences, though, Kraków and Leipzig had three key features in common. First, both had to transition from wartime to peacetime, overcoming the chaos left by six years of conflict.

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Officials rushed to restore transportation, utilities, and the food supply, but this proved a slow process: in Leipzig, regular power outages continued through 1953, while ration cards endured until 1958.25 Aggravating such shortages was the constant flow of refugees, put on the move by ethnic cleansing and shifting political borders. In the summer of 1945, some 170,000 men and women passed through Kraków’s main train station—nearly as many as had lived in the city before the war.26 City officials set out to tame this disorder, and they mostly had to do it alone. On many issues, local administrators received no instructions from above, and on others they received too many disparate instructions to handle. As a result, both Kraków and Leipzig came to operate like little fiefdoms, administering themselves as best they could in the first months and even years after the war. Second, both cities confronted the legacy of Nazi rule and the imperative of denazification. As the capital of the Generalgouvernement, Kraków spent nearly six years under German rule and experienced some of the same policies as Leipzig—most notably the persecution and deportation of Jewish residents. It was also integrated into the German cultural sphere, putting on the lighthearted operettas and film comedies that dominated repertoires in Leipzig. This shared background bred a shared resolve to destroy all residues of Nazism; in 1945, both cities replaced much of their administrative staff, reorganized the structures of government, and investigated potential collaborators. To be sure, denazification was far more pronounced in Leipzig than in Kraków, but what linked the two cities was a pervasive fear of contamination. In order to overcome the legacy of fascism, postwar officials felt compelled to leave no stone unturned, inspecting all local institutions—from theater stages to factory clubrooms.27 Finally, both cities shared an extensive tradition of leftist politics. This tradition was particularly strong in Leipzig, an early socialist stronghold and the birthplace of the communist icon Karl Liebknecht (and of the GDR’s first leader, Walter Ulbricht). In all parliamentary elections held during the Weimar era, socialists received at least 30  percent of the city’s vote, while communists tallied another 15–20 percent.28 The two parties were even stronger in the City Council, where they held an outright majority from 1919 to 1921, and again from 1926 to 1929.29 In Kraków, too, the PPS received over a quarter of the vote throughout

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the 1920s, belying the town’s reputation for conservatism.30 Even after adopting a policy of electoral boycott, the socialists remained active at the local level: in the last elections to the City Council, held on the eve of war, they gained more seats than any other party.31 Thanks to these leftist successes, both Kraków and Leipzig developed an extensive infrastructure of public works and social services. They also developed an impressive number of socialist cadres who had experience in local administration and a proven commitment to the workers’ cause. These similarities between Kraków and Leipzig created common challenges for Drobner and Hartig. Both men had to bring order to cultural life, purge it of Nazi traces, and make it accessible to workingclass residents. They also had to operate in similar environments: as they worked to rebuild culture from the ashes, the two officials were forced to confront postwar shortages, fascist taints, and socialist legacies. These conditions shaped the avenues of reconstruction in each city. They allowed Drobner and Hartig to expand the city government’s role in cultural affairs while marginalizing private ownership and charitable patronage. Neither administrator had to invent or impose a new mechanism for managing the arts. Rather, they were able to amend the prewar order, adopting some traditions over others—and building communist power in the process.

Organizing and Planning The first priority for local officials was to gain control over the wide range of cultural events in each city. Hartig’s Culture Department described itself as the “organizing and planning body for Leipzig’s entire cultural scene,” and Drobner, too, insisted that “the city must know about all undertakings and direct them.”32 Faced with a shortage of manpower, however, both officials were forced to rely on institutional precedent. Kraków’s Department of Education, Culture, Art, and Propaganda, formed in February 1945, took the name and responsibilities of an earlier body from the Polish Second Republic. This department had managed Kraków’s largest theater since 1914, vetting the repertoire while paying a share of expenses, and in 1945 city officials simply renewed the arrangement. Drobner’s Culture Commission gained a say in the theater’s choice of plays in return for footing part of the bill.33 Leipzig’s interwar government lacked a unified cultural administration, but it too ran several offices for managing the arts—including a theater bureau that funded three stages in town.34 Two of the three remained

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under city control after World War II, when they were subordinated to Hartig’s Culture Department. For local officials, in short, funding and supervising the arts was nothing new. Both Drobner and Hartig could lean on long-standing traditions of city government to claim oversight of major institutions such as theaters and museums. For much of the interwar period, such municipal oversight had been extremely limited. For one thing, functionaries were hamstrung by a lack of resources and coordination; for another, they held little influence over private institutions that did not receive public aid. The situation began to change under the Nazi regime, which strengthened and consolidated local government. In Leipzig, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) merged the various cultural bureaus of the city government into a single Culture Department—the office that Hartig inherited. Yet it was the collapse of Nazi power that gave city officials real authority, creating a power vacuum that other actors struggled to fill. Under the Third Reich, the bulk of Leipzig’s cultural infrastructure had been in private hands, and many of those hands belonged to members of the Nazi Party. As former Nazis fled the city or came under arrest, Leipzig officials took charge of their possessions, including thirteen cinemas seized in 1945.35 “The public interest cannot tolerate that these [cinemas] remain in the hands of men who used them for twelve years as instruments of Nazi propaganda,” Hartig insisted.36 The Culture Department was reluctant to take on new responsibilities but often discovered that it had little choice. In 1947, for instance, it was forced to finance Leipzig’s premier orchestra, the Gewandhaus, when no other patrons could be found.37 A  similar issue arose in Kraków, where Nazi authorities had opened a Polish-language theater as part of a “soft course” designed to minimize resistance. A private entrepreneur laid claim to the theater after the war, but city officials protested on the grounds that it had been built “by the German occupier with public funds.”38 After extensive debate, the City Council took control of the theater in May  1946—in response to a proposal by Drobner.39 While Kraków and Leipzig experienced National Socialism in starkly different ways, the two cities were left with a shared, twofold legacy. Nazi rule set a precedent for strong municipal control while casting suspicion on all private initiatives. Postwar disorder further empowered city administrators, who gained a monopoly over scarce resources. Culture departments had to assign spaces for art, organize heating and lighting, and even coordinate transportation; much like food or electricity, culture became strictly rationed.

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“It is irresponsible if one-third [of theater seats] are heated for no reason at a time when schools and hospitals have no heat,” Hartig wrote in December 1945.40 Under these conditions, Leipzig’s city hall began to monitor all cultural events across the city, not just those in city-owned institutions. The lingering threat of Nazi contagion provided an added impetus for oversight. Like their counterparts in Leipzig, Kraków officials were constantly on the lookout for “wild,” or unapproved, performances—such as those by a traveling children’s theater with “an antipedagogical repertoire of German folk tales that give children a taste for cruelty and other characteristic elements of German ideology.”41 To solve the problem, Kraków required all independent performers to get approval from its Culture Department, and this approach gradually began bearing fruit. By the end of 1946, the department reported that it had “gained full control over all performances in the city, without even one unrecognized show.”42 In just a few months, both Drobner and Hartig built powerful bureaucracies that oversaw most cultural spaces within city limits. They did this without relying on Soviet troops or resorting to a blanket policy of expropriation. Instead, the two officials made use of local customs and conditions, making the process seem straightforward, almost natural. Though culture departments became larger than ever before, few residents actively opposed the growing strength of city officials. Someone had to take over for Nazi owners, after all; someone had to make sure that showtimes did not conflict and that theater halls remained heated. Those that did complain were often hard pressed to come up with alternatives. The prewar directors of Leipzig’s Gewandhaus orchestra condemned city control as “both unnecessary and inhibiting,” but lacked the funds to run the orchestra themselves.43 By drawing on prewar experience, wartime practice, and postwar necessity, Drobner and Hartig reasserted traditions of municipal oversight but downplayed those of private patronage. Through the process of selective reconstruction, they managed to consolidate small empires at the city level.

An Elite of the Qualified As soon as the cannons fell silent, thousands of petitions poured into the Kraków and Leipzig culture departments, asking for money, jobs, housing, and more. Drobner and Hartig managed these requests with the help of artists’ unions, which came to function as intermediaries between artists and the state. Such unions first appeared in both cities at the turn of the twentieth century; interwar Kraków had branches of the

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Union of Polish Visual Artists (founded in 1911), the Union of Polish Writers (1920), and the Union of Polish Stage Artists (1918).44 All three gave out pensions, negotiated contracts, and defended members’ rights. They also received occasional subsidies from the City Council, which kept up the practice after World War II. In the chaotic early months of 1945, Kraków officials allocated four apartment blocks to members of the writers’ and the visual artists’ unions, assembling a who’s who of Polish culture. “The common room teemed from morning—to morning,” one block’s resident recalled; “it was a space for constant meetings, deals, and conversations, for literary and political discussions, for friendly agreements and disagreements that often lasted until dawn.”45 Leipzig’s cultural officials had provided less support to unions during the Weimar era, but they did work with the Reich Chamber of Culture—an umbrella organization that encompassed all German artists under the Third Reich. Though the Chamber collapsed in 1945, it was replaced by another unified artists’ union, which the Leipzig City Council continued to support. Members of the new union received benefits such as privileged housing, along with exemptions from the mandatory work orders that applied to all German adults. Artists’ unions thus took on equivalent roles in Kraków and Leipzig, despite their different histories and organizational structures. They allowed Drobner and Hartig to set up a system of state patronage without creating new administrative bodies. Though the relationship between artists’ unions and city governments pre-dated World War II, it acquired a new dynamic in postwar conditions. Before the Nazi era, unions in both cities had chosen their own members, setting entrance exams and other admissions criteria as they saw fit. After the war, however, municipal officials insisted on greater supervision, partly to carry out a thorough denazification and partly to allocate resources more efficiently. This was particularly important in Leipzig, where thousands of artists had belonged to the Reich Chamber of Culture and were therefore treated with suspicion. Under the Soviet Occupation Zone’s six-tiered ration system, moreover, all residents’ daily provisioning became tied to their productive output. While “average” writers and painters received barely more food than children, “particularly valuable” artists were eligible for a manual laborer’s ration, or nearly twice the standard amount.46 Such privileges made the status of artist into a highly desirable commodity, prompting thousands of applications from would-be artists. It fell to Rudolf Hartig, the erstwhile poet, to determine who qualified as an artist and which artists qualified as particularly valuable.

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To help him decide, Hartig assembled an Examination Commission that consisted of three painters—all professors at the Leipzig Academy of Fine Arts with known leftist leanings.47 The commission set aside six days for examinations, asking painters to appear in alphabetical order and with two recent artworks in tow. Nearly half of all applicants were rejected— sometimes with comments like “a hopeless case”—and referred to the Labor Office for immediate assignment.48 Of those approved, 18 percent qualified as “laborers” rather than “clerical workers,” while only 2 percent gained the coveted status of “manual laborer.”49 The commission’s decisions were not foolproof, as Hartig readily admitted: “It happens that one of these examinations rejects someone who exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, and then the rejected painter writes to all the newspapers, with the result that the whole of Germany calls us—I don’t know what!”50 Over time, however, the Examination Commission turned into a well-oiled machine, meeting on the first Tuesday of every month. It grew to include as many as nine artists and invited applicants to revise and resubmit their work. Leipzig officials investigated not just technical skill but also artists’ political views and class background. The Commission on Writers, which Hartig chaired himself, declared that “political harmlessness is a prerequisite [for official recognition], in the sense of a conditio sine qua non.”51 Anyone who had held leading functions in the Nazi Party was automatically excluded, though “nominal” party members often squeaked by.52 Meanwhile, the commission made special allowance for artists from “unfavorable social conditions,” giving them an extra year to improve their work.53 Kraków unions were less likely to consider social factors, but they carefully researched artists’ wartime activities. In April 1945 the Polish Union of Stage Artists gave one opera singer an eighteen-month ban for performing Beethoven’s Ode to Joy for Nazi authorities.54 Kraków’s Culture Department not only oversaw the process of lustration but also ran its own Verification Commission, which examined artists employed in municipal institutions.55 Its actions were not without precedent: under the Polish Second Republic, city functionaries had hired members of the City Theater’s ensemble and also awarded an annual literary medal.56 Both Drobner and Hartig could draw on such legacies to become powerful arbiters of artistic merit. By extending previously limited traditions of city oversight to all local artists, they took on powers that interwar officials never had. This power came through clearly in a speech Hartig delivered in December 1946, at the opening of an exhibition entitled “Contemporary Art in Central Germany.” Hartig began by stressing that Soviet

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Occupation Zone officials had no intention of dictating art. “We are not dogmatists and no slaves of theory,” he insisted; “we do not want to give orders in art, [to say] that this should be painted in this way or that.” Officials’ only goal was to undo twelve years of Nazi “misuse,” promoting “a human art, a free and a good art.” There was, however, “one demand—quality!” Quality would distinguish real art “from the sea of trash and kitsch,” Hartig posited; “when the urge for profits and easy sales is made high by need, then an elite of the qualified must arise, which will be inspired by the urge to create and not by speculation.”57 This speech summed up the rationale for state controls even as it denied that they existed, using language that resonated with many artists. City officials had long championed “quality,” whether by supporting unions or by awarding prizes. Meanwhile, cultural producers in both Kraków and Leipzig had often petitioned local government to protect them “from the sea of trash and kitsch,” though they did not always agree on what measures to take. To many, municipal supervision of artistic unions seemed familiar and even desirable, the realization of an old idea rather than the start of something new. Yet the impression of continuity obscured a remarkable transformation: through postwar rebuilding, both Drobner and Hartig gained the ability to dictate who could make art and what that art could look like.

The Upbringing of the Masses Drobner’s and Hartig’s third key task was making art available to ordinary people. Both men viewed access to culture as a political necessity, a way of educating people and soothing the wounds of war. “With the collapse of Nazism, . . . cultural work acquires a deep and broad social meaning,” Hartig wrote in October 1945; “it [must] aim at a real and genuine upbringing of the masses .  .  . and overcome the lethargy created by this difficult situation.”58 In order to lead workers to culture, the two officials introduced ticket discounts at major cultural institutions, drawing on prewar practices in each city. Kraków’s city-run Słowacki Theater had long offered cheaper seats to poorer patrons, and by 1937 just 9  percent of theatergoers paid full price.59 The postwar Culture Department not only restored this system at the Słowacki but also extended it across the city, granting subsidies to private theaters that offered discounted rates.60 Following local convention, Leipzig officials used a different way of expanding access to the arts: membershipbased viewers’ organizations, which had proliferated under the Weimar

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Republic.61 Before World War II, such organizations were usually affiliated with political parties. The Social Democrats, for instance, funded a Worker Education Institute—headed for a time by Hartig’s older brother—which sold blocks of tickets for an annual fee. Hartig followed this model after the war, creating a Viewers’ Organization that offered a package of six theater passes and six opera tickets at a considerable discount. Unlike its predecessors, though, this organization had formal sponsorship from the city government and was the only one of its kind. In its first season, 1946/47, it attracted more than eighteen thousand members, and a year later it was extended to the city’s famed Gewandhaus concert hall.62 Even as they reconstructed prewar forms, both Drobner and Hartig made adjustments for postwar conditions. In the 1930s the Słowacki Theater had sold discount tickets to the disabled and the unemployed, in addition to school groups, political parties, and charitable associations.63 After World War II, cheap seats were reserved almost exclusively for factory workers, who had to buy them through trade union functionaries. Kraków’s trade union federation sold 150,000 theater tickets and more than 1.6 million cinema tickets in 1947 alone.64 The Leipzig Viewers’ Organization worked in much the same way, offering subscriptions to factory workers at half price and to all others at a discount of just 25 percent. Rather than making seats accessible to all patrons, both Drobner and Hartig deliberately focused on one privileged demographic. Their policies not only enabled workers to attend cultural institutions but also forced those institutions to cater to workers’ tastes. Besides sending city residents to see professional performances, postwar officials encouraged them to perform themselves by joining an amateur ensemble. Such ensembles had proliferated in Leipzig before World War II, ranging in genre from song and dance to theater and puppetry. After the war, Hartig rushed to restore those with strong socialist traditions—like the Barnet Licht Workers’ Choir, founded in 1907—while preventing many Nazi-era ensembles from reassembling.65 Kraków officials also reconstituted prominent leftist associations such as the Workers’ University Society, which dated back to 1898 and organized lectures on the city’s outskirts. Drobner formed the living link between its prewar and postwar incarnations: he had served as deputy chairman of the society’s Kraków branch in the early 1930s before rising to the top post after liberation.66 In his capacity as a city official, however, Drobner helped to channel such civic initiatives into state structures. He led the effort to establish a House of Culture on Kraków’s

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main square, in a former palace that had served as headquarters for both Nazi and Soviet administrators. When it finally opened in 1949 under the direction of the local trade union federation, it put on lectures, exhibits, and performances for some 2,500 workers a day.67 Efforts to bring culture to the masses stirred little controversy, either in Kraków or in Leipzig. To most city residents, they seemed both recognizable and necessary, especially after the social cataclysm of war, and yet the measures that Drobner and Hartig pursued were not as conventional as they appeared. Out of a panoply of prewar cultural associations, the two officials restored only a few, those with a pronounced leftist bent. They then focused such associations on one particular audience, factory workers, while folding them into the apparatus of the state. In Kraków as in Leipzig, exposure to the arts became a governmental project to be steered and supervised by municipal officials. By privileging progressivism over conservatism and public control over private initiative, Drobner and Hartig transformed the city’s role in cultural affairs. Gradually, quietly, and without much opposition, both officials came to oversee all aspects of art: its production, its distribution, and even its consumption.

Mastering Cultural Problems Even as local officials amassed considerable power over cultural spaces, they were not always able to use it. One impediment was a chronic shortage of funds: amid the postwar rubble, clearing streets and rebuilding factories took priority over patronizing culture. Leipzig’s City Council thus spent as much on theaters from 1945 to 1949 as it had in 1942 alone.68 This meant that Drobner and Hartig lacked the resources to commission many new works or to give them a wide circulation. In 1947 both men opened special theaters for working-class viewers only to watch them go bankrupt within two years. “Those of us on the cultural front are like gummy bears,” Hartig complained to a friend; “The financial official pulls on one leg, the cultural policy official pulls on the other. Who’s going to pull harder?”69 Beyond finding money, culture departments struggled to find artworks that were appropriate for postwar conditions. Many of the films and plays that pre-dated the war had fallen out of tune with East European realities, and those imported from the USSR were often little better. As a result, both Drobner and Hartig had trouble building the cultural order they envisioned, even if they had the capacity to do so. “We still live in the private capitalist

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epoch, despite individual measures to the contrary,” a Leipzig official concluded in 1947.70 All that changed over the next two years, as Poland and eastern Germany developed into Soviet-type regimes. In Poland, the final step came in December 1948 with the founding of the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR), which was accompanied by an array of cultural performances. On each day of the party congress, Kraków’s House of Culture set up loudspeakers on its roof and broadcast classical music over the city.71 A joint communist-socialist party had formed in eastern Germany in 1946, but the Soviet Occupation Zone only gained statehood with the founding of the GDR on October 7, 1949. To mark the occasion, Leipzig officials organized a massive demonstration in the city center that featured poetry readings, folk dances, and more classical music.72 Culture was built into the foundation of both communist regimes, and funding for the arts increased accordingly. In Leipzig, cultural spending exceeded 6 percent of the city’s total budget for 1949— up from just 3  percent of a much smaller sum three years before.73 The new resources enabled local officials to reshape their cities’ arts scenes, effecting a far-reaching transformation in cultural life. Yet this transformation was firmly rooted in the administrative structures that Drobner and Hartig had set up after the war. By 1949, all the mechanisms that state officials needed to consolidate control over the arts were already in place. While many were strengthened and expanded under Soviet influence, none were new, and that was precisely why they were successful. The cultural revolution that swept Eastern Europe at the turn of the 1950s built on the work of local officials at the end of the Second World War. East European Stalinism grew out of postwar reconstruction. In Kraków, the forms of oversight that Drobner had developed on the ground paved the way for a centralized system run by the Ministry of Culture and Art. Both of the city’s municipal theaters and three of its private stages were nationalized in October 1949, becoming part of the Ministry’s General Direction of Theaters, Operas, and Philharmonic Orchestras.74 Kraków’s largest art gallery, a longtime recipient of subsidies from the City Council, was subordinated to the Central Bureau of Artistic Exhibitions in Warsaw. “We still make our own schedule of exhibits,” it noted in 1949, “but this schedule must be sent to the Bureau for verification, and the Bureau also puts on several exhibitions of its own choosing.”75 Such changes were more controversial than Drobner’s earlier efforts to expand municipal oversight, but they followed an

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Figure 3.  A poster for the Soviet film The Battle of Stalingrad looms over ruins on a Leipzig street, 1949. Despite poor attendance, the film was considered “especially valuable” and played four times a day. Stadtgeschichtliches Museum Leipzig, photograph by Gerhard Treblegar.

established trajectory. Communist officials were able to portray nationalization as the logical next step in an ongoing process of consolidating state control. Similar changes unfolded in Leipzig, where all cinemas and theaters were gradually integrated into national networks. Citing Hartig’s precedent of expropriating Nazi-owned cinemas, the Saxony provincial government took over all private cinema houses in 1948.76 In January  1950, the last private theaters in Leipzig also passed into state ownership, completing a process that had begun five years before. This adjustment in cultural management became a watershed in cultural life: spaces of art in Kraków and Leipzig were increasingly cut off from Western trends and reoriented toward the East.77 To many observers, such changes seemed abrupt, yet the speed of their implementation only indicated how much groundwork had already been laid. A  new Stalinist culture emerged from old administrative institutions. To spread this new Stalinist art, central authorities relied on artists’ unions—another outgrowth of postwar reconstruction. Polish artists’ unions lost the right of collective bargaining in 1949 and became dependent on the Ministry of Culture and Art. In their new capacity, they helped promote the doctrine of Socialist Realism while also monitoring members’ political activity. A new round of purges took place in 1949

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and 1950, often with the help of the same examination commissions that had been set up in 1945. One “verification” from 1950 found that half of all writers in Kraków were either openly hostile or passive toward the communist regime.78 Though no writers were expelled from the union—under the argument that it was safer to keep them within state structures—they were placed under further observation and ordered to improve their work.79 East German officials carried out similar reviews in 1950, even building separate writers’ and painters’ unions to coordinate the process. Though the unions were new, much of the personnel remained the same: the Leipzig painter Max Schwimmer, who had served on Hartig’s very first Examination Commission, still sat on the commission five years later when it began a new round of evaluations.80 Out of 450 painters registered in Leipzig District, the commission approved just 169, or barely more than a third.81 It publicly acknowledged that it took politics into account, not so much to hunt out Nazi collaborators but to identify spies and “cosmopolitans.” Structures developed after World War II became the primary instruments of cultural change. In Kraków as in Leipzig, artists’ unions created a new kind of artist— privileged, aesthetically appropriate, and fully integrated into the state. The third feature of cultural Stalinism—besides new repertoires and new artists—was a new kind of public. From 1949, all cultural life was directed toward the workers, paralleling the industrialization of Eastern Bloc economies. Using the system of organized viewership developed by Drobner, city officials bussed millions of workers to Kraków theaters and raised average attendance from 50 percent of capacity in 1947 to 80  percent in 1949.82 They also sent orchestras and dance troupes to play directly in the city’s factories, as Drobner had long dreamed of doing.83 Leipzig authorities implemented similar policies, under the argument that “cultural work within factories is the main tool for mastering the cultural problems of our time.”84 Like their counterparts in Kraków, they recruited viewers with the help of local trade unions, which were required to set aside 15  percent of all member dues for cultural expenses.85 This influx of money allowed Drobner and Hartig to realize old goals on a new scale. Thanks to the institutions they developed on the ground, public consumption of art became as tightly controlled as its production and distribution. Within little more than a year, Stalinist officials had thoroughly reshaped cultural life in both Kraków and Leipzig. They did so by using three levers of power: changing the repertoires in artistic institutions, purging artists’ unions, and increasing worker involvement in cultural

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affairs. Though the effect was dramatic, none of the practices were new. All three had been developed by Drobner and Hartig soon after World War II, and all drew on prewar traditions of cultural administration. The cultural changes of 1949/50 were made possible by the structural changes of 1945/46.86 Through a process of selective reconstruction, local officials had managed to consolidate control over the arts while seeming to uphold the status quo. By the time most artists and artistic institutions came to feel the sting of this control, it was already too late: having ceded so much power to city officials, they lacked the autonomy to fend off Stalinist reforms. Like true “spoiler states,” Eastern Bloc regimes monopolized cultural control by suppressing alternative sources of power, yet they did so less through destruction than through reconstruction. It was postwar rebuilding that allowed communist officials to transform East European culture without arousing widespread resistance, and even with sizeable local support.87 If selective reconstruction revolutionized cultural life in Kraków and Leipzig, it also made these cities more alike. Scholars have argued that Sovietization homogenized Eastern Europe by “crushing” local traditions and replacing them with Soviet art.88 Yet cultural imports from the USSR remained relatively rare in Kraków and Leipzig, even during the heyday of Soviet influence in the early 1950s. At both cities’ theaters, for instance, Soviet plays made up roughly 10 percent of all new productions, as compared to 50 percent of Polish plays in Kraków and over 40 percent of German plays in Leipzig.89 Moreover, only two plays from the USSR appeared not just in one city but in both during this period. Soviet imports, in short, played only a minor role in cultural convergence, and they did nothing to displace national traditions. In Kraków theaters, in fact, Polish plays became more common after the Second World War than they had ever been under the Polish Second Republic. The real issue was the kind of national traditions that Stalinism preserved, and it is here that the impact of selective reconstruction becomes clear. In the interwar years, Kraków and Leipzig boasted diverse arts scenes with local characteristics that set the two cities apart. Catholicism, for example, was a major feature of Kraków’s cultural landscape, but only peripheral in Leipzig; meanwhile, fascism shaped Leipzig’s arts scene for much of the 1930s without making a substantive imprint in Poland. These factors conditioned the development of artists’ unions, viewers’ associations, and even municipal offices. They ensured that Kraków and Leipzig looked different from each other throughout the interwar years.

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After 1945, however, some of these differences started to fade. Drobner worked to limit Catholicism’s influence on cultural affairs, substituting city funding for the Church’s educational programming and artistic patronage. Hartig, for his part, largely dismantled Leipzig’s Nazi infrastructure and cleansed city repertoires of fascist works. At the same time, both officials accentuated their city’s “progressive” traditions: they rebuilt interwar workers’ organizations, appointed leftist artists to run artists’ unions, and expanded city oversight of the arts. This filtering stripped away significant differences between Kraków and Leipzig while emphasizing their existing similarities. It produced a cultural convergence that relied less on centralized authority than on local initiative, less on imposing new administrative institutions than on reshaping old ones. Having forged a revolution through reconstruction, local officials forged unity through diversity across the Eastern Bloc. On the last day of 1949, the Kraków art historian Karol Estreicher, Jr., took stock of what the year had brought. “Censorship is going crazy,” he wrote in his diary; “never before has Polish thought been as constricted . . . as now.” Cinemas, theaters, and other cultural spaces had all been reoriented toward “public education.” Whatever did not fit the bill was banned, while private galleries and publishing houses shut down. After several years of gradual creep, the communist regime had taken hold of all political and cultural institutions. “Night has fallen over all of Polish life,” Estreicher concluded.90 The same developments took place throughout Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe. As communists consolidated power, they targeted all structures outside their control, seeking to take them over or take them out. Political parties, civic groups, discussion clubs, private performance venues, periodicals: this was the infrastructure of open, public debate, which offered alternatives to communist rule and therefore was a threat to it. By 1949, as Estreicher perceived, that infrastructure had been gutted and subordinated to the state. Communist rulers had suppressed the bourgeois public sphere. To Estreicher, this change was the result of Soviet pressure, which swept over the region like a storm. “We’re crouching as low as possible to shield ourselves from the eastern wind, so that it won’t tear out our roots,” he wrote.91 But it was those same roots that made the Stalinist takeover possible. Across Eastern Europe, homegrown officials like Bolesław Drobner and Rudolf Hartig were primary agents of cultural revolution. Although this revolution reached its apogee at the end of the 1940s, its origins lay in the rebuilding efforts that followed World

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War II. Partly by instruction and partly by intuition, city administrators carried out a structural transformation of the cultural public sphere: they expanded state control over the arts, eliminated right-wing influences, and weakened the authority of non-state actors. They did all this while seeming to follow convention and without provoking widespread alarm. Selective reconstruction proved to be a highly effective form of revolution because it masked the fact that a revolution was even taking place. Yet incremental changes paved the way for the far-reaching reforms that Estreicher observed in 1949. Rather than crushing East European cultures, communists transformed them from within. Step by step, they built an expansive cultural matrix for overseeing, steering, and instrumentalizing the arts. And as 1949 gave way to 1950, they began to put this matrix to use, endeavoring to forge a new kind of society.

Ch a p ter 2

Planning Workers and Cultural Mass Work

Without raising the people’s cultural level we will never achieve the great economic tasks of the Five Year Plan. —Helmut Holzhauer, chairman of East Germany’s State Art Commission, 19521 No one demands that we put on plays about industrial pig farming; but it’s our task to speak to the people, to shape and educate them, to move and ennoble them in such a way . . . as to help even industrial pig farming. —Jerzy Pański, head of Poland’s Central Theater Board, 19512

The factory hall is full, although production is suspended. Seventy or so workers—men in caps and boots, women in overalls—stand underneath the hulking furnace or perch on piles of steel beams. Smoke billows through the open door, but inside everything is still, because in the center of the hall a pianist in a topcoat is playing a grand piano on a makeshift stage. He looks completely out of place in this factory setting, and yet the workers are transfixed. A few have closed their eyes and rest their heads on their hands; others stare off into the distance, lost in thought. High culture has become accessible to ordinary people, after centuries of being tucked away in concert halls for the elite. In fact, it has become a part of the production process, helping the workers to fulfill their tasks—just like the posters on the wall, which remind them to “look after [their] tools.” The pianist’s music is clearly a production tool, but it is also a production process in its own right. It is visibly transforming its audience, nurturing, elevating, and inspiring. The furnace may have stopped, yet the production of new people in this factory continues. This image, painted by the Kraków artist Mieczysław Serwin-Oracki, is titled Chopin’s Polonaise in A-Major in the Forge of the Kościuszko Steel Mill. 40

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Painted in 1952, it exemplifies the era’s dominant artistic idiom, Socialist Realism, which aimed to shape and showcase the world that socialism was making. This involved concealing blemishes and showing reality in its best light—but that is not to say that Serwin-Oracki’s work was purely fanciful. The central figure was a real pianist, Władysław Kędra, a laureate of the International Chopin Piano Competition. Along with other decorated artists, he regularly performed in workplaces like the Kościuszko Mill in lower Silesia, then Poland’s largest producer of steel. Serwin-Oracki, too, painted this image on site, thanks to state funding that sent artists to the factories. Factory workers, in fact, were practically bombarded with the arts: loudspeakers played classical music while they worked, paintings surrounded them in mess halls as they ate, and field trips to the theater awaited them after a long day’s work. The scene Serwin-Oracki depicted was certainly embellished, but it reflected an underlying reality. In Stalinist Poland and East Germany, factories turned into centers of artistic life. Today, Chopin’s Polonaise hangs in the Gallery of Socialist Realism, a state museum in eastern Poland. Socialist Realism continues to fascinate tourists and scholars alike, and many have interrogated what rules artists had to follow, why they obeyed, and how much they resisted.3 But Socialist Realism was only the tip of the iceberg. Stalinist officials did not just try to shape the art that artists made; they also tried to use that art to shape the public. Polish administrators called this “cultural enlightenment” and East German officials referred to it as “cultural mass work.” Both saw art as a means of social transformation, able to change how people thought and acted. By exposing East Europeans to certain kinds of art, Stalinist functionaries sought to mold them into a certain kind of public: hard working, “cultured,” and receptive to the communist message. This meant that contact with the arts became a public obligation, imposed on millions of people. It also meant that all artistic institutions were subordinated to the task: as instruments of cultural mass work, they had to orient themselves to the mass public, at the expense of the diverse publics they had traditionally served. Never before in Eastern Europe’s history had theaters, concert halls, and art exhibits been so full—and never before had their offerings been so limited. Cultural mass work took place under the banner of the plan. After launching multiyear plans for economic development in 1950, both Polish and East German officials set detailed targets for cultural production and consumption. Artistic life was to become as regimented

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as factory labor, though art was more than just another aspect of the plan. Officials saw art as the plan’s secret ingredient, able to make the fuzzy math add up by motivating workers and increasing productivity. The effort to bring culture to the factories reflected a belief that it could raise factory output. That was why Władysław Kędra went to play in the Kościuszko Steel Mill, why the mill’s workers received time off from work, and why Mieczysław Serwin-Oracki was commissioned to paint the scene. Cultural life was harnessed to economic goals, transforming how and where East European artists worked. Though it was never fully realized, the plan largely succeeded in bringing scenes like Chopin’s Polonaise to life. But the one thing planning could never quite engineer was the workers’ reactions—ironically, the very thing it was designed to shape.

The Plan’s Arithmetic On the same weekend in July 1950, Poland and East Germany adopted parallel plans for economic development. Though Poland’s covered six years and East Germany’s five, both plans ran through 1955 and promised scarcely conceivable growth. In 1955 Poland was slated to produce 100 million tons of coal, 25 thousand trucks, 3.756 million bricks, and 22.2 million pairs of leather shoes.4 East Germany’s plan, which used all the same categories, forecast that truck production would rise by 1,000  percent and shoe production by 262  percent. Some of the figures were remarkably precise and others suspiciously round. A few even matched: in 1955 each country’s gross domestic product (GDP) was pegged at exactly 43.8 billion—złoty in the case of Poland and marks in East Germany.5 Underneath the veneer of objectivity and the confident future tense, both documents were full of wishful thinking. None of the targets were considered realistic; they aimed to strain the bounds of possibility, projecting a glorious future and forcing reality to keep up. The plan was one part science and one part science fiction. While economic goals took pride of place, both plans presented broader visions of national development. They promised thousands of new hospitals, better schools, and improved living standards. They also promised—in identical language—to “raise the cultural level of the whole population,” spurring a “blooming” of art and culture. Poland’s presses resolved to publish 9,000 book titles, and East Germany’s to print some 40 million books. Other targets were even more specific: in 1955 Polish studios were to release 14 movies, 10 cartoons, 99 training

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films, and 87 educational shorts. Culture became a commodity, not unlike coal or shoes. Officials would decide what forms and quantities of it were useful, artists would work by quota to fulfill their tasks, and “the whole population” would receive it, much as they might a textbook or a medicine, and thereby raise their cultural level bit by bit.6 In this as in all fields of life, state planning aimed to align production and consumption, ensuring that nothing was wasted and everything served the state’s goals. But culture was not only a part of the plan; it was also the hidden ingredient that would bring its impossible goals to fruition. “Realizing the tasks of the Six-Year Plan will require great gusto [and] the intensified energy of the working masses,” Poland’s plan proclaimed. With its ability to inspire, culture was meant to “activate” the people, develop their “creative powers,” and mobilize their “inner reserves.”7 Walter Ulbricht made a similar point in introducing the GDR’s Five-Year Plan: “The enormous creative tasks that the plan lays out can only be fulfilled if we develop a progressive German culture and bring it to the people.” Such a culture would “show the greatness of the democratic transformation, of the new construction,” and thereby “deploy the inexhaustible powers that are latent within the popular masses.”8 Neither plan spelled out how culture would achieve this motivational effect, but both kept repeating the phrase “economic and cultural development” almost as a mantra. The arts and the plan were evidently intertwined, so much so that—as the SED’s official newspaper had it—Ulbricht’s audience broke into song at the end of his speech.9 Like the plans themselves, their reverence for culture echoed Stalin, who famously anointed writers “the engineers of human souls.” The Soviet leader coined this phrase in October 1932, amid an all-out blitz to complete the USSR’s first Five-Year Plan within four years. Speaking to writers at the home of the celebrated author Maxim Gorky, Stalin praised their contribution, which was sometimes invisible but always essential— no less than the manufacture of tanks. “Tanks will be worth nothing if the soul in them is rotten,” he insisted. “No, the ‘production’ of souls is more important than the production of tanks. The whole production of the country is linked with your ‘production.’ ”10 Culture, like tanks, was an assembly line commodity, but one that stood above the rest. Rather than an end in itself, it was a renewable resource that raised all workers’ productivity and hence advanced all aspects of the plan. A 1931 poster by the Soviet artist Iakov Guminer put this idea in visual form. Its focal point is an equation, “2 + 2 = 5,” described as the “arithmetic of the

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industrial-financial plan.” Under the plan, the poster implied, the impossible had become real. A five-year plan would be achieved in four, breaking all extant laws of math and man. But the equation only held thanks to another quantity, indicated in a small box in the bottom left corner: it took two plus two “plus workers’ enthusiasm” to make five. Enthusiasm— or “gusto,” ­“intensified ­energy,” “inexhaustible powers”—was communism’s secret weapon, even more potent than tanks, and artists were its most reliable producers. By engineering human souls, they would make the plan’s arithmetic add up. To work its magic, though, culture had to be carefully planned from above. Starting in 1950, both the Kraków City Council and the Leipzig City Council began submitting detailed plans for culture, with numerical goals like raising the percentage of regular readers. Those who administered these plans were not artists themselves, and that was by design. Artists were just too focused on aesthetics, complained East Germany’s prime minister, Otto Grotewohl. Even if party officials knew nothing of art—and most did not—their ideological clarity made them far better judges of an artwork’s worth. “What proves to be correct in politics is also necessarily correct in art,” Grotewohl reasoned; “in evaluating our art, political criticism is primary and artistic criticism secondary.”11 Leading cultural positions thus went to industrial planners. The chairman of East Germany’s State Commission for Cultural Affairs had previously been an economic bureaucrat in Leipzig; Poland’s minister of culture had cut his teeth leading the Central Trade Union Commission in Warsaw. The arts were simply too important to be left to artists. As crucial means of raising workers’ productivity, they needed to be put to proper use. But if all art was propaganda, few forms of propaganda worked as well as art. At a 1950 conference for composers, Polish officials tried to popularize a new genre, the mass song—something that untrained groups could sing in unison and with gusto. “But does this mean that we want to turn songs into political agitprop?” one speaker asked aloud. No, he answered, just the opposite: “In order to affect people profoundly, we have to reach their hearts, their minds, their imagination. No agitprop can do that; only a work of art can.”12 The arts worked on a deeper, more emotive level than other forms of mass mobilization, including political speeches, news bulletins, and even films. While these could educate and motivate the public, they did not elevate or ennoble it like Goethe or Chopin. Even as they bent artists to the plan, Stalinist officials described them in almost mystical terms. The Kraków City Council, for instance, insisted that “writers, painters, and artists of all kinds .  .  .

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are levers of progress and development, sources of gust and flight.”13 The lofty rhetoric belied an inability to say exactly how and why high culture worked, but it also revealed a sense of reverence. Officials felt, or at least knew they were supposed to feel, that culture mattered and that they needed it to meet the plan. Putting economists in charge of cultural affairs was not only a way of disciplining artists—it was also a testament to art’s economic worth.

Into the Factories The showpiece project of Poland’s Six-Year Plan was a planned city: Nowa Huta, or “new mill,” located a few miles east of Kraków on the Vistula River. It was conceived not only as a massive steel mill—the world’s largest—but also as a model community whose layout both expressed and inculcated socialist values. From a large central square, five avenues radiated in a semicircle, with residential buildings dotted in between. On the square’s south side, where all the avenues converged, Nowa Huta’s architects planned a “magnificent theater,” a tall, columned structure resembling a temple (one draft was modeled on the Roman Pantheon). Two “impressive buildings of the Palace of Culture” flanked the theater on both sides, while one of the avenues linked it to city hall, reflecting the close connection between art and power.14 None of these structures ever came to pass, though Nowa Huta’s semicircular layout endures. Before a single building was completed, Poland’s “first socialist city” was formally annexed to Kraków, making much of its planned infrastructure redundant. A far smaller theater opened in 1955 on Nowa Huta’s outskirts; instead of palaces, cultural officials received a few rooms in the post office building. To this day, the south side of Central Square—now named after Ronald Reagan—stands empty, leading out to a green field. Nowa Huta embodied both the plan’s ambitions and its challenges. But while the city’s design was unique, its development followed broader trends in postwar Eastern Europe, where urbanization and industrialization were the order of the day. More than two hundred thousand workers came to Nowa Huta in the 1950s, mostly young men from the surrounding countryside.15 Thanks to this influx, Kraków’s population grew by some 40 percent over the decade, yet that rate actually lagged behind the average for Polish cities.16 Leipzig, by contrast, shrank in size, as did East Germany as a whole, largely as a result of emigration to the West. Still, the city’s industrial production doubled between 1950

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and 1955 as thousands of young men and women flooded into factories under the Five-Year Plan.17 It was these workers that both Polish and GDR officials set out to reach and motivate through culture. Many newcomers from the countryside had almost no familiarity with art, while even experienced factory hands often regarded it as an elite pursuit above their station. In such conditions, disseminating culture was a civilizing, almost humanizing mission, designed to expand workers’ horizons and help them blossom into full-fledged human beings. Even outside of Poland’s first socialist city, culture was meant to forge new socialist men. The flagships of the state’s cultural mass work were so-called Houses of Culture, which offered space for organized and supervised free time. These were Soviet variants of the workers’ clubs that had proliferated across turn-of-the-century Europe, including in both Germany and Poland. Progressive reformers envisioned them as “drawing rooms for the common man,” where those who lived in tenements could come to read a book or hear a lecture.18 In the communist version, the Houses aimed to draw workers and their families away from unsavory alternatives like churches or saloons by providing structured, cultured relaxation, ideally in a suitably grand space. The Kraków Workers’ House of Culture opened in December 1948 inside the former Potocki Palace, the largest residence on the city’s main square. Leipzig had several Houses of Culture, including one for every major factory, but the most striking was a gleaming structure built at the Böhlen coal plant in 1952. Its two-story glass façade concealed a theater that sat 985, a smaller hall for 150, a canteen, an exhibition space, and 15 clubrooms. This was a “culture palace for the workers,” the Leipzig People’s Paper raved, “a testament to the great transformation of our epoch, in which working men have become masters of life and society.”19 The House of Culture’s massive size was also its principal drawback. Because many were located outside of the factories they served, they were difficult for workers to reach, especially on workdays. To solve this problem, trade union rules required all factories to build a small clubroom right on the shop floor and hire at least a part-time cultural administrator. In Nowa Huta, where almost all the workers lived on site, clubrooms were also mandated in each housing barracks—eighty-eight in all by September  1953. Such rooms were a far cry from the wellappointed and spacious Houses of Culture. “Some games, some journals, a radio, . . . an old political poster, a couple of chairs, an empty cupboard,

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[and] five or six people a day,” was what one visitor to Nowa Huta found.20 Yet even such spaces could fill up. “I arrived with a colleague at one [Nowa Huta] club, and there was no one there,” the Kraków actor Jan Adamski remembered. “What were we to do? We started reciting a humorous poem and within two minutes over a hundred people surrounded us.”21 Besides professional performers, staff from the Kraków House of Culture visited several Nowa Huta clubrooms each month. In March 1954 they showed slides from Joseph Stalin’s childhood (30 people), organized an evening of Polish satire (120 people), read aloud from Gorky’s autobiography (30 people), and discussed a recent novel for young adults (200 people).22 Instead of trying to bring workers to culture, such events brought culture directly to the workers, allowing them to join in “without much fatigue and even in house slippers,” as one administrator put it.23 Still, getting people to participate remained an arduous task. Instead of depending on voluntary attendance, officials preferred to engineer it by confronting workers at work. In Leipzig factories, clips from opera productions played over loudspeakers during shifts.24 Actors and musicians sometimes performed for workers on their lunch break, in dining halls decorated by local painters and photographers. Between 1949 and 1954, more Leipzig art exhibits opened in factories than outside of them, often moving from one factory to another after a few days.25 In 1953 Leipzig theaters gave sixty performances in local factories, including at the Böhlen House of Culture, while Kraków theaters gave ninetyone.26 Serwin-Oracki’s painting had come to life: high culture became part of the production process, surrounding workers as they chased the plan. The arts were not just accessible but unavoidable, forcing ordinary men and women into constant contact. While theaters and orchestras traveled to the factories, millions of workers went the other way. Starting in 1949, both Polish and East German factories were required to set aside funds for cultural mass work, the bulk of which went to buying blocks of tickets.27 By the 1953/54 season, workers made up some 86 percent of the audience at Leipzig’s famed Gewandhaus concert hall, up from just 23 percent three years before.28 Many were far from eager to spend their evening listening to Chopin, and factories sometimes resorted to handing out tickets as punishment for coming late or underperforming. But these were also the workers that needed art’s salutary impact most of all. “In buying and distributing tickets, we cannot be guided by the demand for them,”

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Figure 4.  A pioneer choir performs in the clubhouse of the RFT Telecommunications Factory in Leipzig, January 1954. Cultural events became part of the factory workday, accompanying mealtimes (note the plates and servers in the bottom left). SLUB Dresden/Deutsche Fotothek, photograph by Roger and Renate Rössing.

a Polish trade union handbook insisted.29 Engaging with the arts was not an individual choice but a collective obligation, no less than attending a May Day parade or voting in elections. All workers had to be exposed to art, especially if they disliked it—and better yet if they could become artists themselves.

The Workers’ Opera In the summer of 1954, over eight hundred men and women applied to join a newly formed musical ensemble in Kraków. All of them held fulltime jobs as tailors, mechanics, bricklayers, carpenters, truck drivers, doctors, and shop assistants. A few had experience singing and dancing in amateur groups, but none were prepared for their new challenge: creating Poland’s first workers’ opera company, staffed entirely by amateur performers. Within nine months, the company was meant to put on Stanisław Moniuszko’s Halka (1854), one of Poland’s most celebrated operas. Auditions cut the applicant pool in half, down to 110 musicians, 270 singers, and several dozen ballet dancers. They rehearsed each night in Kraków’s House of Culture, sometimes coming straight from

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work and staying until 9 pm. “In one room, . . . young girls and boys repeat the same step, the same figure several dozen times,” a journalist observed. In another, soloists sang for the company’s director, who kept interrupting: “No. You can’t sing like that. Please repeat.”30 Though the performers lacked any formal training, the director remained optimistic. Under socialism, after all, workers could accomplish anything they tried, including singing, dancing, and playing instruments just as well as professional artists. Amateur music societies had been a mainstay of progressive activism since the nineteenth century, when choirs like Workers’ Lute began recruiting members in Kraków factories.31 Postwar officials actively promoted such groups, touting workers’ cultural initiative as proof of their self-actualization under communism. With the onset of Stalinism, however, even musical enthusiasts were folded into the plan. In 1949 Leipzig’s 133 existing groups came under an umbrella organization that instituted ideological training, tied each group to a nearby factory, and oriented them “toward fulfilling the tasks of the Five-Year Plan.”32 Larger ensembles were split in two or three in order to expand their reach and impact. Trade unions, meanwhile, launched a major recruitment drive, not just for choirs but also theater troupes, painting circles, puppetry clubs, and other groups. By 1951 Leipzig had some 931 amateur ensembles with a total membership of 20,000—roughly 4 percent of the city’s total population.33 These ensembles became the shock troops of the state’s cultural mass work, spreading cultural enlightenment and modeling it too. Amateur artists turned into semiprofessional activists. Officials’ first task was to explain that amateur did not mean amateurish. Like the Workers’ Opera, Polish ensembles were told to practice nine to twelve hours a week and to rehearse some sixty times before appearing in public.34 Their ultimate goal was not gradual progress but artistic mastery: “well-led amateur work fully measures up to professional art in its artistic expression,” GDR officials insisted.35 With this in mind, amateur circles usually worked closely with established artists. The head of the Workers’ Opera was the founding director of the Wrocław Opera; his choreographer, who had danced professionally since 1919, went on to lead a ballet company in Lublin. In Leipzig, amateur theater ensembles took diction lessons and learned gymnastics to improve their movement. For each play they rehearsed, they studied the author’s life and times as well as “the contemporary situation in the place where the play is set.”36 Ensembles were to be a vanguard, not unlike the Communist Party, leading members through art to political

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commitment. When they performed, they were supposed to showcase not just artistic skill but also teamwork and dedication, inspiring viewers to follow their example. Amateurs’ principal obligation was to perform as much as possible. Since they were based in factories, amateur groups could easily appear at factory functions, such as awards ceremonies or New Years’ Eve celebrations. Outside of work, they were instructed to perform wherever workers gathered—at “spring and autumn dances, men’s outings, drinking parties, birthday celebrations, and so on”—so as to turn these “standard forms of group relaxation” into “cultural-political events.”37 Workplaces called on them so often that Leipzig administrators felt compelled to issue a reminder: “these groups have not only duties but also rights,” they warned factory bosses in 1950.38 Some groups, such as the puppetry ensemble at Kraków’s House of Culture, performed several times a week.39 Taken together, amateur shows outnumbered professional ones in both Poland and East Germany, vastly expanding the scope of the state’s cultural mass work. From the officials’ point of view, amateurs had an intrinsic advantage over professional artists: since they were workers themselves, they had a better sense of how to reach and motivate their public. Amateur repertoires could easily be tailored to suit a workplace’s particular needs. In Nowa Huta, the Lenin Steel Mill’s Song and Dance Ensemble performed “Let’s Build a New Poland” and “The Song of Nowa Huta,” works written specifically for, and about, construction workers.40 Factory bosses hoped that ensembles would also address concrete production challenges, such as “labor competition, the battle for cost-cutting, [and] new work norms.”41 In practice, though, amateur ensembles remained strikingly committed to high culture. Kraków’s amateur theater circles rehearsed plays by Gogol, Chekhov, and Shaw—the same ones that appeared on the city’s professional stages.42 East German musical ensembles performed works by Schubert and Bach alongside “A Song for Stalin” and “A Party at the Factory.”43 Mastering the classics was no mean feat, since the majority of amateur performers had no prior training. Yet most ensembles kept high culture in their repertoire because officials were convinced it made a greater impact. The rousing “Song of Nowa Huta” raised morale, but only established works of art like Halka could truly motivate and elevate the workers. The Workers’ Opera production of Halka premiered in Kraków’s Słowacki Theater on July 1, 1956, fourteen months later than planned and nearly two years after rehearsals started. Three days before, Soviet

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tanks had broken up a workers’ strike in Poznań, killing at least fiftyseven people and injuring hundreds more. A national revolt was brewing, and against this new backdrop the Workers’ Opera fell flat. “Singers who lose tempo, actors who get lost in group scenes, horrible, cacophonous chords from the choir, . . . a whole collection of unexpected sounds in the orchestra—these are just some of the grave musical offenses that we witnessed,” one newspaper critic wrote in his review. But none of it, he added, was at all surprising: the whole idea of workers singing opera could only be a “gross misunderstanding.”44 The arts were better left to the professionals, while amateur activity, though admirable in itself, did not merit the resources it had been given. Amid the breakdown of the Stalinist system, forcing factory workers to make art began to seem unnecessary, even harmful. The Workers’ Opera had outlived its time. It gave one last show at a closed session of the Kraków City People’s Council and then shut down for lack of funds, sending its cobblers and mechanics back to their day jobs.

Theater of a New Type Three years before the Workers’ Opera debuted on the Słowacki stage, the Słowacki’s professional ensemble premiered a play at the Szatkowski Machine and Equipment Works on Kraków’s outskirts. The play—A Family Matter by Jerzy Lutowski—focused on workers in a Warsaw factory, and so it was only natural to bring it to “viewers who represent the same social group as the characters and who participate in a production process just like theirs,” the theater’s literary director explained.45 Only by speaking to workers about their daily lives could theater fulfill its central mission: to mobilize them for the Six-Year Plan. “Theater must spark a fervor to overcome difficulties and clarify the correctness of our path,” the actor Władysław Tęcza wrote in the playbill. “It’s the universal teacher, the best way of affecting hearts and minds.”46 The Słowacki Theater’s director-general was even more direct. The days of playing to the public’s whims had passed, he wrote in a letter to the Ministry of Culture and Art. Instead of chasing novelty and critical acclaim, theater was to become “a school for socialism.”47 Plays like A Family Matter have not stood the test of time. It was performed some nineteen times between 1952 and 1954, in many of Poland’s leading theaters, but it has never been staged since. Such works, one theater historian argued, “failed to convince anyone of anything and only scared the public away from the theaters”—creating empty

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seats that “had to be filled with school trips or soldiers, who were obviously completely uninterested in what was happening onstage.”48 But this formulation gets it backward. Organized attendance was a deliberate goal, not a makeshift solution, all the more so if viewers were uninterested in theater. Stalinist theaters deliberately oriented themselves toward the workers, transforming themselves in the process. In 1949/50, all theaters in Poland and East Germany turned into branches of the state monopoly, and many were combined into conglomerates. Kraków’s main theaters, the Old and the Słowacki, were nationalized and placed under joint administration as the State Dramatic Theaters (PTD).49 The Leipzig City Theaters (STL) made up an even larger operation. Their five stages—two theaters, an opera house, an operetta, and a children’s stage—could seat more than four thousand viewers each night and put on over 1,600 shows a season.50 Thanks to their size, such conglomerates could supply viewers with everything they needed to complete the plan. Their role was nothing less than “shaping and forming the lives of our audience,” as the head of Leipzig City Council’s Culture Department put it.51 To shape their audience, though, theaters first had to reach it. In both Kraków and Leipzig attendance plummeted in 1950/51, with many regulars complaining about the new repertoire. “It’s all about factories, cooperatives, shock workers,” lamented the Kraków art historian Karol Estreicher, Jr.; “there’s nothing about feelings, doubts, crimes, but only about the virtues of socialist man.”52 Well-heeled viewers like Estreicher, however, were not Stalinist theater’s target audience. It set out to address the common man, swapping out one kind of public for another. With this in mind, the PTD created a new Office for Organizing Attendance, which sold blocks of tickets at discounted rates to factories, schools, and state organizations—all institutions that had culture funds to spend. This model secured a paying audience for any play, freeing theaters from the pressures of the box office. A Family Matter sold fewer than 50 tickets per show but supplemented these with 252 tickets a night for organized viewers.53 As a result, its attendance rate—88 percent—exceeded that of popular productions like A Vaudeville Romance, for which the PTD did no recruitment and viewers eagerly bought seats. The freedom to ignore the public’s tastes transformed how theater worked. The number of new productions plummeted, since there was no more need to woo viewers with novelty. In the 1952/53 season, the Słowacki Theater premiered just three works, compared with fifteen in 1945/46 and twenty-three in 1926/27.54 Successful plays stayed in

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the repertoire for years, so that all workers had a chance to see them. Rehearsals, meanwhile, lasted as many as nine months, allowing theaters to iron out the kinks and present a clear, polished narrative. Both PTD and STL eschewed elaborate staging or costumes in order to avoid

Figure 5.  Workers from the Leipzig Lathe Works consult the factory’s wall newspaper, November 1952. A poster for the Leipzig City Theaters is visible at center; according to the GDR’s News Service, which distributed this photograph, such cultural events “give workers new motivation for greater and better achievements.” Bundesarchiv, photograph by Illner.

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distracting from the plot. “We do not want a director’s personality to drown out or overwhelm the playwright’s will,” the STL’s chief dramaturge observed.55 Even an inexperienced viewer had to get the point, which forced all theaters to simplify their presentations. The same concerns guided a theater’s choice of plays. Every production had to be politically correct and useful to the viewer, though there were different ways to meet these goals. Works like A Family Matter sought to do so directly, by showing challenges that viewers faced in daily life and modeling appropriate responses. Lutkowski’s play is set in Warsaw in the spring of 1951, barely a year before it premiered. It tells the story of the three-generation Kamiński family, whose patriarch Józef works in a lightbulb factory alongside his adult son, Feliks. Although both men are lifelong communists, Józef is suspicious of his son’s invention, a new machine that will speed up production but make his own job obsolete. Feliks, meanwhile, is so committed to his work that he ignores his father’s feelings, to say nothing of his wife and son. The moral was straightforward enough, but just in case, the playbill drove it home. Józef ’s hostility to mechanization was “a sign of backwardness, the product .  .  . of a selfish attitude to society and work.” Feliks’s predicament, on the other hand, showed that even committed workers still had to learn “to live together in a new, socialist way.” By overcoming their shortcomings—with help from the factory’s party cell—the two men not only reconciled but also indicated “the correct course of action.”56 Although such plays define our image of Stalinist theater, they were actually quite rare. In Leipzig the most performed authors were Schiller and Shakespeare; in Kraków they were Fredro and Molière. Yet even such classic plays could advance the plan, by making connections between past and present. Under the headline “Then and Now,” the program for Schiller’s Intrigue and Love (STL, 1951/52) juxtaposed a history of warfare in the eighteenth century with newspaper headlines about West German rearmament.57 In several playbills, actors stepped out of character to address the audience directly: the cast of Sophocles’ Antigone (STL, 1949/50) urged viewers to vote in the upcoming elections and fulfill the plan. With the right staging and presentation, even Schiller and Sophocles could become spokesmen for socialism. Stalinism’s impact extended well beyond the repertoire, shaping how, where, and when theaters performed. As it committed itself to cultural mass work, Stalinist theater evolved into a novel kind of institution. What state

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officials called “the theater of a new type” focused on instructing and inspiring the mass public.58

Planned Creativity Writers and painters too were subject to the plan, and yet their labor was more difficult to supervise. Many worked alone, without the benefit of a team or a leader, relying only on creative instinct. To plan and supervise their creativity, officials turned to a “creative method,” Socialist Realism, borrowed from the USSR. The Communist Party ideologue Andrei Zhdanov had laid out its tenets at the inaugural congress of the Soviet Writers’ Union in August 1934. “Comrade Stalin has called our writers engineers of human souls,” he told the delegates. “What does this mean? What duties does this title confer upon you?” There were only two steps to follow. First, artists had to “depict reality in its revolutionary development,” not “in a dead, scholastic way, not simply as ‘objective reality.’ ” Art should “be able to glimpse our tomorrow,” Zhdanov explained. “This will be no utopian dream, for our tomorrow is already being prepared today by dint of conscious planned work.” The plan was an integral part of reality, no less real than what artists could see with their eyes, and so they had to go beyond what they could see to represent it. They had to flatten time, showing reality as the plan would make it—bountiful, light-filled, and joyous. Second, Zhdanov posited, “artistic portrayal should be combined with the ideological remolding and education of the working people in the spirit of socialism.”59 All art would serve a clear and present function: it had to be directed at the workers, inspiring them to realize the visions that they saw or heard. By representing the glorious future, artists would help create it. Socialist Realism would make socialism real. Notably, Zhdanov said nothing about what Socialist R ­ ealist art should look like; his concern was limited to what it should do. Most of his speech focused on the USSR’s second Five-Year Plan (1932–37) and “such vital branches of the national economy as railway and ­water transport, commodity circulation, [and] non-ferrous metallurgy.”60 Socialist Realism was first and foremost a political project, not an aesthetic one. It was intended to make workers work harder and faster, empowering them to fulfill the plan. A  decade later, Zhdanov reiterated this point during the so-called “anti-formalism campaign,” which ­attacked a handful of Soviet artists for privileging aesthetic form over

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ideological content. Art’s value lay in shaping people’s consciousness, he argued, and anything that did not serve this goal—including a distinctive style—betrayed the artist’s mission.61 The anti-formalism campaign, which Eastern Bloc states duly imitated, thus remained deliberately vague. “They fulminated against formalism as the main enemy, though no one knew exactly what it was,” the Leipzig writer Erich Loest recalled of GDR officials.62 Rigid aesthetic rules were inherently suspect, since they risked lapsing into “formalism” themselves. True Socialist Realism would be defined not by its looks but by its subject matter and ideological commitment. Both Polish and German Communists began speaking admiringly of Socialist Realism soon after World War II but only started to promote it after proclaiming the building of socialism. In Poland this happened at the PZPR’s founding congress in December 1948, and artists’ unions formally adopted Socialist Realism over the course of 1949.63 In the GDR, however, negotiations over the German question delayed the official announcement until July 1952. That March, Stalin had sent a diplomatic note to the Allied powers proposing a neutral, reunified German state. This was almost certainly a propaganda ploy, and the Allies interpreted it as such, demanding that a reunified Germany be allowed to rearm—something Stalin could never accept. Still, Stalin’s posturing meant that the GDR was slower than other East European states to push through many Soviet-style reforms. Only after the Allies rejected his note did the SED decree the building of socialism, and it was then, at the Second Party Conference, that Ulbricht first brought up Socialist Realism as part of a long speech on “The SED’s New Tasks.” “The artist’s task is to get out ahead of life and enthuse millions of people for the great tasks of building socialism,” he declared. “By representing the new, progressive aspects of man’s development, he’ll help shape millions of progressive people.”64 Socialist Realism had to aid in socialism’s construction, and so officials turned to it once that construction was decreed. What it entailed for artists, though, was left unsaid, both in the Soviet Union and across Eastern Europe. Cultural scholars often define Socialist Realism on the basis of the artworks it inspired, delineating Socialist Realist traits in music, literature, and the visual arts.65 While stimulating, this approach is retrospective: it proceeds from an extant body of art in order to interpolate its rules. For East European artists, though, the rules were anything but clear. After party leaders had prescribed Socialist Realism in general terms, artists’ unions met to hammer out its substance, but the

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guidelines they developed remained abstract. Socialist Realist art had to be “partisan” or “party-minded,” reflecting a deeply held commitment to the building of socialism. It had to be “connected to the people” and “typical” of their experience, so as to mobilize them more effectively. Above all, it had to “serve society” by depicting “current themes” with “optimism” and motivating workers to fulfill their tasks.66 None of these keywords told artists what they could and could not do, and every one was subject to interpretation. Even the officials who rolled them out debated what they meant in practice: did a “typical” play proceed from a specific case to general truths, or the other way around?67 And what exactly did a “party-minded” painting look like? The stated principles of Socialist Realism in fact referred to people, not artworks. It was workers who had to become party-minded, optimistic, connected to the collective, and committed to serving society. Socialist Realism was supposed to make this happen, but officials struggled to specify how it would work. Most of them, after all, knew nothing about art and only hoped that it would help them meet the plan. Even in its theory, Socialist Realism gave artists little direction on how to write, paint, play, compose, or act. What it did was commit them to working for the state and furthering its goal of cultural enlightenment. “When our artists ask what they should do, we tell them: establish closer contact with the working people,” Ulbricht advised. “Only an artist who’s fully devoted to the party, who’s strongly connected with the people, can educate them in the spirit of socialism.”68 The tenets of Socialist Realism were principally a guide for how to live: artists themselves had to be party-minded, committed to society, and so on. In hopes of regimenting art, officials sought to regiment the artist. Much of the oversight fell to artists’ unions, which took on an expanded role. At its January 1949 congress, the first to feature a discussion of Socialist Realism, the Trade Union of Polish Writers dropped the word “trade” from its name. Rather than looking after members’ salaries and pensions, as it had since its founding in 1920, the new-look union resolved to foster “engaged art .  .  . for the working masses.”69 The Union of Polish Graphic Artists also proclaimed a commitment to Socialist Realism, while the Union of Polish Composers launched a series of “ideological courses” to educate its members.70 In East Germany, where all existing unions had been dissolved after the war, writers’ and graphic artists’ unions formed in June  1950, on the eve of the party congress that proclaimed the Five-Year Plan. They were initially part of the Culture League, a mass organization for intellectuals, but gained

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autonomy in the summer of 1952—right before the SED announced the building of socialism. In both states, membership in an artists’ union was a prerequisite for publishing or exhibiting new work. By mentoring and monitoring all creative artists—735 in Kraków, 354 in Leipzig— unions aimed to bend their creativity to the plan.71 The unions’ main tool was public criticism, which the SED Central Committee called “an essential precondition for the further development of art.”72 Composers’ unions organized communal listening sessions at which members heard and assessed new compositions (“pleasing, but could have better harmony”).73 Unions of graphic artists sent groups of painters to make studio visits and offer their colleagues detailed advice: “Color your background somewhat darker,” one Leipzig painter was told.74 Such oversight promoted self-censorship, pressuring artists to avoid unpopular topics or techniques. “I get halfway through a phrase, and already I submit it to Marxist criticism,” a writer confided to the Polish author Czesław Miłosz. “I imagine what X or Y will say about it, and I change the ending.”75 That was precisely what union oversight was designed to do. By exposing the creative process to scrutiny, it turned cultural production from an individual act into a planned, collective undertaking. Collective review also produced a new artistic authority: “terroreticians,” as the writer Julian Przyboś called them.76 Armed with Marxist theory, anyone could accuse an artwork of violating Socialist Realist principles, and since those principles were inherently vague, any artist could suddenly find himself in the crossfire. Months after winning a prize from East Germany’s Trade Union Federation, a fugue by the Leipzig composer Fred Malige was labeled “formalist” and stricken from orchestra repertoires.77 The deputy rector of Leipzig’s Academy of Fine Arts, Max Schwimmer—a devoted communist who publicly lauded the Five-Year Plan as “a first-rate cultural achievement”—came under attack for ignoring “socially true themes.”78 The man leading the charge against him was a longtime rival, and local officials eventually cleared Schwimmer’s name, calling the episode “a model for how not to carry out a debate.”79 Schwimmer himself, however, was so shaken by the affair that he resigned from his post and stopped exhibiting. In the absence of clear aesthetic rules, terroreticians with private grudges could destroy whole careers. In such an atmosphere, engagement with the “working masses” became the one sure lodestar for artists. While Socialist Realism’s aesthetic rules were imprecise, its underlying goals were clear: all art had to fulfill

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a social function and advance the plan. Focusing on these goals helped unions avoid disputes over aesthetic norms—disputes that could themselves be charged with “formalism”—while cushioning artists against terroreticians’ attacks. Fred Malige’s fugue eventually premiered after other composers testified to its “progressive theme”—“the rise of the activist movement.”80 Max Schwimmer found a new job at Dresden’s Academy of Fine Arts on the strength of his commitment to the working class, as evidenced in paintings like Industrial Landscape.81 Visiting, mentoring, and depicting workers did not automatically shield an artist from criticism, but it was the next best thing, giving proof of his good intentions. Amid pervasive uncertainty about Socialist Realism’s precepts, the surest way to follow them was by going to the people.

Applied Artists In March 1950 more than sixty members of the Polish Writers’ Union set out on three-month “field trips” to factories, cooperatives, and collective farms. They received a monthly stipend from the Ministry of Culture and Art, which also arranged for them to stay with local workers and peasants. The trips were meant to “familiarize [writers] with matters connected to the Six-Year Plan,” not just as passive observers but as active participants: the ministry asked local officials to find them “concrete work befitting their abilities and desires,” for instance organizing libraries or helping with accounting.82 In Kraków Province, the destinations included a paper mill, a chemical factory, a school for tractor drivers, a locomotive works, and an agrarian academy. “The party leadership attaches great importance to this project, in hopes of introducing new themes into our literature and reinvigorating literary production,” the PZPR Central Committee wrote to provincial authorities. Writers were meant to use their time to work on “stories, novels, novellas, [and] film scripts,” and evidently many did. Already by midMay, a report listed several dozen publications, mostly poems and short stories, inspired by encounters with “the masses.”83 One field-trip participant was the Kraków writer Władysław Machejek, a lifelong communist who in 1952 became editor-in-chief of the biweekly magazine Literary Life. Founded the year before, Literary Life aimed to showcase “how the Six-Year Plan becomes reality, how the foundations of socialism are growing in Poland along with their builders.”84 Under Machejek’s stewardship, it featured frequent reports and stories from local factories and construction sites, with a particular

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emphasis on Nowa Huta. Dozens of prominent Polish authors wrote about Nowa Huta, some as an expression of faith and others as an explicit concession to the new system. Going to the people could even be a form of punishment, as it was for Loest. Fired from his newspaper job on account of his bourgeois origins, the writer was sent to work at a local cable-car factory in order to “develop a proletarian consciousness.”85 Officials hoped that culture’s salutary effect on workers would also function in reverse. Close contact with the working masses was meant to educate East European artists, help them to shed their old elitism, and motivate them to fulfill the plan. Commissioning art was the main means of fostering this contact, especially in the graphic arts. Ahead of the All-Polish Art Exhibit in 1950, Poland’s Ministry of Culture and Art set aside funds for paintings “dedicated to . . . typical problems of life and work as well as elements of the socialist economy.” With this in mind, an office of the state meat producer, Meat Central, contacted the Kraków branch of the Graphic Artists’ Union to request works on topics like “the technology and organization of cattle purchasing centers” and “methods for fattening swine.”86 It invited artists to visit its facilities in Kraków Province and offered to organize travel and housing so that they could experience the Six-Year Plan firsthand. In 1952, after the GDR proclaimed its own commitment to Socialist Realism, its Graphic Artists’ Union commissioned works that showed “typical characters and phenomena in typical situations.” The list of topics included “the new man (tractor driver, young freedom fighter),” “construction in the GDR (industrial progress at the Leipzig Trade Fair),” “production (workers’ brigade),” and “landscape (strip-mining in the Leipzig region).” Those who received such commissions not only had to study their subject on site but also met with groups of workers who were supposed to help them “grapple with [their] theme.”87 For all professional artists, encounters with the public became an almost daily obligation. Factoring in visits to factory clubrooms, schools, hospitals, and collective farms, members of the Kraków Writers’ Union branch gave some 493 public readings in 1952 alone.88 The novelist Henryk Vogler, who worked as an editor at Literary Life, recalled that every few weeks the journal’s staff would board a train to some provincial town or village, where local officials would take them to the nearest clubroom. Their talks “were always received enthusiastically,” at least so long as authors spoke “with inordinate emotion and emphasis,” taking pains to be accessible to the untrained listener.89 Other artists sat

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Figure 6.  Leipzig workers pass through the Third German Art Show in Dresden, March 1953. A special train transported 850 factory workers and their families from Leipzig to Dresden; five more special trains, from other cities in the GDR, arrived on the same day. Bundesarchiv, photograph by Erich Höhne and Erich Pohl.

on juries for amateur art competitions or supervised amateur groups. Officials praised such activities as an important civic service but also hoped that they would impact artists’ art. In his speech on Socialist Realism, Ulbricht made special mention of amateur and folk art, which he called “always realistic,” adding that “it can inspire artists’ creative work.”90 Just as amateur artists had to strive for professional quality, professionals were meant to emulate amateurs’ authenticity and closeness to the people. A demonstrated closeness to the people could even offset negative reviews. The Kraków-based theater director Mieczysław Kotlarczyk had spent the war years alongside the future pope Karol Wojtyła in an underground troupe connected to the Catholic resistance. The troupe—minus Wojtyła—eventually evolved into a professional company, the Rhapsodic Theater, which specialized in staging Polish poetry. Though it received subsidies from the Ministry of Culture and Art, the theater continued to collaborate with the Catholic Church, and after the PZPR’s unification congress it came under fire. Secret

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police officials accused Kotlarczyk of trying “to popularize holy scripture,” while critics condemned his work as “socially harmful,” fit only for “old women and young neofascists.”91 In response, Kotlarczyk stressed a smaller theater’s ability to reach “dirt floors, barns, and factory halls,” where it could really impact “the producing and building masses.”92 Invoking cultural mass work was a useful rhetorical strategy, but the Rhapsodic Theater actually followed through. Over the course of 1951, it made 120 visits to schools, factories, and collective farms, including several trips to Nowa Huta. Newspapers praised the theater for its commitment to the workers, and Kraków officials rewarded it with a new space in the city center.93 Going to the people could only overcome so much: in early 1953, as attacks on the Catholic Church intensified, the Rhapsodic Theater was shut down, along with both of Kraków’s leading Catholic journals. For Kotlarczyk, though, experience with cultural mass work became a lifeline. Soon after his dismissal, the director found a job with the Krakowiacy Song and Dance Ensemble for Workers, an amateur troupe akin to the Workers’ Opera that performed folk standards from the Kraków region. He stayed with the ensemble for five years, directing shows like The Song of Nowa Huta, until the Stalinist regime collapsed and the Rhapsodic Theater reopened. Working with amateur groups, or in applied jobs like industrial design, became a way station for many artists who fell afoul of the terroreticians. This practice was less widespread in East Germany, where dissenters had the opportunity of leaving for the West, but in Kraków it kept censured artists afloat when other prospects evaporated. The Krakowiacy Ensemble’s choreographer, Marian Wieczysty, had run a ballroom dancing school until it was shut down as a bourgeois extravagance.94 The modernist painter Tadeusz Kantor, fired from his job at Kraków’s Academy of Fine Arts in February 1950, was soon hired as a stage designer at the PTD, where he prepared the sets for A Family Matter and a dozen other plays. As Laurie Koloski has argued, such jobs were seen as inherently useful and therefore appropriate for artists who had been accused of neglecting the public interest in their work.95 They even allowed figures like Kantor to maintain and develop their modernist style, since techniques such as symbolism—dismissed as “formalist” in painting—were indispensable in set design (a large, old-fashioned clock hung over the stage in A Family Matter, denoting the passage of time). Applied art brought artists into closer contact with the public, supporting and rehabilitating those who could not be trusted to work

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on their own. It was another way to introduce collective oversight and channel artists into the plan. All Stalinist art, in fact, was meant to be applied. Officials constantly ­attacked the notion of “art for art’s sake,” arguing that art existed solely for the sake of social utility. Vogler thus described Literary Life as a form of “applied literature” because it “aimed to enlighten and educate” Polish workers.96 When cultural policy came under criticism after Stalin’s death, many artists dismissed its focus on the public as a sham—a pretext for ­officials to interfere in creative production. Socialist Realism had been nothing more than “a stick Zhdanov created to kill art, for the use of functionaries from the propaganda bureau,” Przyboś argued.97 He was half right. Art was supposed to be a tool for functionaries’ use, but not only in the propaganda bureau: above all, it was a tool in factories and on collective farms. Rather than killing art, officials sought to steer it, in hopes that it could change how people thought and worked. Stalinist regimes spent so much time on bringing art and artists to the people that it makes little sense to write this off as mere pretense. Engagement with the public was the linchpin of Socialist Realism—so much so that it eventually undermined the whole project.

Unplanned Behavior Deep in the fields of eastern Poland, about two hours’ drive from Warsaw, stands a baroque palace with a manicured French garden. For three ­centuries it was home to one of Poland’s noble families, the Zamoyskis, and today it houses the Zamoyski Museum—a sprawling exhibit of nobility life. Visitors pass through room after room of parquet floors and stuccoed ceilings. Men on horseback and women in gowns peer out from gilded frames. Across the yard, however, the Zamoyskis’ carriage house contains a very different collection. Larger-than-life busts of Lenin, Stalin, and Bierut line the walls. Red banners hang from the ceiling, adorning portraits of hulking coal miners and smiling milkmaids. To complete the effect, a tape of political anthems plays on an endless loop. This is the Gallery of Socialist Realism, compiled from works once stored at the palace by the communist Ministry of Culture and Art. Today they seem like relics from an ancient past, even more distant than the baroque splendor that surrounds them. Created in the early 1950s, these objects had been warehoused by the end of the decade. They highlight the brevity of Eastern Europe’s Stalinist era but also testify to its cultural imprint.

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In the end, planning artists’ creativity turned out to be quite feasible. That is not to say that officials got exactly what they wanted, or that artists did whatever they were asked to do. But the sheer volume of exhibits at the Gallery of Socialist Realism, and at analogous museums across the Eastern Bloc, speaks for itself. With a mixture of carrots and sticks, Stalinist regimes fostered a wide variety of art for and about the working class, on a scale previously unseen in Eastern Europe. Not all artists participated, and only some were able to register as professional artists in the first place. Most cultural producers did, however, both because they had few alternatives and because state policy left them enough room to maneuver. There were many ways to fulfill Stalinism’s demands for socially engaged art, from depicting factory workers to meeting them in person. From the officials’ point of view, some of these were preferable to others, but all mobilized artists in service of the plan. Conversely, there were very few ways to avoid being mobilized, short of emigrating—where possible—or finding a different line of work. Stalinist policy was punitive, restrictive, and often inconsistent, but it was also effective. In Poland as in East Germany, the state largely succeeded in bending cultural producers to the plan. Cultural consumers, though, were another matter. From Houses of Culture to the Workers’ Opera to organized theater attendance, Stalinist officials developed a massive infrastructure designed to make the arts ubiquitous in working people’s daily lives. Behind it all lay the belief that mere exposure to culture could have a verifiable, consistent, almost magical effect. In Marian Brandys’ novel of Nowa Huta, The Beginning of the Story (1952), a youth brigade attends a show at the Słowacki Theater. The workers are so taken with the experience that on the way back the whole train car breaks into song: “We want to transform our whole country / like we’ve transformed these fields.”98 The scene is classic Socialist Realism, in the sense of showing the future as it was “being prepared . . . by dint of conscious planned work.” And yet the plan kept failing to produce the desired effect. Workers did not seem to work any harder after going to the theater or joining an amateur ensemble. Something in the plan’s arithmetic was off. No matter what officials tried, two plus two “plus workers’ enthusiasm” did not add up to five. One issue was pervasive problems with implementation. Even in Nowa Huta, a planned socialist city, spaces for cultural mass work were ill equipped and understaffed. The Lenin Steel Mill’s Song and Dance Ensemble had to rehearse in a garage, while music classes took place

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in a former boiler room.99 In September  1953 there were only eight qualified instructors for Nowa Huta’s eighty-eight clubrooms, many of which went practically unused.100 The PTD and the Kraków Philharmonic came only a few times a year, far less than they had promised, and when they did show up they struggled to draw viewers. Trade unions, which were supposed to organize attendance, often ignored the PTD’s requests. The Kraków Newspaper sometimes neglected to review premieres, while local radio barely mentioned them at all.101 Such problems reveal the limits of the state’s cultural project, and yet they also testify to its extraordinary scope. Breakdowns in organized attendance highlight the fact that most theatergoers came in organized groups; complaints about Nowa Huta’s eighty-eight clubrooms signal that eighty-eight clubrooms existed, at least in some form. Stalinist officials chronicled their shortcomings in a spirit of zealous self-criticism, but these shortcomings should not overshadow their achievements. Even if they fell short of the plan’s lofty ambitions, both Poland and East Germany developed an immense cultural matrix. Another challenge was the logic of the plan itself. In artistic affairs as in industrial production, planning favored quantity over quality and uniformity over flexibility. Instructions often arrived too late and contradicted one another. Little got done until the last moment, when officials resorted to “shock tempo”—and shoddy craftsmanship—to fulfill their tasks. As early as 1951, the head of Poland’s Central Theater Board criticized the “campaign nature” of theater festivals, admitting that “literary work cannot be done through short-term campaigns.”102 Excessive centralization meant that many materials were inappropriate for their audience; workers in Nowa Huta, for instance, had to sit through Rational Cattle Breeding and other agricultural films.103 Waste and inefficiency were endemic to the planned economy, but cultural matters were treated with particular neglect. As a means of improving production, culture never received as much attention as production itself, especially whenever time and money grew tight. “The party doesn’t beat me for [insufficient] cultural work but only beats me for failing to make deliveries, so there’s no need to pay attention to culture,” one collective farm administrator told Kraków officials.104 Subordinating culture to economic concerns made it an afterthought for factory managers, but it also forced factory managers to sponsor culture in the first place. While the plan never worked as intended, it nevertheless brought millions of people into contact with the arts.

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Ultimately, planning failed because East European publics did not respond to it as they were meant to do. Józef Tejchma, who worked as a youth functionary in Nowa Huta before rising to be Poland’s minister of culture, recalled with palpable frustration how the “seemingly straightforward matter” of bringing workers to the clubroom turned out to be an unexpected challenge: I went to a female dormitory, [where] I found six young women. There wasn’t much time, so I spoke briefly: “There’s a show at the House of Culture, get dressed and go.” I hoped that all the dormitory’s residents would be ready to go in a few minutes, but my hopes were quickly dashed. “There’s a show, you say? What kind of show? Who’s performing? From where? Will it be fun? Will we be able to dance? How long will it last?”105 Individual tastes kept getting in the way of well-laid plans. Indeed, officials fully realized that cultural mass work would not be popular—at first. Tejchma blamed “old cultural underdevelopment,” arguing that each day under the communist regime “transforms [the worker’s] habits and preferences.”106 In 1949 and 1950 administrators tended to treat popular resistance as a badge of honor, a sign that their social revolution was on the right track. By 1953 or 1954, however, they had begun to wonder why the revolution was not going as planned. In Nowa Huta, one figure symbolized the breakdown of socialist order. “Bikini Boy,” or bikiniarz, was the officials’ term for a young man inspired by British teddy boys and French zazous: youth subcultures that rebelled against postwar conformity. The bikiniarz wore narrow trousers, bright socks, long, slicked-back hair, and a hand-painted tie—ideally with a picture of the mushroom cloud over Bikini Atoll.107 Officials interpreted his fashion sense as a sign of support for “the American way of life,” but also as an attack on the plan’s presumption of homogeneity.108 In his memoirs, Tejchma described one Nowa Huta bikiniarz, Mentala, who liked to say that “different people have different tastes, which cannot be constricted or condemned.” “His ignorance and bottomless stupidity are stunning,” the cultural official commented.109 Yet the bikiniarz mentality proliferated, even in the Lenin Steel Mill’s showpiece Song and Dance Ensemble. In the spring of 1954, the ensemble’s orchestra had to be dissolved because its members refused to play for free. Musical skill was a valuable commodity, they argued, and they could earn a steady wage playing in bars like the Giant, where the “Nowa Huta cocktail”—“wine mixed with beer and laced with liquor”—flowed

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freely through the night.110 By August, the ensemble managed to get money from the Ministry of Culture and Art to pay its amateur musicians; their nonconformity was written into the financial plan. Most of the dancers, though, stopped coming to rehearsals, taking advantage of the summer weather to go to Kraków or take walks. “Young people must be tied to the ensemble and spend all their free moments there,” the steel mill’s party representative insisted.111 But like Mentala, many young people refused to be constricted and condemned, even after four long years of cultural mass work. When people did come into the state’s cultural spaces, they rarely used them quite as officials intended. After a new clubhouse opened in Leipzig’s Kirov Machine Works in September  1950, administrators rejoiced at the lofty attendance—nearly ten thousand workers per month. It turned out, though, that most visitors used this “drawing room for the common man” as their own drawing room: “they believed they could do anything, drank alcohol, and behaved accordingly.” The clubhouse staff eventually reported that “we have managed to direct these youths from the downstairs clubrooms to the second floor,” but that was all they could do.112 Even well-behaved visitors tended to come for dance nights and film screenings rather than for worthier lectures like “The Working Class and Art.” And when they did take part in amateur ensembles, they did so “for the love of art, without recognizing the great social import of cultural mass work.”113 Despite all the ideological training, ensemble repertoires continued to reflect their members’ tastes and habits. One factory choir put on a show featuring “three Christian Christmas songs [and] two old couplets, one that makes fun of women . . . and one in which a man boasts that he works only eight hours.”114 Officials built a massive cultural matrix designed to transform the workers, only to find the workers transforming it instead. At times, of course, cultural mass work went off without a hitch. In February 1955 the Lenin Steel Mill held a lavish ceremony to celebrate the opening of Poland’s largest open-hearth furnace. Assorted dignitaries attended, and the mill’s Song and Dance Ensemble performed. By special dispensation from the PZPR Provincial Committee, all ensemble members had been given seven weeks off work to rehearse; they also received new colorful folk costumes along with patent leather boots. “The room was packed to the gills, around seven thousand people,” the director reported. The ensemble performed mass songs like “Glory to the Party” and “Forward, Boys and Girls,” and the crowd went wild; “a

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Figure 7.  Young workers outside a Nowa Huta cinema, September 1954, waiting for the Seventh Festival of Soviet Films. Several viewers sport slicked-back hair and striped socks characteristic of the bikiniarz. KARTA Center Foundation, photograph by Irena Jarosińska.

hurricane of applause swept the room.”115 This was what cultural mass work was meant to look like. But what did it really achieve? Many workers undoubtedly enjoyed the show; the Song and Dance Ensemble was popular, by all accounts, and watching it perform was surely preferable to working in the mill. Some workers may have even felt inspired, and perhaps the outing gave them renewed energy for the next day’s work. Not everyone felt that way, though. Nor could one draw a straight line between cultural input and industrial output, because the individual personality kept getting in the way. To make the plan’s arithmetic add up, “workers’ enthusiasm” had to be quantifiable and reproducible, just

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like a production target. And yet the workers kept refusing to be engineered or planned. In his book The Captive Mind, published shortly after he fled for France in 1951, Czesław Miłosz set out to understand the Stalinist system’s appeal. Citing examples from his friends and colleagues, he described the desire for fame, usefulness, and belonging that many writers felt in communist Poland. In his penultimate chapter, however, he turned to everyday culture, focusing on a seemingly minor institution: the factory clubroom. “The club’s significance is comparable to that of the chapel in the middle ages,” Miłosz wrote. It exists in every factory, every school, every office. On its walls hang portraits of Party leaders draped with red bunting. Every few days, meetings following pre-arranged agendas take place, meetings that are as potent as religious rites. . . . People who attend a “club” submit to a collective rhythm, and so come to feel that it is absurd to think differently from the collective. . . . Despite its apparent appeal to reason, the club’s activity comes under the heading of collective magic.116 As Miłosz recognized, it was precisely this “religious” or “magical” quality that made culture essential to the communist project. “Club ceremonies, poetry, novels, films are so important because they reach deeper into the stratum on which the emotional conflict rages,” he explained.117 Cultural practices were pathways to the soul. Miłosz’s analysis echoed the communists’ own visions. In Poland as in East Germany, officials treated culture as a magic potion that could transform how individuals thought and acted. Simple exposure to the arts, especially in a consistent, ritualistic way, was meant to have a lasting psychological effect. The actual dynamics of this process remained vague— Stalinist functionaries repeated watchwords like “ennoble,” “elevate,” “activate,” and “move”—but that vagueness was precisely the point. As Miłosz recognized, the arts were to accomplish what mere propaganda could not, by reaching people’s feelings rather than their intellect. Culture would civilize the workers that streamed from the countryside to the factories—poor, uneducated, almost inhuman. It would stamp out religious belief, substituting one form of spirituality for another. And it would open people’s minds to the communist message by modeling what communism looked like. Or so officials hoped. They had little

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evidence that the arts could do any of this, beyond the fact that some artists were committed communists. But they did not need evidence because they had the plan. The plan was borrowed from the Soviet Union, which was proof positive that it would work. If Soviet workers had been able to complete their Five-Year Plan in four, Poles and East Germans could at least stick to the schedule, however unrealistic it seemed. To do so, though, they had to work at superhuman tempo, and that was where the arts came into play. Moving and activating workers was not just an end in itself but also an important means of raising productivity, since activated workers would work harder. So long as contact with the arts could make them more committed and enthusiastic, it was indispensable for completing the plan. Officials thus set up a massive infrastructure for bringing culture to the workers and vice versa. They made time for plays and concerts during work shifts, built clubrooms on the shop floor, and created thousands of amateur ensembles. They sent millions of workers to visit cultural institutions while incentivizing artists to perform in factories and on collective farms. This cultural matrix made art accessible and even unavoidable for working men and women, but it also transformed what art looked like. Theaters had to adjust to their new public, changing both what they played and how. Artists began to represent and interact with workers, in keeping with the state diktat that all art be oriented toward them. Economic priorities reshaped cultural spaces—but culture failed to make a similar impact on economics. The plan’s defining feature was its universality. All Eastern Bloc states adopted five- or six-year plans in 1949/50, and these were nearly identical, down to the concrete targets. Implementation left more room for variations, as different regimes confronted different challenges. The GDR, for instance, delayed the building of socialism until 1952 because it had to navigate the unique burden of an open border with West Germany. As a result, its artists faced less pressure to adopt Socialist Realism than in Poland, and were, on the whole, slower to do so. But these were temporary issues, as far as state officials were concerned. What united the plans was their assumption that any public could be reformed: that people’s past had no bearing on their future. All souls could be engineered to work in the same way, no matter how they started out. For Miłosz, that was the most terrifying aspect of the factory clubs. Since they existed everywhere “from the Elbe to Vladivostok,” he feared that they would obliterate all nationalities, producing

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a homogeneous imperium with “a single culture and a single universal language.”118 In practice, they did just the opposite: rather than yield to the plan, people rebelled. They refused to go to the club or remade it in their image. They embraced local traditions at the expense of communist doctrine, using cultural spaces to voice their own demands. Instead of transforming East Europeans, the cultural matrix empowered them. It failed to create a homogeneous public and instead opened up a public sphere.

Ch a p ter 3

Nationalism Public Protest and the Birth of National Communism

After the uprising of the 17th of June The Secretary of the Writers’ Union Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee Stating that the people Had forfeited the confidence of the government And could win it back only By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier In that case for the government To dissolve the people And elect another? —Bertolt Brecht, “The Solution,” 19531 They ran to us, shouting: Under socialism a cut finger does not hurt. They cut their finger, they felt pain. They lost faith. —Adam Ważyk, “Poem for Adults,” 19552

Around 8 am on June 17, 1953, the workers of Leipzig’s Construction Union went on strike. Thousands of workers in Berlin had struck the day before to protest rising work quotas, and news of their protest—amplified by the US-backed Radio in the American Sector (RIAS)—was making its way through East Germany. By noon, employees of eighty-one Leipzig factories had laid down their tools and begun marching on the city center, carrying banners that read “Solidarity with Berlin” and “We demand a better life.” As students and passersby joined in, the crowd swelled while the demands grew increasingly radical: “We want free elections!” “Release political prisoners!” “Down with the government!” All across town, demonstrators sang the “Song of Germany,” the Weimar Republic’s—and West Germany’s—national anthem, whose third stanza begins, “Unity and justice and freedom / for the German fatherland!” A workers’ strike had turned into a national uprising, bringing as many as one hundred thousand people onto Leipzig’s streets.3 72

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Although the uprising lacked coordination, protestors instinctively targeted the nerve centers of communist power. Crowds gathered around the District Court building, the radio station, and the pavilion of the National Front—the political umbrella group led by the SED. At each stop, they tore down the state’s banners and posters, as well as anything to do with the USSR—most notably a statue of Stalin on the city’s main square.4 These works of art were so emblematic of the regime that they emerged as magnets for popular wrath. When protestors set fire to the National Front pavilion around 1 pm, someone dragged out a piano and started playing Soviet songs.5 Culture helped channel both political frustration and national sentiment, especially in the absence of institutional outlets. While demonstrators held sway in Leipzig for much of the day, they were unable to negotiate or even meet with party brass, who could afford to wait for reinforcements. Within hours, some sixteen Soviet army divisions fanned out across the GDR, restoring order at the cost of more than fifty lives. The GDR’s June 17 rebellion became the first of several mass uprisings that shook the Eastern Bloc between 1953 and 1956. In Poland, Hungary, and even—on a smaller scale—Czechoslovakia, protestors took to the streets to demand political change. They were inspired in part by government reform: after Joseph Stalin’s death in March 1953, officials revised some of his policies, hoping to curry favor and defuse unrest. Yet these attempts to stabilize communist rule often produced the opposite effect. Regime concessions came off as both arbitrary and inadequate, fueling hostility toward the unpopular measures that remained. The result was an explosion of public discontent that was framed primarily in national terms. Nationalism offered a ready-made vocabulary for criticizing communist regimes without defying them outright. It allowed activists to speak for the people against a heartless bureaucracy, and for the country against excessive Soviet control. The nation became the dominant idiom of political protest—and culture was its foremost medium. Within Stalinism’s repressive political system, political debate took cultural forms. In making calls to rehabilitate banned artists—conservatives, modernists, émigrés—critics made claims about national identity and communism’s place within it. In attacking Socialist Realism as rigid and schematic, they cast doubt on the usefulness of Soviet models. Demands for pluralism and authenticity in art were only thinly veiled political proposals; at cultural congresses and on the pages of art revues, speakers rehearsed arguments that soon spilled out onto the streets. As

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happened in Leipzig, songs, posters, and other works of art accompanied and animated public protests. Yet art did not belong to protestors alone. For state officials, co-opting symbols of national culture became a way to show that they had changed their stripes. By embracing artists and artworks they had previously banned, communist leaders aimed to highlight both their responsiveness to popular desires and their independence from the Kremlin. Revamped cultural policies were a key form of communist legitimation after Stalin, as Eastern Bloc regimes worked to develop more inclusive forms of rule. National art served to promote a new political vision, National Communism.6 National Communism was an international project, approved and coordinated by Moscow. After protests exposed the structural weakness of Stalinist rule, this project represented an attempt to reestablish communism on firmer foundations. Officials openly admitted that their efforts to transform society had not worked as planned because they had been too mechanical and heavy handed. Rather than trying to remake East European publics from above, they promised to involve these publics in the building of socialism, no longer as objects but as subjects of government policy. That involved rejecting the one-size-fitsall Soviet model in favor of distinctive, national roads to communism, which promised to bridge the gap between state and society. But that was easier said than done. Making communism national entailed developing new administrative structures, new ideologies, and new methods of rule. And in East Germany’s case, it also meant developing a new nation.

The People’s Will The events of June 17 caught Leipzig officials by surprise. When reports of demonstrators reached city hall, administrators hoped they might be marching in support of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were slated for execution the next day.7 Indeed, the uprising had no precedent, either in the GDR or anywhere in communist Eastern Europe; it was the largest protest in the region since the formation of the Eastern Bloc. The fact that it took place in East Germany—a country with long communist traditions and a political culture of “loyalty to the state”8—is all the more striking. Historians of the GDR debate whether the leading cause was increased work quotas or their partial repeal, but neither of these factors was unique to East Germany. What was unique within the Bloc, and vital for the June 17 protests, was the fact that East Germany was not a nation-state.

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Germany’s division ensured that the GDR followed a different trajectory from other Soviet satellites. While its eastern neighbors declared themselves “people’s democracies” and embarked on the “building of socialism,” East Germany initially avoided radical reform. Through 1952, Stalin kept dangling the possibility of German reunification in front of the Allies, even as the SED continued to consolidate control. Only after the Western powers rejected one more overture in March of that year did the Kremlin authorize a new approach—what Peter Grieder has called a “crash course in Sovietization.”9 Following its Second Party Conference in July, the SED sped up the building of collective farms, imposed new limits on private businesses, and intensified attacks against Protestant churches. It also placed new emphasis on labor productivity, raising workers’ quotas by an average of 10 percent. Other Eastern Bloc states had already passed similar measures and, after some early storms, were able to suppress resistance. Poland, for instance, introduced a “price regulation” in January  1953 that devalued real wages even more than the GDR’s quota increase, yet failed to produce a major outcry.10 A half decade of Stalinist rule had coerced Poles into accepting draconian measures. In East Germany, however, such policies were novel, unexpected, and unsettling—especially by contrast to West Germany. Fueled by the Marshall Plan and capital investments, the West German economy grew by an average of 8 percent a year over the 1950s.11 This “economic miracle” was both a major impetus for East Germany’s reforms and a direct competitor to them. Those who disliked conditions in the GDR could always vote with their feet by leaving through the open border in Berlin, and many did. Over 1.5 million people fled eastern Germany between 1945 and 1953, but the exodus quickened after the Second Party Conference. According to West German statistics, 112,614 people left the GDR during the first three months of 1953 alone.12 While Stalin was determined to press on with the “building of socialism” in East Germany, after his death the Soviet Council of Ministers revisited the situation. At a meeting in late May it concluded that the SED had erred in speeding up the tempo of reform and therefore lost support “among the broad masses of the population.” Increased emigration threatened not only the GDR’s own stability but also the Soviet Union’s global image. Because of the complexities of “the German question on the international level,” East German leaders were instructed to chart a new course.13 The New Course was announced on June 9 in a communiqué from the SED Politburo, which admitted to “a series of mistakes,” including

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senseless harassment of private landowners and tradesmen. It annulled a number of punitive laws and planned price hikes—though not, in an apparent oversight, the 10 percent quota increase for construction workers. Notably, the Politburo justified these actions by pointing to “the great goal of German reunification, which demands specific measures from both sides that can facilitate their rapprochement.” GDR citizens who had fled west were allowed to reclaim their jobs and possessions without “any discrimination.” The party also promised to “ease transit between East and West Germany,” especially for artists and scientists, who were encouraged to attend congresses in both states.14 The communiqué seemed to signal a new attentiveness to popular wishes, starting with German unity, the biggest wish of all. The New Course had a distinctly national orientation. It was in this context that as many as a million East Germans took to the streets on June 17, demanding that the self-proclaimed Workers’ and Peasants’ State listen to actual workers and peasants. In Leipzig, they spray-painted streetcars with slogans like “Goatee, gut, and glasses”— a reference to the SED leaders Ulbricht, Pieck, and Grotewohl—“are not the people’s will.”15 This was not only a political critique but also a statement of national belonging: separating the SED from “the people”

Figure 8.  Workers march on Leipzig’s city center, June 17, 1953. Note the German flag at center, without the emblem of the GDR. The Stalin memorial in the background would be attacked later that day. Stadtgeschichtliches Museum Leipzig, photograph by Helga Müller.

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marked it as foreign. Criticism of communist rule was intertwined with a defense of German identity. Calls for “free elections” implied elections across all of Germany; “down with the government” inevitably conjured up the Western alternative. At a shop-floor meeting on June  18, one Leipzig worker made the link explicit. “A government that forces thousands of people into misery would be impossible in the West, it would simply collapse,” he argued. “Therefore we demand that the government resign.”16 The national question inflected all discussion of communist reform and loomed over the protests like a specter. The specter of West Germany also loomed over the SED’s reaction. Cold War tensions prevented party leaders from speaking about the demonstrations in earnest. Simply acknowledging public discontent, much less trying to fix it, would have looked like an admission of defeat. Paradoxically, the uprising only solidified Ulbricht’s position, since removing him risked making the party—and the Soviets—seem weak. Instead of confronting its problems, the SED chose to double down, insisting that its “general line was and remains correct.”17 Already on the afternoon of June 17, Leipzig officials received instructions to treat the protests as “the work of provocateurs and fascist foreign agents, as well as their accomplices from German capitalist monopolies.”18 Some East Germans had joined in the protests, the party acknowledged, but only after being incited and led astray. The appropriate response was therefore not reform but renewed vigilance, to be enforced by a beefed-up Ministry of State Security. In Leipzig District, officials arrested nearly a thousand people between mid-June and mid-September and sentenced 161 as spies and saboteurs.19 Such repression not only validated the party’s version of events but also served to halt further discussion. Admitting past mistakes, as the New Course had done, proved so destabilizing that officials had no interest in a further reckoning. Unexpectedly, though, the party encountered open resistance from artists, who had been quiet on June 17 but felt emboldened by the promises of the New Course. On June 23, the Writers’ Union Leipzig branch adopted a unanimous resolution that challenged the official version of events. The resolution criticized the Leipzig People’s Paper—the organ of the local SED—for “portraying the demonstrations of countless workers simply as the consequence of [foreign] agents.” The fact that tens of thousands took part reflected “the hitherto false treatment of the workers by the regime and the party” and required tangible change. “We demand the unreserved truth,” the resolution concluded. “Only through this can [the regime] regain the lost trust of wide segments of

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the population and prevent them from getting their information from the enemy, from RIAS. The consequence of that would be a new, much worse June  17.”20 Ending with a threat brought the point home: the SED had delegitimized itself and had to heed the people’s will. Other artists echoed the Leipzig writers’ call. On the pages of New German Literature, authors decried the practice of sugarcoating and exhorted one another to “write the truth.”21 The Academy of Arts and the Culture League, two of East Germany’s most prominent cultural institutions, presented the government with lists of complaints and suggestions.22 “Never again in the history of the GDR was there a moment of such spunk and such conviction that this spunk was useful,” remembered Erich Loest, the chairman of the Writers’ Union Leipzig branch.23 Party officials were not pleased, nearly expelling Loest from the union and forcing him to perform ritual self-criticism. But the sheer volume of demands, from some of the GDR’s best-known artists, made them impossible to ignore. In calling for openness, truth, and responsiveness, artists urged the regime to become one with its people. The SED had to become more national in order to gain popular support.

The East German Thaw Although SED leaders refused to accept blame for June 17, they quickly made a series of concessions, portraying these as part of the New Course. The regime raised salaries, cut prices, and boosted production of consumer goods. It also placed new emphasis on leisure and entertainment, which administrators had long neglected. In February 1954 Leipzig officials organized a carnival, billed as “a party for the broadest masses of the population.”24 That December jazz concerts resumed after a five-year ban.25 The following April a city park reopened as a “culture park,” with stages for outdoor performances and dance floors for local youths. All these initiatives were designed not just to pacify East Germans but also to draw them into government structures. Whatever else they might accomplish, packed concert halls and enthusiastic crowds helped the regime project an image of legitimacy, both at home and abroad. Above all, though, the new approach was meant to show a willingness to listen to the public. Having convened a Viewer Council to advise them on audience desires, the STL promised to “give humor its rightful place” in the repertoire.26 Putting on comedies not only satisfied demand but also served a useful ventilating function, providing space for

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criticism without destabilizing the regime. That was the goal of Heinar Kipphardt’s play Urgently Seeking Shakespeare, which opened at the STL in the 1953/54 season. Focusing on a young author’s tussles with rigid cultural bureaucrats, the play was heavily autobiographical, and many of its lines could have been slogans for the New Course: “We want [officials] who look toward the masses, not toward their superiors!” “When you encounter mistakes, don’t scurry backward like a crab, but tackle them openly!”27 Plays like Kipphardt’s—which won a coveted National Prize in October 1953—aimed to restore viewers’ trust in the regime by showcasing its desire to change. As one critic wrote, “It will help create a new atmosphere of brave criticism and self-criticism, an atmosphere in which mouths open and hearts unlock.”28 This formulation anticipated Ilya Ehrenburg’s novel The Thaw, which was published in the USSR in April 1954 and lent its name to the whole era. Following Stalin’s death, Ehrenburg suggested, interpersonal relations had grown warmer; as after a long winter, people were coming out into the open and showing their true selves. The notion of authenticity was a hallmark of the Soviet Thaw, as it was for the SED’s New Course.29 By poking fun at its own flaws, the regime aimed to provide a catharsis for viewers, relieving pent-up tension and forging an emotional bond with them. The principle of authenticity also informed the SED’s new policies on artists, who had long chafed against centralization and creative controls. On the same day the Central Committee proclaimed that its “general line was and remains correct,” it resolved to “put an end to fruitless, petty paternalism and narrowness” in matters of science and culture.30 Leipzig officials met with the local branch of the Graphic Artists’ Union in July to clear the air and promise more autonomy, especially in the choice of art for display.31 At the union’s next District Art Show, previously frowned upon domestic scenes far outnumbered factory landscapes and muscled workers.32 As the selection jury observed, it had “worked as far as possible in accordance with the New Course, as encapsulated by [this] guiding principle: while shutting out openly crude, bad, cheap, and hostile art, to display the wide stream of artistic creation.”33 Theater directors, too, gained the right to set repertoires themselves, without having to wait for orders from Berlin.34 The new approach culminated in January 1954 with the creation of the Ministry of Culture, which replaced the hated State Commission for Cultural Affairs. While the commission’s head had been a lifelong bureaucrat, the new minister was Johannes R. Becher, a respected expressionist poet. Such changes, though, were less about artistic freedom than shared

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responsibility. They sought to make East German artists into partners for the state by rooting policy in artists’ concerns. As artists gained more say in cultural affairs, the visibility of Soviet works declined dramatically. The STL had put on four Soviet plays during the 1951/52 season alone, but between 1953 and 1956 it performed just two.35 This shift reflected a deliberate attempt to curb frustration with the Soviet Union and emphasize East Germany’s autonomy. At the end of 1953, Moscow handed over control of thirty-three large factories that it administered directly, including Leipzig’s Kirov Machine Works, which employed several thousand workers. In January 1955 the Kremlin formally ended its state of war with Germany, paving the way for the GDR to join the Warsaw Pact. Eight months later, a friendship treaty with the Soviet Union proclaimed East Germany’s full sovereignty.36 In practice, this sovereignty was strictly circumscribed, since nearly a halfmillion Soviet troops remained on East German soil. The GDR’s formal changes in status amounted to a propaganda offensive, designed to assuage fears of Soviet control and stress East Germany’s Germanness. The GDR had always claimed to represent all Germans, decrying the Federal Republic as a “marionette regime” propped up by foreign powers. While this rhetoric predictably intensified after East Germany’s declaration of sovereignty, the SED also began describing reunification as inevitable. “So long as there are two states with different social systems in Germany, they have no other option but rapprochement,” the party’s monthly magazine proclaimed in October 1955.37 East Germany’s successes, it insisted, had created a magnetic field that the Federal Republic simply could not resist. The country’s task was therefore to broadcast its achievements for the West, and to encourage Westerners— especially artists and scientists—to come and see the GDR’s advances for themselves. As overwrought as these claims were, they gave many East Germans hope that the SED was serious about German unity, especially in light of Austria’s reunification that July. By pursuing a policy of engagement with West Germany, the party hoped to pull off a diplomatic coup and rally popular support at the same time. Much of that engagement took the form of cultural exchange, which became a point of emphasis for GDR officials. In early 1954 the Leipzig City Council’s Culture Department announced that coordinating such exchange, and thereby carrying out “an all-German cultural policy,” had become its primary task. Officials laid out a comprehensive list of measures for establishing contact with West German artists, including inviting them to study in Leipzig free of charge and “asking GDR artists

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who perform in West Germany to hold personal conversations.”38 A few months later, planning began for an All-German Week of Cultural and Documentary Film, which took place in Leipzig in September  1955. A mixed jury selected twenty-five East German and twenty-eight West German films, splitting awards evenly between the two countries.39 With categories like “our beautiful German homeland,” the festival not only fostered East-West ties but also framed East Germany as the defender of the national interest. Beyond effecting a cultural rapprochement, it sought to make the SED appear more German.

The Old Stones A few months before Leipzig writers openly criticized the SED regime, the Kraków branch of the Polish Writers’ Union approved a very different resolution. Its meeting of February 8, 1953 addressed the recent show trial of four priests and three administrators in the Kraków Curia, who were falsely accused—and convicted—of spying for the US government. After three of the priests received death sentences, the Writers’ Union expressed its “absolute condemnation of these traitors to our homeland, who used their spiritual positions . . . to act against the nation and the people’s state.”40 Though the fifty-three writers in attendance included devout Catholics and future dissidents, no one dared object, so the resolution passed unanimously. Together with the Curia trial, this resolution formed part of a sustained antireligious campaign, which crested with the arrest of Poland’s highest church official, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, that September. The party’s willingness to attack the Catholic Church reflected both its vast ambition and its real strength. While a million East Germans took to the streets in protest of the SED, most Poles looked on in silence as their most cherished institution was assaulted. Yet the PZPR’s coercive force exceeded its constructive power. Though it was mostly able to keep subjects in line, the party struggled to transform them into true socialist subjects—even in the “first socialist city” of Nowa Huta. In May 1953 a visit by the culture minister Włodzimierz Sokorski revealed a community that was well insulated from the Catholic Church but otherwise looked nothing like official propaganda. The heroic builders of Nowa Huta were in fact often drunk, forsaking cultural mass work for raids on the women’s dormitory.41 Life had failed to imitate art; proclaiming Nowa Huta to be a socialist utopia had not made it so. Even without a massive crisis like East Germany’s, the PZPR

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had to acknowledge that its attempt at social transformation was not having the desired effect. Czesław Miłosz, whose Captive Mind came out in Paris that same year, neatly summed up the party’s predicament: “Why won’t the equation work out as it should, when every step is logical? . . . What the devil does a man need?”42 By the time of Sokorski’s visit, two months after Stalin’s death, PZPR officials were beginning to develop a new calculus for men’s needs, steered partly by the winds blowing from Moscow. Prefiguring the GDR’s New Course, Kraków administrators confessed to “a series of mistakes” and promised to adopt a more considerate approach. The minister’s willingness to come to Nowa Huta already signaled a new concern for the realities on the ground. As Sokorski explained, the meeting’s goal was to “confront the plans of work based on the Council of Ministers’ latest resolutions .  .  . with the works, needs, and desires of Nowa Huta’s residents themselves.”43 Proclaiming an interest in public opinion was largely a symbolic gesture, since the PZPR had no intention of giving up real power. It did, however, draw on a new policy playbook that was fast spreading through the Eastern Bloc. By admitting unspecified mistakes, vowing reform, and soliciting popular input, communist parties sought to defuse unrest and bolster their authority. Unlike the SED, the PZPR stopped short of declaring a new course, but it did adopt many similar policies. In October  1953 the Central Committee resolved to raise living standards by cutting prices and increasing the output of consumer goods.44 The first elections to People’s Councils, local decision-making bodies that had previously been appointed, took place in December 1954. Two days later, the dreaded Ministry of Public Security gave way to a Ministry of Internal Affairs, which dismissed thousands of secret police officials and admitted that innocent people had been falsely detained.45 All these measures aimed to overcome the PZPR’s “disconnection from the masses,” as the party leader Bolesław Bierut announced in January  1955.46 To fortify its standing, the PZPR had to present itself as a truly national party in line with Polish people’s interests and desires. Cultural policy was meant to reflect and advertise these changes, just as it did in the GDR. Sokorski’s trip to Nowa Huta concluded with a call for better “relaxation and entertainment options after work,” including circus and satirical performances that were “well suited to the needs of the community.”47 Professional artists, too, received permission to explore their interests with less direction and restriction from above. “The [Culture] Ministry . . . will no longer be an agency that administers

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culture,” a senior official announced in late 1953, but would instead heed “the initiative and opinion of artistic unions and groups, as well as distinguished artists and creators.”48 The following April, at a meeting of the ministry’s arts council, Sokorski launched an attack on “schematism” and “command art,” defending artists’ right to “search, experiment, and fight for their own views.” Only such authentic, genuine art, he insisted, could “stand the test of encounter with the people” and therefore succeed in molding them into socialist men.49 Embracing popular culture became a way for the PZPR to demonstrate its kinship with the public. As an emblem of national identity, the arts could make the party seem more Polish. Many artists, however, seized on the language of reform to push its bounds. The most notorious case concerned the writer Adam Ważyk, whose “Poem for Adults” appeared in the August  1955 issue of New Culture, the journal of the Polish Writers’ Union. Ważyk had been a high-ranking union functionary and one of the architects of Socialist Realism in Poland, but the unfolding Thaw persuaded him to reconsider his positions.50 In a freewheeling, fifteen-part text, he called into question the Poland socialism had made while mourning the one it had supplanted. The poem’s most provocative passages centered on Nowa Huta, the “new Eldorado” that had instead become “an inhuman Poland”: From rubbish baskets swinging on ropes boys run like cats on the walls; from the women’s hostels, those lay monasteries, sounds of lust and travail. The duchesses will be rid of their issue—the Vistula flows nearby. Looking out at this new people, the narrator finds himself yearning for a vanished world: “Give me one fragment of old stone./Let me find myself back in Warsaw.”51 Though “Poem for Adults” was unusually direct, its sentiments echoed the PZPR’s own self-criticism. Even Ważyk’s unflattering portrayal of Nowa Huta differed little from what the Culture Ministry had stated publicly two years before, during Sokorski’s visit. Much like the party to which he belonged, Ważyk condemned the current state of affairs while clouding his own responsibility and preaching communion with the masses. “Poem for Adults” raised many of the Thaw’s main talking points, from improved living conditions to sincerity and truthfulness. Its last lines even referenced the PZPR directly, speaking for the nation in the first-person plural: “We demand these

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every day./We demand through the Party.” Small wonder, then, that New Culture’s editors placed Ważyk’s text on the front page and framed it as their contribution to the party’s effort. Party leaders did not see things the same way, condemning “Poem for Adults” as an “anti-party statement” and firing New Culture’s editorin-chief.52 A bottom-up critique of PZPR policy was evidently a step too far, even if it remained supportive of the PZPR itself. In typical Stalinist fashion, officials staged several “discussions” designed to shame and browbeat Ważyk, yet speakers did not always follow suit. At a November meeting with the party brass, several writers defended both the “Poem for Adults” and the broader right to tell the truth as they saw it. “There are certain subjects that literature must discuss openly,” argued Jadwiga Siekierska, a member of the Ministry of Culture and Art’s artistic council. “It is the party’s moral arm. We’re talking about moral and political wrongs, about our battle against lies and fear. Literature can help correct these wrongs.”53 Siekierska still framed literature as an aid to party leaders, but other speakers envisioned a more independent role. The poet Mieczysław Jastruń even suggested that “a dissonance between the writer’s moral mania and politics is maybe unavoidable.” He concluded that “all we can do as writers is to write as honestly and truthfully as possible,” since artists’ duty to the nation eclipsed their loyalty to a regime.54 Artists were not just moral authorities but political actors with a responsibility to expose and rectify the public’s plight. So long as the party remained unaccountable to the people, they were the more legitimate representatives of the people’s will.

The Polish October On the night of February 25, 1956, after the formal end of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) Twentieth Congress, Nikita Khrushchev delivered his famed “secret speech,” “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences.” The proceedings started just before midnight and lasted nearly four hours. In a sweeping philippic, Khrushchev mocked Stalin’s vanity, bemoaned his brutality, and chronicled his “acts of terror,” from mass arrests to ethnic cleansing. The speech sent shockwaves through the communist world, but it was especially destabilizing in Poland, where the PZPR’s crisis of faith combined with a succession crisis. Bierut, the party’s founding leader, developed pneumonia while attending the Congress and died in a Moscow hospital two weeks later: the lapdog following his master to the grave, as the wits

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had it. When it met to choose a new first secretary, the PZPR Central Committee settled on the Kraków-born Edward Ochab, a relatively unknown compromise candidate. He could conceivably distance himself from the Stalinist regime—even though he, like Khrushchev, was deeply imbricated in it—but also had to criticize the party’s past in order to establish his authority. On taking power, Ochab circulated hundreds of copies of the “secret speech” to be discussed at party gatherings across the country. At meeting after meeting, night after night, the party’s rank and file demanded a full reckoning with the past, setting off a maelstrom of political discussion. In Kraków the reckoning came on March  29, barely a week after Ochab’s selection, at a raucous plenum for the local party leaders. Almost no one mentioned the “secret speech” itself, whose revelations had been whispered privately for years. Instead, speakers seized on its spirit of critique to air their own frustrations with communism in Poland. They brought up special stores for the elite, excessive centralization, the chronic lack of basic goods and housing. Above all, they condemned the Soviet Union’s interference in Polish affairs, from its ubiquitous “advisers” to its control of the economy. Speakers seemed to gain courage with each new charge, and long repressed grievances burst into the open. Was not the Katyń massacre—a mass killing of nearly twenty-two thousand Poles by the Soviet secret police—another one of Stalin’s crimes? When would the country’s eastern borders be redrawn, returning Lwów from Ukraine to Poland?55 Khrushchev’s criticisms of Stalin empowered Poles to criticize the USSR and to demand real independence. Discussions of the nation and its interest, once broached obliquely in literary magazines, suddenly went mainstream. Though Kraków’s plenum was closed to the public, word quickly got out and ordinary citizens jumped in. “After the Twentieth Congress residents no longer state their wishes in the form of requests or complaints, but rather as categorical demands,” observed one member of the City Council.56 Demands erupted into violence on June 28, when nearly one hundred thousand people rallied in the streets of Poznań, a major city in western Poland. The sequence of events was strikingly reminiscent of June 17, 1953. In the early morning, workers at the Joseph Stalin Metalworks went on strike, citing worsening conditions and voicing material demands: “We want a pay raise,” “price decreases,” “down with norms.” As they marched on the city center, the crowd swelled and the slogans grew bolder. “Down with the Russians,” the demonstrators chanted. “We demand a truly free Poland.” They

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sang Dąbrowski’s “Mazurka,” the Second Republic’s national anthem, along with “Oath,” a patriotic song whose lines include, “We are the Polish nation, the Polish people / . . .We won’t let the enemy oppress us. / So help us God! / So help us God!” Some voices explicitly called out the party’s cultural policy: “We demand fewer Palaces of Culture and the construction of more housing!”57 The protestors took over the local party headquarters and other government buildings, tearing down portraits of communist leaders. Only a deployment of tanks, led by the Soviet-Polish general Stanislav Poplavskii, managed to restore order, though street battles continued for another two days. At least seventythree people, including sixty-four civilians, were killed. Like the SED, the PZPR initially blamed the uprising on “imperialist agents and the reactionary underground,” which had supposedly led loyal workers astray.58 Just two days later, though, the Central Committee issued a decree titled “On Overcoming the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences,” indicating that the party’s self-criticism and reforms would continue. At its next plenum, held from July 18 to 28, the Committee admitted that the Poznań events “shed a new light on the political and social situation in our country” and promised to investigate the real causes of worker unrest.59 It also formally reinstated Władysław Gomułka, the popular ex-leader of the Polish Workers’ Party, who had been accused of “right-nationalist deviation” in 1948 and spent more than three years in prison. While Walter Ulbricht had managed to consolidate his power after June  17 by preaching continuity, the inexperienced Ochab was forced to turn to more respected politicians for support. By bringing back Gomułka, renowned as the champion of a “Polish road to socialism,” he hoped to stress his party’s national roots and fortify its claim to power. On the ground, however, events were spinning out of the PZPR’s control. “People talk only about politics, even to insanity,” the theater critic Jan Kott observed in early October in a review of Hamlet at Kraków’s Old Theater—which he dubbed “Hamlet after the Twentieth Congress.” The play’s protagonist, he argued, mirrored and motivated Poland’s contemporary youth: “He’s filled with burning passion. . . . He’s livid. He’s a young scandal-maker drunk on his own indignation. But he’s also discovered his capacity for action.”60 One week after Kott’s words appeared in print, Kraków students formed a Student Revolutionary Committee, led by the directorial trainee—and future avant-garde auteur—Jerzy Grotowski. Taking advantage of the PZPR’s paralysis, this committee organized its own militia and even its own housing commission,

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which worked to redistribute apartments from apparatchiks to residents in need. “We believed in the beautiful world of human equality,” one of the organizers recalled; “we listened to jazz, read Ważyk, . . . recited Mayakovsky.”61 It was socialism from below, with a bohemian twist and a strong national flavor. By October 19, the PZPR Central Committee had decided to replace Ochab with Gomułka, the one party leader who still commanded popular support. Before it could finalize the transition, though, Khrushchev and other Soviet officials landed in Warsaw, while Soviet troops began to march toward the capital from their bases near Poznań. Khrushchev was clearly alarmed at the prospect of further reforms, especially in light of the unrest brewing in Hungary, but an all-night meeting with Gomułka eased his mind. The Polish leader promised that his country would remain within the Bloc, reforming but not dismantling its communist system.62 Khrushchev flew home the next morning, Soviet military detachments turned back, and the PZPR formally selected Gomułka as its first secretary on October  21. The threat of a Soviet invasion, however, did wonders for the new leader’s popularity, transforming a communist functionary into a national hero. Some three hundred thousand people gathered beneath Warsaw’s Palace of Culture and Science—which still bore Stalin’s name—to celebrate Gomułka’s accession. Even Miłosz, following from Paris, got caught up in the excitement. “One dramatic night has completely changed the situation,” he wrote in an article for the French magazine Tomorrow. “I believe that the Warsaw crowd felt the same way and, in speaking of the government, now says ‘we’ rather than ‘they.’ ”63 Speaking in Warsaw on October 24, Gomułka promised to pursue a truly national communism that both reflected popular desires and respected Poland’s uniqueness. That meant decentralizing power and fostering grassroots initiatives like the Student Revolutionary Committee. Rather than preaching from on high, the party would take its cues from below, though there were also limits: “We will not permit anyone to take advantage of . . . the people’s freedom for purposes alien to socialism,” Gomułka warned.64 As the Soviet invasion of Hungary—begun on the same day—made clear, Moscow would not allow a state to leave the Warsaw Pact, and so Poland’s national autonomy depended on its international commitments. Gomułka used this argument extensively to rally support for the regime, including from its longtime adversary, the Catholic Church. After his release from prison on October 29, Cardinal Wyszyński expressed his loyalty to the communist state and called

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on the faithful to vote in the upcoming elections. In return, the PZPR pledged noninterference in church affairs, permitted religious instruction in schools, and gave parliamentary seats to a handful of Catholic intellectuals.65 Soviet advisers and military officers left Poland, led by the commander of the Poznań crackdown, General Poplavskii. Amid a surge of public activism—what became known as the Polish October— the new regime described and legitimated itself in national terms. “A real turning point,” the Jagiellonian University art historian Karol Estreicher, Jr., noted in his diary. “The party is becoming Polish.”66

At Ease One week after Gomułka took power, Walter Ulbricht and his prime minister went on East German television to urge calm amid the Eastern Bloc’s unrest. The SED’s line was true and steady, they insisted; “we won’t change the government just because that’s fashionable these days.”67 June 17 had taught Ulbricht that reform was a slippery slope. Admitting mistakes had proved disastrous in 1953, and the first secretary knew that he would not survive another such admission. He thus resolved to suppress all discussion of the “secret speech,” even within the SED, lest it raise obvious questions about his own complicity. The party quietly phased out its most obsequious praise of Stalin and approved a limited amnesty for political prisoners, following the Soviet model. At the same time, it carried out a major purge designed to quash “revisionist” tendencies and prevent the rise of a Gomułka-like rival.68 As after June 17, the SED tried to shut down political debate—but artists once again got in the way. By 1956, East German artists enjoyed more freedom to express their views, thanks to the legacy of the New Course. Officials’ push for genuine engagement with the masses had sanctioned writers to address contemporary themes, creating room for limited critique. In the cultural journal Sunday, according to Verena Blaum’s calculations, articles about “politics and the state” became three times more frequent after 1953 than they had been before.69 The peak came in the spring and summer of 1956, as Sunday—the organ of East Germany’s Culture League—responded to the Twentieth Congress. A July issue paired excerpts from Ehrenburg’s Thaw with a poem by the Leipzig writer Gerhard Zwerenz, “The Mother of Freedom.” “The revolution is not a nightcap, / in which one is gently bedded, / tassels tickling one’s back,” Zwerenz wrote. “Oceans are not puddles, / sand, softly moistened, / to

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charm the boys.” The poem then turned to the country’s leaders, adopting a biting tone: “But you’ve slept like boys / for so long, only not so healthy. / The revolution ran aground, / and that in the middle of the harbor.” Still, Zwerenz ended on an optimistic note: You slept the sleep of the unjust. Awaken, and let us together fight better! The mother of freedom is called revolution. Freedom is her daughter, the Party her son.70 The last lines echoed Ważyk’s “Poem for Adults,” which also ended with an appeal to the party. Like Ważyk, Zwerenz hoped that open criticism would make officials more attentive to the people. And like New Culture, the journal that published Ważyk’s work, Sunday saw “Mother of Freedom” as “a poem in our socialist spirit” that would help right the ship of revolution in the GDR.71 Righting the ship was also the explicit goal of Leipzig’s Peppermill cabaret, which opened in 1954 to defuse tensions by laughing about them. “We poor cabaretists live off the few mistakes the GDR has made, and so we’ll live another few years,” its August 1956 program began.72 Titled “At Ease,” the show featured a soccer game between communist and capitalist leaders that went awry because left-winger Ulbricht kept misinterpreting center-forward Khrushchev’s instructions. The final number hammered the point home: Stand “at ease” in every post, or else your time is up. Many things will and must change. . . . Whoever doesn’t will get replaced.73 At a time when the “secret speech” could not be mentioned in public, it fell to satirists to publicize it, using their well-worn sleight of hand. “It was really quite cheeky, what [the cabaret] got away with,” wrote Erich Loest, who contributed a few skits.74 For Loest himself, as for many of his friends, it was Poland that gave guidance and inspiration. On October 30 the writer hosted a journalist from Warsaw who brought a roomful of Leipzig artists up to speed on the Polish October. Everyone wondered when similar reforms would come to East Germany. “Ulbricht would have to go first, that was clear

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as day, but who else? . . . Gomułka had sat in prison and was now first secretary, what would the analog be in the GDR?”75 They discussed workers’ councils, relations with the Soviet Union, and above all their own role in the transformation ahead. Had not Polish artists and intellectuals sown the seed of political changes, and could not East German writers do the same? The unfolding revolution in Hungary offered another template for socialist rebirth, as well as a cautionary tale. “We all agreed that developments over there had lasting significance for us,” recalled Reginald Rudorf, the doyen of Leipzig’s jazz scene. “We believed that we could use the political ferment to bring at least a bit of liberalization to the GDR.”76 During the Hungarian uprising, city officials lifted all remaining restrictions on jazz, hoping to provide distraction and prevent unrest. For several weeks, jazz concerts were packed, raucous events at which Rudorf demanded reform, students shouted down communist functionaries, and musicians played the “Gomułka Blues.”77 The Stasi registered few cases of unrest after the Soviet invasion of Hungary, as most East Germans remembered such invasions all too well. Artists, however—even those who usually ignored political affairs— suddenly showed “a great interest” in Hungarian affairs, following the revolution over Western radio.78 Having worked to develop a more national communism under the New Course, they saw in Poland and Hungary two models of its full realization. “Intellectuals, both party and non-party members, rushed to action, drafted programs, conspired like dilettantes,” Rudorf remembered.79 Perhaps the most elaborate of these programs was the work of Wolfgang Harich, a philosopher and journalist from East Berlin, who sketched out a “special German road to socialism” in late October.80 Many of Harich’s proposals were lifted straight from Gomułka’s speeches: like the PZPR, the SED had to become a genuine people’s party, adopting “the line of the masses” and defending the national interest. In East Germany, however, this meant something distinctive. To become a truly national party, the SED had to expand beyond the GDR and win over the West German masses. Harich laid out a four-step plan in which it would reform itself, establish contacts with West German leftist parties, then merge with them and win free pan-German elections. Harich delivered his program to the Soviet embassy, knowing that it stood no chance without Moscow’s approval, but the ambassador promptly handed it over to Ulbricht. Though he publicly backed German reunification, Khrushchev was not prepared to lose the GDR.81 Ulbricht, for his part, saw the proposal as an act of treason, not only to his

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regime but to the GDR as such. Harich’s elaborate fifty-page manifesto made clear where a German road to socialism would lead, highlighting the SED’s existential problem: in pursuing a more popular, national communism, it risked destroying its own state. The same reforms that strengthened communist rule in Poland would undermine it in East Germany. All the core principles of the New Course—decentralization, grassroots initiative, engagement with West Germany—amounted to playing with fire. Ulbricht had always been uneasy with these policies, seeing them as necessary concessions, and in November 1956 he finally decided to change tack. Events in Hungary revealed that even limited reform could bourgeon into open revolution, and Harich’s text threatened to open the floodgates. Harich was arrested on November  29, initiating a crackdown on critics of the party line. On December 18, after weeks of middling attendance, the Peppermill was surprisingly full, but the blue-collar workers in the hall looked nothing like its usual public. Once the show got underway, several started hurling rotten eggs, while others stormed the stage and shouted insults: “Counterrevolutionaries!” “Enemies of the people!” “Westerners!” A city councilor suddenly materialized and led a search of the cloakroom for smuggled Western publications.82 Though nothing turned up, officials accused the cabaret of “ideological weakness” and suspended performances for eleven months.83 The next day Reginald Rudorf received a call from the Kirov Machine Works, one of the factories recently ceded by the Soviet Union, inviting him to give a lecture on jazz. His visit followed the same blueprint: an audience of middle-aged workers quickly grew belligerent, assaulted Rudorf, and chanted “Down with fascists!” as he fled.84 Though Rudorf initially left for West Germany, he chose to return to the GDR in the enduring hope of fostering reform. He was arrested on March 25 and sentenced to two years in prison. In the meantime, Leipzig officials mounted their own attack on wayward writers, convening a cultural congress on January 30. With some three hundred artists and activists in attendance, the District SED Committee culture secretary Siegfried Wagner lit into Gerhard Zwerenz and his “Mother of Freedom.” The poem had “poisoned millions,” Wagner announced, before going through it line by line. “ ‘The revolution ran aground’? If that’s not counterrevolution, my name’s not Siegfried Wagner.”85 Zwerenz was stripped of his party card and, seeing the writing on the wall, soon moved to West Berlin. Armed with such “proof ” of his betrayal, officials started investigating his friends, including Loest.

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At a tense, combative Writers’ Union meeting in November, Loest had to account for his support of Zwerenz, his attitudes toward the Polish October, and his lack of contacts with the USSR. Having endured a similar interrogation in 1953, the novelist had nothing left to say. “I don’t know anymore, there is no point, I am a nervous wreck.”86 He, too, was expelled from the party and then arrested three days later. Convicted of “building an enemy group,” Loest served more than six years in Bautzen prison. Loest, Zwerenz, Rudorf, and Harich were all SED members, like almost everyone arrested in the party’s ideological crackdown of 1956– 57. A few, like Harich, worked in education, but most were involved in the arts. These were the shock troops of the New Course, empowered by the party to make East German communism more authentic, then held responsible when it spun out of the party’s control. They were deeply committed to the SED’s own stated goals and principles, which is why its abrupt attacks came as such a blow. “Our dear comrades didn’t know that we would gladly have stayed, had they only given us a bit of breathing room,” Zwerenz wrote with palpable bitterness two decades after leaving. “Even today, I am prepared to be a double citizen . . . so long as the GDR allows me to think, say, and write what I believe is true.”87 But he was missing the point: the GDR could not afford him freedom of expression so long as he remained a double citizen, or even a German at heart. In a divided nation, a government that pursued the national interest would ultimately undermine itself.88 Allowing “breathing room” carried great risks for communist regimes, as Hungary showed, but it was also an alluring strategy that promised legitimacy, popularity, and a new lease on life. For the SED, however, it was simply off the table—unless it could construct its own, East German, nation.

The Socialist Nation On the same day that Siegfried Wagner berated writers in Leipzig, Walter Ulbricht and the SED Central Committee debated German reunification in Berlin. Gone was all talk of an inevitable rapprochement, or even any offer of bilateral discussions. The events of the past few months had changed the situation, Ulbricht explained: after the “unmasking of a counterrevolutionary group in the GDR” and “thanks to the lessons of Hungary,” there could be no more doubt about the Federal Republic’s true intentions. Though billed as socialist rebirth, the fervor that had

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swept the Eastern Bloc was actually the work of Western agents. West German officials could never be trusted, and so the only way to foster German unity was to complete the building of socialism in the GDR. “The attitude toward the German Democratic Republic is the test . . . of every supporter of Germany’s reunification,” Ulbricht insisted.89 Six years before Kennedy declared that he, like all free men, was ein Berliner, the SED’s first secretary made the opposite case. All Germans were East Germans first, and East Germany’s interest was the national interest. The new approach left little use for cultural exchange, which had been a key means of bridging East and West. Starting in 1957, Western performers vanished from Leipzig’s trade fair and Western actors from East German films.90 The All-German Week of Cultural and Documentary Film was cancelled, along with a planned Festival of German Drama at the STL.91 Instead of laying claim to German traditions, the GDR set out to build its own: what Ulbricht called a “socialist national culture.”92 This culture had to be distinctive from the West, avoiding both capitalism’s “decadence” and its “cheap, honky-tonk, shallow entertainment.”93 Above all, it had to be socialist through and through. Artists could no longer be neutral, or even fellow travelers of the SED; to be East German, all East German artists had to be ideologically engaged. Leipzig painters thus vowed in 1958 to “develop [their] union into a socialist artists’ organization,” following the Culture League and the Free German Youth, which also declared themselves socialist groups.94 Political correctness became the benchmark of East German culture, giving officials the right and the responsibility to interfere in artistic affairs. “All cultural means and powers must be put in the service of the party’s general line,” a congress of Leipzig artists resolved in October 1957.95 The goal of party oversight was not just to inspire new socialist art but also to produce new socialist people. Culture had “deep potential for strengthening the socialist consciousness of all working people in our republic,” argued the GDR’s acting culture minister, Alexander Abusch.96 That consciousness was part of what he called a “Socialist Cultural Revolution”: like the Soviet Union, which underwent its own Cultural Revolution in the 1920s, the GDR needed to break with bourgeois tradition and cultivate a socialist way of life. Under the new Five-Year Plan, slated to start in 1958, all aspects of East Germans’ lives would change: from modes of work to codes of ethics to family relations, nothing could stay the same as in the past or in West Germany. Artistic innovation was only a first step, albeit a necessary one. A socialist national culture would pave the way for a socialist nation.

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At the next SED Congress, held in July  1958, Ulbricht laid out how a socialist nation would come into being. A new collectivization drive would revolutionize the countryside, expanding East Germany’s agricultural output while effecting “deep changes in farmers’ consciousness.”97 Collective farms accounted for roughly a quarter of the country’s farmland at the time but made up more than 84 percent just two years later, when Ulbricht declared that “full collectivization” had been reached.98 Private artisans came under pressure to join “production cooperatives,” whose number ballooned in Leipzig District from 15 to 228 over the course of 1958 alone.99 Factory workers joined Brigades of Socialist Labor, launched in 1959, which competed over productivity as well as cultural attainment. New rules for teachers, artists, and scientists stressed party membership and ideological conformity. The Socialist Cultural Revolution radically changed East Germans’ daily lives and experiences, perhaps more than any other state initiative. As the SED expanded its reach—into the countryside, into the factories, into artistic unions and schools—millions of ordinary people were drawn in. Passive acceptance of communist rule was no longer enough; the state required engagement and participation, even if it could not enforce belief. Only the “active collaboration of the widest circles of the population,” Ulbricht insisted, would allow the party to achieve its goals.100 This collaboration, in turn, was meant to change how ordinary people acted, felt, and thought. At the 1958 party congress, Ulbricht proposed a new set of Ten Commandments, supposedly inspired by conversations with Leipzig workers and reflecting their socialist way of life. “Thou shalt always strive for the international solidarity of the working class,” ran the first, while others instructed East Germans to love the Workers’ and Peasants’ State as their “fatherland,” “protect the people’s property,” and “exercise socialist work discipline.”101 Though the SED went unmentioned, an implicit commandment hung over the rest: thou shalt have no other gods before me. Like the biblical commandments, the new ones were supposed to be internalized, becoming genuine expressions of the people’s will. Launching a cultural revolution was the SED’s attempt to square the circle. Unwilling to adjust its policy to popular desires, it sought to adjust popular desires by bringing them in line with policy. Only a wholesale shift in people’s thinking and identity would allow the SED to implement reforms that were still widely disliked. Or as Ulbricht put it, “the building of socialism is above all a matter of transforming people.”102

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The Socialist Cultural Revolution was meant to be a revolution from above, forging a national identity in the crucible of party-driven social change. But Ulbricht’s plan had an essential flaw: so long as West Berlin’s border remained open, GDR residents could opt out altogether. Between 1957 and 1961, over a million people did, roughly half of them under the age of twenty-five—the lifeblood of a nascent nation.103 By the summer of 1961 emigration rates approached the all-time high of 1953, which had forced Soviet leaders to instigate the New Course in the first place. This time around, Khrushchev adopted a different approach, partly as a result of Ulbricht’s constant prodding. Shortly after the SED’s 1958 congress, the Soviet premier demanded that Western forces leave Berlin and threatened to restrict their access to the city. When the United States, Britain, and France refused, he finally allowed Ulbricht to build the Berlin Wall and lock in the East German population. In histories of the GDR, August 13, 1961 often figures as the dividing line that marks the birth of an East German nation.104 But it was really the culmination of a process that began five years before, amid the Eastern Bloc’s turn toward National Communism. To stem nationalist agitation from below, Ulbricht constructed a nationalism from above. He, too, belatedly embraced the notion of National Communism, but with a newly built East German nation at the center.

Unity in Diversity “Gomułka was to Ulbricht what a red rag is to a bull,” one SED official recalled.105 The two party leaders did not see eye to eye, and their attempts to shape the national community were in many ways a study in contrast. It may thus come as a surprise that Polish officials began to speak of Socialist Cultural Revolution at the same time as East German officials, in the late fall of 1957.106 They, too, resolved to revolutionize the ways in which the public lived and worked, by “attacking the broad system of human conceptions that are foreign to socialism,” as Gomułka put it. As in the GDR, this Cultural Revolution was meant to touch “the soul of almost every person,” and yet Gomułka’s version looked distinctly Polish.107 In keeping with his broader reforms, the goal was to “democratize” society. At a major cultural congress in December 1958, officials pledged to give more room to local initiative; to “increase the role of artists, activists, and public opinion in guiding cultural affairs”; and to “guarantee writers and artists the creative freedom . . . that is indispensable for the development of art.”108 The revolution

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lay in curbing the party’s authority and freeing society from excessive political controls. Just when the SED set out to expand its reach, the PZPR was limiting its own. The consequences were immediate in Kraków, which regained administrative autonomy in January  1957. The City Council’s budget rose fourfold between 1956 and 1961, giving local officials more control over construction projects and staffing decisions.109 They also reclaimed oversight of Kraków’s cultural institutions, including five theaters and four museums that had been run from Warsaw since 1950. In keeping with the principle of democratization, however, city authorities looked to delegate some of their newfound powers to civic associations. By 1958 there were already fifty-four nongovernmental cultural organizations registered in Kraków, from the Lovers of Modern Art to the Peasant Society for Education and Culture.110 Such groups put on a wide array of cultural events, breaking the state’s monopoly on programming. The City Council not only gave them subsidies but also involved them in policymaking, through advisory commissions that gave city residents a voice in administrative affairs.111 After years of trying to dictate the public’s tastes, Polish officials started to listen to them. East German officials, on the other hand, aimed to reprogram people’s tastes, and yet their version of the Socialist Cultural Revolution bore certain similarities to Poland’s. The strongest was an emphasis on popular participation, which both regimes saw as the linchpin of their efforts. For the SED, mobilizing the masses was necessary to transform their habits and cultivate a socialist way of life. The Leipzig City Council, like Kraków’s, created dozens of committees that featured community members, and at one point even replaced its Culture Department with a commission staffed by city residents—including a priest.112 For the Socialist Cultural Revolution to succeed, no individual could be left behind, and so all had to be conscripted into public life. That was the goal of Polish planners, too. As ordinary people came off the sidelines and joined the party’s fight, they would “develop a new consciousness and ethics, a new worldview, new habits and interpersonal relations, a new style of life—and therefore a new culture,” Gomułka told a congress of the Polish Writers’ Union, echoing many of Ulbricht’s talking points.113 This similarity was no accident: the Socialist Cultural Revolution was launched in Moscow, at the International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties in November  1957. Held on the fortieth anniversary of the October Revolution, the meeting aimed to coordinate a

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global communist movement that had been splintered by the rise of Yugoslavia and China. Tito ultimately refused to attend, but twelve other leaders from communist states, including Poland and East Germany, issued a declaration that established common ground. “The forms of the transition to socialism may vary for different countries,” it announced, and so each party had to “creatively apply the general laws governing .  .  . socialist construction” to its particular national context. Those general laws, however, were binding everywhere and held world communism together. They included basics such as “the abolition of capitalist ownership” and “fraternal friendship between peoples,” but also “the carrying out of the socialist revolution in the sphere of ideology and culture.”114 It was shortly after returning from Moscow that both Ulbricht and Gomułka launched their Socialist Cultural Revolutions (Mao, meanwhile, waited another nine years). And the two men applied this general law creatively, adapting it to their national contexts. There was, however, unity in diversity. As the 1957 Moscow Declaration asserted, some communist regimes were prone to dogmatism, replacing “the study of the concrete situation with merely quoting classics” and thereby risking “the isolation of the party from the masses.” Others, like Hungary, had veered too far in the opposite direction and “lost contact with the masses” by virtue of their radical reforms. Luckily, the solution to both problems was the same: “to establish close relations with the broad masses of the people, . . . to constantly rely on them, and to make the building and defense of socialism the cause of millions.” All communist parties had “to expand socialist democracy” while promoting “the creative initiative of the broad masses.” At the same time, they had to do so in their own way, for “disregard of national peculiarities” also led to a party’s “divorce from reality, from the masses.”115 The Socialist Cultural Revolution would thus look different in each country, as it did in Poland and East Germany. But through divergent policies, the two regimes sought to accomplish the same thing: to forge a truly national communism. Ultimately, the turn toward National Communism was an admission of failure. Moscow acknowledged that things were not going as planned anywhere in the communist world and blamed its old Stalinist tactics. Imposing the Soviet model by decree—“merely quoting c­ lassics”—left communist parties ill equipped to deal with local challenges. Even worse, it fomented public resistance—“revisionism”—that threatened to corrupt or overthrow them. Although the program of reform came

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from the top, it was driven by events on the ground. In stubbornly refusing to conform to Stalinist visions, East Europeans had cast them in doubt. Adam Ważyk summed up the rulers’ predicament two years earlier in his “Poem for Adults”: “They ran to us, shouting: / Under socialism / a cut finger des not hurt. / They cut their finger, / they felt pain. / They lost faith.”116 Even before mass protests broke out, leading officials began to question the Stalinist blueprint, for the glorious future it promised kept failing to materialize. Those protests amplified such questions and also raised the pressure to change course. To stay in power, Eastern Bloc leaders needed to take the public’s wishes into account. They had to find a way of building socialism that was both more effective and more popular. That was the promise of the Socialist Cultural Revolution. The new initiative aimed to engage those who had watched the development of socialism from afar, often with mistrust, instead of getting actively involved. The 1957 Moscow Declaration posited that this development was well underway but acknowledged that many people felt left out— whether because of their own reticence or as a result of officials’ mistakes. The revolution was a way to draw them in, reaching people wherever they were: at work, at home, at school, at play. It sought to mobilize the masses, to address their concerns, and to make governance a more participatory process. At the same time, it was intended to achieve what Stalinism could not, by reconfiguring the public’s hearts and minds. The ultimate goals of communist rule stayed the same; what changed were its timelines and methods. Like Stalinism, the Socialist Cultural Revolution was meant to manufacture a new man with different tastes and habits than under capitalism. But it would do so gradually, by persuasion rather than coercion, and by appealing to the public as it was: uncertain, fearful, and rooted in tradition. To change the world, officials first had to adapt to it. For many party members in Poland, National Communism felt like a new lease on life. After years of Stalinist terror, it was a second chance to get things right: to build a better, firmer, truer socialism. “We’ve inherited hope— / the gift of forgetting,” wrote the Kraków poet Wisława Szymborska.117 Local officials rejoiced at their newfound autonomy; those who had chafed at Soviet pressure celebrated a return to Polish traditions. Non-communists were less enthusiastic: “Down with the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU / We want a Free Poland without communists,” read a flyer found in Nowa Huta.118 However, the Soviet invasion of Hungary made clear that Moscow would not allow a satellite

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to leave the Bloc. Under these constraints, a national communism was at least better than its previous version, and most Poles welcomed Gomułka’s reforms. New challenges and disappointments would come soon enough. But in the fall of 1956 embracing National Communism was a winning strategy for Polish leaders, supported by the party and the public alike. This strategy was far more problematic for the SED, even though East German officials were some of the first to use it. After June 17, 1953, the GDR’s leadership adopted an early version of National Communism, vowing to become more responsive to the public’s needs—including the need for greater contact with West Germany. But draping the SED in German colors was a dangerous game. Amid national uprisings in Hungary and Poland, even loyal party members pushed its policies to their logical endpoint, calling for German reunification and the erasure of the GDR. In Poland, championing the nation bolstered the PZPR’s authority because it brought the party closer to the people. In East Germany, however, it only exposed the gulf between them. So long as East Germans saw themselves as Germans first, reforms like Gomułka’s— decentralization, democratization, de-Sovietization—would inevitably fuel the drive for German unity and therefore undermine the GDR. The tactics that had stabilized communism in Poland were unavailable to the SED, unless it could instill a very different kind of national identity. Shortly after June 17, 1953, the playwright Bertolt Brecht mocked the SED’s response in an unpublished poem titled “The Solution.” Officials insisted that “the people / had forfeited the confidence of the government,” he wrote. “Would it not be easier / in that case for the government / to dissolve the people / and elect another?”119 The question was meant to be absurd, inverting as it did the standard relationship between people and government. But in effect, electing a new people is precisely what the SED did. Protest in 1953 and criticism in 1956 made clear that most East Germans waited for reunification instead of committing themselves to the GDR. To get through to such people and win their support, the SED had to rewire their sense of belonging. It had to uproot their lives, expose them to the party’s teachings, force them to get engaged in civic life, and distance them from West Germany. The government thus set out to elect its people through a Socialist Cultural Revolution that forced even the most reticent to participate. It sought to make East Germans out of Germans—and in the process to make the SED a truly national party. Once they developed an East German identity, GDR residents would come to share the

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party’s goals and values, and so it would in fact express their will. This, too, was a program of National Communism—not from the bottom up, as in Poland, but from the top down. As she looked back on the Polish October, the Kraków actress Joanna Olczak-Ronikier recalled Gomułka’s speech in Warsaw, the release of Cardinal Wyszyński, and the withdrawal of Soviet troops. But above all, she remembered the extraordinary cultural energy that preceded and prepared these changes. “People .  .  . ran as if possessed from the cinema to the theater, from exhibitions to bookstores, from concerts to the secret balls at schools of art,” OlczakRonikier wrote. “Then they sat in cafes and talked for hours—about . . . the stage sets in Nowa Huta, about the exhibitions at the Palace of Art.”120 Under a Stalinist system that banned public discussion, the cultural matrix was a key outlet for political debate. At union meetings and in literary magazines, artists called communist rulers to account, claiming to speak in the name of the nation and—like Ważyk—using a rhetoric of “us” versus “them.” Through cabaret skits, they alluded to current events that could not be mentioned in print. Even seemingly apolitical performances like Hamlet turned into shows of public disaffection, as actors read their lines a certain way and audiences cheered. Because it was designed to inculcate Stalinism, the cultural matrix proved effective at critiquing it. All art had to engage political issues, the rules of Socialist Realism dictated, and during the upheavals of 1953–1956 it did just that. For the protestors who marched against Stalinist rule, art also carried a political charge. Across the Eastern Bloc angry crowds tore down the government’s statues and posters. At the same time, they often marched in song, reprising national hymns that communists had suppressed. Works of art symbolized political belonging—and so the Bloc’s regimes sought to promote belonging through the arts. To assuage popular frustrations, they introduced more entertainment programming, retreating from the nonstop press of cultural mass work. To demonstrate an openness to criticism, they set up cabarets that laughed at communism’s shortcomings, while—so officials hoped—restoring faith in the system itself. The arts were central to the project of National Communism, which aimed to draw more of the public into public life. By making their cultural programming more attractive, communist parties sought “to establish close relations with the broad masses of the

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people,” as the 1957 Moscow Declaration prescribed. Having fomented public unrest, cultural spaces were charged with defusing it. That charge transformed the relationship between cultural institutions and their public. To reach “broad masses of the people,” they had to learn what people liked and set their repertoires accordingly. Instead of following a blueprint from above, they had to take their guidance from below. The public was no longer raw material to be shaped, but rather a partner to be consulted. It was empowered to express its wants, to choose which options it preferred, to participate in repertoire planning. Even under Stalinism, the cultural matrix had given East Europeans a say in public affairs, allowing artists to critique the state and audiences to express their frustrations. With the rise of National Communism, however, it became a sanctioned public sphere, one in which millions of East Europeans were invited to take part. Officials reasoned that this opportunity for limited engagement would bind the public closer to the state, something that Stalinist pressure had failed to accomplish. Besides, they were confident that they could keep the public sphere in check by setting the terms of debate and restricting who could participate. But the cultural matrix had already proven to be less tractable than expected. As they expanded its scale and significance, communist leaders had to face the consequences.

Ch a p ter 4

Pluralism Individual Choice and Public-Opinion Polling

The new situation demands skilled, constant contact with the public, with society. It is the public that must guide our plan of action, not centrally ordained schematics as before. —Marian Kusza, head of the Kraków City Council Culture Department, November 19581 Cultural life should no longer be designed for the people, but by and with the people. —Leipzig City Council, December 19632

One day in June  1958, the residents of Leipzig’s Giesser Street awoke to a knock on their front door. To their surprise, they encountered pairs of uniformed functionaries who introduced themselves and asked politely to come in. For years such visits had meant certain arrest, or at least a trip to the nearby police station. This time, though, the officials had something else in mind. They were going door to door to ask about residents’ cultural preferences: what movies they liked, how often they went to the theater, what kinds of programs they heard on the radio. After talking to everyone in the household, from toddlers to grandparents, the visitors thanked their hosts and went on their way. Over the course of two days, officials spoke with more than three hundred respondents—and likely left them all shaken.3 Scenes like this became increasingly common in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Across the Eastern Bloc, state officials began to study the people they ruled—by commissioning surveys, conducting public-opinion polls, setting up sociological centers, or even going out into the field themselves. Their newfound interest stemmed from the shocks of recent popular uprisings, which demonstrated the endurance of prewar identities. After a decade of communist construction, agitation, and indoctrination, East Europeans still did not resemble model 102

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communists. Protests in both East Germany and Poland made this plain, forcing party leaders to acknowledge the realities on the ground. Whatever they wanted to achieve, they would have to work with the societies they had and tailor their own policies accordingly. As it turned out, though, Eastern Bloc officials knew next to nothing about the public’s habits and tastes, thanks to years of embellished reports and rigged elections. Even worse, they were entirely unprepared to learn, having stifled all forms of social research. Communist authorities had to rebuild a polling industry from the ground up, and they began by asking about culture. Culture seemed like a safe terrain for both studying and expressing popular opinion. Respondents were more likely to share their tastes in art than their views on current affairs, especially when speaking face to face with state officials. For those officials, too, cultural desires were less threatening than political demands and more manageable than economic proposals. Asking about the arts seemed innocuous, a good way to demonstrate attentiveness to the public’s needs. As a result, many of the Bloc’s leading polling centers got their start in the cultural sphere, by researching East Europeans’ favorite films and hobbies. Yet simply asking about these topics proved more transformative than anyone imagined. Once they acknowledged the diversity of people’s tastes, local administrators began to cater to them: they expanded their offerings, emphasized popularity, and encouraged residents to choose what they liked. Artists used opinion polls to critique state policy, justifying creative experiments by citing popular demand. The public, meanwhile, started to ask for what it wanted and to expect both artists and officials to follow through. Starting in the late 1950s, opinion polling reconfigured the Bloc’s cultural landscape, but its influence extended well beyond the arts. By empowering East Europeans to pass judgment on government policy, it helped reframe the relationship between the public and the state. That relationship lay at the heart of National Communism, a mode of rule that gained wide currency after Stalin’s death. Even countries that sought to avoid a drawn-out de-Stalinization, like East Germany, placed a new emphasis on popular engagement with state structures. Only active, willful participation, they insisted, could reenergize the communist project and stabilize it at the same time. It was to boost civic participation that Eastern Bloc officials turned to public-opinion polling, in the hopes that scientific data would help them reach the public more effectively. What they found convinced them to expand

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and diversify their programs, emphasizing both variety and choice. Thanks in no small part to opinion polls, communist planners started to speak of individuals rather than classes or masses. They also started speaking to individuals, soliciting the public’s input even as they retained the final say. Opinion research fostered what Anna Krylova has called the “individualizing discourse” of communism, but its effects went beyond discourse alone.4 A growing awareness of social diversity transformed communist rule on the ground, creating new challenges and opportunities for officials, artists, and the public alike.

Going to the People While GDR functionaries went door to door to find out people’s tastes, their Polish counterparts had no need to do so. Poland was central to the development of the sociological profession, thanks in no small part to Kraków’s Jagiellonian University (UJ). Two graduates, Bronisław Malinowski and Florian Znaniecki, helped establish the discipline of empirical sociology in the 1910s and 1920s. Znaniecki also founded Poland’s first Department of Sociology at Poznań University in 1920, and sociology departments in Warsaw (1923) and Kraków (1930) followed soon after. All three shut down with the arrival of Nazi troops; at UJ, 144 professors were arrested during a faculty meeting in November  1939 and deported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. After the war sociology again fell on hard times, for Stalin considered it a “bourgeois discipline” that failed to recognize man’s capacity for change.5 In 1949 and 1950, as Soviet influence intensified, Polish sociology departments were either disbanded or subordinated to the study of dialectical materialism, as was the case at UJ. Like the Nazi occupation, however, the Stalin era proved too short to disrupt Poland’s rich sociological tradition. Professional journals, associations, and institutions all reemerged in the wake of the Polish October and set to studying the transformations Stalinism had wrought.6 In Kraków, sociologists flocked to Nowa Huta, the planned urban development that doubled as a tailor-made laboratory of social change.7 One of the first studies of this district, carried out by the UJ professor Maksymilian Siemieński between 1956 and 1958, looked at what workers did in their free time. Despite its emphasis on scientific objectivity, Siemieński’s work betrayed a clear didacticism, asking whether workers “have too much leisure time to use it rationally.”8 In the event, however, this question hardly came into play. Workers spent most of their time

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“chasing women,” an activity that took up more than three hours a day. Only one in three acknowledged reading books or newspapers, and even fewer could actually remember what they read. When asked why, most workers simply said they did not want to. “I’d rather go watch the water in the Vistula River,” answered one worker. “I’ve had it up to my ears with culture,” another replied.9 Siemieński concluded that Stalinist cultural policy had been an enormous mistake, stifling workers’ actual interests and giving culture a bad name. Rather than telling people what to do, officials had to let them choose what they liked. “It is important to cultivate each man’s talents and tastes, to develop his personality in a voluntary and individualistic manner,” Siemieński argued.10 Siemieński’s advice found a welcome reception within Kraków’s City Council, which was working to develop new forms of governance after the Polish October. At a 1958 conference on cultural affairs, the Council resolved to “base the entirety of [its] work on scientific foundations and factual knowledge of the public and its needs,” while admitting that it was completely unprepared to do so.11 To learn more about local residents, the Council commissioned Jagiellonian University to carry out a series of sociological studies like Siemieński’s, both in Kraków factories and in the city’s cultural institutions. It also relied on two research bodies formed in 1958: the Kraków Center for the Study of the Press, which examined the readership of local periodicals, and the national Center for the Study of Public Opinion (OBOP), the first polling institute in the Eastern Bloc. Conceived as Poland’s answer to the Gallup Poll, OBOP studied popular attitudes toward work, religion, foreign affairs, and even communist politicians. Unlike the Gallup Poll, however, OBOP was meant to be a tool for state officials: most of its research was commissioned by government ministries or mass organizations, including the Ministry of Agriculture, the State Price Commission, and city councils like Kraków’s. Notably, OBOP conducted more surveys on cultural matters than on any other topic. Its generic name belied the fact that it was actually a subsidiary of the Polish Radio Service, created to evaluate the state’s cultural programming and investigate the public’s cultural wants. Between 1958 and 1964, OBOP carried out more than thirty studies of art and culture, giving administrators new insight into Poles’ tastes in art.12 Surveys were usually conducted in person, since rates of telephone ownership remained in the single digits through the 1970s.13 Sample sizes ranged from one thousand to three thousand respondents, who were carefully chosen to match national demographic patterns.

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Researchers found that moviegoers preferred comedy to drama, historical themes to contemporary ones, and war films to everything else. They learned that most people trusted their friends more than professional reviewers and that very few took any interest in art exhibitions, regardless of reviews. However, the most common conclusion in OBOP’s early studies is one that seems self-evident today: that different people liked different things, and that their tastes depended largely on their social background. One of OBOP’s first surveys, intended to find out “who listens to the radio, where, and why,” identified major differences between manual laborers and white-collar workers, who were far more interested in highbrow programs. Another study from 1959, commissioned directly by the Ministry of Culture and Art, “discovered” that tastes in art were closely correlated with education levels: those without a high school diploma liked going to the movies and playing sports, while college graduates preferred theater, opera, and classical music. Obvious as these conclusions may appear, they flew in the face of Stalinist policy, which had insisted that the same prescribed artworks were appropriate for all viewers. With the help of sociological studies, officials learned that Polish society was diverse and therefore needed diverse programming. In December 1958, some 750 of these officials convened in Warsaw to work out a new direction for cultural policy. The congress’s keynote speaker, the Politburo functionary Jerzy Morawski, began by condemning his party’s earlier approach to art, with its “imposition of a normative aesthetic and a certain doctrinarism in cultural matters.” Such measures had proved entirely counterproductive, alienating viewers and turning art into “a handmaiden of political campaigns,” but recent opinion polls pointed the way forward. “If we don’t want cultural policy to go askew, we have to base it on the scientific study of the public’s tastes,” Morawski argued. State policy still aimed at social transformation, using culture to drive “the building of socialism,” but its methods had changed. “Based on a more realistic assessment of the situation, we will carry out a policy of cultural choice—a policy that will satisfy the diverse needs of the people,” Morawski concluded.14 The “policy of cultural choice” also applied to artists, who were freed from the responsibility of engineering people’s souls. Since different people liked different things, artists could make different kinds of art, including works that were not directly educational or useful. “We stand for a broad experimentation in creative affairs and appreciate the need for diverse conceptions in film or tendencies in literature,” Morawski

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announced. There was even room for new art from the West, which, while being “wholly foreign to us philosophically,” still introduced “new professional and formal ideas.” After two days of speeches that echoed Morawski’s statements, the assembled delegates declared their “full support for the new cultural policy,” pledging to “give writers and artists the creative freedom necessary for the proper development of art.”15 New information about cultural consumers had led the party to revise its attitudes to cultural producers and set off a revolution in Polish art. To see its effects on the ground, Kraków residents had to look no further than the city’s main square.

Around the Square Dating to the thirteenth century, Kraków’s Rynek Główny, or Main Market, is one of the largest squares in Europe. It has long been a site of privilege and power: the tall, brightly colored townhouses ringing the square have belonged to some of Poland’s grandest families, and even to several kings. After 1956, however, Market Square became an unexpected cultural center as both artists and audiences took advantage of the “policy of cultural choice.” The changes took root at number 27, the former home of the Potocki family, known as the Palace under the Rams for the ram’s head designs atop its entryway pilasters. From 1948 to 1956, the building had belonged to the Central Council of Trade Unions, which organized lectures and exhibitions for factory workers bussed in from the city’s outskirts. After the Polish October, however, it passed to the City Council’s Culture Department, which renamed it the Kraków House of Culture and began rethinking its activities. “Before October, we used to attack the worker, to push him to be more productive,” the new director explained in 1958. “We used to see working masses and not man, though one likes to play cards, another to sing, and a third to plant flowers. . . . It seems to me that treating man as the subject and not the object of our work, that is new. We’ve started to ask ourselves who we’re doing this for: . . . we’ve become interested in individuals and their needs.”16 Under this new philosophy, the House of Culture became increasingly diverse. By 1958 it hosted nineteen clubs, ranging from lacemaking to billiards, and also kept a TV on during broadcast hours (five hours a day, five days a week).17 After years of middling attendance, city residents began to pour in. The old Potocki Palace was suddenly packed to the gills, leaving the new director to complain of “too many people” and “not enough space.”18

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Some extra space turned up in the palace’s basement, where a ragtag group of students set up a makeshift cabaret. In the late spring of 1956, as Poland erupted in discussions of Khrushchev’s “secret speech,” students from Kraków’s arts academies obtained permission to form a Club of Creative Youth. Like the House of Culture above it, the club was meant to serve the needs of its public—in this case, the “creative youth” that had been stifled by Socialist Realism. Barbara Nawratowicz, an early visitor, described the scene: “The room was lit by candles and filled with noise and cigarette smoke. Someone strummed on the guitar, while someone else read out his poetry . . . there was cheap wine and passionate debate. You could feel that something new was coming, that political restrictions were loosening, that modern art and literature were emerging from the underground.” Within a few months, the club began to organize public performances, bringing that modern art and literature into being. Shows were unplanned and uncoordinated. “Anyone who had the will and the courage could climb up on stage and start reading or singing,” Nawratowicz recalled. Early acts included the “Dutch Striptease,” in which a young woman slowly took apart . . . a bicycle, and the “Golden Thoughts of Nikita Khrushchev,” a selection of the Soviet leader’s lesser quotations (“you can’t see your ears without a mirror”).19 Much of the program was deliberately absurd and completely unlike anything under Stalin. “Only in one instance did it exhibit the heroism of Socialist Realism: the striptease took place in a terribly cold basement,” a critic noted, tongue firmly in cheek.20 Across the street, two townhouses formed the heart of Kraków’s literary scene. In March 1958 number 26 became the headquarters of Literary Life, one of Poland’s leading literary reviews. The weekly had debuted in 1951 as the mouthpiece of the Writers’ Union Kraków branch but grew increasingly daring after Stalin’s death. Its poetry section, headed by the future Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska, began publishing work by young authors like Zbigniew Herbert, whose lyrical, metaphysical poetry had found few outlets in the Stalin years. Next door, number 25 was home to the Literary Press, a publishing house founded in 1953, which moved to Market Square one month after the Polish October. As one editor recalled, the political turmoil “allowed us to undertake initiatives that we had never even dreamed of.”21 The press began publishing works by émigré authors and also cultivated relationships with younger writers such as Sławomir Mrożek, whose story collection The Elephant appeared in 1957. Like many of Mrożek’s works, the titular tale was a thinly

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disguised satire of the communist system: it described a zoo director who, in the interest of frugality, replaces a real elephant with an inflated one, only to watch it float away. In a society that was wrestling with the legacy of Stalinism, Mrożek’s stories struck a chord. “His writing was almost cathartic, revealing the comic nature of the absurdity that surrounded us,” one reader remembered.22

Map 1.  Kraków city center, ca. 1960. Map by Bill Nelson.

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Walking east—past the modern art gallery at number 24, and the Society of Art Historians at number 22—one came to the student club Under the Lizards (number 8), named for the sculpted lizards over its door. The club first opened in the spring of 1956, right as the Rams’ Head cabaret was setting up across Market Square. As an organ of the Polish Students’ Association, Under the Lizards aimed at a broader audience and specialized in jazz. The American saxophonist Stan Getz played here in November 1960 and one of Poland’s leading jazz ensembles, the Jazz Band Ball Orchestra, formed here two years later. The club’s concerts and dance parties quickly became legendary; in the words of one UJ student, “this was where you’d take a girl to impress her.”23 But the club also ran a highbrow theater, Theater 38, which opened in January 1957 with a play by the French playwright Arthur Adamov, one of the main practitioners of the Theater of the Absurd. Over the next half decade, Theater 38 introduced Kraków viewers to Samuel Beckett, Michel de Ghelderode, and Jean Genet, avant-garde dramatists who had been anathema to the Stalin regime. The choice of repertoire was driven by the theater’s viewers, its artistic director explained: “A theater funded by the Polish Students’ Association must be a theater for academic youth, . . . a theater that young people actually want.”24 Both Under the Lizards club’s jazz nights and Theater 38’s avant-garde plays aimed to meet this goal, catering to the tastes of Kraków’s large student community. On the north side of Market Square, in the only modern building on the square (number 41), Kraków glitterati flocked to the Café Rio, which opened its doors in 1959. The Rio was decked out in high modernist style with space-age furniture and geometric designs. “For many, it was a slice of Paris in Kraków,” an art critic recalled. “Old people were shocked by the café, while throngs of young people sat inside or milled by the entrance with their cups of coffee.”25 A few doors down, Kraków literati gathered at the Journalists’ Club on the Market Square’s northwest corner. The club launched in November 1955 with a visit by Polish Prime Minister Józef Cyrankiewicz, and it remained a place where writers and artists mingled with communist politicians. Among its regular visitors was Stanisław Wałach, a colonel in the secret police, who would spend hours playing bridge.26 Both Café Rio and the Journalists’ Club exemplified the new kind of sociability that arose in Kraków after 1956. As social life spilled out into the open, dozens of new establishments sprang up, each with its own atmosphere and public. Perhaps the most distinctive of them all was the Krzysztofory Gallery, across the street from the Journalists’ Club in number 35. Named

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for Saint Krzysztof, or Christopher, it occupied a palace that had once been home to King Jan Kazimierz, whose disastrous reign initiated the decline of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the seventeenth century. In December 1956, following on the party’s promise to decentralize cultural administration, a group of artists applied to register as a civic association independent of the Graphic Artists’ Union. Despite concerns from officials in Warsaw, Kraków’s city hall approved their request six months later in a show of its own independence from higherups.27 The newly formed Kraków Group embraced proponents of all strains of modern art, from expressionism to cubism to abstraction. But what united them, as they told city hall, was a desire for autonomy from the state: “a suitable environment” in which they could pursue “extreme radical tendencies” without interference.28 Remarkably, city officials not only registered them as a formal group but also handed over the Krzysztofory space, which became the epicenter of modern art in Kraków. The Kraków Group’s president was the painter and director Tadeusz Kantor, whom the New York Times art critic Dore Ashton called “the leader of the Polish avant-garde.”29 One of the organizers of the landmark Modern Art Show in Kraków in 1948/49, he subsequently lost his job at the Academy of Fine Arts and spent the Stalin years working as a stage designer. At the Krzysztofory, Kantor rushed to make up for lost time by forming an experimental theater, Cricot 2, whose name was an anagram for the words to cyrk—“it’s a circus.” Its first production on Market Square was a play by the Polish absurdist Stanisław Witkiewicz, who committed suicide in 1939 on hearing that Soviet troops had crossed the Polish border. Much of the action took place inside an enormous wardrobe; as Kantor wrote in a poetic manifesto, “The actors are crowded into an absurdly small / space of a wardrobe; / they are squeezed in between and mixed with the dead objects (sacks, a mass of sacks); / degraded, without dignity; / they are hanging motionless like clothes.”30 The production received mixed reviews and averaged just sixty viewers per show, but for Kantor, this was precisely the point.31 At a meeting with city officials, he argued that art had lost its “social function” under Stalinism because “all individuality was perfidiously destroyed.”32 Only a “cult of individuality” could make art socially relevant, he reasoned; instead of trying to appeal to the masses, artists had to focus on one target audience. Like all the new cultural spaces on Market Square, the Krzysztofory Gallery did just that, gaining a small but loyal following.

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The Artists’ World Within five years of the Polish October, Kraków’s Market Square had been completely transformed. It is tempting to ascribe these changes to the loosening of party controls, and many artists did just that. Kantor, for one, believed his creativity had blossomed once it was freed “from the primitive decrees of the authorities, / from the questioning by official and slow-minded judges.”33 Yet those judges and authorities played a key role in remaking Kraków’s arts scene; it was not their absence but their actions that turned Market Square into a cultural center. All of the new establishments on the square had a government sponsor and all received considerable state funding. Kantor’s own Cricot 2 was the beneficiary of annual subsidies from the Kraków City Council, which, in the words of one troupe member, contributed an “astronomical amount.”34 City officials also vetted every performance and exhibition on Market Square, checking programs in advance and attending most premieres. In fact, they became more active after 1956 than they had ever been under Stalinism, when all major decisions on Kraków culture had been made in Warsaw. What changed was not the extent of state oversight but the state’s uses of it. After the Polish October, cultural officials changed the way they worked, placing the public’s tastes and preferences at the forefront of their efforts. Of course, party officials still retained the final say. In July 1958 they fired the editor-in-chief of the Literary Press, which had come under fire for publishing socially critical writers like Mrożek—who ended up leaving for the West a few years later. In July 1959 Literary Life’s weekly arts section, which had been closely associated with the Kraków Group, was abruptly shut down amid a crackdown on pro-Western publications. The party continued to treat culture as an ideological battleground and policed it constantly in order to combat pernicious influences. Yet policing artists was already a major departure from directing them. After 1956 Polish officials adopted a new role: they still set the boundaries of creative expression, but they no longer set its rules. Once they accepted that different people responded to art in different ways, functionaries stopped trying to prescribe what art should look like. In fact, they often struggled to tell artists what to do. “City authorities have not formulated the basic tenets of cultural policy and have no ability to formulate them at present,” the head of the Kraków City Council’s Culture Department admitted in 1961.35 As a result, Polish artists gained considerable autonomy, both from the party and from the public. A study of Polish graphic artists, carried

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out in 1958–59 by the sociologist Aleksander Wallis, found that they formed a distinctive community with “its own ideology, its own hierarchy of values, and its own social norms.” Traumatized by their experience of Stalinism, graphic artists closed ranks and dismissed any outsider’s views of art. Nearly two-thirds of Wallis’ respondents believed that “the artistic professions constitute an isolated community that is separate from the rest of the intelligentsia and all other social groups.”36 Another study from 1959, focusing on ­Poland’s writers, told a similar story. Most writers sought out the company of other writers; they were also friendly with journalists, painters, and actors, but only one in five preferred to socialize with members of other professions. The study’s author, Andrzej Siciński—OBOP’s deputy director— concluded that “the writers’ community is rather hermetic.” By comparing his results to an earlier survey from 1929, he claimed that Polish writers had in fact become “more socially closed” under communist rule.37 That social isolation also affected artists’ work. Graphic artists were so allergic to outside interference that they paid little heed to the public’s tastes in art. In Wallis’s estimation, they embraced “the myth of artistic freedom, . . . based on the conviction that society should adapt to the attitudes and activities of artists, rather than the artists to society.” Many graphic artists readily admitted that they “neither understood nor knew” what ordinary people liked. Instead, they made art solely for their friends and colleagues, further separating the artists’ milieu from the world at large.38 Siciński, too, observed a “growing isolation between writers and the public” sparked by a widespread disdain for the average reader. “Society is not capable of understanding the problems of contemporary literature,” one writer judged. “It is the public’s low level that prevents us from establishing close contact.”39 Both sociologists concluded that Poland’s cultural producers had become a “narrow elite.” In underground galleries, jazz clubs, cafes, and student centers—all the spaces that had sprouted up after the Polish October—artists began to create their own world: insulated from the party, separated from the masses, and largely closed upon itself.

Between Two Worlds In August 1962 two Leipzig painters went on a three-week “study trip” to Poland. Heinz Völkel and Johanna Starke met with dozens of artists in Warsaw and Kraków, and they were stunned by what they saw. “Most artists live isolated, as in an ivory tower,” Starke reported to the

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Graphic Artists’ Union (VBK) back home. “They have no knowledge of the worker and his problems. . . . They only paint what and how they wish.” There was no state patronage to speak of and no commissions or funding for young artists. Despite these difficulties, though, Polish artists were “happy that art had become ‘free’ and that no one administered them or told them how to paint.” Making use of their newfound freedom, they turned increasingly toward the West. “The young artists we met in Kraków were so infected with the Western bug that they recognized no cities in the world but Paris and Düsseldorf,” Starke joked.40 Both visitors found it hard to connect with Polish artists, who treated them with pity and disdain. Völkel lamented that “it was often difficult to speak with our [Polish] colleagues, because their prejudice against Socialist Realism and cultural planning was so strong.” Most had a highly negative image of the GDR: “They think that in our country art is dictated, that artists are coerced, that we are still in the darkest epoch of Stalinism.” One professor at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts called Starke and Völkel “true Stalinist Socialist Realists in the happy barracks of the socialist camp.” The two East Germans were likewise critical of Poland, at least in their official reports. “Most artists don’t understand where their country’s future lies,” Starke wrote; “it’s impossible to tell from their works that Poland has become a People’s Democracy.” Still, she added, “it can’t hurt us Leipzigers to develop some more daring and originality in form and color, and also to experiment a little—though of course without losing our connection to the masses.”41 These impressions reveal as much about Leipzig as they do about Kraków. In the early 1960s East Germany was in the midst of a social transformation. The task of forging a “socialist national culture,” which Walter Ulbricht announced in 1958, became even more pressing with the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961. Once it was fully cut off from the West, the GDR had to develop an alternative way of life that would both cement the country’s separation and justify it. East German leaders were determined to create a distinctive national identity, and artists, once again, were enlisted in the effort. Ahead of one major art show in November 1961, the VBK Leipzig branch prepared an “ideological conception” that laid out the exhibition’s main goals. “The spiritual forming of socialist people has become the decisive purpose of ­artistic activity,” it declared. This meant that each work had to “reflect . . . the best experiences of our socialist reality,” giving viewers “lived wisdom” that they could actually use. Artists also had to abide by Socialist Realism, “the highest form of the creative method,” which alone had

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the capacity “to recognize the socialist future and make it visible to the people.”42 Old Stalinist notions found new life, subordinating East German artists to the task of building socialism. As a founding member of the Leipzig VBK, Heinz Völkel sat on the exhibition jury that selected 236 paintings “in the spirit of true partymindedness.”43 Only a few of these were landscapes and still lifes, subjects that reflected the less political aspects of “socialist reality.” The jury explained to party officials that these were chosen in order to encourage older, reticent artists, many of whom abstained from exhibiting altogether.44 Pride of place, however, went to paintings that showcased “the relationships among our new people”: works like A Coal Brigade, The Chemistry Circle, and International Children’s Day. Notably, several compositions were set in a theater or a House of Culture, modeling the salutary impact that art could have on the public. Johanna Starke exhibited one painting, Maternity Class, which showed young mothers learning to raise children for the fatherland. Like the rest of the displays, it was entirely naturalistic with no trace of the abstraction and surrealism that ruled the day in Kraków. Leipzig officials were generally pleased with the exhibition, which they described as a “forceful realization of the party’s orders in the cultural realm.”45 To reward its participants, they bought most of the artworks and put them on display in city buildings, where they could reach an even broader public. It was not just the promise of fame and glory that compelled Leipzig artists to paint in Socialist Realist style. Up to 80  percent of all artworks produced by the local VBK originated as state commissions and were therefore subject to state oversight.46 A committee to review such works formed in May 1959, consisting of six city officials, six “workers from industry and agriculture,” three architects, and ten members of the Leipzig VBK (including Völkel). Although professional artists were outnumbered—or perhaps precisely because of this—the committee had no qualms about interfering in the creative process. It assigned specific themes like “life on a collective farm” or “strip-mining landscape,” and then followed the work from concept to draft to finished product. At every step, the committee aimed “to show the painter in which direction to go,” often pushing the SED’s initiative of the day.47 In August 1960, for instance, it rejected one artist’s sketch of a folk dance because “cultural activity is today closely tied to the production process, which does not come across in this draft.”48 To get past the committee, artists needed an ideological topic, political awareness, and a realistic style, to say nothing of painterly skill. Not surprisingly, those who made

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Figure 9.  The Leipzig artist Heinz Mutterlose in his studio, April 1961. According to the GDR’s News Service, these workers from the Leipzig Loading and Transportation Works were helping Mutterlose improve his painting of the Leipzig Trade Fair. Bundesarchiv, photograph by Heinz Koch.

it tended to use a standard mold: Starke’s Apprentice Group, approved in 1966, was only a slight rearranging of her earlier Maternity Class.49 The committee’s focus, though, was not just on the art but on the artist. Most commissions required recipients to get to know their subject at first hand by spending time in a factory or on a collective farm. In Starke’s case, this meant signing a contract with the People’s Own Transmission Factory in western Leipzig, just a few blocks south of Giesser Street, where she led a drawing circle for workers. In exchange, the artist was allowed to paint some of the factory’s employees, including Hannelore H.—a young woman whose portrait became Starke’s best-known work.50 Other members of the Leipzig VBK learned to serve on an assembly line or even drive a tractor, as did dozens of writers, actors, and musicians. Going to the people became part of a Leipzig artist’s job description, at the very moment when Kraków artists were retreating into their own world. As Leipzig’s opera company told its tenor in 1963, “It is not enough these days to ‘have a good voice’: you must also have a close connection to our society.”51

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In August  1960 the UJ art historian Karol Estreicher, Jr., visited Leipzig but left unimpressed. “This whole country is weighed down by boredom and the burdens of life,” he wrote in his diary. “Nothing happens here. The old German intelligentsia, to the extent that it hasn’t fled to West Germany, has been silenced and sits quietly. The newspapers don’t print any news. They don’t have the same hidden dynamism as in Poland.” When Estreicher went to the movies, he found them “bland, lacking a point of view, lacking in courage.” That was equally true of other cultural events in town: “The only plays in the theaters are either old and classical (i.e., [Friedrich Schiller’s] The Robbers), or propaganda (Brecht), or Russian. Same with the publishing houses. There are no new and interesting books, just reprints.” By day four, Estreicher’s diary entry consisted of a single line: “Leipzig is boring.”52

The Bitterfeld Way The world that Estreicher described was a product of the Bitterfeld Way, a cultural policy initiative launched in 1959. On April  24 some eight hundred writers, workers, and officials convened in a chemical factory in Bitterfeld, a small town north of Leipzig. The conference aimed to define the “socialist national culture” that Ulbricht had promised nine months earlier, and most speakers focused on telling artists what to do. Alfred Kurella, the head of the Politburo’s Culture Commission, called on “all artists to line up for the task of ‘servicing’ cultural life in the cities and the countryside,” while Ulbricht ordered them “to snap out of their narrowness . . . and join in socialist construction.”53 However, it was the first secretary of the Writers’ Union, Erwin Strittmatter, who best summed up the artists’ station: “Our comrades the politicians are far more poetic than we are,” he argued, because they had coined the winged phrase “hero of labor.”54 The Bitterfeld conference laid out many of the rules that artists’ unions later adopted, including the obligatory trips to factories and close supervision by workers’ committees. Needless to say, many participants interpreted the conference as a direct attack on their creative freedom. As the poet Kurt Barthels whispered during a break in the proceedings, the Bitterfeld Way looked like a “bitter way” for artists.55 Yet the Bitterfeld Way was not for artists alone. The conference slogan, plastered above the stage, addressed a different group of participants, manual workers: “Grab Your Quill, Buddy, Socialist Culture Needs You!” This command reflected the emphasis on mass mobilization that lay at the heart of Ulbricht’s new platform. East

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Germany’s socialist national culture had to be not only for but also by the people, or else it would remain as inauthentic as the failed initiatives of the Stalin era. That is why factory workers made up the bulk of the participants at the Bitterfeld conference, speaking about their needs and tastes in art. To be sure, such speeches were actually prepared by state officials and hardly conveyed what the majority of workers really thought. Still, they affirmed the new role that ordinary men and women had to play in cultural affairs: not passive recipients but active participants, both as producers and as consumers of culture. The Bitterfeld Way was actually more radical than it appeared, adding a new note to long-standing calls for worker-centered art. By going out into the factories, artists were meant to forge a different kind of culture for the masses, one that took the masses seriously as subjects rather than objects. But to speed the process along, and to create a truly national culture, those masses also had to take matters into their own hands. East German officials had long encouraged amateur art, setting up choirs and dance ensembles in nearly every factory. Under Stalinism, though, such circles became so stuffy and didactic that most members left once they could in 1953. To revitalize the movement, the Bitterfeld conference pushed individuals to explore their creativity and follow their passion, with the goal of developing truly organic initiatives. The centerpiece of this project were the so-called Circles of Writing Workers, amateur groups that gave ordinary people a chance to compose literary works under the guidance of professional writers.56 The results were not always pretty, as verses from a Leipzig factory attest: “Production, it’s clear / must go faster this year. / Muscles alone won’t do: / the little head must work too.”57 Yet producing great art was not the circles’ main goal, and in fact Leipzig officials cautioned members against “making literature.”58 More important was the act of participation itself—whether through writing, dancing, singing, or playing the accordion. According to official figures, some five thousand Leipzigers belonged to an amateur arts ensemble in the early 1960s: a considerable number, but still less than 2 percent of the city’s workforce.59 For Leipzig authorities that was not nearly enough, since the ultimate goal of the Bitterfeld Way was to “involve the entire working class, and in fact all workers.”60 To reach more people, officials turned to popular entertainment, which they described as “the light muse.” In the early twentieth century, this term had typically referred to operetta: not quite a high art worthy of the muses, but still a form of “culture light.”

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In GDR-speak, though, it became associated with variety shows, like the one that the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev saw on his visit to Leipzig in March  1959. A Rendezvous with the Light Muse featured “rumba, waltz, and swing rhythms” alongside acrobatics, comedy acts, and classical arias.61 Ulbricht referenced this performance at the Bitterfeld conference, which took place two weeks later. The light muse deserved more attention, he argued, because “our workers and peasants encounter it every day.” By focusing on high culture, artists risked leaving a whole segment of the population behind. A “culture of entertainment” was a key component of socialist national culture, and so the conference ordered “an entire system of effective measures” for promoting the light muse.62 In Leipzig officials converted an old circus into the House of the Light Muse, which was intended to “expand the typical narrow public and . . . become the meeting place for all social groups.”63 This venue quickly developed into one of Leipzig’s main attractions, playing three song-and-dance shows each week to a packed house of 1,500 viewers.64 But other cultural institutions, too, received instructions to make room for lighter fare. “We must meet the entertainment needs of all the diverse layers of the population,” the District Council’s Culture Department insisted. “For the artist, this means catering to specific publics, so raising women’s problems in front of women and youth issues among youth.”65 A differentiated repertoire was as much a part of the Bitterfeld Way as going to the factories: in both cases, artists had to adapt to their public in order to involve it in the arts. The Bitterfeld Way was not a democratic project. It aimed to shape and educate East Germans, inserting Ulbricht’s notion of socialist values into every walk of life. There was to be no realm outside the purview of the state, no form of culture that the state neglected. At the same moment that the Polish regime curtailed its role in cultural affairs, East German officials were expanding their own. Yet the Bitterfeld Way was not just another agitprop campaign in the Stalinist mold. In their effort to reach all East Germans, state authorities began to listen to them. They acknowledged that different people needed different forms of culture: everything from factory poems to variety shows. All these forms were intended to involve people in public life, making them properly East German, but that required knowing what people actually liked. In order to transform society, officials needed to understand it. And just like their counterparts in Poland, they turned to sociology to do so.

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Consumer Reports Like Kraków’s UJ, Leipzig University played a key role in the development of modern sociology. Several of its professors were founding members of the German Sociological Association, formed in 1909. Fourteen years later, the university became one of the first in Germany to establish a permanent chair for sociology, which was awarded to Hans Freyer—a fellow traveler of the National Socialist movement. That background made work in the Soviet Occupation Zone impossible, so Freyer fled west in 1948. However, his legacy lived on: the new East German regime eyed all sociologists with suspicion, fearing the whole discipline had been corrupted to the core. At Leipzig University—renamed Karl Marx University in 1953—the chair of sociology went empty and social science classes were replaced by dialectical materialism. When a small group of professors set up a sociological seminar in 1957, inspired by developments in Poland, one of the organizers promptly lost his job. Ulbricht was afraid that sociology might give new ammunition to his critics, who questioned how well his policies actually worked. As a result, discussion of sociological theory remained taboo while empirical research on the GDR went lacking.66 Leipzig officials began to feel this lack around the Fifth Party Congress in 1958, when they were asked to attend to “the cultural needs of the masses.”67 In the absence of trained sociologists, there was no one to research what those needs looked like, and so officials had to do the job themselves. That was how twenty party functionaries ended up going door to door on Leipzig’s Giesser Street in June 1958, asking residents what they did in their spare time. According to the SED’s official paper, New Germany, this was the first time that party authorities had done anything of the sort, and it represented “an important step toward a new, inclusive way of work.” The survey was to be a kind of “schooling” for city officials, giving them “concrete directions for their work.”68 Though they spoke with 319 respondents, the functionaries made no effort to tabulate the results or to record requests and complaints. What they really wanted to know was where the state’s cultural programming was falling short, and it turned out that there were plenty of answers. Most women were too busy with household chores to go to the movies, much less to the theater or opera. Young people went more often but only in poor weather, and mostly to Western productions, which they considered “freely made and less political in content.” Working men, meanwhile, wanted little to do with culture at all. While many

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were “active in the workplace,” attending lectures and film screenings, at home they just sat on the couch and drank.69 In its story about these findings, New Germany took a didactic tone. “Let us say quite frankly that such ‘recreational activities’ in no way conform to our new socialist way of life,” the paper’s culture correspondent wrote. However, the results did suggest what Leipzig officials could do. “We have to organize social life in residential neighborhoods too. Young and old people have a need for cultural events; it would be pleasant for them to get together. Therefore we should create cultural centers in every neighborhood.”70 Ulbricht floated this idea at the Fifth Party Congress, just weeks after the Giesser Street survey, and Leipzig’s City Council approved a development plan in March  1959. As it explained, a Cultural Center’s goal was to involve all Leipzigers in public life, paying particular attention to groups that were difficult to reach: “housewives, young people, the middle classes, retirees.”71 By getting together for lectures and “practical courses (baking, sewing, cooking, etc.),” they would begin to “grow into a collective, be filled with a higher socialist consciousness, and find the way from ‘me’ to ‘we.’ ”72 Cultural Centers were conceived as laboratories of social change and charged with inculcating a new East German sociability. Having learned what people did in their free hours, Leipzig officials set out to transform it, one neighborhood at a time. Within two years, there were some forty-nine Cultural Centers in Leipzig, and yet they rarely worked as planned. One of the most troublesome was the showcase example on Giesser Street, which opened in a former dance hall in April 1960. On the eve of the opening, the center sent out a flyer with prospective activities for different social groups. There was a checkers circle for the elderly, practical advice for women (“How to Dress Beautifully and Easily”), and a record club for the young (“Introduction to Concerts Good and Bad”).73 The offerings seemed to check every box, meeting the City Council’s call to respect “residents’ needs,” except for one thing: what officials thought residents needed and what residents actually wanted were two different things. Though the center’s staff sent two flyers to every household in the area and even recruited residents in person, they were unable to form a single circle.74 Before they could re-educate East Germans, Cultural Centers had to get them through the door, and this forced Leipzig officials to go back to the people. In May 1961, shortly after a visit from Ulbricht, the Giesser Street Center organized a series of meetings with local residents to find out what they really liked. In the words of one local functionary, “it turned

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out that [residents’] needs are diverse: one person wants to discuss books, another to make handicrafts, a third to paint and draw, a fourth is a great actor, and a fifth loves science.”75 This language was a stark departure from the didacticism of the first Giesser Street survey, but it bore a striking resemblance to government rhetoric in Poland. In both countries, public-opinion research had shown that the public was a differentiated body with a variety of views and tastes. What the two states did with this information differed greatly: Polish officials talked openly about trying to satisfy popular wishes, while the SED worked to steer them into new, East German channels. Yet simply acknowledging the diversity of popular preferences made administrators more responsive to them. In order to reach more East Germans, the Giesser Street Center put on a wide range of events and circles, allowing locals to choose what they like. Across Leipzig as a whole, attendance at Cultural Centers nearly tripled between 1959 and 1962, fueled by a spike in “dance evenings” and “song nights.”76 Few of these were free from propaganda, and all were intended “to develop socialist relationships among our city’s residents,” as officials insisted.77 However, it was precisely the effort to transform people’s identity that empowered them to express it. In wooing city residents, soliciting their opinions, and giving them plenty of options, Cultural Centers began to treat them as individuals. This new attitude was both the cause and the consequence of intensified public-opinion research. Just like the Giesser Street Center, more and more East German institutions wanted to know about the people they encountered. Cultural spaces were among the first: in response to the Bitterfeld Way, art galleries, theaters, and publishing houses began to conduct internal surveys of their publics.78 The SED’s Central Committee finally set up an Institute for Public Opinion Research in April 1964, but kept all findings strictly classified. To promote social studies more broadly, it formed a Scientific Council for Sociology, which helped revive the discipline in East German universities. At Leipzig’s Karl Marx University, a sociology section emerged within the Department of Philosophy in 1965, and a Central Institute for Youth Research began work one year later. The institute soon grew into the largest polling firm in the GDR, with over one hundred employees and roughly twenty projects per year. Like Poland’s OBOP, it was intended as a resource for officials and often carried out commissioned research for state agencies. At the same time, it published many of its findings, popularizing both the concept and the content of “public opinion.”79

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Even West Germany’s Der Spiegel noted the rise of public-opinion research in the GDR. “Trained to bring Ulbricht’s subjects into line with the state’s agenda, [functionaries] now feel like guard dogs who are suddenly asked to shake hands,” it reported in 1965. “They no longer just spy on people’s opinion but have to respect it.”80 Indeed, the spread of statistical research left a clear imprint on SED policymaking. Party leaders had always claimed to follow the people’s will, but with the rise of opinion polling they were confronted with this will in quantified form. That forced them to rethink their goals and methods, much as officials had in Poland.81 Even dyed-in-the-wool hardliners began to recognize diversity and cater to individual choice. There is perhaps no better illustration than Karl Kayser, the longtime director-general of the Leipzig City Theaters.

The Red Director For more than three decades, Karl Kayser was one of the most powerful men in Leipzig, and one of the most reviled.82 As a member of the SED Central Committee and a delegate to the East German parliament, Kayser helped craft the policies that governed Leipzig’s cultural spaces. As an actor, director, and theater manager, he then implemented these policies on the ground, setting the profile of Leipzig’s theaters from his appointment in 1958 to the fall of the GDR. Born in Leipzig on the eve of World War I, Kayser grew up surrounded by politics. The son of a labor organizer, he joined the socialist Red Falcons at age six, graduated to the Socialist Worker Youth as a teenager, and fought street battles against Nazi Brownshirts in the 1920s. “Whenever someone was swinging a red flag, I was there,” Kayser recalled.83 He worked on and off as an actor before being drafted into the Nazi army, captured, and sent to a POW camp. When he returned to Leipzig in 1946, Kayser joined the two organizations that would define his career: the City Theater and the newly formed Socialist Unity Party. His manifest political commitment helped the young actor rise through the ranks of the GDR theater establishment. In July 1950 Kayser was named director-general of the German National Theater in Weimar, where he stayed for eight seasons before coming home. Kayser arrived in Leipzig two weeks after the Fifth Party Congress, amid the rollout of the Socialist Cultural Revolution. By then, the city theater was part of a five-stage conglomerate known as the Leipzig City Theaters (STL), which had 1,400 employees, more than 4,000 seats, and

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around 1,600 performances per year.84 “The STL is a factory, which can be described as a large factory in the theater sector,” Kayser told the City Council; “it is the biggest theater factory ever created.”85 The choice of language was deliberate, for Kayser was deeply committed to the Bitterfeld Way. As he saw it, theater’s job was to produce East Germans, using art to inculcate socialist values and promote an East German identity. Rather than satisfying private wants, the STL would fulfill public needs. “The possibility of deciding for oneself can in no way determine the basis of theater,” the director wrote in a 1964 essay; “[only] a stable, organized community of viewers .  .  . will allow the breadth of the repertoire to act on them.”86 By then, nearly three-quarters of all STL viewers came in organized groups, mostly from schools and factories. According to the STL’s statistics, the average Leipzig worker visited every three months.87 To guide this audience, the repertoire was tailored to the party’s goals. There was no room for recent Western plays, which Kayser deemed “covert maneuvers .  .  . to liquidate our way of life.”88 In their stead, the director put on dozens of works from the GDR, chosen to showcase its collective farms, factories, and construction sites. A few were even written by workers themselves, such as the 1962 play Millionenschmidt— literally, “Schmidt of the Millions,” after its protagonist, construction worker Walter Schmidt. Penned by a local carpenter, Millionenschmidt dramatized the daily life and ideological development of a Leipzig construction brigade. This was the first time a “writing worker’s” play was staged in the GDR, and it received wide acclaim as a triumph of the Bitterfeld Way. Many actors, however, found the work “unplayable,” complaining that the main characters were crude and undeveloped. The STL was forced to organize a series of discussions. “We explained that the characters in Millionenschmidt showed traits of the New Man and therefore required a new way of acting and a deeper connection to our socialist life,” one report declared.89 Despite enduring hostility, rehearsals went ahead and the play premiered in November 1962 to a full house of East German dignitaries. It ran for 58 performances and brought in 57,498 viewers—nearly 100 percent of capacity. Still, many viewers were upset with Millionenschmidt, and they let the STL know when it came time to renew their season tickets. “If Karl Kayser doesn’t put on something more reasonable, and soon, then no one at all will go to the theater,” one factory manager grumbled.90 Kayser had often dismissed such complaints, but by the early sixties even he could not ignore the growing emphasis on viewers’ desires. More and

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more factories were in fact cancelling their subscriptions and turning toward popular entertainment, like the recently opened House of the Light Muse. With this in mind, Kayser tried a new approach: he sent out some thirty-eight thousand questionnaires to Leipzig theatergoers, asking them to describe what they wanted to see. When the results came back in early 1965, they were unequivocal: “the public demands more funny works in the theater.”91 All of the STL’s best-liked productions were comedies, while didactic works like Millionenschmidt were almost universally reviled. “The public doesn’t want us to ‘explain’ to them things that they already know—often better than we do,” the survey concluded. Instead, what viewers wanted from the STL was “a deep and universal treatment of their problems, of the interaction between individuals and their society.” The use of the word “individual” here is telling: for the first time, the STL acknowledged that its audience was not homogeneous but diverse, with differentiated tastes and unique personalities. One size would no longer fit all. Though the STL’s survey was conducted in-house, Kayser decided to publicize the results by placing an article in East Germany’s leading theater journal. The director also seemed to take them to heart: over the next few months, he reconfigured the STL’s repertoire to make room for new kinds of productions. From 1965 to 1969, the STL performed some twenty plays by authors living in the West—four times as many as in the previous five years.92 Meanwhile, the East German plays on stage became more daring, as the morality tales of Kayser’s early years gave way to stories about everyday life, or Alltag.93 The director paid particular attention to young, provocative playwrights like Volker Braun, whose celebrated play Die Kipper premiered in Leipzig in 1972. Named for “the dumpers” who dispose of slag at a coal mine, Die Kipper explored one worker’s difficulty with fitting into a rigid collective. With its incisive critiques of social conformity, political stagnation, and industrial decay, the play showed just how far Karl Kayser had come in the ten years since Millionenschmidt. The new approach was sometimes challenging for Kayser, who looked back wistfully to the “golden fifties.”94 “It was easier back then, since the public’s sensibilities [and] needs were not as differentiated as they are today,” he told an interviewer in 1974.95 After the STL’s public-opinion survey, however, the director acknowledged that even he had to change with the times. That meant putting on different plays for different kinds of viewers, but also treating theater as a site of experimentation: a playground rather than a classroom. The

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epitome of this vision was an intimate new stage that Kayser created in the bowels of the STL’s Opera House. Opened in 1969, the Basement Theater sat fewer than a hundred viewers, who crowded around a small central stage. It played difficult, controversial works that were considered inappropriate for a mass audience, like those by the American playwright Arthur Miller. Above all, though, the Basement Theater focused on new drama from the Eastern Bloc, and especially from Poland. “For us, Polish plays opened the door to the theater of the absurd,” recalled Kayser’s son, Karl Georg, who directed many Basement Theater productions. “They poked fun at the absurdities of society and the follies of men without taking everything in life so deadly seriously.”96 Both Kaysers became frequent visitors to Poland, where they could see “fantastic, provocative theater.” In fact, it was Poland that inspired the Basement Theater in the first place: as Karl Georg remembered, “We saw a tremendous production in a Kraków underground theater, and immediately my father decided to create just such a space in Leipzig.”97 Most likely, the two men attended a performance of Witkiewicz’s The Water Hen, staged by Tadeusz Kantor in the Krzysztofory Gallery. An English critic called it “a remarkable theatrical experiment” with an “endless fertility of surrealist imagery.” Unable to make heads or tails of the production, he could only describe some of the action: “a girl clatters frantically away at a typewriter, a bald-pated chap in drag hauls a heavy trunk, two men in black bowlers quietly shave each other.”98 For decades, this had been just the kind of theater that Kayser abhorred and battled. After surveying his viewers, however, he turned to it for inspiration and worked to recreate the experience in Leipzig. This improbable connection signaled a broader rapprochement between artists in Kraków and Leipzig. Over the course of the 1960s, East German art became more colorful, innovative, and varied. In responding to the public’s tastes, it diversified in similar ways as Polish art ten years before. To be sure, significant differences remained: Leipzig artists received more money from the state and faced tighter creative controls. However, the contrasts that Johanna Starke, Heinz Völkel, and Karol Estreicher Jr., all identified at the start of the 1960s were not as prominent by the end of the decade. Leipzig artists had in fact developed “more daring and originality” and had also started “to experiment a little,” just like Starke had wanted. The city’s cinemas and theaters were no longer “bland, lacking a point of view, [or] lacking in courage,” as Estreicher had found them, but actually displayed some of “the same

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hidden dynamism as in Poland.” After a decade of divergence, the two cities’ cultural spaces were gradually becoming more alike. And it was public-opinion polls that paved the way: having given Polish artists license to experiment, they soon pushed East Germans to follow suit. Across the Eastern Bloc, public-opinion research emerged in the cultural sphere. The Bloc’s first polling center, OBOP, grew out of the Letters Bureau at Polish Radio in 1958. Hungary’s Public Opinion Research Institute originated in 1963, also as a branch of the national radio service. In Romania the leading center for empirical research was the Office of Studies and Polls, established within the Radio and Television Agency in 1967. In Czechoslovakia it was the Institute for Research on Cultural Questions, founded just after the Prague Spring in 1969. The GDR’s main polling firm, the Institute for the Study of Youth, initially focused on questions of culture and leisure before branching out to other topics. So too did Bulgaria’s Center for Sociological Studies on Youth, which started work just two years later, in 1968.99 In the United States, as Sarah Igo has shown, public-opinion polling grew out of consumer reports, market surveys, and other forms of commercial research.100 In the Eastern Bloc, where commercial interests were subordinated to the state, pollsters instead got their start by studying the public’s tastes in culture.101 The pollsters’ emphasis on culture was no accident. For communist authorities, this was a relatively safe and easy way to acknowledge the people’s will, as they kept pledging to do. Survey research promised to kill two birds with one stone: by asking people what they liked, governments could make their policies more effective while making a show of heeding popular opinion. In the absence of free elections, surveys provided crucial feedback that kept officials informed without pressuring them to act. Public-opinion polls seemed harmless to the state, especially where culture was concerned, and indeed they revealed nothing that was particularly troubling to officials. In Poland as in East Germany, the polls’ main finding was that the public was “diverse”—a conclusion bordering on a platitude. And yet this obvious point revolutionized how state administration functioned on the ground. In embracing sociological research, Eastern Bloc officials gave rise to a culture of pluralism. Inside the halls of power, administrators began to develop new methods of work. Polls forced them to confront the fact that the public was not a homogeneous mass but rather a kaleidoscope of groups:

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white-collar workers, women, theater lovers, fans of comedy. These wanted different things and reacted in different ways, making it impossible to pursue a single, uniform cultural program. Stalinist tactics were clearly a poor fit for this reality: to reach more people, one could not simply send more buses from the factories to the opera. Instead, administrators had to learn what people liked and then adjust their programming accordingly. Like Kayser, many felt that “it was easier back then,” and to be sure, the job changed fundamentally with the rise of National Communism. Rather than following a blueprint from above, officials had to respond to signals from below. They still set repertoires and oversaw all cultural events, but they no longer did so alone. Through public-opinion research, the public became part of communist policymaking. This shift in governance had a far-reaching impact. Across the Bloc, artists seized on the language of diversity to argue for more pluralism in art. Varied societies needed varied artworks, they reasoned, and so it made no sense to bend all cultural production to one code. A plethora of new cultural spaces sprang up, legitimating their experiments by pointing to public demand. But different publics also made their own demands, empowered by officials’ newfound interest in them. Simply asking residents about their views created expectations that the state would listen. Compiling and publicizing these views, as many social research centers did, transformed them into a quantified public opinion that even dictatorships could ill afford to ignore. In this environment, East Europeans grew increasingly vocal about what they wanted, making it clear that they would not be passive objects of communist rule. Instead, city administrators had to treat them as subjects, as partners— and even as consumers.

Ch a p ter 5

Consumerism Cultured Consumption and Its Limits

This is the new thinking about people’s needs: the client must not always be right, but we must always listen to him and try to accommodate his wishes. —Leopold Grzyb, director of the Kraków House of Culture, 19581 It is totally natural, it is a human need, that everyone wants to eat more, wants to dress himself, wants to have a nice home. He wants to claim for himself everything that he sees and that exists. That is totally natural. —Paul Fröhlich, first secretary of the Leipzig District SED Committee, 19622

On August 22, 1968—one day after the Warsaw Pact’s invasion of Czechoslovakia—the GDR’s largest department store opened in Leipzig. Its curvy metal façade concealed over 11,000 square meters of shopping space, along with a restaurant, showers, and a childcare facility “for shopping mothers.” Over five floors, the store showcased everything from bicycles to toothbrushes, from fashion to the latest electronics. “The most modern sales methods make shopping easy for the client,” the Berlin Daily raved. Shoppers could hold and examine some 96 percent of the items on offer, “an unheard-of proportion in international retailing.” More than a thousand staff members were on hand to answer questions, give advice, and provide demonstrations. In typical Eastern Bloc fashion, all shop assistants had a quota: 167,000 marks in sales per person per year, or roughly a worker’s monthly salary each day.3 Unlike many Eastern Bloc businesses, however, they had to cater to the public’s wants, meeting demand and stirring desire. The story-high letters on the building said it all: the department store was called Konsument, or “The Consumer.” Starting in the late 1950s, consumption emerged as a point of emphasis for Eastern Bloc regimes. All European states had preached frugality 129

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in the wake of World War II, tamping down consumer demand amid widespread shortages. When the Marshall Plan flooded Europe with American goods, that frugality became a way for communist regimes to set themselves apart and assert moral superiority. Officials framed capitalist abundance as illusory, selfish, and exploitative, juxtaposing Western materialism to socialist culture. In place of mass consumption, they celebrated mass production, which promised to bring welfare for all without leaving anyone behind. As a private, domestic, and feminized domain, consumption did not fit the collectivist ethos of the Stalin era. Through the first half of the 1950s, it was mostly an afterthought in economic planning, eclipsed by the weightier tasks of industrializing and collectivizing. Many administrators saw the consumer sector as a haven for old, selfish, capitalist thinking. They worked to rationalize consumption, restraining individual desire and aligning people’s wants with their objective needs, as defined by the party.4 A shift became apparent after Khrushchev’s “secret speech,” which sharply criticized Stalin’s approach to economic affairs. Consumption was increasingly framed as a socialist virtue, both proof of the system’s successes and its rightful reward. Eastern Bloc states ramped up production of consumer products, rolling out millions of cars, television sets, and other household appliances. Officials not only enabled but celebrated such growth, boasting of their ability to deliver the goods. Consumption even became an object of Cold War competition, as Eastern Bloc states resolved to beat the West at its own game. In 1958 Walter Ulbricht announced that the GDR’s “main economic task” was to overtake West Germany in “the per capita consumption of all important foodstuffs and consumer goods” within as little as three years.5 The following summer, the American National Exhibition in Moscow and the Soviet National Exhibition in New York put kitchens, cars, and gadgets on display, as residents of both superpowers looked on in wonder.6 After a decade of deliberate neglect, consumer goods had become proof of communism’s superiority. The goods, though, were just one part of the story. Well before department stores appeared in Eastern Europe, Eastern Bloc states began to treat their subjects as consumers. Personal choice was central to the program of National Communism: by voicing their preferences, making selections, but also spending their own funds, East Europeans were meant to commit themselves to the communist project. Officials framed consumption as a form of civic engagement, a way for individuals to find their place in socialist society. They argued that it extended far beyond

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material objects to education, leisure, travel—and culture. All works of art, in this view, were consumer goods, and the cultural sphere a kind of market. Consumers could select the ones they liked best, even those from the West, provided they were willing to pay for them. Officials, meanwhile, worked to guide the public’s choice, teaching a form of tempered, “cultured” consumerism. Yet it turned out that even a cultured consumerism was impossible to contain. The same consumer thinking that regimes promoted made it harder for them to formulate policy, to impose censorship, or to engage in cultural exchange. Opening Konsument was easy enough, but dealing with consumers was another story.

To Market Two years after the Polish October, Kraków’s cultural officials convened in city hall to discuss its effects. Tadeusz Mandecki, the head of the city’s cinema network, noted a shift in audience behavior: “The public has become pickier, which has forced us to increase the number of films we bring to the screen.”7 In their search for popular engagement, cinemas expanded and diversified their repertoire, pivoting toward comedies, musicals, and other “films that enjoy great acclaim.” And yet total attendance actually declined because ticket prices had gone up by half. Once they stopped being platforms for cultural mass work, cinemas were expected to pay for themselves; state patronage existed to advance the state’s agenda, and after the Polish state adopted a less hands-on role in cultural affairs, its patronage collapsed. At the national level, budgets for art and culture fell by a third from 1956 to 1959, and then by half over the 1960s.8 This was the hidden cost of pluralism in the arts: both artists and audiences gained access to a wide variety of art, but only if they could afford it. Government bodies, too, became more attuned to economic metrics. “All theaters must be asked constantly and systematically about two indicators: the number of viewers and box-office receipts,” Kraków’s Provincial Party Committee (KW) insisted in 1963.9 Even under a planned economy, profit remained a major consideration and clearly affected how officials thought about their work. Mandecki, for one, described film as an “article of trade,” while the director of Kraków’s Literary Press called his books “commodities that helps us realize our financial plan.”10 Though party authorities sometimes bemoaned such economic thinking, they also stressed that all artistic institutions had to watch the bottom line. In Gomułka’s Poland, culture became subject to the

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market—a market that was highly regulated and constrained but still responsive to the pressures of demand.11 Stalinist rule had insulated artists from these pressures, since it was state officials who controlled all funding for the arts. After the Polish October, though, this monopoly collapsed, giving artists more creative freedom but less guaranteed income. They suddenly had to compete to sell their works, peddling artistic products like consumer goods. The new funding model presented both challenges and opportunities. In 1963, according to one contemporary study, just 16 percent of Poland’s writers could live off literature alone, while the rest had to take on other jobs—mostly as journalists, editors, or teachers.12 The situation was even tougher for members of the Polish Graphic Artists’ Union (ZPAP), by far the largest of Poland’s artist unions. In the wake of the Polish October, only a third of all ZPAP members found regular employment and even fewer had studios of their own. “After leaving the art academy we were left completely alone, surrounded by a mass of difficulties: no apartments, no workspaces, no means to make a living,” one young artist told the sociologist Aleksander Wallis.13 The problem was particularly acute in Kraków, where the Academy of Fine Arts turned out over eight hundred graduates between 1950 and 1956, far more than during the entire interwar era.14 Under Stalinism all these artists had been needed to bring culture to the masses, to glorify party leaders, and to commemorate the building of Nowa Huta. But what would become of them after Stalinism’s demise? Many unemployed artists turned to the Catholic Church, which regained its prewar role as a cultural patron. As the seat of a Catholic archdiocese, Kraków offered extensive opportunities in the field of sacral art, though these had largely dried up during the antireligious campaigns of the early 1950s. Only under Gomułka did the Polish Catholic Church reclaim some of its former autonomy, allowing it to launch an ambitious program of building and restoration.15 The highpoint came in 1966 when the Church celebrated one thousand years of Christianity in Poland. In Kraków Province, the archdiocese built more than a dozen new churches, creating jobs for sculptors, painters, metalworkers, and glassmakers. City authorities had no way to track the Church’s spending, but they suspected that it added up to “very significant sums.”16 In 1969 the head of the local ZPAP branch suggested that more members received commissions from the Church than from the state’s entire cultural matrix.17 Still, working with the Church was not for everyone, and most artists had to find other means to survive. Some turned to Cepelia, the folk art

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association launched in 1949 to nurture Poland’s peasant traditions. By the early 1960s Cepelia ran seven workshops in Kraków, making everything from toys and plates to fabrics and tapestries. Taken together, the workshops had over five hundred employees and collaborated with hundreds more freelancers, including many ZPAP members.18 They sold their wares directly to consumers, allowing artists to turn their creativity and expertise into marketable commodities. So, too, did the ZPAP’s own studios, founded soon after 1956 “to liquidate unemployment among graphic artists and fully utilize their creative potential.”19 Several studios took over the empty synagogues of Kraków’s Kazimierz district, where they made furniture, repaired decorative moldings, and printed posters. In 1960 they paid Kraków artists some 9 million złoty, or eight times more than what the union itself gave out in stipends and commissions.20 Given this financial reality, union members increasingly sought refuge in applied art.21 “The great bulk of [Kraków] artists are not active in their field of training but occupy themselves with other jobs,” the KW reported in 1960.22 “Pure” art, meanwhile, became the province of a narrow elite, those who had legions of admirers to support them—or better yet, clients abroad. Tadeusz Kantor was one of these lucky few: with a dealer in Switzerland and a regular exhibition space on Paris’s Left Bank, the painter was able to quit his day job in 1963 to focus on his art. “I was a stage designer for several dozen years, but for me it was, to put it bluntly, only a way to make money,” Kantor explained. “Generally I am against stage designers.”23 Such disdain for applied art, and for commercialism more broadly, was widespread in the artists’ world, which prized autonomy and authenticity above all. As one group of painters told a gallery in 1956, “We are artists and will not sell our work!”24 Applied artists were often treated as second-class citizens: Wallis found that “limiting oneself to profitable and uncreative activities completely disqualifies an artist in the eyes of the community.”25 The only way to maintain one’s standing was to disavow whatever work one did for money, and better yet to call it by a dirty name. In the late 1950s applied art came to be known as chałtura—a Russian word for extracurricular labor with connotations of shoddiness and unoriginality. And yet as thousands of classically trained artists turned to marketable pursuits, they produced some of communist Poland’s most ­distinctive and enduring artworks. The best known abroad are Polish posters, which gained worldwide renown in the 1960s. Poster ­design had been a point of emphasis under Stalinism, when it served to

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convey the party’s program to the masses. In 1956, however, commissions for political posters largely evaporated, leaving hundreds of art academy graduates out of a job.26 One of those graduates was thirtyfour-year-old Wiktor Górka, a former student of Kantor’s who received a degree in graphic design in 1952. During the Stalin era, Górka created more than a dozen propaganda posters exhorting the public to “join the chemical industry,” to “reap the harvest quickly and without loss,” and to “sell hogs for feed and coal.” Once such heavy-handed messaging went out of style, though, he was forced to look for new employers. For a while Górka worked with the Central Council of Trade Unions, making safety posters that warned workers of potential disasters: tripping over rails, falling off cranes, losing limbs, or blowing up. He also struck a partnership with the Central Film Lease Agency, which distributed and advertised all movies shown in Poland. In the late 1950s the agency had just begun to import Hollywood productions and it commissioned Górka to make posters for blockbusters like the Kirk Douglas epic Ulysses (US/Italy 1954, Poland 1957) and John Huston’s Moby Dick (US 1956, Poland 1961). It was in these works that the artist really came into his own, developing a visual idiom that helped define the so-called Polish School of posters.27 Most of the School’s designs were visually simple, with a single figure or object at the center of the composition. That object was usually surreal or allegorical, since it had to sum up the essence of the film at hand. Górka’s most famous poster, for Bob Fosse’s Cabaret (US 1972, Poland 1973), showed a tangle of women’s legs in the shape of a swastika, surmounted by a screaming face. Unlike typical Hollywood posters, the goal was not to promote a particular star or studio but rather to catch the viewer’s attention, as Górka’s friend Waldemar Świerzy ­explained. “The poster is looked at in passing, in the rain, in winter at the bus stop, in the crowd, so it must only be a signal, a suggestive sign for the passer-by to register.”28 Both Górka and Świerzy, a fellow ­graduate of the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts, applied this principle to other subjects too. Starting in the early 1960s they designed dozens of posters for the State Circus Agency that featured just one word, “circus” (cyrk), amid jumping tigers or balancing bears. Since the agency ran every circus in Poland, there was no need to include brand names or tour dates, only to evoke the thrill and awe of being at the circus. Making circus posters became a rite of passage for Polish graphic artists, who produced over a thousand designs between 1960 and 1989. With their bold forms and bright colors, they added a touch of whimsy to

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the Polish urban landscape and also became the calling card of Polish art abroad. Jumping tigers, swinging legs, Kirk Douglas—these hardly fit our standard image of Eastern Bloc culture. And yet the Polish School of posters was very much a product of the communist system, no less than the propaganda posters that preceded it. Emerging in the wake of the Polish October, it displayed all the hallmarks of the Gomułka era: an embrace of diversity, a focus on consumption, an attentiveness to pop­ ular taste. In keeping with the state’s new emphasis on satisfying individual desires, posters began to advertise consumer goods and services. At the same time, they became consumer objects in their own right, reflecting the growing commercialization of Polish art. As thousands of trained artists found themselves out of work, they sold their skills to the highest bidder and in the process turned advertising into high art. The Polish School of posters both paralleled and reinforced the boom in washing machines, refrigerators, and other household appliances. Applied art was the perfect symbol of the new consumer culture.

New Economics Applied art also enjoyed a golden age in East Germany, although for rather different reasons. Just as state funding plummeted in Kraków, it ballooned in Leipzig amid the Socialist Cultural Revolution. Per capita spending on culture rose by a third from 1958 to 1961, while long-term investment grew even faster: of all the cultural infrastructure built in Leipzig between 1945 and 1969, three-quarters dated to the years 1956–62.29 This windfall created new opportunities for local artists, even in long-neglected fields like handicrafts and architectural design. From 1950 on, budgets for all administrative buildings had to include a line item for “artistic decoration,” and in 1959 this requirement was extended to residential construction.30 Since Leipzig officials had just launched a comprehensive rebuild of the city center, millions of marks were set aside for public statues, friezes, and mosaics. To this day, central Leipzig is peppered with hidden gems: a wall mosaic of a flying cosmonaut, an inlay of a shopkeeper carrying his wares, a bronze fountain with splashing geese.31 Paradoxically, an abundance of funding achieved some of the same effects as its lack, forcing artists out of their studios and into the urban landscape. By contrast to Poland, GDR artists remained largely shielded from market forces, since state officials controlled access to sales,

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commissions, and exhibitions. East Germany’s cultural institutions, however, were increasingly exposed to economic pressures, especially after the announcement of the New Economic System of Planning and Management (NES) at the Sixth Party Congress in January 1963. The NES aimed to improve the planned economy’s performance by applying modern “scientific and technological” methods.32 It loosened rigid controls and production targets, gave factory managers more autonomy, and implemented a system of bonuses to incentivize productivity.33 Most of these measures were borrowed from the West and adapted to socialist conditions. As Jeffrey Kopstein has argued, they simulated market mechanisms through administrative means without exposing East Germany’s economy to the vagaries of the global market.34 Like so many of the Bloc’s economic reforms, the NES struggled to overcome central planning’s rigidity and inertia. It did, however, place new emphasis on profit, efficiency, and competition, and not just in economic matters. Echoes of the NES were clear at a major cultural conference in April 1964, which introduced “the principle of material self-interest” to artistic affairs. It made no sense for cultural institutions to receive funding irrespective of their achievements, the culture minister Hans Bentzien reasoned. “If a theater or House of Culture fails to reach its planned attendance target, that should have an impact on its subsidies.”35 Better performance would lead to better funding, pushing cultural institutions to strive for more shows, more openings, more viewers. After all, Bentzien argued, such institutions “belong to the sphere of social consumption” and should not forget that their offerings were, in part, consumer goods. To remind them, the Ministry of Culture rolled out a model of “achievement financing” under the motto “culture must also produce economically.”36 Cinemas, for instance, were allowed to keep a cut of their profits, while their administrators received cash awards for exceeding quota. By 1967 this model extended to theaters, Houses of Culture, and even art academies, encouraging them to cut expenses and raise prices.37 “It can no longer be tolerated that [such institutions] put on all events for free, or . . . don’t charge to alleviate their costs,” the ministry insisted.38 The predictable result was that cultural officials started to focus on economic performance while treating programming as a means to an end. This complaint crops up repeatedly in petitions and reports from the 1960s. The rector of Leipzig’s Academy of Fine Arts lamented that “the book is seen almost exclusively as a commodity, not as an object of culture.”39

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City authorities grumbled that House of Culture personnel saw dance evenings “purely as an opportunity to fulfill the financial plan, without understanding that . . . they can be used to influence the youth.”40 Such criticism framed economic interest as a distraction from political objectives, and the Ministry of Culture tried to adjust by stressing these in its accounting of achievement financing. Starting in 1964 each film received a different “economic goal” based on its cultural and political value, with perceived worthiness offsetting a lack of profitability—and vice versa.41 The most politically valuable (“category A”) films thus had a lower revenue target than musicals or comedies because the state was willing to subsidize their distribution.42 Still, such a calculus upheld profitability as an essential policy goal. Even if books, films, and dances were meant to be more than commodities, they were commodities nonetheless. Despite the emphasis on profits, most of East Germany’s cultural institutions were planned loss makers that survived on state funding. This was a deliberate choice, one that allowed officials to keep ticket prices low and promote worthy but unprofitable works. While Kraków artists grew dependent on the Church, the West, and private buyers, artists in Leipzig continued to receive support, and hence direction, from the state. In both cities, though, art was increasingly viewed as an object to be bought and sold. The common element was growing competition: with the advent of National Communism, the range of cultural options expanded, creating a consumer market. Artists and institutions had to compete for the public’s attention, even if their funding came entirely from the state. Cultural pluralism—what Polish authorities called the “policy of choice”—changed how both artists and officials thought of art. It incentivized them to pursue popularity, and nothing was more popular than culture from the West.

The Western Invasion Arriving in Warsaw in the spring of 1961, the American theater impresario Norris Houghton found the Polish capital “almost aggressively Western.” “Night clubs blare out Western jazz long after midnight,” he wrote in a report for the New York Times; “American cigarettes and soaps are in all the kiosks; the bars offer American gin and whiskey and, from Scotland, Scotch.” Western culture had returned to Poland after the Stalinist hiatus, and it returned with a bang. Buoyed by Gomułka’s reforms, Polish artists and promoters rushed to make up for lost time. Kraków’s leading stage, the Old Theater, premiered recent works by

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Eugene O’Neill, Luigi Pirandello, and Eugene Ionesco, all authors who had long been banned. Houghton came away impressed, noting that many European plays reached Kraków before New York: “I cannot think of a single theater in the West that can offer a comparably rich and cosmopolitan repertoire.”43 Another theater troupe toured Kraków Province with a production by the French existentialist Jean Anouilh. “While it was not very understandable in the countryside because it was too hard, . . . it was still the first effort to link us with the repertoire of the civilized West,” the organizers boasted.44 With the Soviet model in the rearview mirror, Polish artists set their sights firmly on the West. The country’s westward turn was even more apparent in the cinemas. Hollywood movies had been withdrawn from circulation in 1950 but quickly reappeared after the Polish October. By 1960 Western productions made up half of all films shown in Poland and accounted for some 85  percent of all screenings.45 As one film scholar has written, “There is no need to list the Western masterpieces that appeared on Polish screens during the 1960s and early 1970s: in principle, [officials] bought them all.”46 While the total number of Western films began to decline over the course of the 1960s, they became more popular than ever. In 1966 nineteen of the top twenty films in Kraków Province came from the West, headlined by the John Wayne vehicle North to Alaska (US 1960).47 The Western invasion came later to Leipzig, but it arrived in full force. In 1957, when Ulbricht proclaimed the Socialist Cultural Revolution, Leipzig officials cancelled their international film festival, banned Western performers from the annual trade fair, and sent the city’s leading jazz promoter to prison.48 Yet Western culture grew more widespread in the 1960s, as the regime made allowances for popular desires. At the Leipzig City Theaters (STL), works by Western authors reappeared in 1965 after nearly a decade of neglect. That same year Louis Armstrong arrived in Leipzig to a rousing reception. An American correspondent described the scene: “Beginning at noon on Tuesday, loudspeakers of the Stadtrundfunk [city radio service], scattered throughout Leipzig’s City Center, broadcast the arrival of Mr. Armstrong’s chartered plane from East Berlin. . . . Tickets for the two Armstrong performances were sold out well in advance. [When] Mr. Armstrong came on stage, . . . the audience continued applauding and crying ‘Satchmo’ for eight minutes.”49 While Satchmo blew up the stage, Brigitte Bardot and Steve McQueen ruled Leipzig’s screens. By 1966 Western movies made up 42 percent of the repertoire in Leipzig District—even more than in Kraków.50

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All of this Western programming came through government channels; it was not smuggled in suitcases, circulated underground, or broadcast from abroad. Led by the CIA and the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Western organizations spent a fortune on the cultural Cold War, yet it was communist regimes that did the most to bring Western culture across the Iron Curtain. Financial considerations played a central role, since imports from the West fared well in the cultural marketplace. In Kraków Province, the average Western film brought in four times the revenue of Eastern Bloc productions, while major blockbusters could be even more lucrative.51 From January to June 1969, Kraków’s largest and newest cinema, the Kiev, played nothing but Liz Taylor’s Cleopatra (US 1963, Poland 1968), for which it charged six times the standard price. While some officials groused about films of such “questionable value,” the city’s cinema boss pointed to the value of the bottom line. Since “viewers vote with their feet,” he argued, cinemas had to give them what they wanted, at least enough to make ends meet.52 This ­consumerist logic reflected the reality of market competition. If all cultural objects were consumer goods, Western goods simply sold better than others— not least because a shortage in supply drove up demand. Public demand also opened the door to Western TV shows. Polish Television started buying Western films in 1959 after broadcast hours expanded and its own production could no longer keep up. By the mid-1960s these took up nearly 20 percent of all airtime and outnumbered Polish movies by a factor of five to one.53 Western serials were even more popular, especially among children. Disney shows, including The Mickey Mouse Club and the live-action Zorro, played almost every weekend morning. In 1962 a Kraków journalist rejoiced that Zorro had finally gone off the air: “For some time now, . . . no one has tried to lasso my head or jump on my shoulders.”54 Polish adults were only slightly less infatuated with American serials. According to opinion polls from 1967, Bonanza, The Fugitive, and Dr. Kildare were the three most popular shows on TV, with approval ratings above 70 percent.55 When they played, nine out of ten television subscribers turned on their sets, so that each episode of Bonanza commanded more viewers than all of Poland’s theaters over a whole year.56 Western TV was even more accessible in East Germany, though not entirely by design. In 1957, amid the Socialist Cultural Revolution, the GDR switched its transmission standard from the Soviet D/K system to the West European B/G. This involved converting some 90,000 sets already in circulation, but GDR officials argued that it would help

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them reach West German viewers and advance the socialist cause.57 However, the change also made Western broadcasts accessible to viewers in the GDR. From 1957 on, roughly nine-tenths of the country could receive West German TV—everywhere but the northeastern and southeastern pockets of the GDR, known popularly as the Valley of the Clueless. Opinion polls found that most viewers watched Western television each night despite some early pressure from the state to redirect antennas from the West. “I  will take mine down, all right,” a Leipzig worker told a foreign journalist in 1961, “but they cannot expect me to watch their programs. I  will just get rid of the set.”58 To avoid public outrage and to accommodate public opinion, GDR authorities tacitly accepted Western programming. In fact, they integrated more and more of it into their own broadcasts, in an effort to compete: by the late 1960s Western movies made up roughly a third of all films on East German TV.59 In Poland as in East Germany, television subscribers paid a flat annual fee, so Western programming brought no additional profits. In fact it represented a considerable expense, requiring an outlay of precious hard-currency reserves on the world market. Yet officials justified the cost by pointing to audience desires. “When a man buys a television set with his hard-earned money and pays dozens of złoty each month in fees, he wants to be fully satisfied when he sits in front of it at night,” reasoned Włodzimierz Sokorski, the Stalin-era minister of culture who made a soft landing as director of Polish Television.60 This language explicitly framed television as a consumer good, but it also went a step further. In treating personal satisfaction as the object of government policy, it reached beyond consumption to consumerism.

Cultured Consumerism Consumerism, according to Eastern Bloc theorists, was a blight peculiar to the West. In an unending search for greater profits, commercial interests vied to sell more goods, no matter how frivolous or outlandish. They used the glitz and glamor of deceptive advertising to manufacture popular desire, tricking alienated workers into a vicious cycle of yearning and spending. Blinded by the chase for the latest fashions, people lost sight of their true interests and of the actual value of the goods they bought. Communist production, by contrast, promised to eschew showmanship and redundancy in favor of practical, sensible goods. Removing false advertising would eliminate false consciousness, so that

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people would come to want that which they needed most. Impulsive consumerism would thus give way to rational consumption, and subjective desire to objective demand.61 In the Bloc’s early years, amid pervasive shortages, communist leaders stressed these contrasts between East and West. “The task of the planned socialist economy is, first, to satisfy not the individual need, but rather the social need,” the Leipzig-born SED functionary Fred Oelssner wrote in 1947; “it is the capitalist mentality that assumes that the most important task of the planned economy is the satisfaction of individual needs.”62 But as the Cold War deepened, and as the Bloc’s economies grew, satisfying individual needs became a communist talking point as well. The 1963 East German congress that proclaimed the NES offered a new definition of “the goal of communist production”: to provide “material and cultural goods for each member of society according to his or her growing needs, individual demands, and inclinations.”63 Polish officials, too, promised that policy would be “oriented above all at satisfying the needs of the mass consumer and meeting his interests.”64 These formulations tempered the objective principle of needs with such subjective notions as “interests” and “inclinations.” The consumer became not just the object but the subject of government planning, with the ability and the right to make demands. Leading officials even reframed consuming as central to the socialist way of life. “Consumption in socialism is not simply a matter of needing something and getting it, but rather a process by which the socialist personality is created,” insisted Günter Mittag, the SED’s chief economic planner.65 Consumption, in this view, was barely tied to needs at all. It was instead a mode of interacting with the world, a way of formulating one’s identity through choice. Stefan Żółkiewski, a prominent member of the PZPR Central Committee, shared this expansive notion of consumption. “A  consumer good is anything that serves to satisfy human needs, including all products and services,” he wrote in an article coauthored with some of Poland’s best-known sociologists. “The concept of ‘consumption’ encompasses both material and mental phenomena.”66 Here, too, consumption figured as a form of self-expression. It was through consuming—desiring, choosing, buying, possessing—that East Europeans were meant to become socialist citizens. Fostering a consumer attitude was thus no longer the domain of Western capitalists, nor necessarily a threat to communist rule. So long as consumption served communist interests, Eastern Bloc states could fully embrace consumerism.

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At the same time, party officials insisted that theirs would be a better, “cultured” consumerism. The term built on the Russian notion of “culturedness” (kul’turnost’), developed by progressive reformers in the late nineteenth century but popularized under Stalin’s rule. As millions of peasants flocked to cities during the first (1928–32) and second (1932–37) Five-Year Plans, Soviet officials worked to make them “cultured”: literate, secular, and at least somewhat educated, with good manners and personal hygiene. A cultured person knew and loved high culture, but also acted and thought in a socialist way. The drive for “culturedness” was an extension of the Cultural Revolution, which aimed to overcome the residues of capitalism and forge a new society for a new political order. “Cultured” was thus a near equivalent to “socialist.” Officials spoke of cultured habits, cultured family relations, and even cultured trade—stripped of the drive for profit and focused on fulfilling society’s needs.67 Despite its prominence in the Soviet Union, this language was slow to reach Eastern Europe. On the pages of New Germany, the SED’s official newspaper, the term “cultured” (kulturvoll) barely appeared before 1957, when East Germany, like Poland, launched its own Socialist Cultural Revolution. As in the Soviet Union, the GDR’s Cultural Revolution was meant to forge a socialist way of life. “The new, socialist conditions in industry and agriculture are leading to new relations between people,” Ulbricht declared at the Fifth Party Congress (1958), which also introduced the Ten Commandments of Socialist Morality and Ethics.68 All aspects of East German society were becoming socialist, which meant they had to become cultured. “To live in a socialist way is to live in a cultured way,” Ulbricht summed up.69 A few months later Gomułka echoed this idea at the Third PZPR Congress (1959), held at the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw. “The goal of the unfolding cultural revolution is to link culture to the entirety of social life and the needs of its development,” he announced. It was “culture” that would produce a new society, not least by overcoming the old order: “Cultural goods serve to deepen the masses’ socialist consciousness, . . . to conquer darkness, superstition, the bourgeois and clerical legacy.”70 Culture was not confined to concert halls and galleries, but rather permeated daily life. It guided how one worked, dressed, socialized, relaxed—and consumed. On the ground in Kraków and Leipzig, culture departments had to reckon with a new role. What had long been the focus of their work— reviewing repertoires and organizing attendance—became only a subset of it, what Leipzig officials termed “artistic culture.”71 Alongside this,

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new tasks emerged: cultivating “a culture of work,” raising “the cultural level of interpersonal relations,” designing forms of “cultured entertainment.”72 The Leipzig City Council’s Culture Department, in fact, declared in 1962 that its main focus was no longer on Kultur but rather on “spiritual-cultural life,” a broad category that included “the socialist education of our workers, the constant raising of worker productivity, [and] the development of a socialist way of life.”73 The emphasis on productivity was not coincidental, for “culturedness” was also an economic tool. As in the Soviet Union’s five-year plans, it was supposed to raise factory output, since cultured workers would work harder and smarter. “Culture” was thus the key to socialist prosperity, the oil that greased the planned economy’s rusty gears. Cultured production made cultured consumerism possible. The task of teaching both fell principally to Houses of Culture. Handbooks for Polish functionaries stressed that “culture and economics are closely connected and interdependent,” so economic matters had to be at the forefront of a House of Culture’s programming.74 That entailed teaching “appropriate attitudes toward work tools and social goods”— in other words, toward both production and consumption. While lessons on shop-floor decorum were geared to the “working man,” those on consumption were directed toward women. One handbook laid out a model lecture course titled “My Home and I,” intended to help women “become actively involved . . . in economic processes.” Topics included “How to dress cheaply and aesthetically,” a presentation coupled with a fashion show; “I  am prettier every day,” accompanied by a demonstration of cosmetics products; and “We are making a family budget,” which taught responsible saving and spending.75 The course combined an emphasis on rational housekeeping with an embrace of individual desire. It encouraged consumers to make cultured choices, but also to appreciate and celebrate choice. All cultural institutions were meant to impart similar lessons, if not by talking about consumption then by modeling it. Theaters, cinemas, and museums presented dozens of options for consumers, each at a different price and of a different value. Choosing among them required budgeting, comparison shopping, and even paying on installment—for instance in the case of season subscriptions. As the East German culture minister Hans Bentzien observed, simply participating in cultural life fueled “the development of economic thinking.”76 Shopping for cultural goods was meant to train consumers to shop for material goods, but it also raised their expectations. The vast array

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Figure 10.  An exhibition of consumer goods at the Lenin Steel Mill’s House of Culture, Nowa Huta, June 1969. The visitor in the foreground carries an issue of the journal Opinions, published by the Internal Trade Ministry’s Bureau of Cooperation with Consumers. Kraków Historical Museum, photograph by Janusz Podlecki.

of cultural choices exceeded anything available in stores; easy access to Western films only highlighted the lack of Western products. It did not help that many films depicted seemingly unlimited abundance, both dazzling and infuriating viewers. Kraków officials worried that young people in particular would be “susceptible to the surface glitz of the capitalist world they see onscreen, [and] ready to believe it all in their naïveté.”77 Domestic programming was often little better: even the fashions on display in House of Culture courses were difficult for most consumers to attain. Cultured consumerism was consumerism nonetheless. The more officials taught the public how to shop, the more it wanted to do so.

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For many administrators, in fact, public desires began to seem like threats. The longtime head of Leipzig’s SED, Paul Fröhlich, warned that the proliferation of consumer goods was spreading a “consumer ideology” that encouraged “squandering” and placed excessive pressures on the GDR economy.78 His counterpart in Kraków, Zdzisław Kitliński, criticized the rise of a “consumer attitude to life” marked principally by passivity and selfishness.79 Consumer practices were out of officials’ control, and everybody knew it. Writing in 1963, a leading Polish sociologist concluded that “no efforts on the part of the mass media will be sufficient to shape the choices and judgments of the mass audience in the way that policy finds most desirable.”80 The growing emphasis on catering to the public’s wants made it that much harder to keep them in check, or even to critique them. In an increasingly consumer-centered climate, censorship became officials’ last line of defense.

Policing Choice Censorship was the precondition for cultured consumerism. If the consumer was king, or at least a model citizen, officials’ power over him was circumscribed. Culture departments no longer told him what to read, watch, or hear, and so all they could do instead was tell him what not to do. Censorship promised to draw the boundaries of appropriate behavior, giving consumers free rein but making sure they did not go too far. It was supposed to make consumerism innocuous by guaranteeing that all choices were equally safe, if not necessarily equal. By setting limits to consumers’ freedom, censorship allowed officials to embrace consumerism while keeping it in check. The only challenge was agreeing on those limits in the first place. Uniquely among Eastern Bloc states, East Germany did not have a formal censor’s office. This was a consequence of national traditions as well as Cold War competition: the Weimar constitution flatly declared that “no censorship will take place,” and East German authorities feared losing face by breaking with this precedent.81 Instead, they hid censorship within the cultural matrix, couching it as “planning,” “guidance,” and “advice.” All cultural administrators had to do double duty as censors in order to make sure that nothing untoward got through. Before reaching Leipzig, a foreign film needed approval from the GDR’s Foreign Trade Agency, the Association of People’s Own Film Enterprises, the Progress Film Company, the Ministry of Culture, a certification board, a repertoire committee, and the local culture department.82 Any

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one of these could demand edits or blacklist the film altogether. Even after a film got the green light, it could always be felled by a sudden decree from above: what the Leipzig author Erich Loest called “censorship from the highest darkness of anonymity.”83 The lack of a censor’s office, in short, did nothing to curb censorship itself. Ironically, it only raised the number of censors. Effective as it was, pervasive censorship was often problematic. Without clear rules or instructions, officials were forced to rely on their own judgment. In the case of theater censorship, Laura Bradley has found, they “worked mainly inductively, reading Party pronouncements, listening to guidelines at training events, and learning from production bans.”84 Inevitably, different officials disagreed, making state controls seem arbitrary and vindictive. Leipzig artists complained that local authorities were more restrictive than officials in Berlin, thanks partly to the influence of Alfred Kurella—the first director of the city’s Literature Institute and a longtime member of the SED Politburo. In 1965 Kurella suddenly took issue with a set of murals in the Hotel Germany, a showpiece project on Leipzig’s Karl Marx Square. Although the murals had gone through many rounds of review and even won praise from city officials, Kurella rebuked them as a “deformation,” leading the Leipzig District Council to condemn the whole project.85 Two years later, however, the noted hardliner intervened to save a controversial play at the Berliner Ensemble, run by his good friend Helene Weigel.86 In the absence of standardized censorship, personal opinion was government policy. East German controls enforced an abundance of caution, but they were also unpredictable and inconsistent. In Poland the tasks of censorship fell to one centralized body: the Main Office for the Control of Press, Publications, and Performances. The Office and its subsidiaries vetted all texts before they could be printed or performed. In 1969 its Kraków branch reviewed some 370,000 typewritten pages, or roughly 100 pages per censor per day.87 To guide censors, many of whom were poorly educated and untrained, the Office compiled a book of rules and suggestions; after being smuggled out by a disgruntled Kraków censor in 1977, it was published in London as The Black Book of Polish Censorship. The Black Book contained lists of authors who could not be published or even mentioned in print.88 However, it gave no advice on what a socialist text should look like or how much Western culture was too much. Such decisions were left to individual censors, who sometimes arrived at contradictory conclusions. Publishers liked to submit controversial books to censors in different districts,

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shopping around for the most favorable reviews. As in East Germany, personal contacts were the best guarantee of success. “To appeal a [local censor’s] decision, I would immediately take a train or plane to Warsaw, where I’d settle the matter with the director of the Press Department,” one Kraków journalist recalled.89 Even a centralized bureaucracy could be erratic and disorganized. In Poland as in East Germany, the rules of censorship were often in the eye of the beholder. That inconsistency was rooted in National Communism itself. Because it had to take the public’s tastes and wishes into account, the program of National Communism could not be set entirely from above.90 Governing required interfacing with the public, Kraków administrators explained, “not centrally ordained schematics as before.”91 Even follow­ing orders involved improvisation and initiative, since orders had to be  adapted to the local context. To implement directives in the most fruitful way, officials had to know the people over whom they ruled and tailor their methods accordingly. That meant relying heavily on their intuition, with predictably chaotic results. “Individual party members and even whole party organizations differ enormously in their assessments of ideological-artistic value because they have no yardstick to go by,” Kraków’s KW lamented in 1967. “They fail to compare their opinions to others’ and attribute ‘party-mindedness’ to their own particular ambitions and conceptions.”92 Even censors were guided by their own conceptions of the public: what viewers would respond to, where they would read between the lines, which topics might provoke unrest. Because it aimed to control popular reactions, censorship was ultimately dependent on them. Consumer behavior could force officials to rethink all regulations—as Leipzig administrators learned firsthand.

Is the Film So Dangerous? In August 1963 more than forty Leipzig officials gathered in city hall to discuss one film: The Magnificent Seven (US 1960, GDR 1963), the first American western released in the GDR. The blockbuster starred Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, and Yul Brynner as gunslingers hired to protect a Mexican village from bandits. Despite disappointing returns in the United States, it proved a smash hit in Europe, especially behind the Iron Curtain. Tomasz Strzyżewski, the Kraków censor who carried the Black Book of Polish Censorship to the West, called it his favorite movie and modeled himself on Bronson.93 East Germany’s film distribution

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office was only slightly less enthusiastic, giving The Magnificent Seven a staggered release designed to maximize attendance. By the time the movie came to Leipzig, it had already played in seven of the GDR’s fifteen districts and become the year’s top-grossing film.94 Anticipating massive profits, loudspeaker vans circled the city on opening night, while the suburb of Taucha organized a massive outdoor screening. By the following day The Magnificent Seven ran in six Leipzig cinemas at once and brought in close to a thousand viewers per show.95 It looked like a rousing success, a perfect fulfillment of officials’ public promise to “do right by viewers’ needs.”96 Immediately, though, alarming reports began pouring in. Observers noted that “crowds of youths thronged to the cinemas,” causing “tumult at the box office.”97 Because ushers did not dare turn them away, hundreds of people sat in the aisles. The Magnificent Seven turned out to be too popular, so much so that viewers got rowdy and stopped behav­ ing like socialist citizens. That was what prompted the forty-­person meet­ ing, which brought together members of the City and District Councils, SED representatives, Free German Youth (FDJ) functionaries, artists, and even local factory directors.98 In light of the film’s boisterous reception, these men—and they were all men—had to decide whether it was in fact appropriate to screen. It did not matter that the film had been approved by higher-ups, or that it had already played for more than a month across the GDR. None of the participants so much as mentioned the authorities in Berlin, but they referred constantly to the reactions of the Leipzig public. These offered proof positive that the film could produce ill effects, forcing local officials to reassess its value. Even central decrees had to be judged by their results, and by those closest to the situation. Within minutes, it became clear that the officials did not see eye to eye. Some argued that the film was filled with dangerous ideas, spreading a capitalist, antihumanist worldview. Its heroes, after all, were churlish bandits, concerned exclusively with profit and contemptuous of all rules. The film’s Mexican farmers, meanwhile, seemed not only helpless but also grateful to the Americans for protection—“just the opposite of reality,” as one writer observed. Other speakers found more to like, including the film’s critique of Western racism and its “clean,” “refined” love scenes. Besides, did not the cowboys help those in need, as good socialists should? Like any work of art, The Magnificent Seven could be read in contrasting ways, which made it difficult to judge. “How does one even evaluate a film by its content?” asked Armin Kuckhoff, the

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director of Leipzig’s Theater Academy. The answer, several speakers suggested, was to look beyond art’s content and consider its impact on society. “I cannot say that the film has such and such a percentage of humanism,” argued a district-level SED official, Arthur Möbius; “what matters is how it works on people.” But what impact did The Magnificent Seven really have? Two FDJ functionaries suggested that it undermined their task: “We’ve long fought against [Western] comics, and now you bring us this film, .  .  . which does nothing to help our education efforts.” Other speakers worried that it might cultivate Western fashions or whitewash American imperialism, but several were more sanguine. Kuckhoff pointed out that Leipzig youths already watched Western TV, which was suffused with far more problematic content. At least GDR cinemas could make some money off the film, allowing them to subsidize worthier productions. Numerous participants also acknowledged that The Magnificent Seven was actually quite fun, unlike so many movies from the Eastern Bloc. “There is a real need for entertainment and adventure films,” one SED functionary explained, “and nothing like that in the socialist camp.” The film’s social value, in other words, turned out to be just as ambiguous as its content: it risked promoting Western culture, to be sure, but also satisfied the public’s desires. In the absence of definitive criteria, speakers kept circling back to audience response. The FDJ functionaries illustrated their concerns by pointing to local teenagers, who had already internalized the movie’s moral code: “They ask each other, will you fight like a cowboy or struggle through life like a farmer?” Such comments suggested that The Magnificent Seven was too dangerous to show because it evidently corrupted socialist sensibilities. Other officials, however, cited conflicting information from their own experience. “When we spoke with viewers, they showed a healthy attitude toward the film,” Möbius claimed. “Many were discussing race problems [in the United States], and they weren’t exactly our most progressive citizens.” These were impressionistic observations, not based on polls or other scientific data, and it is impossible to know if they were based in fact. What is clear, though, is that officials used them to support their arguments, marshaling the public’s responses as evidence. State functionaries did not always aim to serve consumers, whose tastes and practices could be grounds for alarm. They did, however, pay attention to consumers, even behind closed doors, and judged state policy by popular reactions.

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After several hours of debate, Leipzig officials decided that they needed more evidence. “Is the film so dangerous that we can’t screen it? I  don’t think so,” argued Helmut Häussler, vice chairman of the District Council. “We can try it out, though for a shorter period of time than originally intended.” The Magnificent Seven played through the rest of week before being gradually phased out of circulation. In Taucha, though, its unexpected removal caused a stir, as disappointed moviegoers confronted cinema employees. “If you won’t show the film, we won’t go to the elections!” someone yelled. “If you won’t show the film, then bring in the harvest yourselves!” These comments portrayed access to Western movies as a right, and even part of an implicit social contract. They framed consumerism as an essential element of socialism, the precondition for both economic success and political stability. Other voices reminded cinema staff that they had other options: “We’ll just have to redirect our antennas toward Western television!” one man threatened. “Go watch your East German movies on your own!” Consumerism was not just a demand but a reality: amid the growing range of entertainment choices, viewers no longer depended on officials’ choice of films. They felt empowered to demand what they wanted and even to threaten officials when those demands went unmet. For Häussler and his colleagues, this overt challenge to authority was all the evidence they needed. On August  19 the city SED Committee concluded that it was wrong to show The Magnificent Seven “because it complicates and therefore harms our educational work.”99 While Leipzig teenagers’ responses may have been ambiguous, the Taucha demonstrations testified to the unbridled, unbecoming passions that The Magnificent Seven could provoke. Armed with this proof, the same officials who had approved the film a week earlier concluded that “its release in our Republic is not correct.”100 Häussler not only pulled the movie from Leipzig cinemas but also contacted the Ministry of Culture to suggest a total ban. Remarkably, the ministry agreed, overturning its own earlier decision on the suggestion of a provincial administrator. Public reaction in one Leipzig suburb trumped multiple levels of official approval, six weeks of screenings, and over 3.1 million tickets sold. Amid all the debate over The Magnificent Seven, what is perhaps most striking is what went unsaid. Officials never questioned whether it was right to import movies from the United States or to show them for a profit. Both cultural pluralism and material interest had become accepted as matters of course: it was perfectly legitimate for East Germans

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to pursue their desires and for state institutions to profit from them. It was up to censorship to keep these desires in check, and in one sense the system worked exactly as intended. Despite The Magnificent Seven’s immense popularity, censors proved willing and able to ban it after it caused unrest, constricting both the public’s right to choose and the cinemas’ imperative to profit. And yet the process demonstrated the centrality of consumerism, even for communist policymaking. In dis­cussing the film, Leipzig officials acknowledged that they lacked the standards to evaluate it—and furthermore, that they could not rely on higher-ups’ evaluations. It was the public that determined whether The Magnificent Seven was fit to screen, no matter how state functionaries judged it. Consumers did not always get their way, but their choices still guided government policy.

Trojan Horses In principle, the scrutiny that applied to Western films did not extend to Eastern Bloc productions. All imports from the West carried potential risk as products of a capitalist world that was ideologically foreign and inherently suspect. The Bloc, by contrast, was designed as a safe socialist space, one in which “brotherly exchange” would amplify each country’s own resources. Of course one brother stood above the rest, especially in the Stalinist era. An early slogan of the German-Soviet Friendship Society put it best: “To learn from the Soviet Union is to learn to win.”101 After 1956, however, many East European states distanced themselves from the Soviet model, embracing a National Communism that was defined in part through difference from the USSR. Others, like East Germany, began to feel that the Soviet Union had distanced itself from them, and even from principles of communism. The more Eastern Bloc states worked to appease their publics, the more their policies diverged. Consumerism pushed communist regimes further apart, transforming “brotherly exchange” into a dangerous business. Anti-Soviet sentiment exploded under Gomułka’s regime, which played up its independence from Big Brother. In Kraków, membership in the Polish-Soviet Friendship Society plunged by 90  percent, while the concrete star in front of its headquarters was torn down.102 Yet anti-Soviet sentiment was also a threat to Gomułka’s reforms, since his position depended on Moscow’s approval. Polish officials thus found themselves having to censor Soviet texts out of a fear that they could sow mistrust or anger. This was a new and unexpected challenge, Kraków

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censors observed: “We had assumed that everything that appeared in the Soviet Union could be reprinted in our country without reservations.”103 They took out many references to Stalin’s misdeeds, lest these inspire fresh calls for a full reckoning. They also excised anything that might upset a deeply Catholic society, even a line from Alexander Blok’s classic poem “The Twelve,” written in the midst of the Russian Revolution: “Freedom, freedom, yeah, yeah, without the cross!”104 Soviet culture, it turned out, was not just unpopular but destabilizing. By highlighting the mutability of communist visions, imports from the USSR threatened to undermine faith in Gomułka’s new order. East Germany, on the other hand, turned toward Soviet culture after 1956, seeing it as a bulwark against “revisionist” tendencies. “Soviet art and policy will always set the direction for our own work,” Leipzig’s SED officials declared in October 1957, right before launching the Socialist Cultural Revolution.105 Yet they soon learned that even Soviet works could not always be trusted. In February  1962 a delegation of Leipzig painters visited the All-Union Art Exhibition in Moscow, a show of recent art from across the USSR. It left the visitors in shock: “We were struck by modernist influences and manifestations of symbolism,” the group’s leader wrote in his report back home. The only works they liked came from the show’s Ukrainian pavilion, which their young Soviet guide dismissed as “particularly conservative and old-fashioned.” While the visitors conceded that a certain degree of “innovation” could be useful, they worried that their Soviet colleagues had abandoned the principles of Socialist Realism, “throwing out the baby with the bathwater.”106 This was particularly alarming because it threatened to blur the line between East and West. Far from a source of inspiration, Soviet culture had become a liability, smuggling Western decadence in through the back door. The Leipzig painters saw it as a kind of Trojan Horse, all the more damaging for being deceptive. And yet the Soviet Union remained East Germany’s chief ally and avowed model. That was why a selection of works from the All-Union Art Exhibition came to Leipzig that summer for a show entitled “Soviet Art.” To prove their loyalty to the USSR, city officials recruited nearly thirty thousand viewers, a record for an exhibition of contemporary art. Many of those viewers, though, reacted with “amazement,” questioning why “the Soviet Union would organize a show of abstract works.”107 Leipzig artists were especially surprised: one writer even wondered if the USSR had “deviated from the line of the socialist camp.”108 Cultural

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officials tried to walk a fine line, explaining that “our artists should reject such manifestations of abstract art and orient themselves toward the many positive and fruitful examples of art in the USSR, which still have a great deal to teach them.”109 Still, Leipzig painters pressed on: “If such things are happening in the Soviet Union, then why is the GDR being so stubborn?” “Why doesn’t East Germany allow any modernist art, unlike other socialist states?”110 Artists seized on the Soviet model to argue for East German reform. Just as in Poland, Soviet imports threatened to upend national conventions. Nor could Leipzig officials count on other socialist states, least of all their neighbor to the east. After 1956 they often warned of “harmful tendencies” in Polish culture and even questioned whether it remained socialist at all.111 Hans Michael Richter, the chief dramaturge at the STL, wrote in 1964 that “geographical and ideological concepts have become misaligned”: the East was no longer synonymous with socialism, nor the West with capitalism. Many Western plays, Richter maintained, were actually “closer” to East German culture than those from Poland. As evidence, he cited the recent play Inkarno by Kazimierz Brandys—a comedy set in a psychiatric ward—“whose lack of contact with socialist reality produces a poorly written, convoluted nothingness.”112 When Inkarno played in Kraków, The People’s Tribune—the press organ of the PZPR Central Committee—called it “sensational fun” and added, “there’s no need to search in it for philosophical or psychological depth.”113 Clearly, notions of “good socialist fun” diverged in Poland and East Germany and often contradicted each other. As policy became more focused on consumers, it began to vary widely from country to country and even from case to case. That made it practically impossible to define a socialist culture or to distinguish it from culture in the West. Six months after the Konsument department store opened in Leipzig, the Polish Information and Culture Center moved in next door. Designed to foster “brotherly exchange,” it put on cultural events like concerts and movie screenings and also ran a gift shop selling Polish posters, books, and records. While the events were sparsely attended, the gift shop was always full: in 1973 it counted half a million visits, or one for every resident of Leipzig. Officials praised its “effective, decorative window displays,” but the real draw were LPs of Western bands put out by Poland’s state-run Muza label. Western recordings were hard to come by in the GDR, so fans sometimes lined up outside the center’s doors for hours, prompting complaints from Leipzig administrators.

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“They gave us to understand—in a very careful way—that this propaganda of Western music was not in the interest of their cultural policy,” the center reported to Warsaw.114 Yet there was little Leipzig administrators could do, since the center did not receive East German funds. Its staff was understandably more focused on sales targets set by Polish authorities, who treated it primarily as a source of revenue.115 Much like the Konsument next door, the Polish Information and Culture Center was driven by public demand. Although they disagreed over cultural policy, Polish and GDR officials found common ground in catering to consumers. In an influential 1976 book, the literary scholar Vera Dunham argued that the late Stalin regime had struck a kind of social contract with its subjects, what she called a “Big Deal.”116 Using dozens of popular novels published in the first years after World War II, she traced a growing focus on material comfort rather than struggle and ideological commitment, the values that had animated early Soviet fiction. Dunham concluded that the Soviet state was bribing its own people, trading prosperity for obedience and buying social peace. She saw this as a largely cynical bargain: by caving to the public’s “middle-class values,” the Soviet government gained stability but sacrificed its revolutionary goals. Gaining stability was even more imperative for Eastern Europe’s communist regimes, which faced mass protests in 1953 and 1956. In the GDR as in Poland, demonstrators had called for higher living standards above all, and both states’ spending on consumption, which increased soon after, was certainly intended to appease them. Yet this “consumer turn,” as scholars often call it, was more than a reluctant concession. It also reflected a new vision of rule, one that framed the public as consumers. For Eastern Bloc regimes, the newfound focus on consumption was an attempt to draw the public into government structures. Consuming meant engaging with the state, not only in stores but also in cinemas, theaters, clubs, and—thanks to the spread of television—even in the home. By offering variety and choice in cultural affairs, officials aimed to reach all members of society, no matter their tastes and habits. By satisfying the public’s cultural wants, they hoped to demonstrate that they deserved its trust, even if they could not yet satisfy all its material desires. Cultural spaces were meant to preview the emerging world of socialist prosperity and also to teach East Europeans how to consume correctly. Within the state-run cultural matrix, officials sought to inculcate a “cultured” consumerism, one that encouraged individuals

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Figure 11.  Leipzig youths peruse the offerings of the Polish Culture and Information Center, February 1977. More than 400 Polish LPs were available for sale, some featuring Western musical acts. Bundesarchiv, photograph by Waltraud Grubitzsch.

to find themselves through shopping—for goods, experiences, and identities—but also helped them find their place in socialist society. Like National Communism more broadly, the Eastern Bloc’s consumer turn aimed to involve the public in public affairs. By catering to individuals’ personalities and desires, communist leaders hoped to bind them to the state. Yet catering to individuals empowered them, to an extent that threatened the leaders’ control. Once they gained access to Western films, viewers demanded more and even rioted when officials tried to ban one. Once they could choose what plays and concerts to attend, they stayed away from the most edifying, politically valuable works. The more programming officials put on, the more the public wanted; instead of being grateful for their new TVs, East Europeans asked for better shows. The state’s attention to consumer wants only encouraged consumers

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to express them, opening up a public sphere that officials could not ignore. Listening to the public, or at least monitoring its behavior, became a key part of administrators’ jobs. To promote consumption, and hence engagement with the state, they always had to pay attention to consumers and take their attitudes into account. This did not mean that the public got whatever it wanted, but rather that it influenced whatever it got. Even central decrees had to be adjusted to local conditions, and even censorship evolved in light of changing tastes. Once policy was geared toward consumers, they gained a say in making it. Officials could no longer govern on their own. As they adapted to consumers’ expectations, officials found themselves in an unfamiliar, disorienting world. American films played in cinemas and on TV, while movies from the Bloc had to be censored. The West was not always a threat and was sometimes even a model; the Soviet Union was not always a model and was sometimes even a threat. To make ends meet, theaters avoided ideological themes in favor of escapist entertainment. To meet the plan, department stores lured shoppers with bright lights and urged them to spend. The consumer turn scrambled socialism’s coordinates, making it difficult to know what was acceptable and what was not. Socialism did not have to be anticommercialist, anti-individualist, or anti-Western; simple dichotomies no longer applied. Increasingly, officials struggled to say what socialism even was, since they could not define it by themselves. Consumers played a major role in shaping socialist culture, socialist economics, and socialist censorship—and they increasingly expected to shape socialist politics too.

Ch a p ter 6

Reform The Promise and Peril of Controlled Revolt

I don’t consider [rock and roll] to be the greatest form of club activity, by any means. But what can you do if young people want it? —Jacek Żukowski, Nowa Huta journalist, 19581 If Friedrich Engels heard this music, he would get very upset. —Rudolf Mehmel, head of the Leipzig District Council’s Culture Department, 19582

Twenty minutes into Jerzy Passendorfer’s musical comedy Big Beat (Poland 1966), a shy, bespectacled bureaucrat finds himself performing at a rock concert. Kuba, a humble factory inspector, is about to wed his girlfriend Majka when a young blonde appears and slaps him in the face. It turns out that she has mistaken Kuba for her boyfriend, the famous rocker Johnny Tomala, to whom he bears an uncanny resemblance. To prove that he did nothing untoward, Kuba sets out to locate Johnny, but he is nowhere to be found. With help from his friend, a TV producer, he decides to impersonate Johnny at a televised rock concert. There is really nothing to it, the producer explains. Kuba takes off his glasses, puts on a long-haired wig, takes a few swigs from a flask, and struts around the stage, lip-syncing to a prerecorded rock song. The crowd goes wild. Majka is convinced, but suddenly becomes more interested in Johnny. Luckily, Johnny’s girlfriend has soured on his antics and falls in love with the dependable, hard-working, honest Kuba. In the film’s last scene, the bureaucrat casts off his wig instead of going onstage and runs off with the woman who loves him for who he is. Big Beat was Poland’s first rock musical, with a soundtrack by some of the country’s most popular bands. At the same time, it is full of ambivalence about rock and roll, and even outright derision. Kuba can neither sing nor play guitar but becomes a star thanks to canny marketing. His

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adoring fans cannot tell real from fake and bop along to anything the producers give them. The irony, of course, was that Big Beat was part of the same mass-culture industry it mocked and actually did turn its musical performers into stars. What it told viewers, though, was to choose substance over shine: it was OK to enjoy rock and roll so long as one did not become entranced with Johnny’s messy hair, cowboy boots, or bolo tie. The well-dressed, well-mannered bands that played backup—and actually sang all the songs—exemplified a suitably socialist form of rock, what Polish officials called “big beat.” As much as the film ridiculed Johnny and his producers, it also celebrated the country’s burgeoning big-beat scene. “Sing to your heart’s content. . . . He who sings does not err,” the master of ceremonies tells the crowd, and the film’s audience, before Kuba first takes the stage.3 The televised concert was in fact part of a real music competition, “Microphone for All,” that encouraged Polish youths to try their hand at guitar music. Even a Johnny Tomala was welcome to sing—but the film urged viewers to reject him all the same. By the time Big Beat came out, Warsaw wits described the regime’s policy on rock as “controlled revolt.”4 Officials were clearly a bit uncomfortable: accepting rock meant sanctioning behavior of which they disapproved. There was no getting around the fact that rock was cool because it was Western and so unlike the music that officials had championed for so long. But that was precisely the reason to promote it. Rock served as a revolt for people, especially young people, who were particularly susceptible to revolting. If the regime could only keep it under control—by organizing state-run competitions, vetting MCs, making films about “good” and “bad” types of rock—then it could help young people express themselves while gaining their trust and support. Like Kuba, officials could learn to be hip without changing their stripes. By loosening up a little, donning a wig, and playing along, even buttonedup bureaucrats would turn into rock stars, adored by legions of fans. They would win over those like Johnny’s girlfriend, who was attracted to the glitz of rock and roll but gradually learned to see through it. And in the end, they would be loved for who they really were, cropped hair, glasses, and all. The whole project of National Communism was in effect a controlled revolt. It involved letting the people speak—having a “Microphone for All”—without allowing their demands to spiral out of the party’s grasp. Officials had to show a willingness to listen, admit mistakes, and change their ways. They actively encouraged some debate,

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inviting the public to weigh in on matters of policy, yet also sought to set its terms and limits. The plan was to let people blow off steam while keeping one hand firmly on the valve; in creating a circumscribed public sphere, officials hoped to use it to their advantage. Rock and roll was one such circumscribed sphere, in which young people could express a longing for the West. Contemporary literature was another: permitting writers to address real social ills was meant to force a contained reckoning with the past, deflecting criticism from current affairs. In both cases controlled revolt promised to give communist regimes new life by winning over their biggest skeptics. But in the end it proved impossible to control—and when a cultural rebellion broke out, political upheaval was not far behind.

Settling Accounts For Polish artists, National Communism brought a measure of relief from the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR) and its demands. Yet it also offered new freedoms for the party: the freedom to transform its program, to criticize the Soviet model, and to start anew. These were the main goals of the Kraków People’s Theater, which opened in Nowa Huta in December 1955. By then the party’s program of cultural mass work was fast becoming obsolete, and so the theater never put on the Socialist Realist plays for which it had been built. Instead it embraced a more experimental approach, led by the director Jerzy Krasowski and the set designer Józef Szajna. Though barely over thirty, both men were longtime party members who believed that theater could modernize the party’s message. “The rising Nowa Huta was a place that demanded entirely new methods,” Szajna recalled; “we knew that our viewers were seeing theater for the first time, and so we had to attack them with something new and unexpected.”5 The People’s Theater offered a blank slate—a chance to remake theater from the ground up without the weight of tradition or Stalinist baggage. It was to be a new socialist stage for a new socialist city. The theater’s first contemporary play premiered in October 1957, at the start of its third season. The Names of Power was the stage debut of Jerzy Broszkiewicz, a thirty-five-year-old journalist and party member who had chronicled the Polish October for the Warsaw press. His play was an extension of this work, exploring the interplay of truth and power in three epochs. Act one takes place in ancient Rome, where the ruthless and pragmatic consul Claudius tries to persuade his democratic

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colleague Quintus to resign. Claudius then reveals that Quintus has already been declared a traitor and sentenced to death—a verdict with clear echoes of Stalinist show trials. The next act jumps ahead to Habsburg Spain, tracking a struggle to succeed its longtime dictator, King Philip. Surprisingly, the king’s first choice is his nemesis, Prince Juan, who is brought out of prison but refuses to accept the crown: “Receiving power from your hands, I would lose all my purity, would cease to be the hope of the unhappy and the wise.”6 He too is condemned to die, while the crown passes to the meek and talentless Prince Philip. The final act is set in an unnamed contemporary prison, where prisoner number 114 encounters his former accuser, the recently arrested number 20,000. We learn that 114 was sentenced for not firing on hungry workers—an obvious allusion to the Poznań protests—and that all those arrested since have been detained as his co-conspirators. While the two men confront each other, a guard arrives to let them go: a crowd has gathered outside, calling for 114’s release. “The people have lost patience,” number 114’s cellmate tells him, and now demand “unfettered freedom of thought and action.”7 Both viewers and reviewers picked up the parallels to recent politics. “Broszkiewicz’s play is the first manifestation of October in contemporary Polish drama,” wrote a critic for the Kraków-based magazine Literary Life. “It recapitulates all the opinions, experiences, and hopes of the past few months, . . . enabling an emotional confrontation with current affairs.” Indeed, audience members loudly applauded number 114’s release, “since they surmised correctly that this was a reference to Gomułka.”8 The Names of Power was both cathartic and didactic, celebrating the eventual triumph of truth over power. The theater’s staging was designed to stress this point: the same actor portrayed Quintus, Juan, and number 114, linking their stories into one narrative of righteous perseverance. After years, even centuries, of oppression, popular protest at the prison gates had finally broken the circle. Backed by true popular support, number 114—and, by extension, Gomułka—could overcome the rule of power and harness the power of truth. The Names of Power was part of a literary movement known as literatura rozrachunkowa—literally, a “literature of settling accounts.” It was a way of coming to terms with the Stalinist past, but it also raised present-day problems. In each of Broszkiewicz’s three acts, those who have power refuse to relinquish it, attacking every rival and stifling all dissent. While the names of power change, its operation remains constant and consistently hostile to truth. Broszkiewicz’s critique of past abuses thus

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raised difficult questions about contemporary leaders. This was a fundamental ambiguity of Eastern Bloc reform: whatever its intent, any critique of the socialist past cast doubt on the socialist present. If the party had been wrong before, it could be wrong again; if one aspect of the system needed changing, then perhaps others did too. Reform was a slippery slope, threatening to undo not only socialism’s mistakes but also its foundations. Constructive criticism slipped easily into subversion. After the Polish October, officials constantly had to distinguish between the two and often varied in their judgments. Kraków’s Provincial Party Committee (KW) praised the People’s Theater for its “strong engagement in our social and national life,” but also criticized it for “portraying questions of rule in a mythologized way.”9 It chose The Names of Power for the theater’s first foreign trip, to Paris in 1958, then substituted another play at the last minute.10 This pattern characterized much of Poland’s cultural life in the late 1950s as both artists and officials reckoned with the meaning of National Communism. Dozens of new initiatives were unexpectedly shut down, leaving ideologically committed artists disillusioned and prompting some to leave the party. It is tempting to view this as a concerted rollback of the October reforms, or even proof that they were “something of a fake.”11 But occasional crackdowns were really part and parcel of reform—a way for officials to influence a cultural sphere that they no longer directed. They reflected contestation over the meaning of socialist culture at a time when the party could not define it alone. Artists played leading roles in this contestation, including Polish artists living abroad. One prominent example was the émigré writer Sławomir Mrożek, whose play Tango appeared at Kraków’s Old Theater in 1966. Born in 1930, Mrożek became an enthusiastic communist who joined a youth brigade in Nowa Huta and signed a letter in support of the Kraków Curia Trial. However, he broke with the party over the slow pace of Gomułka’s reforms and left for the West in 1963. Despite this, Tango appeared in the theater journal Dialog the following year and was taken up by nine Polish theaters during the 1965/66 season alone. Set in a rundown country house that stands for contemporary Poland, the play described a grotesque atmosphere of moral decay. “No order, no sense of reality, no decency, no initiative. You can’t move in this place, you can’t breathe, you can’t live!” laments Artur, the main character.12 He yearns to restore the house to its old glory, but his one plan—marrying his cousin—falls apart when the rest of the family refuses to cooperate. While Artur sulks, the family’s old butler takes control. A  crude and

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simple man, the butler is unconcerned with big ideas and therefore able to assert his will. After killing Artur in the play’s last scene, he forces Artur’s uncle to dance the titular tango. “I submit to brute force,” the uncle mutters, “but I’ll despise him in my heart.”13 Even more explicitly than The Names of Power, Tango spoke about communist Poland’s social and political ills.14 Reviewers did not hide this fact: “The play touches on . . . the reality that surrounds us,” the critic Jerzy Bober wrote, illuminating “a world of shams and half-truths.” He saw it as a call to action. “Tango warns us not to dance mindlessly to any random tune dictated by suspect organ-grinders.”15 Before and after the Gomułka era, both Mrożek’s play and Bober’s statement might have been taken as political attacks, but the program of National Communism created space for social critique—even coming from abroad. The KW’s Culture Department actually praised “sharply political” plays like Mrożek’s while criticizing escapist entertainment. “Such works are often contentious, but never irrelevant or indifferent,” it wrote in a 1968 assessment; “they make for the most interesting productions, because they are the most unsettling and because they seek out contact with contemporary viewers.”16 Tango certainly fit the bill, running for nearly three hundred soldout shows. It vanished from the stage only in the fall of 1968 after its author publicly criticized the Eastern Bloc’s invasion of Czechoslovakia.17 Mrożek’s experience was not unusual. Artists enjoyed a certain leeway for political expression, but only within works of art: whenever their critiques threatened to transcend the cultural sphere, state functionaries grew concerned. Such was the case with the Letter of 34, an open protest against censorship signed by thirty-four writers and academics in March 1964. The signatories, including three UJ professors and the editor of Kraków’s leading Catholic journal, framed their protest in the language of Gomułka’s reforms: “The undersigned believe that public opinion, the right to criticize, free discussion, and substantive information are necessary elements of progress. Moved by civic concern, we demand changes in Polish cultural policy.”18 They submitted their letter to Prime Minister Józef Cyrankiewicz, who received them in his office and accepted that they had sent it “in good faith.”19 He even promised to create more lines of communication between writers and the state but took issue with the one they had chosen. As an open letter, their petition had made its way to the West, where it was picked up by “hostile propaganda . . . damaging to Poland.”20 That, Cyrankiewicz argued, transformed it from constructive criticism into a destructive attack and brought its signatories under fire.

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The publicity around the Letter of 34 pressured the PZPR to reassert control, but also insulated signatories from the harshest retribution. The official response thus focused less on the petition itself than on the way it had been smuggled out of Poland.21 Polish authorities arrested one signatory for publishing under a pseudonym in an émigré journal, and another for criticizing communism in letters to his daughter in the United States. Most of the thirty-four received less visible forms of punishment: some were banned from appearing in print, prevented from traveling abroad, or—as in the case of the UJ art historian Karol Estreicher, Jr.—passed over for promotion. In the retrospective narrative of Poland’s “road to freedom,” they figure as martyrs and pioneers of anticommunist struggle.22 In the context of the Gomułka era, however, the Letter of 34 exemplifies the challenges and contradictions of reform. It was Gomułka’s policies that made the letter possible by heralding a National Communism and inviting the nation to weigh in. Some signatories did in fact aim to improve the communist system, while others sought only to mitigate its impact. In addressing the state directly, though, they showed a faith that they could influence state policy. For the PZPR, however, the Letter of 34 exacerbated the tension between accommodating a public sphere and maintaining its own leading role. Polish officials struggled to define the limits of acceptable critique, especially amid the Cold War’s propaganda battles, and they were not alone.

The Literature of Arrival One month before the People’s Theater opened in Nowa Huta, the Johannes R. Becher Literature Institute began work in Leipzig. It, too, aimed to develop a new and improved socialist culture, but this meant something different in East Germany than in Poland. The institute’s mission was to train fighters for socialism through courses on MarxismLeninism, Soviet literature, and cultural policy.23 All students promised to “consistently apply the methods of Socialist Realism, to combat manifestations of decadent ‘modernism,’ ” and “to unmask [enemy] agents and hand them over to state organs.”24 There was no room in this vision for “settling accounts,” since the Socialist Unity Party (SED) did not like to acknowledge past mistakes. Rather than critiquing state power, the institute was meant to function as its mouthpiece, teaching young writers to internalize and carry out the party’s program.

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Part of this program was increasing popular engagement, a goal that formed the basis of the Bitterfeld Way. At the Bitterfeld conference in 1959, Walter Ulbricht repeated his call for a “socialist national culture” with an organic connection between art and life. While workers “stormed the heights of culture” by engaging in amateur art circles, professional artists were meant to draw inspiration from factory life.25 All institute students spent several weeks a year working directly on the shop floor, as did many established writers across the GDR. In the process, they confronted men and women who were often tired, hungry, lazy, and unhappy—completely unlike the eager musclemen of Socialist Realist lore. That was in fact what officials intended: to truly reach and influence the public, they insisted, writers needed to get to know it as it was, with all its challenges and complexities. The institute’s teaching materials stressed that East Germans were diverse, and so it was essential to explore, not hide, their different personalities.26 They also urged writers to focus on real-life problems that ordinary people knew firsthand rather than staging abstract battles between good and evil. Literature needed to show not just the glorious future but also the difficult present, becoming more relatable to readers and guiding them at the same time. While it remained a tool of socialist construction, it had to be a compass rather than a hammer. The new literary style came to be called the “literature of arrival,” after the title of Brigitte Reimann’s novel Arrival in the Everyday. Published in 1961 and inspired by the Bitterfeld conference, the novel follows three high school graduates as they begin work at a coal-processing plant. Reimann herself had volunteered at such a plant, and her account drew on her own experience and observations. The three main heroes— Recha, Curt, and Nikolaus—are wholly unprepared for the reality of their job, which turns out to be much harder, grimier, and less heroic than they had expected. Put off by this “arrival in the everyday,” they start to doubt whether they can keep going, and Curt at one point even packs his bags. Yet in the book’s last chapter he returns, deciding not to betray his duty and his friends. Recha, who feels the same doubts, sums up their emotions: “I’m fickle, impatient, and afraid, [but] this time I don’t want to stop halfway or turn around like a coward.”27 Reimann’s characters are three-dimensional figures with distinct personalities and flaws, yet in the end they overcome their reservations in service of the common good. The novel is a Bildungsroman of socialist becoming, in which the three heroes finally “arrive” as East German citizens. It both

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departs from formulaic Stalinist novels and recapitulates their message, only in more compelling, relatable ways. Arrival in the Everyday won a prestigious prize from the Free German Trade Union Federation, inspiring more GDR authors to take up contemporary themes. Over the next half decade, prominent writers like Christa Wolf and Erik Neutsch published works that would have been banned a few years earlier for touching on real social problems in the GDR. Wolf ’s Divided Heaven (1963) told the story of two lovers, Rita and Manfred, who were separated by the Berlin Wall, leading Rita to attempt suicide. Neutsch’s Trace of Stones (1964) revealed the painful process of collectivization, the chaos on a state construction site, and even a party functionary hiding an affair. Both books played on the idea of authenticity, raising issues that had long been taboo in order to win the readers’ trust. A lyric preface to the film adaptation of Trace of Stones (GDR 1966) put it best: “There’s no lying here! Nor distortion; that’s clear. / There’s nothing here stylish; no glossy polish! / Here, life is coarse and open to view, / It’s crazy and true, crazy and true!”28 Like Reimann, both Wolf and Neutsch sought to affirm their readers’ faith in the SED. The problems they laid out were always overcome, showing that socialism was not perfect but perfectible so long as everyone joined in and played their part.29 The party actively encouraged a certain level of critique as a way to build good will and foster popular participation, not only after the Berlin Wall went up but as part of the program of National Communism. Like the PZPR, however, it quickly discovered that even well-meaning critique was always a double-edged sword. The text that most alarmed party authorities was “Fairground” (Rummelplatz), a chapter from a manuscript by the Leipzig writer Werner Bräunig that appeared in New German Literature in October 1965. Bräunig’s own life story reads like a novel of arrival. The son of a Nazi war criminal, Bräunig became involved with the black market after World War II, when he was barely a teenager.30 He shuttled between East and West Germany for several years, working odd jobs while trading on the side, until he was arrested in the GDR in 1953 and sentenced to three years in prison. Remarkably, Bräunig emerged from his detention a changed man: he threw himself into organizational work with the Free German Youth, joined the SED, and began writing articles for his factory newspaper. This caught the attention of the GDR Writers’ Union, which was actively recruiting working-class talent. It sent Bräunig to study at the Literature Institute in 1958, and just a year later chose him to exemplify the “writing worker” at the Bitterfeld conference.31 “Pick

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up your quill, buddy,” Bräunig urged attendees on the first day. “Write about your life, what’s close to you.”32 He himself did just that, embarking on a major novel about the Wismut uranium mines where he had worked before his arrest, and where he then interned during his time at the institute. Provisionally titled Iron Curtain, Bräunig’s book centered on four protagonists, all born around 1930, who struggle to find their way in a divided Germany. Volume one, which Bräunig nearly completed, covered the years 1949 to 1953, while a planned second volume would have brought the story into the 1960s. It was a coming-of-age tale of a whole generation, depicting the birth, growth, and “arrival” of the GDR. Several chapters of the manuscript came out without much fanfare in 1963 and 1964, but “Fairground” tread on more sensitive ground. Set at a traveling fair near Wismut’s mines in 1949, it described the bleak and crude experience of workers’ daily lives. “Behind rows of tents the black market flourishes, they’re having sex on overturned gravestones, on forgotten benches, leaning up against a tree.”33 Our young protagonists sing Nazi songs and openly despise the SED—to say nothing of the Red Army. Bräunig’s account deconstructed the state’s foundation myth, stripping the varnish from buzzwords like “antifascism” and “liberation.” The fact that it appeared in New German Literature’s October issue, a celebration of the GDR’s sixteenth anniversary, only heightened the effect. In late November, at a meeting with some of the country’s best-known writers, Ulbricht singled out “Fairground” as an example of “dangerous tendencies” in East German literature. “It depicts every kind of filth that existed back then,” he complained, without denying that the depiction was accurate. “And as I read it, I asked myself—and this is the question I want to put to everyone here—whom does it serve? . . . Whom does it serve to show how people looked after they went through Hitler’s war, people whose education would take decades?”34 Ulbricht did not dispute the truth of Bräunig’s narrative but only questioned whether it was useful to the party. The literature of arrival had specific goals: by bringing social ills into the open, it signaled that the state could overcome them and grow stronger. In Bräunig’s work, by contrast, the benefits of candor seemed less clear, at least to the party brass. “No one can claim that there’s a danger of this happening again,” Ulbricht insisted, and so there was no point in dwelling on the past. Critique was purely a means to an end, to be used sparingly and under supervision. Ten days later, New Germany printed an open letter, signed by four workers from the Wismut mines, that attacked Bräunig’s chapter as

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“alien to our very nature.”35 Though it was actually commissioned by the newspaper’s culture editor, the letter sought to harness the authenticity of workers’ personal experience—the same authenticity that Bräunig channeled in his book. It undercut the writer’s claim to speak for his characters, asserting that he lacked “the proper view” to recognize their achievements. A week later, New Germany published Bräunig’s response, which thanked the workers for their input while claiming they had missed the point. “My goal is not just to show difficulties . . . but to show the overcoming of difficulties: how else can the greatness of our present day become clear?”36 Although this argument built on the wellknown notion of “arrival, ” the paper’s editors deemed it “insufficiently clear.” More letters, many from prominent writers, were published over the next few weeks, all educating Bräunig on the error of his ways. The sudden attack left Bräunig devastated and confused. Rather than bend his story to officials’ tastes, he put the manuscript aside and never published another novel. Neither did Brigitte Reimann, who wrote that she felt “personally affected” by the “Fairgrounds” controversy.37 Both early champions of the Bitterfeld Way grew disillusioned with the party’s lack of trust, but the SED, too, had reason to feel disillusioned with its writers. From any vantage point, Bräunig looked like the model socialist artist: a party member, a “writing worker,” a graduate of the Literature Institute and later one of its instructors. Yet even he had managed to offend party leaders and, as they saw it, to besmirch the party. The Bitterfeld Way turned out to be more destabilizing than its architects expected, simply because showing life as it was inevitably highlighted what it was not. Officials had hoped that frank discussion of selected issues would help defuse pent-up frustration, only to discover that it actually opened the floodgates. At the Literature Institute, alarm bells started ringing in the fall of 1965 when Berlin officials got wind of “conversations directed against the regime’s cultural policy.” An investigation found that students openly mocked the Bitterfeld Way and saw themselves as “the conscience of the nation, entitled and obligated to doubt and criticize the Central Committee’s decrees.” Many instructors indulged and even fostered such behavior, including Bräunig, who led the institute’s prose seminar. His students, in turn, defended him from party criticism, rejecting the Wismut workers’ letter as part of an “unfair campaign.”38 The Ministry of Culture’s review concluded that the institute was overrun by “unteachable, foreign, and hostile” students, and by professors who were little better.39 Allowing criticism, however limited, had opened

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a Pandora’s box. In search of authenticity, even ideologically committed writers like Bräunig had corrupted East Germany’s youth—and they were far from the worst offenders.

Big Beat “Spotlight, microphone. A young man, age twenty-one, stands on the stage. Strands of hair fall on his forehead, his eyes are closed, his shoulders hunched. He sways rhythmically and . . . chants in a powerful baritone to the tunes of ‘lashing’ jazz.”40 With these words, in October 1956, Elvis Presley burst onto the Polish scene. Entitled “Rock’n’roll— Super-Rhythm,” the article was reprinted in the daily Kraków Echo from the West German magazine Der Spiegel. It reflected both Poland’s newfound openness to the West and a growing attention to “mass culture” (kultura masowa), a term long banished from the Polish lexicon. Under Gomułka, Polish sociologists revived the concept by drawing a distinction between a culture’s “type” and its “style.” Mass culture, they argued, was a “type” common to all developed societies, the product of modern technology and standardization. Under capitalism, it tended toward the lowest common denominator, but under socialist conditions it would be free to take on a new “style.”41 The same channels that spread capitalism in the West, from soap operas to hit parades, could be used to build socialism on the other side of the Iron Curtain. This approach opened new doors for Western imports like rock and roll, which was suddenly recast as a system-neutral genre. But it also fueled the need for a non-Western brand of rock, one that infused this cultural type with distinctive socialist style. Ironically, Polish rock grew out of Stalin-era institutions for spreading cultural enlightenment. After 1956 thousands of factories handed over their break rooms to civic associations as part of broader efforts to decentralize and democratize cultural life. The change was especially pronounced in Nowa Huta, where former “red corners” morphed into youth centers and jazz clubs. It was here that Kraków rockers got their start, performing hits by Presley and Bill Haley to adoring crowds. “Rock’n’roll: it’s not just for youth,” the local newspaper We Are Building Socialism proclaimed in February 1957, alongside bikini shots of the Italian starlet Marisa Allasio.42 By then, a Nowa Huta band had won third place in a popular music competition organized by Kraków Echo. “Colorful Jazz consists of students and schoolchildren,” the newspaper wrote; “most of them are studying technical subjects. That figures:

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technology and rock and roll have the brightest future!”43 The band’s prize was a Tesla radio receiver imported from Czechoslovakia and strong enough to catch signals from the West. “When, through the static, I’d hear the announcer say, ‘Radio Luxemburg, Station of the Stars,’ I’d freeze by the radio in my Nowa Huta apartment and nothing could tear me away,” one budding rocker recalled.44 In the summer of 1960, the former saxophonist of Colorful Jazz co-founded Poland’s first major rock group, the Czerwono-Czarni (“Red-and-Blacks”). Named for the colors of the Gdańsk jazz club where they had formed, the Red-and-Blacks became an overnight sensation, ushering rock into the mainstream. They launched a national tour, appeared on TV, and released Poland’s earliest rock record with songs by Haley, Chuck Berry, Cliff Richard, and Tommy Steele. Though the group sang in English, it took steps to distance itself from the West. The Red-and-Blacks were the brainchild of Franciszek Walicki, a former naval officer and music promoter whose first rock band, with the English name Rhythm and Blues, was given a performance ban in 1959. At a time when some officials had started to rue the Polish October’s “excesses,” riots at a Rhythm and Blues concert convinced them that rock was a bridge too far. “That music annoyed them—above all the name ‘rock and roll,’ ” Walicki remembered, “so I stopped using those words and founded the Red-and-Blacks, without a foreign word in the title.”45 The new band, he argued, played not rock and roll but “big beat.” This English phrase became a Polish adjective—bigbitowy—that embodied the attempt to adapt Western culture to socialist society. Several features distinguished the Red-and-Blacks from their foreign models. Most notably, the band lacked a front man or even a vocalist, performing instead with a revolving set of singers. This reflected both its roots in jazz and the Eastern Bloc’s ambivalence toward stars, whose private lives risked overshadowing their public functions. At concerts a master of ceremonies would introduce each song and ensure proper decorum. Off stage, band members received regular musical training along with performance reviews from the Ministry of Culture and Art. Though they were paid to play, all members held full-time jobs or studied at musical academies. Besides keeping the band in check, such measures also made it more relatable: the media portrayed the Red-and-Blacks as ordinary boys empowered by the state’s support and guidance. They were not so much idols as role models, showing Polish youth how to have good clean fun. That was the message of a year-long tour that launched in August 1961 under the slogan “We Are Searching for New Talents.” Both

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the slogan and the premise were staples of Stalinist cultural mass work; the aim was to encourage active participation, drawing wayward boys and girls into official structures.46 At each concert the Red-and-Blacks would hold a talent show for bands and singers from the local area. The winners received a trip to the All-Polish Festival of Youth Talents, a multiday concert held in July  1962. All in all, some four thousand people participated in this competition, which not only spawned a generation of Polish musicians but also turned rock into a national obsession. After the Red-and-Blacks appeared in Kraków in January 1962, the city exploded with new bands. Many arose in Nowa Huta, thanks to its expansive youth infrastructure: Biała Gwiazda (White Star), Czarne Koty (Black Cats), Bezdomni (Homeless), Ametysty (Amethysts).47 Emulating the Red-and-Blacks, most bands took Polish names, and even those that did not often had their names Polonized by fans. The Jumbles thus became Dżamble and the Lessers Leserzy, just as the Beatles appeared in the media as Beatelsi. They played in schools, Houses of Culture, and especially in youth clubs, which provided both patronage and equipment. Even factories sponsored bands, in the tradition of the Stalin era: Wawele (Wawels) were the in-house band of the Wawel Confectionary Company, while Zefiry (Zephyrs) played in the factory clubroom of Kraków’s Tobacco Warehouse (known as the Snuff Box). They then faced off at music competitions like We Are Searching for New Talents. In June  1963 the Polish Students’ Association and the Union of Socialist Youth organized Kraków’s first big-beat contest, held in the Jagiellonian University’s student center. First prize went to the Amethysts, whose Afro-Polish lead singer—nicknamed “the Polish Chubby Checker”—performed his namesake’s hit “Let’s Twist Again.” The band received a certificate from the City Council’s Culture Department, along with a more lucrative award: a contract to tour Kraków Province, spreading the gospel of rock and roll.48 For Polish officials, embracing rock was a deliberate policy. Some saw rock as means to reach and educate the youth. “We cannot waste such an exceptional chance to enlist literally hundreds of thousands of teenagers into the ranks of singing youth,” proclaimed the People’s Tribune, the mouthpiece of the PZPR.49 Others were less sanguine but still supportive, like the deputy editor of the journal Politics: “If they have to cut class, it’s better that they spend time singing and playing guitar than loitering in the streets or—God forbid—getting into brawls.”50 To be sure, there were plenty of gripes about rockers’ long hair: “hermaphrodites with female Beatle-manes, a demimonde of demi-brains,”

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the Kraków writer Jerzy Lovell called them.51 But such complaints were widespread among older critics on both sides of the Iron Curtain. They paled next to the Polish state’s growing embrace of rock and roll on radio, TV, and in youth institutions. Polish officials did not just tolerate rock but actively promoted it, encouraging young people to play as well as listen. They made rock into a symbol of a new, permissive brand of communism—and in so doing remade it in their image. Musical competitions gave shape and direction to the emerging Polish rock scene. Above all, they prevented rock and roll from going underground: with so many opportunities to perform in public, rockers had little reason to avoid official channels, even when these came with strings attached. By 1962 the slogan “We Are Searching For New Talents” gave way to “Polish Youth Sings Polish Songs.” Many competitions required participants to sing in Polish or even assigned them specific songs. Such was the case at Kraków’s Song Exchange in October 1965, where several bands had to perform a song by the local poet Wiesław Dumny. With no difference in repertoire, only technical proficiency set the competitors apart. First prize thus went to Skaldowie (Skalds), a band of students from the local musical academy who received the most votes from a tepid crowd. “No one was dancing, everyone was seated. People cast their vote on a card and voted for our songs,” one of the Skalds recalled.52 Though the audience got to pick the winner, the format of the competition strongly influenced its choice. This was a perfect emblem of controlled revolt: free choice, but within bounds and with plenty of advice. The Skalds, too, were fitting representatives of Poland’s state-backed rock. Taking its name from Viking bards, the band featured six young men between the ages of nineteen and twenty-one: three guitarists, a drummer, a keyboardist, and a violinist. Its leader, Andrzej Zieliński, studied piano at Kraków’s music academy and worked as an instructor in a Nowa Huta House of Culture. “We didn’t start playing just because it was fashionable,” he later told an interviewer. “We wanted to show that you could do everything in beat music: write a good text, compose worthy music.”53 Unlike most Kraków bands, the Skalds wrote their own songs, many of which were influenced by folk melodies from the nearby Tatra mountains. “Our music displays our national character, our traditional Slavic melodies, our Slavic lyricism that is so different from Anglo-Saxon countries,” Zieliński explained.54 Unsurprisingly, both critics and administrators embraced this brand of elevated, educated rock. “This band is very harmonious and musical, ambitious and

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Figure 12.  Musicians perform during a competition for student bands, Kraków, May 1961. Through dress codes and assigned songs, such competitions helped keep Polish rockers in line. National Digital Archives, photograph by Zbyszko Siemaszko.

unassuming, while its big beat is cultured, unobtrusive, inoffensive,” one Kraków newspaper raved.55 Thanks to official support, the Skalds enjoyed a meteoric rise. Winning the Song Exchange came with a radio contract; a regional tour followed in February 1966 and a four-song record in April. The band also took part in a national music competition, the Spring Festival of Teenager Music, winning neighborhood, city, and provincial-level contests before taking first place at the finals in July. Yet even as organizers praised the Skalds’ “noble” performance, many of the thirty thousand youths in the audience booed. The same qualities that appealed to officials—poetic lyrics, folk motifs, sweater vests—made the band unpopular with fans. Still, the state’s promotional machinery

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pressed on. After the festival the band joined a “laureates tour” that modeled appropriate style and also began appearing on TV. Most significantly, it received a starring role in Passendorfer’s Big Beat, playing onstage while Kuba pranced around. “Thanks to this film we reached every place that we couldn’t get to with our concerts,” Zieliński remembered; “thanks to it, we won over the youth and found popularity.”56 By the end of 1967 readers of a leading music magazine named the Skalds their third favorite band in Poland; a year later the group ascended to number one. Just as it did with Big Beat’s hero, Kuba, communist Poland’s music industry turned unassuming young men into stars. “The Skalds . . . have managed to change the musical tastes and interests of Polish youth,” a critic exulted in 1969. “They prove that even the most difficult . . . repertoire can ‘grab’ listeners, and that socalled artistic songs can be the biggest hits in Poland.”57 The Skalds’ own motives were less ideological. “I wanted to create music that would combine all interesting trends,” Zieliński insisted. “I wanted to be myself, without imitating anyone else.”58 The band’s songs owed as much to Pink Floyd and Deep Purple as they did to Polish folk motifs; many featured the Hammond organ, a staple of Western progressive rock, which Zieliński brought back from a tour of Polish-American communities in 1969. The Skalds were not simply a proxy for state policy, but they unquestionably benefitted from it. Government patronage first encouraged these musicians to apply classical training to contemporary rock, then nurtured and popularized their achievements, turning an esoteric folk-rock band into international stars. In embracing rock music, Polish officials managed to steer it, use it, and even perhaps to “pacify” it.59 They produced a distinctive brand of rock and roll that drew young people into the state’s cultural matrix, something that Stalin-era policy had continually failed to do. In Poland, limited openness to the long-forbidden West became a key building block of National Communism. In the GDR, however, it proved far more problematic.

Butlers’ Boogie From the front lines of the Cold War, East German leaders cast a wary eye on Western popular music. Officials watched in horror as Bill Haley toured West Germany in 1958, inciting what New Germany called “an orgy of noise and destruction.” This “rock ’n’ roll-gangster” was not just

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an emblem of “American unculture” but an agent of NATO aggression: “through hectic, animalistic rhythms he unleashes the most primitive instincts, . . . dulls and brutalizes the youth, [and] prepares them for a coming war.”60 The press reacted the same way to Elvis Presley, who spent fifteen months on military duty in the Federal Republic. “His ‘song’ is just like his face: dumb, dull, and brutish,” wrote the youth magazine Young World in February 1957.61 Such comments tapped into long-standing German fears of US culture that spanned both sides of the Iron Curtain—fears that were always racially tinged.62 In the GDR, though, the rising popularity of Western rock served as a call to action. “It’s not enough to condemn capitalist decadence in words,” Ulbricht declared at the Bitterfeld conference. “We have to offer something better. . . . Let’s prove that we can compose better hits than the West.”63 In fact, Ulbricht went on, there were already “some advances to report. We have created new hits and dances—such as the Lipsi.”64 Developed by the Leipzig composer René Dubianski, the Lipsi had burst onto the scene earlier that year thanks to a sustained propaganda campaign. It was a six-step partner dance in 6/4 time, roughly similar to a waltz, which aimed to maintain proper distance and decorum between the sexes. “The movement is full of harmony . . . and entirely modern,” New Germany raved; “our young people don’t want to dance close together, they want to move freely, without the tasteless and uncontrolled contortions of dances from overseas.”65 To promote the new dance the state record label, Amiga, released two LPs of Lipsi tunes, including “Everyone’s Dancing the Lipsi” by the Leipzig bandleader Alo Koll. This proved to be wishful thinking, as East German teenagers showed little interest in another formal dance. In Leipzig groups of youths even took to the streets chanting, “We don’t want no Lipsi and no Alo Koll, we want Elvis Presley and his rock and roll!”66 In the end, the Lipsi vanished just as suddenly as it appeared. By the fall of 1959, with the dance failing to catch on, its name was repurposed for a brand of underwear. Rock and roll, meanwhile, proved far more enduring, despite—and because of—official hostility. In the late 1950s groups of Leipzig teenagers started to gather on street corners to blare Radio Luxembourg and Radio in the American Sector from transistor radios. Western fashion, like Western music, was the order of the day: Klaus Renft, one of the city’s first rockers, remembered a sea of “James Dean jackets, blue jeans, and moccasins,” ideally imported from West Berlin.67 Like the English Teddy Boys and West German Halbstarke, these young East Germans chafed at the conformism of postwar society, carving out their

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own space on the margins.68 They disdained state organizations such as the Free German Youth (FDJ) but also used them to pursue their own agenda. Leipzig’s first rock concerts thus took place at Clara Zetkin Culture Park, set up in 1955 to extend cultural mass work into the summer months. Under the Bitterfeld Way, which urged workers to make art themselves, the park’s many stages and dance floors opened the door to young amateur performers. It was here that Klaus Renft debuted in 1959, playing tunes by Little Richard and Fats Domino to a crowd of swooning teenagers.69 Even as government channels helped nurture an East German rock, government officials remained deeply ambivalent. Renft’s band received a prompt performance ban on the grounds that its fans “trampled flowerbeds, harassed women, urinated in the bushes, and heard forbidden Western songs.”70 This last point was the officials’ main concern, although technically no Western songs were forbidden as such; the only formal limit was a quota law from 1958, which restricted Western music to 40 percent of the repertoire. All rock and roll came under suspicion, however, because of its connections with the West. “It’s from there that [young people] get their Rock’n-Roll [sic] records, together with their morphine cigarettes and weapons,” the Leipzig People’s Paper warned in October 1960.71 This language echoed the regime’s descriptions of the still-open border in Berlin. As Heather Gumbert has shown, the trope of Western criminality helped state media to float and later justify the building of the Berlin Wall, officially called the “anti-fascist protection barrier.”72 Even after the Wall went up, the West remained a clear and present danger. Several teenagers received prison sentences for singing rock songs at the Leipzig Trade Fair in September  1961, thus demonstrating that they stood “on the side of the enemy” and against the GDR.73 At the same time Leipzig officials used the lure of rock and roll to bring rebellious teens into the fold. Despite his ban from Zetkin Park, Renft performed regularly in youth clubs across the city with his fivepiece band, the Butlers. They always started off with slow songs, Renft recalled, “but then, when [most of] the public had gone home, . . . the club director would tell us, ‘now, boys, play what you want, just make it really hot.’ ”74 While such instructions broke the letter of the law, they reflected a growing sense that party policy had to keep up with popular desires. “We understood that in order to win over the youth, we had to accept what moved them and thrilled them,” one SED functionary explained.75 In 1963 this approach found sanction in the “Youth

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Communiqué,” a Politburo decree that formally authorized rock and roll. “We regard dance as a legitimate expression of joy and zest for life,” the communiqué read; “no one would dream of telling youth that they can express their feelings and moods only in waltz and tango rhythms. Whatever beat [Takt] the youth chooses is up to it: the important thing is that it remains tactful!”76 This last line hinted at the limits of state tolerance, leaving officials to decide which beats were “tactful” and which were not. Yet the communiqué also made clear that those officials could not orchestrate youth culture on their own. Young people had to shape it from below, playing an active part in the building of National Communism. The “Youth Communiqué” was announced a few months after the New Economic System (NES) and shared the latter’s emphasis on grassroots initiative. For Klaus Renft and the Butlers, it brought an immediate change in fortunes. In May the group played at a major FDJ festival in Berlin, receiving an award for “outstanding achievement.” In December it recorded four songs for Amiga, which put out two LPs of East German rock under the English (and, by then, Polish) title Big Beat. The Butlers also started appearing on radio and TV, helping to promote and legitimate rock across the country. With such encouragement, the rock wave that had swept Poland three years prior finally reached the GDR. The number of rock groups registered in Leipzig District exploded from six at the start of 1965 to eighty-three by October.77 The FDJ newspaper Young World even announced a “guitar competition” modeled on Poland’s with a series of local contests culminating in a national showcase planned for January 1966.78 In Leipzig as in Kraków, all rockers faced constant oversight and performance reviews, along with the occasional check on hair length. Officials hoped that such supervision would integrate young people into state structures while weaning them off Western imports. In promoting the Butlers, Leipzig administrators explained, they aimed “to create something new for the youth of the GDR instead of always lagging behind the West.”79 Yet a distinctive brand of rock proved hard to find, thanks in part to the genre’s ambivalent status. In Poland, where officials championed it from the start, rock music developed within the state’s cultural matrix, which left a clear imprint on bands like the Skalds. In East Germany, by contrast, the rock scene emerged underground and always retained a harder, nonconformist edge. It was also indelibly tied to foreignness, reflected in the fact that, like the Butlers, almost all Leipzig bands had English names: the Shake Hands, the

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Jarring Doors, the Crying Shadows, the Play Fellows. They sang primarily in English without regard for formal prohibitions or even temporary bans. As a result, both of Amiga’s Big Beat albums had to be purely instrumental, betraying the lack of German-language songs. In their performance style, too, GDR rockers emulated Western fashions. The Butlers played in blue jeans, strutting around the stage and whipping crowds into a frenzy. “It was a euphoria that you can’t even imagine,” Renft recalled. “It was almost mass hysteria.”80 Without investing in competitions, teaching rock music in schools, and organizing tours, Leipzig administrators lacked the tools their Polish colleagues used to keep rockers in line. Implementing such measures, however, required a leap of faith that many were unwilling to take. As Jeffrey Kopstein has shown, the NES inspired widespread fears that a “technocratic orientation had led to a neglect of traditional political and ideological concerns,” and this was also true of rock and roll.81 Tensions came to a head in April 1965 when New Germany published a sympathetic profile of the Butlers. Penned by the journalist Heinz Stern, “Butlers’ Boogie” portrayed the band as model citizens who played in a “clean and respectable” manner. It also dismissed critics of rock and roll as “overzealous champions of misunderstood principles of socialist cultural policy.”82 The article set off a firestorm, since many officials remained suspicious of rock. “There are many amateur ensembles in our Republic whose musical and cultural-political levels are far higher than the Butlers and who deserved this kind of publicity,” a group of Leipzig administrators wrote to the Ministry of Culture.83 Officials’ mistrust intensified that fall after a Rolling Stones concert in West Berlin descended into riot. An unnerved Central Committee instructed local organs to crack down on rock and roll and the Leipzig People’s Paper obliged with a scathing attack on October 20. “No Room for the Abuse of Youth” declared that rock groups “act like apes,” “drive their young public to crimes,” and “do not see how abnormal, unhealthy, and inhuman their behavior is.” It condemned youth clubs for “promoting American non-culture and decadent ways of life” and accused the Butlers of stealing some 10,000 marks in unpaid taxes.84 Over the next two weeks, the Leipzig City Council’s Culture Department forced all local bands to retake the certification exams they needed to perform in public. Of the forty-two groups that showed up, just four made the grade, while the Butlers and three other bands were banned for life. “Your performances contradict our moral and ethical principles,” the City Council wrote. “While thousands of young people in our city find

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joy, relaxation, education, and aesthetic satisfaction in the amateur art movement, your guitar group causes harm.”85 The sudden ban bewildered rockers and officials alike. At a meeting the next day in city hall, the Butlers struggled to grasp “why state organs and above all the Free German Youth abruptly turned from left to right.”86 Across the table, the head of the Leipzig SED Culture Department also found himself in hot water. He had initially opposed rock music, he told his superiors, but received a reprimand for misreading the party’s youth policy. “I then relied on the ‘Youth Communiqué,’ ” he explained, and approved a music club in which the Butlers performed.87 Such confusion reflected the challenges of building a popular culture on the Cold War’s front lines, where West German trends often shaped East German tastes. On the one hand, officials felt acute pressure to keep up with popular demand, which meant adopting Western fashions. On the other, they worried that doing so threatened the GDR’s distinctiveness and therefore undermined its reason to exist. The program of National Communism, with its attentiveness to the public’s desires, was always more fraught in East Germany than in Poland. If East Germans started to think and act like West Germans, following their desires risked subverting the GDR.

Clear-Cutting A few days after the Butlers’ ban, handprinted flyers turned up in Leipzig schools. “Beat-friends! We will meet on Leuschner Square on Sunday at 10 am for a protest march.”88 The Stasi later discovered that the culprits were three boys, ages fifteen and sixteen, who used a children’s printing set to make a hundred leaflets. By that Sunday, October 31, the police were well prepared. Of the 2,500 people who showed up to Leuschner Square on the southern edge of Leipzig’s downtown, perhaps 2,000 were party functionaries and plainclothes policemen. The crowd just stood in place, the writer Erich Loest recalled, before a police loudspeaker ordered it to disperse. “And then it began, the police hunted young people with dogs, chased them into side streets, encircled them. The water cannons sprayed and the policemen bludgeoned.”89 When the dust settled, 264 people found themselves under arrest, most of them under the age of eighteen. One hundred and seven were eventually sentenced to hard labor in a nearby coalmine, where they slept on the floor of the local House of Culture.90 The Leipzig protest march was one of the largest unauthorized demonstrations in the GDR since the uprising of June  1953. It terrified

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party officials, who scrambled to stamp out all traces of rock and roll. In a letter to district party secretaries, Ulbricht described “so-called beat groups” as “rowdys” and “deadbeats,” hell-bent on “ideological destruction.” “It was wrong for the FDJ to organize beat competitions and to spread the notion that beat music and Western hits could not produce negative effects here, unlike in West Germany,” he asserted.91 Such vehemence was in part a form of self-defense: having authorized the “Youth Communiqué,” Ulbricht was on the hook for its consequences. Many functionaries had mistrusted Ulbricht’s reforms, but after the Leipzig protests they had proof that cultural openness could lead to political upheaval. As the epitome of socialism’s ills, culture became a cudgel for attacking Ulbricht’s whole platform. At the next SED Central Committee Plenum—held in Berlin on December  14–17—nearly two-thirds of the speakers raised issues of art and culture, often in blistering terms. In his opening address Ulbricht’s chief rival, Erich Honecker, blasted “the antihumanist displays in film and newspapers,” the spread of “immorality and decadence,” and the reappearance of “destructive tendencies foreign to socialism.” He cited Werner Bräunig’s “Fairground” as a particularly troubling case, full of “obscene details [and] a false, warped representation of the difficult beginnings in Wismut.”92 A folder of materials that delegates received on the eve of the plenum elaborated these complaints in great detail. East German poets pursued a “policy of skepticism, doubt, and discrediting the GDR,” and Leipzig artists were among the worst offenders.93 With their “doubts about [SED] policies, . . . their petit bourgeois and anarchist opinions,” they had paved the way for the Leuschner Square protests.94 Such vitriol shocked many participants, stirring up memories of the Stalin era. Among writers and filmmakers, the main targets of Honecker’s wrath, this event came to be known as “the Clear-Cutting Plenum.” The gist of the attacks was that excessive contact with the West had muddled the true meaning of socialist culture. In their search for a National Communism, East German artists had lost sight of communism’s foundations and had even started to erode them from within. Their works were thus more dangerous than any imports, not to mention costly to the state. “If anyone can be allowed some skepticism, it should be the finance minister,” joked Leipzig’s SED boss, Paul Fröhlich; “he must be skeptical in giving out funds, which we are needlessly wasting.”95 Bringing up economics was a calculated move. For Fröhlich, as for Honecker, the cultural situation was both a product of economic reforms and an opportunity to attack them. Without criticizing the NES

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outright, several speakers linked it to the corruption of GDR culture. The FDJ’s main mistake, Honecker argued, was to treat rock and roll as “the musical expression of the era of technical revolution,” but the FDJ not alone in looking to the West. Many state officials still had “a tendency to fixate on the ‘Western level’ in all questions of new technology,” ignoring the lessons of the USSR—especially its “economic methods of planning and management.”96 With this clear reference to the NES (whose full title was the New Economic System of Planning and Management), Honecker implied that tried and true Soviet methods were superior to any system from the West. Even the GDR’s finance minister, Willi Rumpf, suggested that aspects of the NES were inappropriate for “socialist conditions,” not unlike imported Western models for the arts.97 The “Clear-Cutting Plenum” marked the beginning of the end for the NES, and for Ulbricht himself. The NES had faced strong opposition from the start, upsetting veteran officials who distrusted change. Still, the plenum marked a “noticeable shift”: much of the party brass openly questioned the direction of the GDR and blamed its leader’s policies.98 For some, the protest march on Leuschner Square brought home the dangers of reform, raising the specter of social upheaval. Others likely viewed it as a pretext for challenging Ulbricht’s grip on power. In the end, the plenum’s cultural attacks had major consequences for East German politics. The NES came to a formal end at the next party congress, giving way to the Economic System of Socialism—“with the emphasis on ‘socialism,’ ” as Kopstein put it.99 By the following congress in June 1971, Honecker had supplanted Ulbricht as First Secretary of the SED. Cultural critique proved an effective political strategy, not least because cultural openness had been a political strategy all along.

The Polish March Two years after the SED’s “Clear-Cutting Plenum,” Forefathers’ Eve, a play by Adam Mickiewicz, opened at Warsaw’s National Theater. Written between 1820 and 1832, Forefathers’ Eve is a poetic, metaphysical reflection on personal freedom and national belonging. It is among the best-known and most cherished works of Polish drama, which is precisely why the National Theater chose to stage it in November 1967 for the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. In this symbolic slot, Forefathers’ Eve challenged the primacy of the Soviet Union and

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Figure 13:   A staged demonstration on the shop floor of the Lenin Steel Mill, Nowa Huta, March 1968. The prepared signs include “Writers back to their quills, students back to their studies” (center left). KARTA Center Foundation, photograph by Stanisław Gawliński.

its communist model. It stood for Poland’s special path, one rooted in national traditions and authentic popular engagement. Every performance was a charged, emotional event. “When we walked out on stage, we entered a distinctive atmosphere of unity, contact, and inspiration flowing from the audience,” one of the actors recalled; “artistic values faded into the background while great political allusions came to the fore.”100 With its messianic rhetoric and animated public, Forefathers’ Eve embodied the idea of a national, popular culture. Key members of the party brass attended the production, but many left the theater stunned. As an eyewitness put it, the crowd cheered wildly at “perceived allusions to the current situation in the country”—lines

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in the text that criticized the Russian empire or praised the Catholic Church.101 A  concerned Central Committee resolved to shorten the play’s run, but its sudden cancellation only fanned the flames. At the last show, on January 30, 1968, viewers chanted “Independence without censorship!” before marching toward a nearby statue of Mickiewicz, where the police intervened and thirty-five people were arrested. This crackdown, too, fueled a new wave of demonstrations. The largest came a few weeks later, on March 8, when Warsaw University students gathered to protest the play’s removal and to support those who were still detained. They insisted that they were acting in defense of National Communism: “not as a dictatorship of a small group of people but as a genuine influence of society on shaping its reality.”102 Unsurprisingly, such language spooked the party leadership, which called in troops. Over two thousand policemen took part in a “pacifying action” that afternoon, using rubber truncheons to beat the student crowd. By March  13 the protests spread to Kraków, where a student procession marched from the university to Market Square. People walked “shoulder to shoulder, with the heady spirit of community,” the writer Jan Józef Szczepański wrote. “Then, in a moment, the street was filled with burning gas and everything turned into a chaotic rush.”103 A force of some six thousand men had ambushed the procession, using teargas and water cannons imported from the GDR.104 Over the next few weeks, thousands of students went on strike to protest police brutality and a few hundred barricaded themselves in UJ dorms. Yet a broader resistance movement failed to materialize amid a state-run disinformation campaign. Party leaders blamed all unrest on Jewish agitators— “Zionists”—whom they portrayed as a fifth column hostile to Polish interests. Thousands of students, academics, and even officials of Jewish background lost their jobs; some thirteen thousand left the country.105 This so-called anti-Zionist campaign sought to frame liberal reform as national betrayal and cultural experiments as existential threats. As in East Germany, popular culture’s “excesses” made appealing targets for National Communism’s critics. This criticism was on full display in March 1969, one year after the student demonstrations, when Kraków’s KW met to discuss “certain cultural problems.” The introductory readings got straight to the point: “The March events should remind us that culture, too, is a domain of sharp class war.” They explained that culture was uniquely vulnerable because “the variety of cultural forms creates many opportunities for hostile penetration, especially by revisionist and liberal-bourgeois

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elements.” Those elements had been at work for years, ever since the Polish October first opened the door to pluralism and consumerism. Initially they focused on “the issue of the individual [and] the morality of rulers, . . . for instance, in Broszkiewicz’s Names of Power.” That “fashion” soon gave way to “stage grotesques” by writers like Mrożek, who “deliberately threw our social and political activities in question.” All the while, big beat worked to erode socialist morals by “unleashing primitive jerking and promoting foreign content and style.” In all these ways, the KW concluded, the cultural sphere had harbored “unsafe and antisocialist currents” that culminated in the March events.106 Cultural openness had paved the way for public lawlessness, leaving its architects to pay the price. Following East Germany’s lead, Poland abandoned all experiments with worker self-management and enterprise self-funding—attempts to fix the planned economy through decentralization.107 Instead, its Politburo tried a dirigiste strategy for cutting costs: raising consumer prices. Announced abruptly in December 1970, less than two weeks before Christmas, the price hikes set off a wave of strikes, especially in the enormous shipyards on Poland’s Baltic coast. On December 14 the workers of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk marched to the headquarters of the local KW singing “The Internationale” and demanding to speak with officials.108 This was a call for dialogue, just the kind of civic engagement that Gomułka had long championed. By 1970, however, even he was determined the nip the protests in the bud, both to avoid a repeat of the March events and to prove his toughness. He ordered troops to fire on the demonstrators, killing at least forty and injuring over a thousand. Those who remembered Broszkiewicz’s play must have felt a bitter irony: even prisoner number 114 eventually succumbed to the curse of power. To quell a public outcry, the Politburo forced Gomułka to resign and replaced him with Edward Gierek, his second-in-command, who had supported both the price hikes and the crackdown. One act in the names of power ended and another began. In early April 1968 the Czechoslovak Communist Party issued an “Action Program” that laid out its vision for reform. It resolved to adopt “a new model of socialist democracy,” one that left “a broad scope for social initiative, frank exchange of views, and democratization of the whole social and political system.” The “Action Program” touched on all the hallmarks of National Communism, from public-opinion polling to “the growing demands placed by consumers.” It called for “a new

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economic system” grounded in modern planning methods, as well as a wide range of “voluntary social organizations” that expressed “the various interests of the people.” The program’s cultural directives echoed earlier pronouncements from Poland and the GDR: they invited artists to “disclose frankly [the party’s] mistakes and deformations” and “to open widely and confidently the doors of our Party to young people.”109 To be sure, the Czechoslovak Communist Party went further than either the SED or the PZPR, for instance in its total condemnation of censorship. But then again, had not those parties’ own reforms gone further than intended? Thanks to their own experiences with National Communism, Ulbricht and Gomułka were two of the Prague Spring’s harshest critics. At a Warsaw Pact summit on March 23 they sharply attacked Czechoslovakia’s leader, Alexander Dubček, and even raised the possibility of an invasion with Brezhnev.110 The two men knew full well where calls for a socialist democracy could lead, since they both had been making them for years. Under the banner of National Communism, the SED and the PZPR had sanctioned a limited public sphere in which the public could express its tastes, wishes, and grievances. Its main arenas were cultural spaces, both popular and highbrow. In youth clubs and concert halls young people gained the freedom to play the kind of music they liked, even if it came from the West. In theaters and at poetry readings writers could raise pressing societal issues and openly discuss them with their fans. This newfound openness was rooted in two guiding principles: first, that civic activism could aid in the building of socialism, and second, that it could not be micromanaged from above. To stabilize communist rule, officials had to loosen the reins. In many ways, this approach brought tangible results. Broszkiewicz and Mrożek were two of the most staged Polish authors of the 1960s, while Wolf ’s Divided Heaven and Neutsch’s Trace of Stones each sold over half a million copies.111 More than fifty years after they formed, both the Skalds and the Butlers continue to tour, with several septuagenarians and a few replacements. All these artists were genuinely popular, far more so than the vast majority of Stalin-era writers and performers. They electrified audiences, reached distant readers, and brought millions of teenagers into state institutions, just as officials had hoped. But they also forced officials to question whether this was enough. In acceding to popular taste, party leaders risked losing their leading role; a National Communism that became too national might cease to be communism at all. Both in Poland and in East Germany, both

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in literature and in rock and roll, officials worried that civic initiative might do as much harm as good because it was unplanned and unpredictable. Instead of defusing tensions, a public sphere only seemed to inflame them, despite officials’ efforts to guide how it worked. Controlled revolt eventually spun out of their control, first in East Germany in 1965 and then in Poland in 1968. Looking out at the developing Prague Spring, both Ulbricht and Gomułka saw the revolt brewing. The intervention finally came on the night of August  20 when a joint Warsaw Pact army entered Czechoslovakia and placed Dubček under arrest. Poland contributed more than 24,000 men, the largest contingent after the USSR, while 16,500 soldiers from the East German People’s Army were held up at their border, stopped at the last minute to avoid unseemly parallels to the Third Reich. In East and West, for many devotees and fellow travelers alike, the invasion precipitated a loss of faith in the communist system, shattering hopes that it could break away from its Stalinist roots. For communist regimes, too, armed intervention in Czechoslovakia limited options back home. The Prague Spring’s outcome cast suspicion on its slogans, from “democratization” to “exchange of views” to “social initiative.” All civic activism came to be seen as a potential threat, dangerous in excess and requiring close supervision. So too did the idea of “national roads,” which risked running afoul of the newly minted Brezhnev Doctrine: that no communist party “should damage either socialism in their country or the fundamental interests of other socialist countries.”112 In this environment the delicate balance of controlled revolt tilted heavily toward control. Gierek and Honecker had no patience for their predecessors’ collaborative, open-ended experiments. National Communism was out and Actually Existing Socialism was in.

Ch a p ter 7

Dissent Normalization and Its Discontents

A commander has every right to direct his army against the enemy, but only if he provides it with weapons. This is the first time I’ve seen the commander show less initiative than the soldiers. . . . We have to know what direction to go in. Because it’s boring to stand in place, your feet hurt and you start having very bad thoughts. —Jerzy Goliński, Kraków actor, 19711 I renounce all support and pleasant social standing, and . . . resolve to be my own world, my own party, my own truth. —Siegmar Faust, Leipzig poet, ca. 19682

In September  1973 Kraków and Leipzig became sister cities, and exchanges between them intensified. Representatives from Kraków’s main department store, Jubilat, visited Leipzig’s Konsument to share their marketing techniques and distribution practices; the editor of the Leipzig People’s Paper spent time at the Kraków Newspaper offices.3 Administrators, too, established closer contacts with one another and learned that they had much in common. When a Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR) functionary traveled to Leipzig in November 1976, local officials asked him about “the organized Polish opposition.” Their questions and discussions “showed a great familiarity with this topic,” he reported, along with “an awareness of the emerging similarities” between Poland and East Germany.4 Three years later, two Leipzig administrators faced similar questions on their visit to Kraków, where functionaries wanted to know about “the problem . . . of dissidents in the GDR.”5 Dissent had become a transnational problem, and city officials looked for all the help they could get. A spate of protest letters brought dissent into the spotlight. In ­December 1975 fifty-nine artists and intellectuals penned a petition to the Polish Sejm opposing changes to the country’s constitution. The 186

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proposed revisions described Poland as a “socialist state” rather than a “people’s democracy” and proclaimed the PZPR its “leading political force.” As the signatories pointed out, this phrasing violated the constitution’s stated commitment to freedom of speech and religion; once one party was declared the country’s leading force, its platform became legally binding. In practice, of course, that had been true from the start, and unsurprisingly the Letter of 59 went unanswered. What is remarkable is that it arose at all, becoming the largest petition to date against the regime’s policies. Even more remarkably, it inspired several more petitions and led to the formation of the Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR), created in September  1976 to support victims of state repression. KOR not only provided material aid but also aimed—in a co-founder’s words—“to stimulate new centers of autonomous activity in a variety of areas and among a variety of social groups.”6 An underground world was coming into being with its own structures, leaders, and institutions. Two months after KOR formed over a hundred East German artists submitted their own protest letters to the GDR regime. No such petitions had appeared in 1968 when the East German constitution was amended to emphasize the SED’s “leadership” of the “socialist state.” In November 1976, however, dozens of artists openly criticized the regime for expelling the singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann, who had been stripped of his citizenship while on tour in West Germany. Four Leipzig writers told Honecker that the expatriation had “damaged our identity as socialists,” while a fifth called it a “fascist measure” to his friends.7 Though private griping was nothing new, signed condemnations of state policy were practically unheard of in the GDR, and the regime reacted with alarm. The Stasi placed all signatories under observation, creating a new operational group to monitor “political underground activity” among artists.8 The similarity of timing and method between the two protests suggests that broader forces were at work. This becomes even clearer when we look south to Czechoslovakia, where the year 1976 produced perhaps the most famous of the Bloc’s signed petitions, Charter 77. Two trials of rock musicians inspired Václav Havel, Václav Benda, and a dozen others to launch a civic appeal for “a loose, informal, and open association of people of various shades of opinion, faiths, and professions . . . [that] seeks to promote the general public interest.”9 Charter 77 eventually collected more than a thousand signatures and helped create an underground milieu, what Benda dubbed a “parallel polis.”

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In Czechoslovakia as in Poland and East Germany, government actions spurred artists to band together and issue a public rebuke. Within the space of one year different triggers produced similar outcomes in three countries, forging dissident networks and consolidating opposition to communist rule. What might account for this transnational convergence? One tempting explanation is the Helsinki Accords, signed by the United States, Canada, and thirty-three European countries in the summer of 1975. Western states formally accepted the Eastern Bloc’s territorial integrity while communist regimes pledged to uphold “human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief.”10 Leonid Brezhnev and other Bloc leaders considered this commitment a dead letter, but dissidents embraced its language of rights to point out communism’s hypocrisies and charge it to live up to its own vows. Indeed, both the Letter of 59 and Charter 77 explicitly referenced Helsinki, adopting a legalistic tone that called communist states to account. And yet, as Jonathan Bolton has shown, the Charter’s authors arrived at the idea of using “rights talk” long after conceiving of the document itself.11 Seeing Charter 77 or the Letter of 59 as responses to Helsinki overlooks the plethora of local factors that stimulated dissent in the first place. It was in fact the Eastern Bloc’s own policies that drove East European artists to dissent. Poland, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia all changed party bosses between April 1969 and May 1971, shortly after Soviet troops crushed the Prague Spring. The new first secretaries—Edward Gierek, Erich Honecker, and Gustáv Husák—were born six months apart on the eve of World War I. They belonged to a new generation of communist leaders, one that had spent more time running communist regimes than fighting for them. Coming to power after the tumult of 1968, all three were determined to restore order and avoid unrest—a program aptly summed up as “normalization.” They pursued generous social policies designed to raise living standards while doubling down on party dogma and stifling all discussion of reform. This focus on the past and present left little role for culture, which had long served to prepare a glorious communist future. Over the first half of the 1970s culture budgets collapsed, performance opportunities dried up, and artists grew increasingly dissatisfied. At the same time, new access to Western markets both expanded artists’ horizons and freed them from dependence on the state. Increased autonomy went hand in hand with mounting frustration, producing a volatile mix that eventually erupted into public protest.

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Actually Existing Socialism In the fall of 1967, on the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution, the Polish Graphic Artists’ Union announced a competition for a statue of Lenin, which was to be a “landmark symbol of Nowa Huta and the Lenin Steel Mill.”12 Proposals were due on April 15, 1968, but by that date the country was in turmoil. Instead of raising funds for the statue, as they had “volunteered” to do, Lenin Steel Mill workers covered the walls in anticommunist graffiti and openly derided the USSR.13 The competition had to be delayed and the winning work— by the local sculptor Marian Konieczny—was only unveiled five years later in April 1973. Weighing seven tons and rising to a height of thirty feet, it showed the leader midstride, arms behind his back, stepping boldly into the future.14 Just a few years before, the square on which it stood had hosted “big beat” competitions designed to showcase the flexibility of National Communism, but in the meantime everything had changed. The hulking Lenin embodied Edward Gierek’s vision of socialism: sturdy, monolithic, and unyielding. Coming to power in December  1970 and May  1971, respectively, both Gierek and Honecker blamed their predecessors for empowering “revisionism.” They argued that too much political discussion had unmoored socialism from its foundations, allowing hostile elements to pass themselves off as reformers. To prevent a recurrence, communist parties needed to reclaim their leading role in defining the meaning of socialism. No longer would this be a vague utopia, something individuals could imagine for themselves. In place of National Communism or “socialism with a human face,” both of which had asked the public to envision different futures, Gierek and Honecker promoted a new concept: “real” or “actually existing socialism,” first mentioned in Pravda in September 1967.15 The phrase made clear that socialism was not just an idea but a reality, the product of communist parties’ hard work. It was these parties that had built Actually Existing Socialism and therefore had the sole authority to define it—along with the right to punish any disagreement. Having spilled out onto the streets in 1968, the discourse of socialism would be brought back under the parties’ control. The new approach required a great deal of “political-ideological work” with artists, many of whom had backed reform in 1968. “The main problem is artists’ relationship to real socialism and the subjective notions that some still have,” the SED Central Committee observed soon after Honecker took power. Those notions included “the idea of

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Figure 14.  The Lenin Monument shortly after its unveiling, Nowa Huta, April 1973. The storyhigh banner in the background reads, “Lenin’s Ideas Are Alive Forever”; a poster featuring Soviet and Polish flags proclaims, “Always Together.” Kraków Historical Museum, photograph by Janusz Podlecki.

a ‘freer, more humane’ socialism” as well as “an ‘untainted, pure’ socialism, which is often connected with a certain enthusiasm for ‘exotic revolutionaries.’ ”16 All such utopian visions had to be weeded out, since they implicitly critiqued the Actually Existing Socialism of the GDR. Any critique from artists, in fact, came to be seen as unacceptable. “We must ensure that they think exactly as we do in all questions of worldview and politics,” the Leipzig District SED Committee declared.17 To meet this goal, the committee put on a series of lectures on MarxistLeninist theory, but it was unions that bore the brunt of keeping artists in line.18 They had to meet at least once a month to discuss current events, while correcting “any temporary deviations, mistakes, or errors . . . through intensive, patient, and persistent effort.”19 Amid this focus on worldview and politics, however, party officials largely ignored artists’ creative work. Their many meetings and discussions almost never addressed aesthetic matters, such as the questions of form and style that had long dominated cultural debates. As early as 1972 the Leipzig branch of the East German Graphic Artists’ Union commented on the difference: “Previously the party used to say what was correct and what was up to standard [in painting], but now the union

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has to do that on its own.”20 Aesthetic rules were no longer explicit, in keeping with a grand pronouncement Honecker made at the Fourth Central Committee Plenum in December  1971. “When one proceeds from the firm foundations of socialism, there can in my opinion be no taboos in the field of art and literature,” the first secretary declared. “This concerns both questions of content and of style—in short: questions relating to what we call artistic mastery.”21 Some artists took this as a promise of creative freedom and were dismayed to see censorship endure. Honecker, however, meant something else entirely: a politically correct artist—one standing on “the firm foundations of socialism”— could never produce an inappropriate work. Aesthetics was simply a function of politics, which ultimately determined the value of a work of art. “An artist’s worldview, his Weltanschauung, is always reflected in his work,” argued the SED’s chief ideologue, Kurt Hager. “Therefore it is much more important to discuss than the aesthetic side.”22 An artist’s politics took precedence over his art. The way to judge a book was by the name on its cover. Kraków’s Provincial Party Committee (KW) responded similarly to the 1968 events, promising to “deepen the party’s impact on artists’ ideological values.”23 But this turned out to be no easy task: since many Polish artists and artistic institutions were self-funded, officials lacked the kinds of levers used in Leipzig. The Polish Graphic Artists’ Union, for instance, had turned down public funds each year since 1963 in order to maintain creative autonomy, and was therefore more focused on financial than ideological concerns.24 Unlike the Graphic Artists’ Union in Leipzig, it failed to implement required discussions or political courses, and there was little the KW could do. It did not help that just 3  percent of the union’s members—five times fewer than in Leipzig—belonged to the ruling party.25 The climate was so hostile to the PZPR that even those who joined would sometimes hide this fact. “They don’t talk about it. Their greatest joy is when people pretend they don’t know. A party member will never, ever admit to it,” crowed the UJ art historian Karol Estreicher, Jr., an unabashed opponent of the communist regime.26 Though he exaggerated, the PZPR’s membership figures spoke for themselves. With so little purchase in the artists’ world, it was a struggle for the party to introduce ideological training, much less inspire ideologically committed works. The PZPR did more to patrol artists’ political activity, rewarding faithfulness and punishing dissent. Ideological assessments often trumped artistic merit, as in the case of a musician who applied for a

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professorship at Kraków’s Higher School of Music: “Though she possesses a great deal of technical knowledge,” the KW wrote, “she is not engaged in ideological work with youth, and therefore we oppose her appointment.”27 Yet such reviews rarely linked an artist’s politics with her art. Censors’ codes prohibited any reference to Leszek Kołakowski or Krzysztof Pomian, philosophers who supported the 1968 protests, yet allowed free discussion of their published texts. Other blacklisted writers, such as the émigré Czesław Miłosz, could be mentioned by name so long as one “specif[ied], in an introduction, afterword, or footnote, the position these figures took . . . toward our system.”28 Political opinions became all that mattered, trumping any consideration of artistic value. In the era of Actually Existing Socialism, artists effectively ceased to factor as artists.

Entertainment Art Twelve years after the giant Lenin statue rose in Nowa Huta, officials in the East German town of Freiberg unveiled a very different public project. Located an hour east of Leipzig, Freiberg lay in the “Valley of the Clueless,” the small corner of the GDR that Western television signals could not reach. Its residents lacked access to West German broadcasts and, perhaps not coincidentally, applied to emigrate at a higher rate than any other region of the country. To stem this tide, the SED tried a radical approach: it began laying cables that retransmitted Western TV. “Anyone can sign up, whether a functionary or a retiree, the mayor or a dissident,” observed West Germany’s Der Spiegel.29 To justify this decision, officials cited Honecker’s 1973 announcement that Western television was no longer taboo: “anyone can turn it on or off as he likes.”30 Even as political controls intensified, the SED opened up to Western culture, since it could entertain and pacify East Germans—and perhaps coax them into staying in the GDR. Domestic artists were increasingly expected to do the same, providing an escape from daily life and soothing the public’s frustrations. Rather than aim at social transformation, the cultural matrix was tasked with keeping social peace. In Leipzig administrators worked to organize events with mass appeal. “Our goal is to involve all residents in spiritual-cultural life, especially the youth, without exception,” the city councilor for culture wrote in 1970.31 Neighborhood festivals with dancing and comedy acts appeared later that year; by 1984 Leipzig had nearly one a day, in addition to 67 “factory festivals” and 3,634 “house festivals.”32 The organizing

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force behind all these was the Committee for Entertainment Art, set up in 1973 to provide good clean fun for all ages. In order to “spread freshness, optimism, and joie de vivre,” it put on everything from variety acts and musicals to rock and roll.33 Although the committee’s director had once blamed the Prague Spring on Elvis Presley, in his new role he began actively promoting rock, which remained popular with East German youth.34 Within a year of its founding, the committee had registered 417 rock and roll bands in Leipzig District, allowing them to perform in Houses of Culture—where attendance ballooned.35 Even the Leipzig City Theaters staged a rock opera, bringing popular culture into the temple of Kultur. To audiences and administrators alike, the message was clear: all art was to be entertainment art. This shift was rooted partly in opinion polls, which gained new prominence under Honecker. One month after taking power, at the Eighth Party Congress in June  1971, the First Secretary promised to base policy “on the actual conditions [and] concrete needs” of workers in the GDR.36 Besides using its own cadre of pollsters, the SED Central Committee turned to Leipzig’s Central Institute for Youth Research, which carried out regular surveys of cultural preferences among local teenagers. Unsurprisingly, these found that listening to music was more popular than volunteering with the Free German Youth, and that respondents far preferred rock and roll to “political songs” or classical music.37 More striking is the fact that officials took notice: the City Party Committee discussed the results at length in November  1977, concluding that they raised “serious questions about the adequacy of . . . our cultural programming for youth.”38 Other studies showed that the public wanted more dance nights at Houses of Culture and more festivals in residential areas, suggestions that were quickly adopted.39 As cultural policies shifted toward entertaining the public, officials became more responsive to its wants. Poland, too, saw a turn toward entertainment programming under Gierek. Over the leader’s first four years in power, Polish Television broadcast more soap operas than it had during its first two decades put together.40 Like East German TV, it also devoted more time to game shows, reality competitions, and music revues; “everything was colorful, fun, optimistic, done with a flourish and open to the world,” one scholar summed up.41 Kraków officials pursued a similar agenda, scheduling “mass events”—pop concerts, variety acts, neighborhood festivals—whose function, they admitted, was “limited to entertainment.” Even museums and art galleries received instructions to stage

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at least one “mass event” a month in order to attract a broader public.42 Officials paid particular attention to young people, sponsoring discotheques, rock concerts, and open-air game shows. Like much of Gierek’s cultural programming, such initiatives aimed to “distract [youth] from their everyday tasks and surround them with general merriment”—as one Kraków newspaper put it.43 Like East German administrators, Polish officials justified the new approach by pointing to public opinion. “Cultural planning must correspond to people’s perception of needs and should be based on widespread polling and consultation,” Kraków’s KW announced in 1974.44 That meant a shrinking role for high culture, along with a near-total rejection of cultural mass work. By 1969 trade unions in Kraków Province spent the bulk of their culture budget on “parties and entertainment,” while slashing funds for educational activities.45 Even so, many workers complained that culture budgets existed at all, since they were taken out of union dues; several factories even went on strike over the issue.46 Though administrators refused to eliminate cultural spending entirely, they gradually reduced it, as did officials in the GDR. Culture funds, which had made up 32 percent of the Free German Trade Union Federation’s expenses in 1950, shrank to just 14 percent of the total by 1968, and kept falling through the 1970s.47 The growing emphasis on entertainment not only reoriented cultural officials’ work but also reduced their significance. Satisfying public tastes took far less time and manpower than trying to transform them, making much of the state’s cultural matrix obsolete.

The Quiet Life At first glance, the policies that Gierek and Honecker pursued can seem inconsistent, almost schizophrenic. On the one hand, both leaders repoliticized cultural life, instituting ideological training and tightening censorship. On the other, they depoliticized it through an embrace of Western television and mindless entertainment. This mix of “liberal” and “conservative” tendencies confounded artists and observers alike. “Western entertainment films suffused our screens,” recalled Leipzig rocker Klaus Renft, and yet his band faced “constant controls, inspections, warnings.”48 To Renft the regime’s cultural policy made little sense, but this was by design. In the era of Actually Existing Socialism, artists struggled to parse cultural policy because they had little say in making it. Officials reasserted their authority, eschewing the

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open-ended, collaborative ethos of National Communism. For Gierek and Honecker, all art was meant to be politically correct but resolutely apolitical, in the sense of avoiding open debate or critical engagement. Rather than draw Poles and East Germans into politics, it was designed to keep them out. The new approach was a response to the upheavals of 1968, which made Eastern Bloc leaders wary of civic initiative. In Czechoslovakia, where the upheavals prompted an invasion, it became known as “normalization,” a term used by officials and the public alike. First and foremost, normalization meant the withdrawal of foreign troops, but Soviet “friends” explained that this required structural changes. “The process of normalization is above all . . . the decisive strengthening of the Communist Party’s leading role in the work of state organs, in the ideological and public spheres, in the country’s whole life,” Pravda declared on September  6, two weeks after Soviet tanks rolled into Prague.49 Making politics normal again entailed barring the public from the public sphere and reasserting the party’s control—the kind of control it once had under Stalinism.50 And yet it also meant avoiding the relentless agitation that had undermined the Stalinist system. Everyday life had to feel normal as well: the public was too likely to rebel if it was constantly exhorted to work harder, to change its ways, to build a glorious future. Soon after taking power in April  1969, Czechoslovakia’s new leader, Gustáv Husák, promised “a quiet life for people,” under “conditions to live well and quietly, so that it is worth living.”51 In effect, the regime offered the public a tradeoff: welfare and stability in exchange for quiescence and conformity.52 Although they rarely used the word “normalization,” Gierek and Honecker pursued much the same goals. Instead of searching for an elusive National Communism that would make ideology attractive, they pursued attractive policies that could offset and justify ideological control. “We are building socialism on two fronts simultaneously: the socioeconomic and the ideological,” Gierek told an assembly of party activists in October 1973. “A dynamically realized socioeconomic program is the foundation for a Marxist-Leninist ideological offensive, while the promotion of socialist ideology has a direct impact on socioeconomic development.”53 While he insisted that ideology and development were linked, the Polish leader effectively admitted that they ran on different tracks. An “ideological offensive” would reaffirm the party’s authority and “socioeconomic development” would secure its popularity. Both were key to socialism’s success, but they were best served apart.

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To achieve popularity, Gierek and Honecker worked to raise living standards, increase purchasing power, and ease material concerns. The SED’s Eighth Party Congress, the first with Honecker in charge, proclaimed the “unity of economic and social policy,” pledging to direct all economic development toward satisfying social needs. The party raised pensions, improved childcare provisions, and upped the production of consumer goods. Average incomes doubled over Honecker’s two decades in power, while subsidies for basic foodstuffs and clothing rose by a factor of seven. Promising to “solve the housing question as a social problem,” the SED regime built nearly two million new apartments—in a country of just sixteen million people.54 Gierek’s first party congress also launched a construction boom under the slogan, “Let’s build a second Poland”—that is, double the country’s housing stock and infrastructure. The PZPR rolled back the price increases that had spurred protests in December 1970 and bumped up wages by 7 percent a year through the rest of the decade.55 To this day, many Poles and East Germans remember the 1970s as the highpoint of the communist era, “a time of optimism and relative abundance.”56 At the same time, the two regimes clamped down on protest, stifling all disagreement with the party line. The East German Ministry of State Security nearly doubled in size over the 1970s by hiring some thirtysix thousand employees. It also added twice as many informants, or “unofficial collaborators,” whose number peaked in 1977 at about two hundred thousand: one out of every eighty-four East Germans, by far the highest ratio in the Bloc.57 The result was “constant psychological terror,” the author of one protest letter recalled.58 Critics—even potential critics—always felt followed, watched, and hesitant to speak out, not just in public but in private too. In Poland, where the Security Service remained smaller, Gierek relied on censors to “eliminate critical accents in the press.”59 He demanded that all media embrace the so-called “propaganda of success,” downplaying difficulties while touting the regime’s achievements. State censorship grew so restrictive that even the secret police feared it had gone too far: “Mass media have become an instrument of rather primitive propaganda, perhaps too primitive for the public’s level of consciousness.”60 Like the SED, the PZPR broached no opposition and expected residents to fall in line. Ideological restraints went hand in hand with material improvements. Both strands of this normalization were made possible by a third: the normalization of relations with the West. In December  1970 the West German chancellor Willy Brandt renounced all claims to territory

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beyond the Oder-Neisse line, formally accepting Poland’s western border. Two years later he signed the Basic Treaty with the GDR, which recognized the country’s sovereignty and paved the way for it to join the United Nations. International legitimacy had long been a key goal for Eastern Bloc regimes, and it was the main driving force behind the 1975 Helsinki Accords. Communist leaders saw the treaty as a coup: they were acknowledged as the rightful rulers of their lands, with full authority at home and proper standing abroad. Just as important, improved relations between East and West enabled Eastern Bloc regimes to take out Western loans. Between 1975 and 1980, they borrowed roughly $35 billion from foreign banks, money that bankrolled their extensive welfare spending.61 Eventually the rising interest payments brought real pain, but in the 1970s communist rule seemed more stable than ever. After three decades of searching and striving for a better future, Eastern Bloc leaders finally felt secure in the present. This shift in attitudes transformed the role of art in public life. Since Marx’s time, communist thinkers had seen art as a means to change society, and early Eastern Bloc officials wrote policy with this goal in mind. Culture was meant to bridge the gap between present and future by shaping people’s hearts and minds; for Stalinists and National Communists alike, the arts were an essential conduit to socialism, whatever it might look like. Yet as these utopian visions started to fade, culture’s political value grew less clear. If changing people was no longer a priority, the arts no longer had a special function. They could still entertain and appease, but no better than sports or vacations. They could certainly glorify communism’s history, but not as effectively or reliably as school textbooks. For decades, culture enjoyed a privileged status because it represented a step toward the communist future. Once the present eclipsed the future in Eastern Bloc politics, spaces of art lost much of their political significance. Culture’s fall from grace was unmistakable in Polish and East German rhetoric of the 1970s. A  Leipzig plan for cultural development called art and culture “components of ideology” whose value rose and fell with the intensity of international class struggle.62 Gierek, too, told the PZPR Central Committee that “our artistic output, our culture, must provide us with ideological arguments in the battle with capitalism.”63 In most texts and speeches from this era, culture figures as an afterthought, subordinated to weightier material concerns. “The harmonious development of culture must accompany the country’s social and economic development,” the PZPR’s Sixth Congress resolved in

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1977. A decade later, the Leipzig City Council proclaimed that cultural development “must be connected more closely with the party’s main battlefield: the unity of economic and social policy.” It went on to give an example: art could be useful in “conveying the experience of socialist togetherness and providing varied forms of classy entertainment and sociability.”64 Under Actually Existing Socialism, culture was only a component of ideology, a form of entertainment, and an accompaniment to the production of consumer goods. This was a far cry from engineering human souls—but the regimes’ new attitude to art was not without its benefits for artists.

An Act of Community In September  1969 Kraków’s Old Theater premiered an unknown work by the young playwright Ernest Bryll. Like Forefathers’ Eve, the play that had set off riots a year earlier, Kurdesz (Drinking Song) tackled weighty questions of Poland’s mission and identity. Its characters include the Young Man, a career-minded opportunist; the Guest, a former resistance fighter turned Warsaw bureaucrat; and the Soldier, an émigré with a romantic view of Poland. The atmosphere is heavy and dejected. Speakers describe their country as “so tired,” “so drained and so poor,” “not at all romantic,” “so banal.” “When will people in Poland say ‘career’ and think ‘fatherland’ instead of shouting ‘fatherland’ and thinking ‘career’?” the narrator asks.65 Kurdesz had won the Ministry of Culture and Art’s drama contest in January 1969 and the Old Theater agreed to stage it sight unseen. It opened on September 14 to an indifferent reception: over the first seven shows, more than two-thirds of the seats went empty.66 The censors who attended each performance commented on the audience’s “cold” reaction, speculating that the production was too “confusing and incoherent” for most viewers.67 As a rehash of old subject matter, Kurdesz was a total dud. Everything changed on September 23 when the Kraków Newspaper, the KW’s press organ, ran a scathing attack. Local officials had come under criticism after the 1968 events, and the attack served as a show of ideological vigilance. “It is necessary to say clearly that Bryll’s play is bad, that it is socially harmful, and I view its production as a serious mistake in the theater’s repertoire policy,” the paper’s editor-in-chief declared.68 The next day Kurdesz was sold out. “As soon as that article appeared, Bryll and his Kurdesz became the number one topic in all conversations,” one actor told the secret police. “Students literally started

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fighting to get tickets. Even those who have no idea about theater and hadn’t been there in years showed an extraordinary desire to go.”69 Rumors circulated that “the play will certainly get removed,” just like Forefathers’ Eve.70 Meanwhile, the performances themselves became increasingly incendiary. Once the play was declared “antisocialist,” viewers started to cheer at ambiguous passages; by late September, according to the Security Service, “the phrase ‘they say fatherland, and think career’ set off a storm of applause.”71 After three packed shows, the KW had seen enough and pulled the plug.72 The Kurdesz affair revealed a growing polarization in Polish society. The simple fact that officials disliked a play made it attractive to large segments of the population, especially in Kraków, where so many students had taken part in the 1968 protests. Inadvertently, Kurdesz had uncovered a new public, one that yearned for a sense of autonomy from the state, and the Old Theater was eager to keep it coming back. When the theater’s director resigned in the wake of the scandal, the job went to Jan Paweł Gawlik, a longtime drama critic who was on good terms with Kraków authorities. The KW considered Gawlik politically reliable, and he repaid its trust by meeting with the secret police. At the same time, Gawlik’s ideological correctness afforded him more freedom to reshape the Old Theater’s profile. “I  felt .  .  . intellectual and moral unrest rise up all around,” Gawlik remembered. “I  wanted to use it, and even, if possible, to stimulate it.”73 What he set out to build was a theater that was socially engaged, “a space in which social consciousness would be objectified through an act of community between the audience and the stage.”74 The Old Theater would steer clear of Kurdesz’s political critique but try to recapture its explosive energy. With this goal in mind, Gawlik shifted away from troublesome contemporary plays and focused on national classics, which he called “the natural bloodstream of our culture.”75 Party authorities even allowed Gawlik to stage Forefathers’ Eve for the first time since its ban in 1968, on the director’s assurance that he would avoid any political commentary. When it premiered in February 1973, the Old Theater’s production duly eschewed pathos and sentimentality, warning viewers that this was not some “mournful mass for the liberation of a people.”76 Instead, the play’s director, Konrad Swinarski—a student of Brecht’s— emphasized its “universal character” and worked to draw the audience into the production. The first scene took place in the theater’s foyer, where theatergoers huddled around the actors in the dark.77 Inside the

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auditorium, the action continued on a walkway raised above the aisle, breaking the fourth wall. “The atmosphere was so charged and unusual that it seemed like both actors and viewers radiated some shared, uncanny energy,” one critic observed.78 Forefathers’ Eve clearly struck a chord, running for 269 shows over nearly a decade.79 The theater’s next premieres followed the same blueprint, building togetherness by exploring Polish identity. The noted filmmaker Andrzej Wajda directed Stanisław Wyspiański’s play November Night— another take on Poland’s 1830 uprising against Russia. His production, too, used symbol and archetype to stress the nation’s continuity through time. A few months later Swinarski staged one more Wyspiański work, Liberation, which picks up where Forefathers’ Eve leaves off. Mickiewicz’s protagonist, Konrad, arrives in Kraków to put on a play about contemporary Poland but despairs at the mix of resignation and listless idealism that he sees around him, and even in himself. His story is a meditation on the possibility of liberation: of Poland from foreign rule, Poles from passivity, art from lies. Wyspiański’s drama was every bit as relevant in 1974 as when it premiered at the Słowacki Theater in 1903. Together with Gawlik and Wajda, Swinarski received that year’s Yeast award from Politics magazine “for innovative theatrical work that aroused a broad social response [and] leavened thought.”80 The Old Theater’s success was rooted in its aura of community. For many viewers, the theater formed a special, timeless world devoted to the national idea and closed off from the realities of Actually Existing Socialism. In truth, it was anything but. The Old Theater’s choice of classic plays reflected Gierek’s emphasis on political correctness; in the wake of the Kurdesz affair, the theater made a conscious decision to avoid contentious new material in favor of the tried and true. Its focus on Polish drama dovetailed with regime’s celebration of patriotism and national traditions, which grew to an obsession under Gierek. Meanwhile, the state’s indifference to artistic form allowed for more experimental and innovative staging. Allegory, symbolism, and allusion all blossomed in the 1970s as artists looked to circumvent restrictions on free speech. So too did charismatic auteurs like Swinarski, who gained wide latitude to realize their artistic visions. As long as Gawlik fulfilled the economic plan, avoided meddling in political affairs, and reported on those ensemble members who did, city officials were willing to give his theater free rein. The result was an explosion of creativity that inspired some of Poland’s most celebrated productions.

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The international environment also factored into the Old Theater’s success. In opening up to the West—partly to assuage popular demand, partly for the sake of foreign loans—the Polish state became increasingly attentive to its judgment. Even before they signed the Helsinki Accords, Polish officials constantly monitored Western reactions to their cultural policies, at least where the most prominent artists were concerned. Just one well-publicized case of creative interference risked damaging the regime’s carefully crafted “propaganda of success” abroad, and Polish artists used this fact to their advantage. Wajda, for one, decided to stage November Night specifically with a foreign tour in mind and in consultation with a London theater promoter.81 When Warsaw authorities initially blocked the tour, the personal intervention of Poland’s ambassador to the United Kingdom allowed it to proceed.82 Improved relations with the West not only opened doors for Polish artists but also gave them more autonomy from the regime. Gierek’s political priorities even helped burnish the Old Theater’s nonconformist image. Kraków officials were so desperate to avoid a public scandal that they repeatedly gave in to Gawlik’s demands—for instance in May  1973, when the director threatened to resign unless he got more say in personnel decisions. Given his visibility, the head of Kraków’s City Council warned, “Gawlik’s resignation would definitely provoke a response from certain groups at home and hostile centers abroad.”83 The same polarization that made Kurdesz a hit put city administrators on the defensive, forcing them to compromise in order to preserve the sheen of order. Prominent artists like Wajda and Swinarski had even more clout. “In order to avoid misunderstandings, their work has a kind of immunity and carte blanche from the Culture Department of the Central Committee,” the department’s head reportedly told Kraków officials.84 The Gierek regime’s emphasis on stability made it reluctant to get too involved in cultural affairs. While it ruthlessly patrolled any political critique, it allowed—and even fostered—spaces of civic dialogue like the Old Theater, where artists and the public bonded over a shared worldview.

The Culture Factory Falls into Ruin Even as the Old Theater enjoyed its greatest artistic successes, it was quite literally falling apart. Starting in 1968 the 130-year-old building needed an annual exemption from the fire marshal just to stay open.85

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Kraków’s aging infrastructure had become a major liability and there was little money for repairs—to many artists’ consternation. By October  1971 tensions ran so high that city authorities felt compelled to clear the air. Officials from the City Council and the Ministry of Culture and Art met with more a hundred local artists at Wawel Castle in the former reception hall of Polish kings. The proceedings resembled a negotiating session: after an opening salvo from the First Secretary of Kraków’s KW, the writer Tadeusz Hołuj presented the artists’ demands. A noted author of historical fiction, Hołuj was an Auschwitz survivor, a leading figure in the Polish Writers’ Union, and a KW member himself. On this day, though, the lifelong communist could not hold back. “Our culture factory has fallen into ruin,” he complained; “the devaluation of our equipment has reached the final frontier.” Practically all city theaters were on the verge of collapse, while local painters had not received a single new studio in five years. “State patronage cannot be an act of kindness or a form of pension,” Hołuj insisted. “It must be based on mutual obligations.”86 To many artists it seemed that state officials were failing to keep up their side of the contract or even wanted to rip it up altogether. What really irked Kraków’s cultural circles was the state’s apparent lack of interest in their work. Instead of promoting “society’s cultural education,” a music critic noted, officials focused solely on “entertainment spread through the mass media.”87 Jerzy Broszkiewicz—a longtime party member and author of The Names of Power, the 1957 play that crystalized National Communism’s hopes for reform—asked what kind of citizen the state was trying to create. “Is it the guy who sits in front of the TV from morning till night, no matter what’s on, no matter if it’s a [pop music] festival in Sopot, a football match, or the Chopin competition?”88 High culture was being neglected and subordinated to market forces. “As a theater, we have simply been commercialized,” Gawlik lamented; “economic rigor has fundamentally overshadowed artistic criteria.”89 The growing prominence of mass media only exacerbated shrinking budgets for culture and led most speakers to the same conclusion: the arts were suffering from a lack of respect. Frustration ran highest among young artists, who had less access to state resources. While Kraków’s art academies continued to churn out new graduates—nearly one thousand between 1974 and 1977— city officials had precious little to offer them.90 By 1979 only one in three Kraków artists under the age of thirty had a steady job and only one in eight his own apartment.91 Artists’ unions, meanwhile, were of

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little help, since they depended principally on member dues. In 1972, as funding for the arts declined, the Polish Graphic Artists’ Union stopped organizing exhibitions, buying artworks, or awarding financial aid; it effectively ceased to function as a union.92 Similar challenges emerged across the world once mass culture eclipsed high culture in both prominence and popularity. In the Eastern Bloc, however, where the state controlled all cultural institutions, artists blamed state officials for marginalizing art. Predictably, dissatisfaction with the regime’s cultural policies shaded into resentment against the regime. “Janusz,” one of the Old Theater’s secret police informers, warned his handlers about mounting hostility in a 1975 report. “At a certain point material decline can lead to an actor’s ‘civil death,’ ” he cautioned; “sooner or later, these kinds of stresses must lead one to stop defending the right positions.”93 The younger generation was especially susceptible, as city officials realized all too well. “Young artists’ difficult social situation .  .  . produces feelings of despondency, frustration, or social inadequacy,” Kraków’s KW noted in 1979.94 Just as often, it produced feelings of anger. Among young painters, the KW found, material difficulties had inspired “a certain ferment . . . that, if left unchecked, could lead to ideological-political unrest.”95 One sign of this unrest was younger artists’ failure to join the PZPR. By 1975 no Kraków writer under thirty belonged to the ruling party; four years later, there was not a single party member among the Music Academy’s 526 students.96 It was in this context that protests against a rewrite of the Polish constitution gained steam. Many signatories of the Letter of 59 were former party members who had grown disillusioned with its policies, both political and economic. Some left in protest over the PZPR’s behavior in 1968, or over its treatment of striking workers two years later. Others only broke with the party in the 1970s out of frustration with normalization. Most younger artists, meanwhile, had never joined in the first place. “Out of the triad ‘yesterday,’ ‘today,’ ‘tomorrow’ we have marginalized the only one that can awaken hopes, which is ‘tomorrow,’ ” the Kraków writer Jerzy Surdykowski, a longtime party member, warned city authorities in 1978. “By contrast, KOR and other oppositional groups give the youth alternatives—illusory but fascinating to impetuous minds—that allow them to express protest and dissatisfaction with things as they are.”97 By focusing on material needs, the party had turned off idealists while failing to live up to its own promises. It offered artists neither hope nor comfort, nor really much reason to stay by its side.

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Left in the Lurch East German artists, too, felt normalization’s effects. Cultural spending accounted for 6.3 percent of Leipzig’s total budget in 1953 but only 3.9 percent two decades later, as the City Council reallocated resources to housing and social services.98 Even the GDR’s most celebrated institutions were not spared. In 1972 the local branch of the East German Writers’ Union reported that “almost all” its members were in debt to their publishers and struggling to get by.99 While the prestigious Gewandhaus orchestra toured regularly around the world, its musicians received so little spending money that many had to carry food from home.100 On several trips, the director Kurt Masur paid for the whole orchestra’s meals out of his pocket because the promised funds had not arrived.101 In the big picture, of course, skimpy per diems were a minor issue, and professional artists still enjoyed higher salaries and better perks than the majority of East Germans. Many, however, experienced the cuts in funding as a slap in the face and grew increasingly embittered. As in Kraków, older artists often blamed the state for their diminished role. Musicians groused that a pop singer earned more in one night than an opera performer did in month.102 The Writers’ Union branch reported “serious problems among many older authors, who feel pushed aside, whose books no longer reach such large masses, and whose work no longer finds much notice in the press.” Union officials feared that the bad feelings could fester: “This often leads [writers] to compare their role during the battle times of proletarian literature to today and makes them doubt whether the party’s and the state’s cultural policy line is correct.”103 And yet such “older authors” still enjoyed privileged access to resources, from state commissions to scarce housing. “I will try to be objective, but there is an intolerable unfairness in the [state’s] treatment of authors,” a Leipzig writer complained to the Ministry of Culture in 1977. “One gets a thousand marks to build a private house, even though he’s wretched, . . . and another can’t even get help with a normal apartment.”104 While older artists lamented their diminished status, their younger colleagues believed they were still getting too much. Wolf Biermann’s expatriation brought these resentments to the surface. The son of a Jewish communist murdered in Auschwitz, Biermann moved from West Germany to the GDR in 1953 at the age of sixteen. In the early 1960s he published and performed poems alongside students

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from Leipzig’s Literature Institute who shared his commitment to improving socialism in the GDR. “The present, for you / A sweet goal all these bitter years / For me is only a bitter beginning, calls out / For changes,” he wrote in a 1965 poem entitled “To the Old Comrades.”105 A few months later, the “Clear-Cutting Plenum” took aim at such impertinence, condemning Biermann’s “anarchic individualism” and “principled opposition to real socialism.”106 The writer received an indefinite publishing ban but continued performing privately in his East Berlin apartment. While the Honecker regime constantly monitored Biermann, it seemed to have reached a modus vivendi with him, which is why his expatriation came as such as shock. After a concert in Köln in November 1976, Biermann was stripped of his citizenship and prevented from returning to East Germany, eventually settling in Hamburg. At least a hundred artists sent letters of protest against Biermann’s expulsion and hundreds more expressed their disagreement in meetings with officials. What rankled most was the state’s unwillingness to accept even constructive critique. The twenty-five-year-old writer Jürgen Fuchs argued that Biermann was a true communist, “whose criticism was perhaps somewhat excessive, but still necessary and partly accurate.”107 Four members of the Writers’ Union in Leipzig, all under the age of forty, told Honecker they disagreed with many of Biermann’s positions but firmly supported “an increasingly open discussion of all our problems within our own republic.”108 Biermann’s expatriation suggested that officials were not prepared to listen, and their subsequent actions bore this out: Fuchs was arrested for his protest and spent more than nine months in jail. Such harsh reprisals led to more frustration, especially from younger artists who no longer knew where they stood. “I used to have firm confidence in the party,” the writer Gunter Preuß told Writers’ Union leaders in Leipzig, “but that has changed.” After seeing the state punish his friends for trying to improve it, he wondered if there was still a place for writers in the GDR.109 For loyal party members, meanwhile, the Biermann affair highlighted the regime’s lack of conviction. At a meeting with the Leipzig District SED Committee, several writers questioned why the party had put up with Biermann for so long, or why it seemed unwilling to discipline more of his supporters. Most of those present were SED members in their fifties who held leading roles in the GDR Writers’ Union. They bemoaned the party’s “defensive tactics” and “temporizing policies,” comparing these unfavorably to earlier, more aggressive cultural

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campaigns. Speakers complained that young writers “have abandoned Marxist-Leninist positions and make principled attacks on the foundations of our policy,” and yet the Honecker regime continued to fund and promote them. As the SED’s report concluded, Leipzig’s older writers were “united in the opinion that comrades who stand behind the party’s policies have been left in the lurch.”110 For these loyalists, Biermann’s expulsion was too little, too late. Far from a show of strength, it showed the party’s lack of fighting spirit. To artists on both sides of the debate, the Biermann affair revealed that the regime no longer cared about their views. It did not want advice even from lifelong party members, nor would it tolerate critique; officials made decisions on their own and then expected everyone to fall in line. For many artists this felt like a bitter demotion. Preuß groused that “the relationship between power and spirit has been disturbed,” but also saw this as a symptom of a larger problem. The whole “relationship between the party-state and the working people” was out of alignment, he argued: “the masses are not included in decision making and not even informed about it.” Preuß’s colleague Erich Loest, who attended the same meeting, compared the situation to “1953, before the New Course. No one knows what is happening [in the government].”111 What the writers really lamented was the shrinking of a public sphere: the lack of opportunities to share their thoughts, to get involved in civic life, to influence government policy. Such opportunities had been a major part of the New Course, but they grew limited under normalization, even for loyal members of the SED. To have a public discussion of public affairs, East German artists increasingly looked beyond state structures.

The Parallel Polis In May 1978, eighteen months after he helped to draft Charter 77, the mathematician and philosopher Václav Benda reflected on its failings. The Charter had found itself “in a rather schizophrenic situation,” he wrote in an underground journal. Although its signatories took “a very dim view of the present political system,” they still directed their appeals to it, “taking the authorities at their word.” That was a dead end, Benda argued. If they really wanted “to participate in the affairs of a community (affairs that are ‘political’ in the broadest sense of the word),” Czechs and Slovaks could not rely on “dialogue with the regime.” Instead, they had to “join forces in creating, slowly but surely, parallel structures” that would supplement the governmental ones and

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eventually supplant them. Benda called for “parallel cultural structures,” “a parallel structure of education and scientific and scholarly life,” even a “parallel information network” that could replace the staterun media. Taken together, they would constitute nothing less than a “parallel polis”: a public sphere entirely independent of the state, one that provided “the proper conditions for political discussion.”112 By the time Benda coined the phrase “parallel polis,” a group of dissidents was busy building one in Kraków. Their starting point, as in Czechoslovakia, was the futility of dialogue with the state. Far from engaging with the Letter of 59, the Polish leadership only stepped up repressive measures, not just against the signatories but against all critics. In June  1976, when workers went on strike to protest rising prices, Gierek sent riot police to disperse them, leading to hundreds of injuries, dismissals, and arrests. It was these workers that KOR was formed to defend. Out of its fourteen founders, eleven had signed the Letter of 59; KOR was for them a way to move from talk to action, to guarantee the “civil liberties” that the regime refused to provide.113 It offered legal and financial aid to persecuted workers and also put out two of the first underground periodicals in communist Poland, the Communiqué and the Information Bulletin, which spread the word about state persecution. This was precisely the “parallel information network” Benda wished for, and it became the germ of an entire parallel polis. Typewritten issues of the Communiqué reached Kraków in October 1976, spurring Jagiellonian University students to organize a fund for workers’ defense. Poland’s Security Service followed them from the start. On May 7, 1977, the body of one student activist, Stanisław Pyjas, was found on the stairwell outside his apartment; officially the death was ruled a drunken accident, but everyone suspected murder. KOR organizers in Warsaw helped Pyjas’s friends print hundreds of flyers that laid out the circumstances of his death and urged students to boycott the upcoming Juwenalia festival.114 On its last day, while university officials crowned Kraków’s “prettiest student” in a beauty contest on Market Square, over two thousand people took part in a counterdemonstration, marching from Pyjas’s funeral mass to the site of his death. Later that evening one student climbed on the festival stage to announce the founding of a new group: the Student Solidarity Committee (SKS). “The Socialist Union of Polish Students has completely lost the moral right to represent the student community,” he declared; only the SKS could be “an authentic student organization, replacing coercion with

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authentic solidarity and genuine ties.”115 Over two hundred students signed this founding declaration, forming an institutional alternative to the official student union. Their vision of solidarity quickly spread beyond Kraków as SKS branches popped up at most of Poland’s major universities.116 Like KOR, the SKS relied on samizdat—self-publishing—to inform and attract members. Kraków students edited two SKS publications, Index and Signal, which appeared every few months and covered matters the state press ignored, like poor living conditions and faculty dismissals. The earliest issues had to be typed on carbon paper, four or five copies at a time, but the students quickly mastered a more efficient method, screen-printing, which allowed them to print thousands of copies within hours.117 Thanks to this technology, the SKS was able to set up an underground publishing house, the Kraków Students’ Press. Its output included texts by Soviet dissidents, documentation of Stalinist repressions, and novels by the likes of George Orwell and Friedrich Dürrenmatt. While most of these were reprinted from émigré newspapers, the press also put out new material—for instance, by the Kraków writer Adam Zagajewski, who signed the Letter of 59 and was then blackballed at government presses. His poetry collection Letter appeared in 1979 in an edition of two thousand copies, with an introduction by a prominent literary critic and original illustrations. Six more underground presses had opened in Kraków by the summer of 1980, obliterating the state’s monopoly on publishing and expanding access for readers and writers alike.118 The SKS also put on a series of live events, initially under the aegis of the Catholic Church. Meetings took place at the Convent of the Norbertine Sisters, roughly a mile from Jagiellonian University, and sought to “promote Catholic values through culture, broadly understood.”119 This involved a rich artistic program: film screenings, concerts, theatrical performances, evenings with authors such as the science-fiction writer Stanisław Lem. After several months, officials forced the convent to shut down the series, only to watch it reappear in a new guise—as part of the Society for Scientific Courses, known as the Flying University. The “university” consisted of lectures by dissident thinkers held mostly in private homes. In Kraków as many as a hundred people crowded into student apartments to hear writers like Zagajewski, or KOR leaders such as Adam Michnik.120 Outside of the classroom the SKS organized public marches on interwar Poland’s independence day (November 11) and the anniversary of the Katyń massacre (April  13). Though police

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forces quickly broke them up, such demonstrations made the SKS visible to a wide public and served as a recruitment tool. What was emerging in Kraków was an alternative cultural matrix, one that operated outside of government institutions—or rather, that operated as if these did not exist. The SKS self-consciously fashioned an independent infrastructure: publishing houses, periodicals, concerts, lecture courses, even an entire symbolic calendar. Much of this infrastructure was parasitic on the communist state, making use of its spaces and resources. The Students’ Press, for instance, bought reams of paper from state stores by bribing clerks to write them off as missed deliveries.121 The SKS also relied on powerful institutions like universities and the Church, which had gained considerable autonomy after the Polish October. Deans at Jagiellonian University often protected student activists from dismissal, both out of sympathy and in defense of their own authority. Church leaders, too, provided organizational and material help, not least in an effort to grow their student ministry. The SKS included devout Catholics, socialist reformers, and proponents of open anticommunist struggle. What united them was a commitment to a civic activism that ignored state institutions and instead built a parallel polis.122

Internal Opposition The kind of activism the SKS pursued was practically unthinkable in Leipzig. There were certainly plenty of people who disagreed with the regime or even opposed it altogether. After the Biermann affair the Stasi compiled a list of potentially dangerous artists, who came under surveillance by a newly formed operative group devoted to “internal opposition.”123 In Leipzig this surveillance extended to several hundred people, including the Literature Institute’s entire faculty and over 70 percent of its students.124 Two prominent painters, Werner Tübke and Wolfgang Mattheuer, had to be placed under close watch, alongside the writer Erich Loest and many others. These were all “key figures of the political underground,” the Stasi believed.125 “Their hostile-negative positions have hardened and their behavior and demeanor support the goals and activities of hostile forces.”126 Critical attitudes were not in short supply. Unlike in Poland, though, even the SED’s most fervent critics expressed them through official channels. Those whom the Stasi called “key figures of the political underground” were also key figures in the state’s cultural matrix. When Loest

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openly argued that it was “high time for the party to admit its mistakes,” he did so at a meeting of the Leipzig Writers’ Union steering committee.127 Tübke and Mattheuer both belonged to the SED; even as they condemned party policy, they still adhered to its rules on discipline. They sought to expand the state-sanctioned public sphere, not to create a new one. In the 1970s Leipzig had no equivalent of Kraków’s SKS—no samizdat, no Flying University, no protest marches. Whatever dissidents it had were almost entirely contained within state structures. This contrast fits neatly with national stereotypes of rebellious Poles and obedient Germans, but what really set the two states apart was geopolitics. Leipzig dissidents did not need to forge an alternative cultural matrix because it already existed, right on the other side of the inner German border. For East Germans, West Germany was a photo negative of the GDR: it represented the noncommunist version of their national community. While Poland’s SKS had no choice but to build such a community inside the communist state, residents of the GDR could access it outside. Before 1961 critics were able to leave East Germany and still preserve their language, culture, and connection to the nation. Those who chose to stay were more likely to hold leftist views and to feel invested in the GDR—two factors that help explain the comparatively high rates of party membership.128 Even after the Wall went up, the SED allowed retirees to emigrate to the West, under the argument that they no longer contributed to the country’s welfare. It increasingly applied the same logic to openly critical voices, reasoning that a release valve would reduce internal pressure. When Loest asked for permission to leave for the Federal Republic in November 1979, officials quickly relented, “so as to diminish his potency inside the GDR.”129 Even those who wanted to stay were sometimes expelled by force, in the same manner as Wolf Biermann. Three fervent critics of his expatriation—the Leipzig artists Jürgen Fuchs, Gerulf Pannach, and Christian Kunert—were first arrested in November 1976 and then deported to West Berlin after nine months. Their expulsion came a month after a Polish amnesty freed nearly a dozen KOR activists, all of whom quickly returned to oppositional activities. Those who might have done the same in East Germany, by contrast, often ended up in the Federal Republic. But if West Germany’s existence defused protests in the GDR, it also helped to fuel them. Practically all East Germans could watch West German television, which not only reported on East German events but also amplified East German voices. Nor was there any need for a domestic

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samizdat, like the one Kraków’s SKS produced, so long as writers and readers had access to West German tamizdat—“publishing over there.” East German authors used this opportunity to publish works that were not welcome in the GDR, especially when censorship intensified under normalization. The writer Gert Neumann, who was expelled from Leipzig’s Literature Institute in 1969 for “spreading revisionist opinions,” was able to document this experience in a short-story collection that appeared in Frankfurt.130 Though he was banned from publishing in the GDR, hounded by Stasi agents, and forced to work as a repairman at the Konsument, Neumann achieved renown both at home and abroad—renown that shielded him from harsher persecution. Over the course of the 1980s he published two more novels in the West, using West Germany’s public sphere to become one of East Germany’s most prominent authors. GDR writers also used the threat of publishing abroad to win concessions at home. Like Neumann, Erich Loest spent years working on an autobiographical novel, It Goes Its Way, which opens with the Leipzig “Beat Demo”: the 1965 protests in support of rock and roll that led to hundreds of arrests and inspired the “Clear-Cutting Plenum.” For Loest’s young protagonist, who gets attacked by the police, the unexpected assault becomes a transformative moment. “I knew I had to get revenge. Before the battle on Leuschner Square, I thought the world was neatly divided. The enemy was in the West; the Americans bombarded Vietnam, Kissinger was a fascist. Now one of our own dogs bit me, not an American soldier. . . .  Hence revenge.”131 Predictably, officials blocked the book for several years, until Loest secured a contract from a Western press. To minimize publicity, they finally agreed to print his novel domestically in an edition of just nine thousand copies.132 Loest saw this as a major triumph after a “difficult battle.” By threatening to send his manuscript abroad, he had managed to “force reflection” about public affairs within East Germany’s state-sanctioned public sphere.133 For Václav Benda, the parallel polis had two goals: to assure independence from official structures and to “humanize” them.134 West Germany helped GDR artists achieve both. For some, like Neumann, publishing in the West became a way to circumvent the state’s cultural matrix altogether. For others, like Loest or the painter Wolfgang Mattheuer, the money that they earned abroad bought more autonomy from the state. To raise precious hard currency, the Honecker regime encouraged artists to start selling in the West and let them keep 15 percent of the profits. Mattheuer made thousands of marks a year from foreign sales, which freed him to refuse state commissions—but also

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empowered him to speak his mind.135 While he remained a party member until 1988, the painter openly critiqued its policies, demanding (on West German television) that SED officials confront “bitter truths” instead of hiding behind “window dressing.”136 Unlike the Kraków SKS, Mattheuer did not publish samizdat, organize protest marches, or found new institutions; he sought to “humanize” the communist regime, not to replace it. And yet he too relied on a parallel polis to do so, turning to West Germany’s public sphere in order to expand the GDR’s. Writing in emigration in 1951, the Polish author Czesław Miłosz tried to explain why so many of his friends had chosen to work with the communist state. Part of the answer, he argued, lay in its promise of a brighter future. Communism appealed to higher ideals and gave believers “the certainty that [they] belonged to the new and conquering world.”137 It helped to justify both past traumas and present difficulties by pointing to the redemptive, glorious tomorrow. Another element was a sense of inevitability: those who wanted to stay in their homeland often concluded that “there is no other way.”138 As communist regimes nationalized cultural institutions, attacked churches, and exiled private patrons, artists had little choice but to work for the state. At the same time, officials made this choice as attractive as possible. “Writers in the people’s democracy belong to a new privileged caste,” Miłosz wrote; those willing to collaborate were given “every conceivable opportunity.”139 For many, the promise of fame, fortune, and power was enough to convert skepticism into support, or at least grudging acceptance. Three decades later, none of these motivations still remained. Both Gierek and Honecker pivoted away from utopian language, focusing their energies and budgets on the here and now. Though this proved popular with millions of Poles and East Germans, it disappointed those who harbored hopes for a radically new social order. Old loyalists felt betrayed and alienated by communist regimes’ materialism, while younger artists chafed at these regimes’ lack of imagination. The idealistic visions that had animated a youth revolt in 1968 began to fester in the 1970s when party leaders proudly proclaimed their satisfaction with the socialism that actually existed. Unsurprisingly, many artists were drawn to alternative projects, such as the “last utopia” of human rights or the “parallel polis” of the underground.140 The same desire for a “new and conquering world” that had attracted young dreamers to communism in the 1940s repelled them from it by the 1970s.

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It did not help that artists faced extensive funding cuts. Though economic difficulties exacerbated the problem, reduced budgets for culture were a deliberate policy designed to focus spending on consumer goods. As Gierek and Honecker turned toward present-day needs, culture’s transformative potential faded in importance. The arts stopped being a political priority, leading to budget shortfalls and a diminished role for artists. Established figures still received the lion’s share of available resources, but many felt slighted by their drop in status. Younger cohorts, meanwhile, lacked basic supplies and opportunities, even as art academies kept turning them out in droves. Far from a “privileged caste,” artists increasingly felt like second-class citizens, neglected by the state and stifled in their careers. Shrinking budgets angered communism’s supporters and gave fodder to its critics, transforming cultural spaces into breeding grounds of dissent. At the same time, artists gained new professional opportunities that enabled other ways of making art. In pursuing better relations with the West, Poland and East Germany gradually opened up their borders, sending performers to tour abroad and spreading Western mass culture at home. Foreign sales allowed Eastern Bloc artists to sidestep domestic controls, or at least to avoid state commissions. Visibility in the West also insulated them from administrative pressures, freeing producers to make more daring, innovative art. Because cultural policy focused narrowly on political correctness, artists gained new autonomy to experiment, to express their creativity, to break aesthetic taboos. In state-run spaces like the Old Theater, they built their own secluded worlds, complete with an adoring public, that operated as if the state did not exist. It was this combination of frustration and empowerment, of disillusionment and opportunity, that led hundreds of artists to sign protest letters in 1975 and 1976. Though Poles and East Germans protested different things, what they demanded was a public sphere: an opportunity to share their views and have a say in policymaking. This opportunity had existed before 1968, when Eastern Bloc regimes looked to involve the public in the project of National Communism, but it largely evaporated after the crushing of the Prague Spring. To “normalize” political life, communist leaders barred the public from it, hoping to buy quiescence with material goods. Many of those who sent petitions to the state found themselves persecuted, jailed, or even exiled. Unable to carve out a public sphere within the state, they had no option but to go around it. In Poland activists built a parallel polis underground, with help from the Catholic Church and other semiautonomous

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institutions. East Germans, meanwhile, had no need to create alternative structures from scratch, since the alternative existed in West Germany. For some the parallel polis was a way to avoid the communist regime, for others to improve it. But in both Poland and the GDR, as well as elsewhere in the Bloc, artists increasingly turned their back on the state cultural matrix. In absolute terms, the number of such dissidents was small. Only two GDR painters earned as much abroad as Mattheuer did and could therefore afford to be as critical as he was of state policy.141 After the SKS’s novelty wore off, even its founders grew tired of the constant work, which came to seem “uninteresting, dull, risky, ineffective”—as the group’s own newsletter put it. They felt they were living “on the margins of society,” unable to break through and win a mass following.142 Building a parallel polis was lonely work, and even turning to West Germany could leave one isolated at home. But the fact that these alternative structures existed at all profoundly worried communist regimes, and with good reason. Eastern Bloc leaders knew full well that they had lost the artists’ world: that while few artists publicly critiqued communist rule, the vast majority wanted to do so. Increasingly, officials saw the whole cultural matrix as a threat, one to be closely watched and limited in its impact. Open dissent was just the tip of the iceberg. In order to defuse the artists’ world, communist states had to co-opt it.

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Protest Spaces of Opposition, Spaces of Dialogue In this confrontation between uncontrolled power and captive society, I stand on the side of the interned and the arrested. . . . In this situation I cannot lead a state institution. —Andrzej Kijówski, director of Kraków’s Słowacki Theater, in his resignation letter, 19811 There are things we can repair with a clarifying conversation, after both sides have probed how far they can go. . . . What I can do above all is to open our [concert] hall to such problems. —Kurt Masur, director of Leipzig’s Gewandhaus, 19892

In January 1984 East Germany’s top cultural officials met to discuss the upcoming Folk Music Workshop in Leipzig. The workshop, held each year since 1980, served as a showcase for traditional folk instruments such as the mandolin and concertina, as well as for folk musicians who understood themselves as modern-day troubadours, duty-bound to speak truth to power. Many of the songs, which bands had been asked to submit in advance, touched on sensitive issues in the GDR: environmental degradation, food shortages, the rising tide of emigration seekers.3 For some officials—including Rudi Raupach, the deputy head of the SED Central Committee’s Culture D ­ epartment— their insolence clearly went too far. “Are these really folk musicians or political mountebanks?” Raupach asked. “We won’t let ourselves be pissed on,” he continued. “Given the current situation in folk mu­ sic, we can’t allow the workshop to proceed.” Others, however, urged a different strategy. Eberhard Fuhrmann, an administrator at the Ministry of Culture, laid out “the ministry’s position.” Precisely because of the musicians’ “oppositional attitudes,” he explained, it was essential to “prevent them from ‘sliding into the underground’ and to signal our

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willingness to reach an understanding.” Officials had to censor texts that were “explicitly directed ‘against power,’ ” but otherwise let the musicians be, so as to keep them under supervision.4 The best way to contain the opposition was to co-opt it. In the late 1970s and 1980s, as “oppositional attitudes” proliferated, Eastern Bloc leaders had to choose how to address them. Repression—Raupach’s preference—was easier to implement but c­ arried greater risks. By simply banning nonconformist artists, as well as any form of undesired activity, regimes could keep control of public life yet lose much of the public. Rigidity not only bred resentment but also pushed more and more people “into the underground,” expanding the parallel polis that had emerged outside of government structures. By contrast, integration—Fuhrmann’s choice—promised to keep potential dissidents within the state’s cultural matrix, where they could be properly watched and contained. At worst, officials would keep tabs on “political mountebanks,” learning their plans and tracking their movements. At best, they might even “reach an understanding” with them, bringing rebellious youths back into the fold. But this solution, too, came at a price. Co-opting the opposition meant having to tolerate, fund, and promote it. Officials had to let themselves “be pissed on,” time and again, by those who openly criticized communist rule. The rise of a nongovernmental infrastructure—a parallel polis—put Eastern Bloc administrators in a bind. To gain control over dissenters, they had to cede control of cultural policy, or vice versa. Accounts of communism’s collapse rarely foreground its administrators, and understandably so. By organizing, demonstrating, and simply reclaiming public space, East European men and women played leading roles in the events of 1989.5 But governmental choices shaped the avenues available to them, conditioning the forms that protest took. The Bloc’s regimes did not simply “implode” under the weight of crippling debt and Cold War competition.6 Faced with rising unrest, they tried to change the way they ruled, just as they had over the previous four decades. The demonstrations calling for reform in 1989 were themselves products of regime reform. They were made possible by choices regimes made as they attempted to respond to public pressure—the kind of pressure that left Raupach and Fuhrmann scrambling for answers. The interplay between the two solutions these officials proposed, repression and integration, not only defined cultural life in the last decade of communist rule but also shaped the way in which that rule came crashing down, first in Poland and then in East Germany.

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In the end, the fifth Folk Music Workshop of the GDR went off as planned, with seventeen bands and extensive surveillance. Fuhrmann’s integrationist vision prevailed, both in this instance and in much of the GDR’s cultural policy. Over the course of the 1980s East German officials created dozens of niches within the state’s cultural matrix, for folk musicians, punk rockers, conceptual artists, and even samizdat journals. In an effort to forestall unsupervised opposition, they built a state-sponsored underground that fueled dissent but also fostered dialogue with administrators. The Polish regime, too, sought to co-opt the country’s underground by legalizing the Solidarity movement in August 1980. Sixteen months later, however, it shifted from integration to repression after discovering that it could not maintain control of public life. Thanks to an artists’ boycott, the state’s cultural matrix atrophied while the parallel polis grew larger than ever. Cultural spaces splintered into camps, losing their power to mediate between state and society. By 1989, they played only a minor role in Poland’s transition from communist rule, whereas they formed a crucial public sphere in Leipzig.

Niche Society On March 6, 1978, the Federation of Evangelical Churches in the GDR struck an agreement with the SED regime. The federation represented roughly eight million Protestants, or nearly half of all East Germans. Under a Marxist state, they had long been subject to harassment and discrimination, but the agreement promised to change all that. Protestant churches would become “churches within socialism,” both sides declared. The state accepted their right to exist and minister to the public; the churches pledged to help parishioners “find their way in socialist society.”7 At the same time, as Mary Fulbrook has argued, officials “sought to make use of the Church hierarchy as an extended arm of the state.” In establishing better relations with church leaders, they hoped to gain influence over church affairs at a time when more and more churches were sheltering pacifists, environmentalists, and other dissident groups. Ultimately, Fulbrook concluded, the agreement was an effort by “the SED leadership . . . to co-opt Christians for their own purposes.”8 Rather than run the risk that churches might sustain a parallel polis, the way they had in Poland, the GDR regime pursued a rapprochement. It resolved to keep its friends close and its enemies closer. The same philosophy guided East Germany’s cultural policies. In early 1972, just a few months after Honecker’s accession, the Ministry

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of Culture began training disk jockeys—“because there are many illegal Dis-Jockeys [sic] that must be brought under state control.”9 At the conclusion of a six-month course that covered both technique and ideology, participants received a special license, gaining the right to play in youth clubs and charge fees. By 1979 there were 296 registered DJs in Leipzig District, all of whom had to file quarterly reports and meet each month with state officials.10 Music bands followed a similar qualifying process, which included a civics exam, a test of musical knowledge, and an audition. Even punk rockers could take a test, and many did, since formal recognition brought tangible benefits—above all the right to play in clubs.11 Administrators also organized annual showcases for registered musicians, from the Leipzig Jazz Days (started in 1976) to the Folk Music Workshop (1980) to Rock for Peace (1982). In 1985 they even staged the first Leipzig Breakdance Competition, which forced city officials to assess such moves as “Robbot,” “Elektrik Buggie,” and “Cresi-Lex-Tec” (i.e., crazy-legs technique).12 Leipzig’s delegation to the Free German Youth’s 1989 spring festival included groups with (English) names like Funktaxi, Sound-Express, and the United Break Crew.13 On the eve of East Germany’s dissolution, its state-sponsored culture encompassed everything from skiffle to punk. To make room for these initiatives, Leipzig’s cultural matrix expanded, adding more spaces as well as more officials to oversee them. The goal was to make sure that no city residents slipped through the cracks; whatever cultural activities they pursued, it was imperative they did so through government channels. This forced administrators to turn to opinion polls, above all those conducted by Leipzig’s Central Institute for Youth Research. One 1984 report found that “young people prefer to pursue their cultural interests individually or in informal groups”—a sentence one administrator marked with an exclamation point. They tended to avoid Houses of Culture as too “planned” and instead gravitated toward smaller spaces where “programming is organized with them rather than for them” (double exclamation point).14 Responding to such suggestions, city officials shifted funding to so-called youth clubs, often just a few rooms for games and dancing, whose number ballooned from 91 in 1971 to 479 by 1987.15 They also opened dozens of “small galleries” in public buildings like hospitals and schools, giving artists more opportunities to exhibit and making art accessible to diverse publics. That marked a sharp reversal from Walter Ulbricht’s model of consolidated Culture Centers that aimed to forge a unified “socialist people’s community.” Honecker’s Leipzig, by contrast, had

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differentiated spaces for different groups: state institutions that were designed to feel like private worlds.16 This change in course proved difficult for many state officials, who had been used to banning subcultures, not promoting them. Sent to review a punk concert in one “small gallery,” a Leipzig functionary could only describe it as “a kind of beat music, accompanied by hammering on tin cans, a fire extinguisher, an old searchlight, and a chrome car bumper.”17 Administrators often felt out of their depth, not just in judging punk or the “Elektrik Buggie” but in making judgments at all. In 1985 seven Leipzig officials convened to evaluate a farce about “contemporary student life” written by a student at the city’s Medical Academy. Some thought the play was ready as it was, while others found it completely unacceptable. After multiple meetings they resolved to punt the matter to “another committee that is capable of assessing [the play’s] ideological content.” The trouble was that guidelines for such assessments barely existed. As one official explained, cultural policy focused instead on “the possibility of registering this collective”—that is, the author and his student friends—and integrating it into state structures.18 Administrators were constantly “registering” cultural events they did not understand or even actively disliked, because state policy prized integration above all. When pressed to actually assess a work of art, they lacked any criteria for judgment. There was one thing that all administrators knew: no cultural activity could take place outside of government structures. They worked to suppress any unauthorized undertaking, no matter how small or innocuous. Founded in Leipzig in 1981, the “Hope for Nicaragua” initiative raised money for a school in Nicaragua, where the Sandinistas had recently formed a socialist government. It organized readings by local writers and auctions of graphic art, but state officials quickly intervened. Although it was entirely in line with the regime’s Third World aid programs, “Hope for Nicaragua” was a private venture run by a group of twenty-something friends without institutional guidance or support, and Leipzig administrators felt uneasy with their lack of oversight. “Although I support the end goal of your efforts, I must strongly suggest that you pursue other means,” the head of the Leipzig District Council’s Culture Department told the group.19 The matter went all the way to the minister of culture, who likewise attempted to steer the initiative into official channels. When organizers refused, one was arrested, several were forced to emigrate, and another died under suspicious circumstances. “For us this wasn’t just about Nicaragua but about creating a

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free space that wasn’t dominated by either the state or the Church,” one of the group’s founders later admitted.20 In Honecker’s East Germany, however, there was no room for such independent activities, even when they aligned with the state’s goals. The end result was to create a multitude of niches, as one Stasi report mapped out. “Young hostile writers” gathered at a student club in the city center, “alternative painters” at small galleries around town. Punks met in downtown nightclubs, skinheads at a discotheque in north Leipzig, goths in a youth club on the city’s outskirts (“at night they seek out cemeteries for parties,” added the report). Some dissidents made use of church facilities, but artists rarely did: there were plenty of spaces for them within the state’s cultural matrix.21 In a 1983 book West Germany’s first permanent representative to the GDR, Günter Gaus, famously described East Germany as a “niche society.” The niches that he had in mind were apolitical: a niche, he wrote, was “the preferred space in which people leave everything—politicians, planners, propagandists, the collective, the grand objective, the cultural heritage—behind .  .  . and spend time with family and friends watering the flowers, washing the car, playing cards, talking, celebrating special occasions.”22 This vision has been rightly criticized for overdrawing the line between public and private, and therefore overlooking the regime’s ubiquity in daily life.23 But the concept of “niche society” does capture a key feature of East Germany in the 1980s, when public life became increasingly fragmented. In dozens of niches, diverse groups pursued their own interests under the state’s protective umbrella, thanks to the SED’s concerted strategy of integration.

Poland’s Perestroika On August  17, 1980, the newly formed Interfactory Strike Committee in Gdańsk issued a list of twenty-one demands. Gdańsk had been a center of the December 1970 protests that left forty people dead and over a thousand injured. Ten years later, many of the strikers felt like veterans, familiar with organizing and determined to stick together in the face of repression. They also knew that they were not alone: thanks in part to underground publications from the Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR), they were aware that hundreds of factories across Poland had also gone on strike. Their demands thus read less like workplace grievances than a national manifesto. The strikers called for a lower retirement age, improved health services, better childcare facilities, and

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shorter waitlists for government housing. All these asks were in line with Gierek’s welfare policies, reflecting the public’s growing expectations for state services. Other demands, however, betrayed the influence of KOR and its push for autonomous structures. Point number three asked officials to “respect freedom of expression and publication,” including in the “underground press”; points number one and two called for “free trade unions independent of the party,” with the right to strike.24 What they demanded, in effect, was for the state to legalize the parallel polis and cede its monopoly on political life. Since the emergence of KOR, the Student Solidarity Committee (SKS), and other oppositional groups, the Polish state had tried both integration and repression. In Kraków SKS events were constantly raided and their participants detained.25 At the same time, officials hoped to win back some of the group’s sympathizers by offering apartments, travel opportunities, and other incentives.26 This was a similar approach to what the SED pursued, but it proved harder to implement in Poland. For one thing, oppositional activists were less dependent on the state, thanks largely to the power of the Catholic Church. A few months after the church-state agreement in the GDR, Kraków’s archbishop, Karol Wojtyła, became Pope John Paul II. When he returned to Kraków in June  1979, he told a crowd of some two million people to “never lose your spiritual freedom,” and Church officials backed him up by sponsoring dissident artists.27 At the same time, the Polish state had less to offer than East Germany’s, not just to dissidents but to the population at large. Unlike the GDR, which had a willing lender in West Germany, Poland came under mounting pressure to repay its foreign debt. Gierek raised food prices in June 1976, only to backtrack amid popular protests. Four years later, though, he was forced to do it again, triggering a strike wave that culminated in the twenty-one demands. Having failed either to integrate dissent or to suppress it, the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR) was running out of options. On August  31 Polish authorities acceded to all twenty-one demands, recognizing an independent, self-governing trade union—Solidarity. Though the Politburo drew up plans to break the strikes by force, memories of 1970 and 1976 lingered. PZPR leaders understood that another crackdown would cripple the party’s authority and reasoned that conciliation would leave them more room to maneuver. “It is necessary to choose the lesser evil,” Gierek concluded, “and then try to get ourselves out of this.”28 It was a strategy the PZPR had tried before under

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its previous leader Władysław Gomułka: after making far-reaching concessions in October 1956, the party gradually clawed back some of its lost powers. Then, too, officials had been forced to grant autonomy to non-state groups, most notably the Catholic Church but also private farmers, tradesmen, and civic associations. They subsequently worked to limit this autonomy, for instance by banning religious instruction in schools just five years after allowing it.29 Unlike the East German Socialist Unity Party (SED), the PZPR was both experienced in working with non-state institutions and confident that it could keep them in line. Recognizing Solidarity was a surrender, to be sure, but party leaders saw a silver lining: the parallel polis had finally moved aboveground, where they hoped it might be easier to co-opt. A founding committee for the new union convened in mid-September inside the Lenin Steel Mill’s Theater Hall, built in 1955 to showcase Nowa Huta’s amateur ensembles. Within a week it had 71,000 members in 154 workplaces across Kraków Province.30 The union’s popularity owed a great deal to Poland’s history of worker activism, its strong national traditions, and the integrating role of the Catholic Church. Yet all of these had been in place long before August 1980; it was state policy that had changed. So long as non-state groups like KOR remained illegal, they attracted no more than a few thousand followers—“professional oppositionists,” as the historian Andrzej Paczkowski has called them.31 After the state formally recognized Solidarity, however, the union’s membership approached ten million. Over a third of all PZPR members— roughly a million people—also joined the new union, some in an effort to tame it but many in search of authentic reform. More than a trade union, Solidarity became a broad-based social movement enabled by the regime’s grudging acceptance. Artists were heavily involved in Solidarity from the start. Kraków officials estimated that one in three writers and painters belonged to it, far more than had ever joined the PZPR. Among actors and musicians, membership was nearly universal, “ca. 100 percent.”32 At a series of fiery meetings through the fall and winter of 1980, these artists ­bemoaned the party’s mistakes and blamed it for ignoring them. Members of the Graphic Artists’ Union criticized the regime for neglecting “Polish society’s spiritual needs”; the local Writers’ Union branch urged major “changes in cultural policy, so that writers can speak freely and have a say in the future of national culture.”33 The branch’s party cell sent its own letter to the Central Committee, urging Poland’s

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leaders “to carry out extensive economic reforms, to expand transparency, democracy, and self-governance, to make public officials answerable to society.” The letter’s twenty-one signatories included the branch president, the head of Kraków Radio, and the editor-in-chief of Literary Life. Even the PZPR’s most loyal artists were demanding a full party “restructuring”—przekształcenie, a cognate of the Russian perestroika.34 By then a major restructuring in cultural administration was well under way. Under the Gdańsk Accords, Solidarity gained the right to publish without censorship, so long as each text carried the label “for internal union use.” Overnight the fledgling underground press became a legal, thriving operation: by one count, 1,896 periodicals sprung up in Poland between August 1980 and December 1981.35 Book publishing also prospered, as Kraków’s Student Press put out long-proscribed works like Orwell’s 1984 and Czesław Miłosz’s The Captive Mind.36 State theaters, too, adopted a new repertoire, most strikingly a play written by Wojtyła when he was still a parish priest. The Brother of Our God tells the story of a nineteenth-century nobleman who leaves a successful painting career to minister to the poor. Though penned in 1950, the play was first staged in December 1980 at Kraków’s Słowacki Theater after direct authorization from the pope prevailed over the Ministry of Culture and Art’s objections. It was a phenomenon: “Huge crowds came from across the country, seats were sold out for months ahead,” recalled the theater’s director Krystyna Skuszanka. “The theater was becoming a true national stage, having regained an authentic connection to the life outside its walls.”37 For Skuszanka, the moment was “reminiscent of the atmosphere of October 1956—our theatrical youth in Nowa Huta.” Back then she headed Nowa Huta’s newly opened People’s Theater alongside her husband, Jerzy Krasowski, a leading figure in the local PZPR. The two put on another celebrated play, Jerzy Broszkiewicz’s The Names of Power, which embodied that era’s hopes for socialist reform. By 1980, though, the party’s visions of reform were just one option among many. The Słowacki’s ensemble enthusiastically supported the choice of a Wojtyła play, but also pushed for further changes: more influence on the repertoire, more creative autonomy, and more say in staffing decisions.38 Amid Solidarity’s emphasis on societal control, they were no longer satisfied with even a reformist state official. Skuszanka eventually resigned, giving way to a man more in line with the ensemble’s views: the literary critic Andrzej Kijówski, one of the founders of the Flying University. Inspired by the idea of an independent, self-governing trade

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union, artists increasingly expected to govern themselves—and administrators increasingly consented. In early December 1980 the head of the Kraków PZPR Culture Department sent a questionnaire to every party cell in town. “In the current situation it seems necessary to have an exchange of opinions about the program, goals, and methods” of cultural administration, he posited. “Instead of a rigid plan of work, let’s try to come up with a list of problems.”39 The responses were nearly unanimous, calling for “decentralization” and “debureaucratization” in cultural affairs. Even among party members, surveys showed, “the main postulate is creative freedom. . . . The state’s cultural policy must avoid administrative measures, allowing an authentic battle of opinions and societal judgment. Officials’ interventions must be limited to extreme cases.”40 In June  1981 local party leaders formally endorsed these postulates, resolving to create “self-government” and “communal oversight” in cultural institutions. Only in this way, they explained, could cultural policy attain its ultimate objective—to become “credible in society’s eyes.”41 Backed into a corner, PZPR officials promised to expand the public sphere, empowering Polish society to bring them to account. A major test of their sincerity came six months later, in December 1981, when several hundred artists convened in Warsaw for a Congress of Polish Culture—the first since 1949 that was not programmed from above. Organized by the Coordinating Committee of Creative and Scientific Associations, an offshoot of Solidarity, the congress sought to “express societal aspirations” for culture and lay out a new model for self-government in the arts.42 The first two days were filled with lively discussion, but on the third, December 13, the delegates showed up to a locked door and a hastily scribbled sign: “The Congress of Culture has been dissolved.”43 Within hours it emerged that several participants, including Kijówski, had been arrested along with some five thousand Solidarity activists. The era of the Gdańsk Accords was over, and the country was under martial law—or, to translate the Polish term for it literally, a “state of war.”

A State of War A week later, around midnight on December  20, sixteen transport trucks pulled up to Kraków’s party headquarters. They carried gifts from sister city Leipzig, including 49 tons of flour, 16 tons of washing powder, and 18 crates of children’s toys.44 The goods were meant to ease the growing supply shortages and burnish the party’s image: after

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months of blaming Solidarity for the economic crisis, the PZPR was eager to show that things had improved under martial law. It was a tough sell. Under the party’s new leader, Wojciech Jaruzelski—the longtime minister of national defense—the Politburo took the step it had refused to countenance in August 1980, choosing repression over integration. On December 13 all of Solidarity’s activities became illegal and dozens of protest strikes across the country were violently crushed. After sixteen months of operating openly, the parallel polis was again confined to the underground, but there could be no going back to how things were. Their brief period of intermingling had transformed state and non-state structures alike; disentangling the two would change them further still. Artists were among the first to protest martial law. Locked out of their conference hall, the participants of the Congress of Polish Culture adjourned to a nearby church, where they decried the measure as “a decisive break in dialogue between society and power.”45 Many artists subsequently refused to appear on radio or TV, fearing that doing so would serve to normalize the situation. Those who broke ranks often incurred the public’s wrath: the pro-regime pianist Halina Czerny-Stefańska was clapped off the stage during an April 1982 performance at the Kraków Philharmonic.46 The boycott was rooted in a sense of solidarity that outlived the union itself. The artists’ world had been so closely linked to Solidarity that martial law felt like a direct attack, making enemies of those who had previously tolerated the regime or even worked to improve it. Under the Gdańsk Accords, Poles did not have to choose between supporting Solidarity and supporting the PZPR; indeed, forestalling such a choice was the main goal of the Accord. After December 13, however, the battle lines were drawn. Even when martial law was lifted in July 1983, Kraków’s arts scene remained in a state of war. To city officials, winning the war meant getting artists to declare support for the regime. Over the fall of 1982, they approached many of Kraków’s best-known cultural figures with an offer to join the new government, but almost all came up with an excuse (“an infirm mother,” “a small child,” “I don’t get involved in social or political initiatives”). Jerzy Trela, one of the Old Theater’s foremost actors, complained that being a party member in the theater was hard enough without taking a leadership position, which would surely “burn his bridges” with the rest of the ensemble.47 Indeed, party cells were hemorrhaging members: 58 Kraków artists turned in their party cards after December 13, cutting the rate of PZPR membership to 8 percent of workers in the cultural

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sector. Among 1,007 students at Kraków’s art academies in July 1984, just 4 belonged to the PZPR.48 City officials were left to console themselves with an old truism: “one only discovers real friends in times of need.”49 The state faced similar difficulties in promoting its new artists’ unions. All the old unions were suspended on December 13 and Jaruzelski decided that they were too infiltrated by Solidarity to be restored. Instead, when martial law came to an end, the regime set up new unions for writers and actors while splitting graphic artists between four associations—the better to control them. Most artists, however, stayed away. Out of 1,241 members of the old Union of Polish Graphic Artists in Kraków, just 8  percent joined an official association after martial law.50 Many considered the new unions illegitimate—“a usurpation,” in the words of the Kraków writer Jan Józef Szczepański, the last president of the old Writers’ Union. His union had always “made far-reaching compromises with the authorities,” he insisted, but the opportunity for compromise had passed. “The violence that has been done [to Polish culture] has renewed its sense of mission—that special feeling of responsibility for the nation’s ethos and identity.”51 As in 1956 and 1968, artists spoke the language of nationalism to challenge communist rule. This time, though, they did so from outside of government structures and aimed not to reform but to reject the state. It was the rise of a parallel polis that had made this shift possible. An alternative infrastructure first developed in the late 1970s when groups like KOR and SKS built bridges between churches, universities, and cultural spaces. After the Gdańsk Accords, it emerged from the underground and grew, extending into state institutions. Artists created new publications, unions, and networks, and though these all became illegal under martial law they could not and would not simply disappear. The underground that came into being in December 1981 was vastly stronger and more interconnected than the one that had existed before August 1980. Over a hundred uncensored periodicals, most publishing monthly, appeared in Kraków in 1982 alone.52 They made use of Solidarity’s printing machines as well as its contacts with legal suppliers and publishing houses. Thanks to the Independent Bureau for PublicOpinion Research—a Solidarity research center that survived martial law—we also know they circulated widely. In 1985 just 4.2  percent of respondents reported that they “never” encountered the uncensored press, while 25.9  percent read it regularly.53 The sequence of sudden openness and sudden repression produced a blooming “independent

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culture” that operated outside and on the margins of the state’s cultural matrix. Part of the reason why so few artists joined the new artists’ unions is that they had a viable alternative with its own ethos, infrastructure, and institutions. For Kraków writers who stayed away from the reformed Writers’ Union, professional life revolved around the Catholic Intelligentsia Club. Founded in the wake of the Polish October, the club organized discussions on Catholic theology and culture, and later provided a safe haven for activists from KOR and SKS.54 After martial law it set up a theater and literature section that coordinated a lecture series, awarded stipends, and edited a kind of literary journal, Out Loud— spoken rather than written in order to sidestep censorship. For each “issue,” eight to ten poets, novelists, and critics read from their work to a standing-room-only crowd. “Every meeting was a joint manifestation of protest and independence for writers and readers alike,” the journal’s editor recalled.55 Many of the pieces from Out Loud later appeared in the underground press, especially the quarterly Ark, which had a print run of two thousand copies. Although Ark’s editors were periodically arrested, the state was too weak, too fearful of bad publicity, and too reliant on Western loans to squash underground printing entirely. Some forty unofficial publishing houses operated in Kraków between 1982 and 1989, producing over five hundred books and brochures.56 Kraków’s graphic artists gathered around the Visual Arts Workshop, one of nearly thirty private galleries in town. Like the Catholic Intelligentsia Club, the workshop was a product of the Polish October’s decentralizing reforms. During and after martial law it organized auctions of local art, which provided vital visibility and funding for artists who refused to join a state-backed union.57 Other private galleries helped arrange sales abroad, but it was the Catholic Church that served as the main patron for independent artists. In the brief window of Solidarity rule, Kraków’s diocese received permission to build twenty-three new churches and subsequently hired dozens of sculptors, painters, and decorators.58 Churches also put on regular exhibits of contemporary art, including “Around Graphics,” which opened in Nowa Huta’s St. Maximilian Kolbe Church in September  1984. Timed to coincide and compete with the state-sponsored Graphics Biennale, the exhibition featured more than seventy artists from across Poland and even several from abroad. While many works engaged religious themes, the political subtext was clear: the show’s most celebrated piece was a

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Figure 15.  Mass in the lower chapel of St. Maximilian Kolbe Church, Nowa Huta, September 1984. The posters in the background are part of the independent art show “Around Graphics.” Note the Solidarity banner at top-center, declaring “We Exist.” KARTA Center Foundation, photograph by Piotr Dylik.

drawing of the Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa, cheekily titled “Unknown Man with Mustache (Second Half of the XX Century).”59 Later that month St. Kolbe hosted the Sacrosong music festival, founded by Wojtyła in 1969. During its 1984 edition several dozen choirs, youth orchestras, and even rock groups gave three concerts a day for an audience of nearly four thousand. At the festival’s end, the entire congregation joined in singing its anthem, whose refrain summed up the underground’s ethos of resistance: “I pray that my son is not a coward, not a marionette.”60 Three weeks later, many of the same musicians took part in the annual Week of Catholic Culture, a massive showcase of independent art. The whole week served as an outlet for “pro-Solidarity declarations” and “the patriotism of the underground,” city officials warned. While they insisted that it had made little impact—partly because “there were no events for particular social groups,” contrary to culture department regulations—officials worried that churches were supplanting the state’s cultural institutions.61 The Catholic journal Universal Weekly assessed this possibility with glee: amid the desert of state-sponsored programming, it wrote, events like the Week of Catholic Culture gave thirsty viewers “authentic contact with authentic artworks.”62

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What emerged in 1980s Poland was an alternative cultural matrix—a framework for producing, distributing, and consuming art that was not run by government officials. It depended on two types of institutions, both born out of a reckoning with state violence: the first in June 1956 and the second in June 1976. After the Poznań protests brought a change in leadership, the PZPR gave new autonomy to civic organizations such as the Catholic Intelligentsia Club, the Visual Arts Workshop, and above all the Catholic Church. While these collaborated with the state and moderated their behavior accordingly, they provided legal spaces of refuge to artists stymied by government policy. The other set of institutions was illegal and inspired by the PZPR’s lack of change after the popular protests in 1976. Groups like KOR and SKS developed an underground infrastructure that encompassed publishing houses, lecture courses, and civic holidays, all meant to duplicate and circumvent the infrastructure of the state. Solidarity helped weave these strands together and greatly broadened their reach. The state’s attempt at integration backfired: officials had hoped to co-opt the parallel polis by legalizing it, only to find the parallel polis co-opting government structures instead. When the two had to be disentangled under martial law, the balance between them shifted irrevocably. As Szczepański crowed in his memoirs, Poland’s cultural life “had slipped out of the state’s hands” once and for all.63

The State-Sponsored Underground In May 1981—nine months after the Gdańsk Accords and six months before martial law—three Leipzig functionaries went on an exchange trip to Kraków. To them it looked like communism had fallen; the visitors reported that “the counterrevolution is in full swing.” At the Old Theater they saw life-size posters of Wałęsa under the caption, “Man of the Century.” On their way to the Philharmonic, they ran into a giant protest march demanding freedom for political prisoners. “The party and state apparatus is barely operational,” the Leipzigers concluded. “With the increasing penetration of Solidarity members into the PZPR, the word ‘party’ has become almost a synonym for ‘Solidarity.’ ” They did not dare raise these matters with their hosts, not least because their translator belonged to Solidarity and “greatly abridged” anything they said. The group’s only suggestion was to invite Kraków administrators to Leipzig, “where they can experience the stable political power of the working class and its leading party.”64

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Indeed, East Germany’s leading party enjoyed far more stability and power than the PZPR. Leipzig lacked the kinds of institutions that gave rise to Kraków’s independent culture—both the oppositional structures and the semiautonomous ones. There was no underground press and no Flying University, but also nothing like the Catholic Intelligentsia Club, a civic group that was recognized by the state without being integrated into one of its mass organizations. Besides exhibiting or publishing in the West, an option reserved for the most prominent figures, Leipzig artists had no way to circumvent the state’s cultural matrix, and even minimal attempts to do so—as in the case of “Hope for Nicaragua”—led to censure. And yet the SED’s determination to control all facets of cultural life created certain opportunities for artists. Because they were resolved not to let anyone “slide into the underground,” officials developed a tolerance for critical voices. They often chose to accommodate and even promote dissident figures rather than ban them and lose all influence. Just as the cultural matrix made room for punks and b-boys, so too did it have space for critical writers, private galleries, and an uncensored press. In its effort to prevent a truly independent culture, the SED gave rise to a statesponsored underground. Leipzig’s cafes became important venues for this nascent underground. Starting in the mid-1970s a handful of musicians began performing witty, irreverent songs, or chansons, mostly on the guitar but sometimes on traditional instruments like lute and concertina. They took inspiration from different sources: the political songs of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, medieval German ballads, Saxon folk music. The common elements were candor and forthrightness, often with respect to the absurdities of life in the GDR. “My fatherland is the country where my father has no land,” Dieter Kalka sang; “it’s where barbed wire blooms and he who pricks himself is not forgiven.”65 Most of the artists involved were what he called “professional dissidents,” forced to work menial jobs under constant observation by the Stasi. The chanson scene’s spiritual father, Andreas Reimann, had been expelled from Leipzig’s Literature Institute in 1968 for opposing the invasion of Czechoslovakia. While serving a two-year prison sentence, he met Hubertus Schmidt, an eighteen-year-old jailed after trying to cross the Iron Curtain; Schmidt then set more than seventy of Reimann’s poems to music. On their release, the two started playing in Leipzig cafes, where they attracted a countercultural following. “Even from their external appearance, it was clear that these people [in the audience] had

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‘alternative’ lifestyles,” one Stasi officer observed. “Long or extremely short hair, beards of all types, and the hitchhiker-look predominated.”66 Indeed, the Stasi monitored every performance, wary of “negative enemy statements about the policies of our party and regime.”67 It found plenty and reacted accordingly: members of the so-called Leipzig Song Scene were periodically detained and barred from going on tour. But persecution was just one facet of the state’s approach. The regime also organized the National Song Days, an annual festival at which many chanson singers performed and both Schmidt (singing Reimann) and Kalka won prizes. Official recognition ran counter to the scene’s dissident ethos. “I didn’t tell anyone that I had won the prize,” Kalka remembered; “I was ashamed of it.” And yet the award proved invaluable when he had to audition for his musician’s license. “For the first and only time I introduced myself as the winner of a state prize”—and passed.68 As a prizewinner, Kalka began to appear on the radio despite a standing tour ban, reaching far more people than he ever could in Leipzig. Nor was Kalka an isolated case: the GDR even held a second Song Days festival aimed explicitly at the most critical artists. Though cultural officials attended, they refrained from raising political issues so as to keep musicians coming back and therefore keep them under observation. The singers too “knew perfectly well that such events served as opportunities to watch us,” Schmidt recalled, “but still experienced them as enriching our own activities.”69 Officials pretended to be blind and chanson singers pretended to be free, since both groups had more to gain from working together than apart. The same held true for the GDR’s dissident writers. Many of those who protested Wolf Biermann’s expatriation lost their ability to teach or publish, and nine more were expelled from the Writers’ Union in 1979 for criticizing censorship. Even these blacklisted authors, however, continued giving readings at Leipzig’s Arthur Hoffmann Youth Club as part of its Reading Lamp speaker series. The club’s director “ran around with her underground sense and invited anyone who was somehow objectionable,” as her husband put it.70 Between 1982 and 1989, she organized seventy-five talks by some of East Germany’s most notorious and controversial writers, including her husband—one of the nine union expellees. Many of the participants got by as stokers, brewers, and delivery drivers but desperately needed money and an open forum. The Reading Lamp provided both, even as Stasi officials judged it a “platform for enemy-negative authors.” Three readings got banned, and in 1986 city officials resolved to fire the director—though

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tellingly, they never did. While one account blames this on administrators’ “sloppiness,” the Reading Lamp was far too closely watched to just slip through the cracks.71 Rather, officials decided that it served a useful function as a safe outlet for dissident writers: a way to keep them out of trouble, observe their fans, and limit their impact. Another such safe outlet was Leipzig’s first non-state gallery, Eigen+Art (“own” plus “style,” combining to form the German word for “originality”). Eigen+Art was run by Judy Lybke, a onetime youth club director who lost his job after allowing banned musicians to perform. Until the fall of the GDR it put on some fifty-eight exhibitions, mostly by younger artists who had a hard time breaking into the Graphic Artists’ Union shows. Eigen+Art started out in Lybke’s apartment before moving into an abandoned factory building in south Leipzig. It was formally registered as an artists’ workshop, but city authorities were under no illusions about what it did. They knew from Stasi reports that the gallery’s activities were clearly illegal and still allowed them to proceed. Exhibition announcements ran in city newspapers and in Graphic Art, the journal of the Graphic Artists’ Union; Lybke was even admitted to the union’s art history section, despite having no formal training.72 In fact, the District Council’s Culture Department considered giving Eigen+Art state funding, “with an eye to the associated possibility of guidance.”73 For the gallery’s artists and visitors, including the critic Henry Schumann, “the old factory building became a space of freedom, a place to exchange unrestrained ideas, despite the constantly present spies and eavesdroppers.”74 Such a space was equally valuable to the regime, not just for keeping tabs on the participants but also for creating the feeling of freedom that Schumann described. Leipzig’s underground press served a similar function. Churchsponsored periodicals began appearing soon after the 1978 churchstate agreement, but the city’s first self-published magazine was 1984’s Attack—a cultural journal that described itself as “an attack on convention.”75 Many of its writers and editors were involved with the Reading Lamp series, while artists from Eigen+Art provided graphic design. It published poetry and prose from local authors as well as texts by East European dissidents like Václav Havel; one unrealized issue was even devoted to “oppositional culture” in Kraków.76 Issues had a print run of twenty-five to fifty copies, low enough that Attack was classified as a work of art rather than a periodical, and hence not subject to preapproval. Even so, the Stasi knew about each issue long before it appeared. Already in January 1985 the agency concluded that the magazine was

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“insignificant from an operational perspective”: while it was full of “pessimistic and existentialist statements that are foreign to socialism,” it contained “no open attacks against the GDR.”77 Rather than shutting down the journal, the Stasi chose to use it to learn more about Leipzig’s dissident art scene. By October 1987 twenty out of twenty-two Attack authors were under regular observation—some by as many as twelve informants.78 But the relationship between Attack and state officials ran much deeper. Because it received notes from all editorial meetings, the Stasi sometimes warned contributors against going too far. The chain of communication ran through the head of the Leipzig District Council’s Culture Department and his deputy, who were both Stasi informants. They received drafts of each issue before publication and used their administrative positions to summon authors for “advisory conversations.”79 But authors, too, used these meetings to push for more autonomy and even full legalization. In 1987 an Attack editor asked a culture department official to review the latest issue in the local press, thus granting it official recognition. Although the official demurred, this was not an outlandish request: the GDR’s National Library already collected each issue of Attack, along with several other underground publications.80 East German samizdat was firmly enmeshed in government structures and subject to some of the same oversight as official publications. Samizdat, in fact, may not be the right term: starting in 1988 Attack was printed on a Stasi-owned computer, which the agency had provided—and bugged—via a plant.81 The goal of building a state-sponsored underground was to maintain control of dissident artists. East German officials wanted to keep an eye on them, to know what they were saying and planning, even if this meant giving them considerable leeway. By the 1980s the state not only tolerated countercultural activity but actively empowered it within small niches like the Reading Lamp and Eigen+Art. The trouble was that the niches began to break down, giving rise to an underground world. One of the founders of “Hope for Nicaragua” become chief editor of Attack and ran an interview with the Eigen+Art director Judy Lybke. The singer Hubertus Schmidt took part in literary evenings at a student cabaret alongside writers from the Reading Lamp series. Dissident artists got to know one another, found common ground, and forged new networks, transforming individual dissent into an increasingly organized protest movement. Far from suppressing oppositional activity, the SED’s integrationist strategy actually promoted

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it—but also kept it tethered to the state. State officials were a key part of Leipzig’s emerging underground world. They worked with cabaret performers at the National Song Days, with critical writers at the Arthur Hoffmann Youth Club, and with the editors of Attack inside the District Council’s offices. Although the two sides viewed each other with mistrust, they had no choice but to develop a working relationship. And when mistrust between state and society intensified, it was this relationship that made dialogue possible.

Off to the Side In Poland, mistrust between state and society reached new heights under martial law. Almost overnight, Szczepański recalled, cultural life fractured into warring camps, with state officials and party members on one side and the majority of artists on the other. “And yet these people used to talk to one another, to meet in cafeterias and offices, to work together in union structures, to feel a sense of professional community. Now they stopped acknowledging each other and cut off all contact.”82 This split also transformed the role that artists played. Having splintered into pro- and anti-regime factions, artists lost the ability to mediate between them. Cultural spaces ceased to be sites of dialogue because they were too closely associated with one side, either the government or the opposition. “Art is violently divided now,” observed the Kraków writer Adam Zagajewski, who left Poland in 1981 and watched the growing polarization from afar. “It is not social. . . . It is always reminiscent of a long corridor, rooms off to the sides, well or poorly lit.”83 While many artists still engaged in political activism, their art no longer had the same political significance as before. As new public spheres emerged in the second half of the 1980s, artists often found themselves shunted “off to the sides.” Within the state’s cultural matrix, political loyalty became all that mattered. Officials focused on weeding out those who were active in the opposition without paying much attention to what “reliable” artists actually did. As the head of the Kraków PZPR Culture Department put it bluntly, he cared far more about “political assessments” than “artistic ones.”84 The department thus told city theaters to play whatever they wanted, “provided it does not explicitly attack the socialist system.”85 Instructions like these led party artists to grouse that “cultural policy does not exist,” and even the Central Committee agreed, to a point.86 As a result of martial law, it noted, policy came to be guided by “subjective”

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considerations like “the artist’s name and his artistic authority.” While an “objective” approach was preferable, it required “reviewing every individual work of art” and “formulating stable criteria for review.”87 That, evidently, was beyond officials’ capabilities, and so assessments of an artist’s quality rarely extended beyond his political views. The lack of a coherent policy betrayed the regime’s lack of interest in the arts. Because the artists’ world had been so closely linked with Solidarity, officials came to distrust it. Under martial law Kraków’s Security Service rejoiced that theaters “have a limited role in shaping public opinion and therefore do not pose a serious threat.”88 Rather than use the theater to build support or advance a new vision of socialism, the PZPR just tried to limit its impact. Instead, it invested even more in Western entertainment, looking to sideline Polish artists altogether. In 1985 Polish TV began airing the Brazilian soap opera Isaura the Slave Girl, which was panned by critics but enjoyed a rapturous public reception. “If there are shows like that, I agree to all the rising food prices and will gladly accept bread and water,” one viewer wrote in.89 To counterbalance such escapist shows, officials relied on parades and public festivals, which were supposed to “awaken society’s patriotic feelings” and “shape [its] sense of responsibility for the country’s fate.”90 As in the Gierek era, mindless fun and political propaganda went hand in hand, while the arts received progressively less funding and attention. Underground cultural spaces, by contrast, boomed under martial law, providing the parallel polis with a much-needed sense of community. Events like Sacrosong or “Around Graphics” were packed, emotional gatherings at which the spirit of Solidarity lived on, sometimes in almost mystical form: the centerpiece of “Around Graphics” was a Solidarity shrine, surrounded by candles, flags, and votive offerings.91 Yet that intensity was unsustainable and over time attendance started to drop. Underground cultural events grew increasingly ritualized, tied to anniversaries like December 13. Instead of addressing current events, they focused on commemorating Solidarity’s martyrs and stuck to an established script. They also became more explicitly religious under pressure from church officials who were uneasy at the volume of secular art under their roof. For many younger Poles especially, church-based exhibits and performances came to seem stuffy, rooted in the past, and—worst of all—devoid of any impact. Those who attended them “were unhappy, talked among themselves, but no one saw any possibility of protest,” one Nowa Huta activist recalled.92

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Adam Zagajewski, too, found something lacking in underground culture. Although he sympathized with it, and even contributed to underground journals, he worried that oppositional art was too inflected by what it opposed. “Totalitarians have their own primitive seal, which they stamp onto the wax of reality,” he wrote in a 1984 essay. “Antitotalitarians have fashioned their own seal. And it, too shapes the wax.” In an atmosphere of intense polarization, Zagajewski argued, all works of art—“poems, stories, theater, arts, historical essays, oil paintings, secular and church hymns”—became as rigid as seals. Rather than grapple with “the wax of reality,” they aimed only to “obliterate the previous sign,” through sheer force and rote repetition. Cultural life turned into a shouting match, incapable of persuading, inspiring, or arriving at truth. For Zagajewski, it became a sideshow, entirely disconnected from “reality [as] it exists in trees or meadows, in sunsets or in friendship.”93 In more prosaic terms, cultural spaces ceased to be a public sphere. Neither governmental nor underground institutions had any interest in engaging with the other side, or in attracting new publics. They still put on exhibits and performances, many of which were artistically noteworthy, but by the late 1980s it was hard for them to make a splash. For years cultural spaces had been some of the only outlets for political critique; in the absence of other channels, debates over the public good were frequently expressed through art. With the rise of the parallel polis, however, many new channels emerged. By 1989 Poland had roughly 1,300 underground periodicals, catering to different ages, social groups, and political leanings.94 There was little need to see a controversial play at the Old Theater, or even an oppositional one in the basement of St. Kolbe Church, if what one really wanted was a discussion of current affairs. Nor did the communist regime attempt to teach and mobilize through art, the way it had long done. At most, officials hoped that cultural events might distract Poles from political activism, not initiate them into it. Cultural spaces, both above and underground, continued to engage with politics: to address political themes, to take political stances, even to make political appeals. But in late-1980s Poland they were no longer politically significant. Only in the spring of 1989 did Kraków artists return to the limelight. As the economy deteriorated and a new strike wave loomed, the PZPR decided that it had no choice but to reprise the integrationist approach. Jaruzelski authorized negotiations with Solidarity’s remaining leaders, hoping that bringing them into the government would buy goodwill and help secure more Western loans. The subsequent Round Table

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Talks not only legalized the union but set a date for semifree elections to be held on June 4. Solidarity had less than two months to pick its candidates, devise a platform, and campaign. It was also at an immense disadvantage to the state’s well-oiled propaganda machine: the union received just seven minutes of television time per day, along with fifteen minutes on local radio—from 1:35 to 1:50 pm.95 To overcome these handicaps, the Solidarity campaign relied on artists, whom the regime had trained to win the public’s hearts and minds. For their last role in communist Poland, the erstwhile engineers of human souls played propagandists for the opposition. Hundreds of Kraków artists volunteered for the electoral campaign. The writer Jerzy Surdykowski, a party member before martial law, edited the Kraków Solidarity’s Electoral Voice, where colleagues such as ­Kornel Filipowicz published their endorsements. Prominent actors from the Old Theater hosted the seven-minute bulletins that ran on TV; filmmakers produced and edited footage from rallies. But it was graphic artists who were most in demand, since the campaign relied primarily on visual propaganda. Across the city, pretzel stands morphed into voter information booths and delivery vans into mobile billboards. Hastily printed posters with a red V for “victory” appeared in shop windows and on city trams.96 Most posters, though, were saved for the last night of the campaign when government supporters could no longer tear them down. Between 3 and 6 am, some seven hundred volunteers put up over seventy-five thousand posters all over town, each reading “Only Solidarity—Vote for Solidarity.” They covered windows, drainpipes, vehicles, trees. “The entire neighborhood was completely blanketed,” one participant remembered; “the regime’s posters totally vanished under a flood of ours.”97 Electoral returns were similarly sweeping: across the country, Solidarity won 260 of the 261 seats it was allowed to contest. The parallel polis was again integrated into the government and before long it was the only government that remained.

Socially Necessary Discussions Six days after the Polish elections—on June  10, 1989—several dozen musicians gathered in Leipzig for an unregistered street music festival. They set up early in the morning and started to play: a blues group by the city theater, Renaissance flutists outside city hall, guitar and drum circles in a central park. Within an hour the police arrived, dragging anyone with an instrument into transport wagons. Those who escaped

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joined a few hundred onlookers in a sit-in on Market Square, where they sang “The Internationale” and “We Shall Overcome,” but these were no defense against batons. “Row upon row of policemen stormed in and began pulling people out at random without saying a word,” an eyewitness recalled.98 All of the festival’s organizers were fixtures in Leipzig’s state-sponsored underground: they included the head of the Reading Lamp lecture series, several Eigen+Art contributors, and the cabaretist Dieter Kalka. No longer content to remain in their niches, they insisted on banding together and acting openly, even if this meant provoking the East German regime. The impetus for public activism came largely from the East. “Free self-organization, which is already commonplace in Budapest, Leningrad, Warsaw, and Prague, represents a novelty for the rigid GDR,” one church-affiliated periodical noted about the street music festival.99 Like the editors of Attack, many GDR dissidents kept in touch with friends across the Eastern Bloc, exchanging tactics, tips, and texts. All East Germans, meanwhile, could follow the swelling “carnival of revolution” on Western TV: Polish elections on June 4, Imre Nagy’s reburial in Budapest on June 16, environmental protests in Prague on June 21.100 It was impossible not to sense that the whole Bloc was changing and that the GDR was getting left behind. Even the Kremlin was preaching a thorough “restructuring” (perestroika) of communist rule so as to bring the public into public life—one last attempt to stave off dissent by co-opting it. Yet Honecker, too, kept a close watch on Eastern Europe and understood that any effort to reform the GDR would start with his own dismissal. Just as Ulbricht had tried to quash all mention of Khrushchev’s “secret speech” three decades earlier, Honecker avoided talking about perestroika and played down its impact. “Would you feel obligated to redo the wallpaper in your apartment just because your neighbor redid his?” Kurt Hager, a close ally, asked rhetorically.101 By 1989, however, East Germany’s neighbors were not simply changing their wallpaper but tearing down their walls. In May Hungary’s government started dismantling fortifications on its border with Austria, partly as a gesture of goodwill and partly to avoid paying for repairs. Over the month of August, more than five thousand East Germans used this opportunity to flee to the West, and tens of thousands more followed them to Hungary. In Leipzig, meanwhile, emigration seekers began gathering outside St. Nicholas Church in the city center, which hosted peace prayers every Monday night. “At the beginning it was almost all people one knew from the [underground arts] scene,” a punk

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rocker remembered. “A  few artists, a few people who hung around the Academy of Fine Arts and student clubs, all somewhat alternative people.”102 GDR cultural policy had allowed “alternative people” to band together in niches, incubating a nascent opposition, and in the spring and summer of 1989 this opposition spilled out onto the streets. Each week one to two hundred people marched outside St. Nicholas Church, sometimes chanting “We Want Out”—and each week the police broke up their demonstration, arresting 10 to 40 percent of the participants.103 The prayer meetings paused for summer vacation in July and August, but as they prepared to resume, tensions ran high. Emboldened by events in Eastern Europe, protestors planned to come in numbers, while an increasingly beleaguered Politburo issued instructions to suppress all protest. It was in this environment that the Gewandhaus orchestra’s conductor, Kurt Masur, organized a public forum on “Leipzig Street Musicians Then and Now.” It took place in the Gewandhaus vestibule on Monday, August 28, at the same time as the weekly peace prayers—5 pm—and just a stone’s throw from St. Nicholas Church. The forum was part of a regular series, “Meetings in the Gewandhaus,” that featured conversations with musicians, mostly on music history. These normally attracted a few dozen people, but on August 28 the vestibule was packed with nearly eight hundred. Masur had called the forum to discuss the failed street music festival, personally inviting both its organizers and party officials. “I believe that the confrontation in June could have been avoided had we sat down to such a conversation earlier,” he began. “Both sides should now tell each other what they want.”104 A cultural administrator argued that not just anyone could be allowed to perform, and Masur agreed: “Naturally, certain permissions are necessary.” A  street musician explained how hard permissions were to get, and again Masur was sympathetic: “In this respect we’re simply too rigid, too inflexible.”105 After officials promised to revisit the approval procedure, the forum ended with a concert by street musicians—both legitimating their work and channeling it into a sanctioned outlet. Masur’s peacemaking session grew out of contacts he had made through his position. As the Gewandhaus director, Masur worked closely with two members of the Leipzig District SED Committee: Culture Secretary Kurt Meyer and Education Secretary Roland Wötzel. “We knew each other well,” Meyer recalled. “We were fully legible to one another, trustworthy and reliable.”106 Both Meyer and Wötzel attended the August  28 forum, conveying that the party was prepared

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to listen, and Masur stressed this point in his remarks. “We have many people in the state apparatus who agree with [the need for reform],” he assured a skeptical crowd.107 At the same time, Masur knew many of the street music festival’s organizers, one of whom thanked him for “addressing such a burning issue on our terms.”108 The conductor also invited critical artists to perform after the forum, including the cabaretist Bernd-Lutz Lange, whose skit concluded with a warning to the authorities: “Hope for change is now growing scarce.”109 Like Masur, Lange had known Meyer and Wötzel for years; although they often disagreed, Lange “valued Wötzel as a man with whom one could talk and argue.”110 The SED’s resolve to supervise all cultural affairs brought artists and officials into constant contact, forging relationships that sometimes shaded into friendship. Barely a week after Masur’s forum, a group of artists and officials met again, this time at an exhibition opening in the Grassi Museum, a short walk from the Gewandhaus. “The City: Leipzig Images” featured photographs by twenty local artists showing Leipzig as it really was: crumbling façades, polluted rivers, tired people. Although administrators banned the most provocative works, they also organized a roundtable conversation that included Meyer and Lange. “We had an open, honest, controversial discussion,” Lange remembered. “People were considerate, engaged, sensible. It gave me courage.”111 For Meyer, too, these talks with artists left a mark. “I couldn’t keep myself closed off to their arguments,” he told an interviewer in December 1989. “On the contrary, I began to open myself up to them, and . . . to acknowledge contradictions openly.”112 What Meyer termed “contradictions” were social problems the regime ignored; urban decay, for instance, became a burning issue for Leipzig residents in the 1980s yet barely featured in state media.113 At the Grassi Museum, however, familiarity between artists and officials created an environment in which these groups could talk and hear each other. Cultural spaces offered space for dialogue amid a sea of mutual misunderstanding. The need for dialogue grew pressing by the early fall. When prayers at St. Nicholas resumed on September 3—exactly one week after Masur’s forum—more than a thousand people protested outside. The demonstration swelled to two thousand on September 18, six thousand a week later, and as many as twenty-five thousand the Monday after that.114 The atmosphere also became more heated. On October 7—the fortieth anniversary of the GDR—police turned water cannons on a crowd of

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Map 2.  Leipzig city center, 1986. Map by Bill Nelson.

protestors and then detained over two hundred people, some in horse stalls. These heavy-handed tactics backfired: outraged at the provocation, tens of thousands made plans to march in the next Monday

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demonstration, on October 9. Gearing for battle, SED leaders called in reinforcements. Some fifteen hundred army soldiers, three thousand policemen, and six hundred paramilitary troops arrived in Leipzig by the early afternoon, under orders to “suppress hostile-negative activities decisively, by any means necessary.”115 Hospitals received extra supplies of blood; schools and kindergartens let out early. “The tension was unbearable,” recalled Masur, who was preparing for a concert later that night. At dress rehearsal, the veteran conductor noticed that his hands were shaking.116 Resolving to “do something,” Masur placed a call to Meyer: “The man I  knew [in the city leadership], who was active in the cultural sector.”117 Meyer looped in his colleague Wötzel, who already had a standing appointment with Lange. The two men had arranged to meet that afternoon, with a vague plan to walk into St. Nicholas and tell the crowd “that there were people in the District Committee who were ready for dialogue.”118 Instead, everyone went to Masur’s house, along with Propaganda Secretary Jochen Pommert—a colleague of Meyer’s and Wötzel’s—and the theologian Peter Zimmermann, whose work the three officials also oversaw. “All six of us knew one another, some for years,” Masur explained.119 That familiarity helped overcome considerable hesitation on both sides. “Let’s be clear about what this means for the three of us—expulsion from the party,” Pommert told Wötzel and Meyer on the way to Masur’s house.120 But the conductor, too, worried about aligning himself with party functionaries. When Pommert wanted to describe the protestors as “trustful”—the regime’s favorite word for its subjects—Masur broke in: “That’s no good! The trust is gone.”121 The final statement was a mishmash of two vocabularies, speaking of “the free exchange of opinions” as well as “the further development of socialism.”122 It both appealed for dialogue and embodied it—a dialogue honed through years of working together within Leipzig’s cultural matrix. By 5 pm the Leipzig Six returned to the Gewandhaus, where an enormous crowd had already formed. Zimmermann hurried off to St. Nicholas with a copy of their statement; Pommert arranged for it to play on local radio. Around 6 pm, just as the prayer services were ending, Masur’s voice rang out from loudspeakers in the city center: “We urgently ask you for prudence so that a peaceful dialogue can take place.” Demonstrators broke into applause and chanted the conductor’s name. “We were always stamped as criminals [in the media], . . . and then, suddenly, Masur puts himself on our side,” one woman recalled. “That was very

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important to me and took my fear away.” Others were more impressed that three party secretaries seemed to be breaking ranks. “When it emerged that there were cracks, that they weren’t all united, that three of them stepped out of line, that was hugely important,” an eyewitness added.123 Indeed, Wötzel, Pommert, and Meyer had rushed to District Committee’s headquarters to intercede with Helmut Hackenberg, its acting first secretary. They found him all alone, waiting for orders from Berlin. Though Hackenberg had general instructions to disperse any “further riots,” no one had reckoned with a crowd of this size: “approximately one hundred thousand” people, he estimated, now starting to march along Leipzig’s ring road.124 He eventually managed to reach Honecker’s deputy, Egon Krenz, who promised to call back but then went silent. “It was just us in the room: Hackenberg, . . . Pommert, Meier [sic], Wötzel,” the latter remembered. “We were left entirely to our own devices.”125 At 6:35, as the procession approached Leipzig’s main train station, Hackenberg made the decision to let it pass, commanding all troops to stand back. Over the next two hours the peaceful demonstration circled Leipzig’s center, returning back to Karl Marx Square and, at the same time, to a different GDR. Meyer, Pommert, and Wötzel were all suspended for insubordination, but the SED found itself hemmed in by their appeal. Within four days the Leipzig District Committee proclaimed that “dialogue is our policy!” and promised “an expansive popular conversation.”126 Still, the committee made it clear that it would hold this dialogue on its own time and its own terms, prompting a host of artists to push back. “It is our duty to force a dialogue between the people and the party leadership,” the staff of Leipzig’s Theater House resolved on October 11.127 The Academixer cabaret, which Lange had co-founded, also declared that it would be “an outlet for socially necessary discussions.”128 On October 14 it staged the first of these, about “Media Policy in the GDR,” featuring Lange as moderator and Pommert as an invited guest. For more than three hours, audience members peppered Pommert with questions, demanding to know why newspapers lied and why censorship existed. The next day the discussion continued a block away in the Moritzbastei, the city’s largest student club, in front of over fifteen hundred people. “In our appeal [on October 9] we called for a free exchange of opinions,” Lange told the audience. “We asked city residents to search everywhere for public spaces in Leipzig.”129 They found these in the city’s cultural institutions, which became outlets for “a free exchange of opinions” over the coming weeks and months.

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By mid-November the Academixer cabaret and the Moritzbastei had staged four more public discussions, culminating with a forum on Stalinism and its legacy. Other cultural spaces also opened their doors to conversations about current affairs. Debates took place at the Opera House, the Central Youth Club, and of course the Gewandhaus, which hosted five in twenty days, on topics ranging from “Problems of Health Policy” to “Socialist Democracy—But How?” Each Gewandhaus event was preceded by a short concert, which was supposed to “animate our discussion,” as Masur put it.130 The conductor himself continued to play a starring role, as did numerous other artists, including Lange and the painter Werner Tübke. “In the past weeks and months, this country’s artists have proven themselves to be responsible political men,” the Gewandhaus’s own report on the debates summed up. “With the sensitivity of a seismograph and the courage of desperate men they have recognized problems and voiced their concerns.”131 Artists also served as moderators for practically every discussion, formalizing a role they had long played in the GDR. For decades cultural spaces had functioned as a public sphere, making space for civic debate—however indirect or veiled. The form of the debate changed fundamentally after October 9, as East Germans gained new freedoms to speak openly. And yet they still went back to cabarets and concert halls to exercise these rights, continuing to talk about the public good within the state’s cultural matrix. One month after it opened at the Grassi Museum, “The City: Leipzig Images” made its way to Leipzig’s sister city Kraków. Despite the controversy that surrounded the exhibit, it was included in the program for Kraków’s “Leipzig Days,” scheduled that year for October 9–13. “We were not very euphoric about this trip,” remembered the photographer Harald Kirschner, who was selected to accompany the show. “We were photographers and wanted to be there for the Monday demonstrations.”132 The artists arrived a few days early to set up, but on the evening of October 5 they were suddenly summoned to the GDR Culture and Information Center just off Market Square. “When we came, we saw that that several hundred Polish youths had symbolically walled in the entrance to the center,” Kirschner recalled. A pile of paving stones— “luckily without mortar,” one newspaper noted—blocked the door and trapped the center’s staff inside.133 Outside the building was completely covered in graffiti: “Put Honecker in the zoo”; “Stasi out.” A  banner in the doorway commemorated Peter Fechter, killed in 1962, and “75

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Figure 16.  Kurt Masur (with microphone) opening the first Gewandhaus debate, “On the Political System of the GDR,” October 22, 1989. The other members of the Leipzig Six are seated next to him on the podium. From left to right: Kurt Meyer, Jochen Pommert, Masur, Peter Zimmermann, Roland Wötzel, Bernd-Lutz Lange. Picture Alliance/DPA/AP Images, photograph by Waltraud Grubitzsch.

other victims of the Wall.” Additional banners read, “Polish-German Solidarity,” “We salute the New Forum”—a budding GDR opposition group—and “Kraków-Leipzig: common cause.” On the plaque reading “DDR,” someone crossed out the D for “Democratic” and the R for “Republic,” leaving a single D for “Deutschland.” A full year before German reunification, Kraków activists saw the writing on the wall. The audacity of the protest stunned Kirschner, revealing just how different Kraków and Leipzig had become. “We knew that things were a little freer in Poland, but we did not expect this,” he recalled thirty years later. “We were shocked at the transformation in Kraków, how much further they were than us.”134 The sense of freedom in the air was intoxicating and inspiring. “The Poles discussed things that we had not even thought of,” Kirschner went on. “This liberty to speak your mind—it made us optimistic.” The visitors were blown away by the amount of interest in East Germany; “everywhere, we saw posters and flyers for solidarity with the New Forum and with Leipzig.” At the same time, they sensed that Poles did not entirely know or understand the GDR. “There was also a poster that depicted the walled-in GDR as a concentration camp. That was too far for me; the comparison simply did not hold up,” Kirschner complained.135 The two cities were deeply

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Figure 17.  Façade of the GDR Culture and Information Center, Kraków, October 5, 1989. The poster to the right of the walled-in entrance reads, “Kraków greets Leipzig” and “Kraków—Leipzig: common cause.” CDCN Foundation, photograph by Waldemar Czyż.

unlike and thoroughly interconnected, both mindful and ignorant of each other. Like the Eastern Bloc at large, they were worlds apart and yet part of one communist world. In cultural affairs the differences between Poland and East Germany became more glaring in the 1980s than ever before. Faced with the rise of an emerging parallel polis, both regimes tried to co-opt it, but with contrasting results. In the GDR officials created a state-sponsored underground: they begrudgingly made room for punks, performance artists, and critical writers within the state’s cultural matrix so as to stop these from going around it. With few exceptions, artists accepted oversight and observation as a fair price to pay for new creative opportunities. They often criticized the SED—East Germany was not a concentration camp, as Kirschner pointed out—but broadly recognized the party’s authority. In Poland, on the other hand, the parallel polis was considerably larger, thanks to the power of the Catholic Church and other semiautonomous institutions. Unable to integrate it into government structures, Polish authorities were forced to bring it into government, legalizing Solidarity in August 1980. They hoped that doing so would make the opposition easier to infiltrate, but in reality the

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opposition infiltrated the state. To reassert control, the PZPR ordered a full crackdown. The parallel polis was again confined to the underground, yet sixteen months of acting openly had made it stronger than ever. Far from containing the opposition, the short-lived attempt to co-opt it had only fanned the flames, creating an alternative cultural matrix that operated as if the state did not exist. Fragmented and politicized, Polish cultural spaces ceased to be a public sphere. Many artists and residents boycotted state institutions, and state officials, too, lost faith that they could spread the communist message. Although the underground arts scene initially flourished under martial law, it soon started to wither. There were too many other outlets for political discussion and no more need to couch it in artistic form. As a result, cultural institutions were less prominent in 1989 than they had been in previous political upheavals, for instance in 1956 or 1968. The real action took place elsewhere; though artists actively participated in Poland’s revolution, they no longer played a leading role. The situation looked quite different in East Germany, where cultural spaces incubated dissent. Officials’ insistence on co-opting the opposition allowed it to flourish in niches like youth clubs and private galleries, which offered meeting points for those disenchanted with communist rule. Increasingly, the walls between the niches broke, consolidating networks of activists who were prepared to challenge the regime in public—including at Leipzig’s unauthorized street music festival. At the same time, the SED’s integrationist strategy ensured that even dissident artists developed good relations with officials. As tensions rose over the summer and fall of 1989, those relationships empowered artists to be peacemakers and made cultural spaces into a vibrant public sphere. It was the difference in the workings of the public sphere that most struck Kirschner on his visit to Kraków. In Poland political debates took place in the streets and, by October 1989, took communism’s demise for granted. For the photographer, meanwhile, just getting to discuss his work at the Grassi Museum was already a major coup; and though he openly critiqued the SED, he—like the Leipzig Six—still aimed at “the further development of socialism.” Yet being in Kraków made clear that Poles and East Germans were members of one Eastern Bloc. Their public sphere was not just national but also transnational: they felt a sense of kinship, watched each other closely, and responded to developments in other communist states. That was why communism collapsed throughout the Bloc in 1989, despite the different pathways of each

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member state. The GDR was able to contain unrest at home, and yet it felt the impact of unrest abroad. The calendar of Leipzig’s “peaceful revolution” reveals its debt to neighbors in the East: the street music festival took place six days after the Polish elections, the demonstration on October 9 two days after Hungary’s ruling party dissolved itself. Foreign events turned out to be no less impactful than domestic ones because the Bloc had come to function as one public sphere. For all the contrasts between them, communist regimes in Poland and the GDR were in the end a “common cause.”

Epilogue What would happen if one day—one beautiful day—Poland regained the freedom of a political life? . . . Would poetry become—as it does in untroubled countries—food for a bored handful of experts, and film one branch of commercialized entertainment? —Adam Zagajewski, 19841 But, in the midst of all the turmoil, what has happened to art? The post it occupied so long is now vacant. . . . We [artists] need to ask ourselves if we have really been released from our public responsibility, and, if not, what our future role should be—assuming that it will be more marginal than in the past. —Christa Wolf, 19902

Long before communism fell in Poland, Adam Zagajewski was dreaming about its demise. As a young poet in the 1970s, he helped to organize Kraków’s incipient dissident networks; when the regime restricted his ability to publish, he left the country and settled in Paris. In “The High Wall,” an essay written in 1984, Zagajewski revisited Kraków in his mind, trying to see the city as an outsider—a “Dutchman, Spaniard, or Dane.” There was a lot this traveler would not understand, Zagajewski reckoned, but what would shock him most was “the great cultural yearning so keenly felt in our part of Europe.” Everywhere, people “went to art exhibits, to official and underground lectures and readings, went to state and private theaters.” Cultural spaces, invariably empty in the West, “pulsate[d] with energy” in Poland; they “constituted a magnetic field so strong it was a hair’s breadth away from being a religious experience.” Here Zagajewski felt compelled to act as tour guide. “There is nothing strange or wrong with this,” he explained to his imaginary friend; “if politics is forbidden it is sought everywhere.” Under an authoritarian regime, all those who wanted to take part in public life “have achieved something like a

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forced sublimation and occupied themselves with culture.” Zagajewski yearned for the day when such a sublimation would no longer be necessary, but also realized that something would be lost in its passing. “Would this splendid spiritual tautness . . . survive?” he wondered. “Or would what arose in response to the dangerous challenge of totalitarianism cease to exist on the same day as the challenge?”3 For Christa Wolf, the same realization came more suddenly, and painfully. For forty years a member of the SED, she understood herself as a fighter for a better socialism. She was elated when East G ­ erman protests broke out in the fall of 1989, seeing them as validation of her efforts—as well as proof of artists’ “coalescence with other strata of the population.” By year’s end, however, the role of artists had become less clear. “Many books that met with [government] opposition only a few months ago are now passé because radical social criticism comes directly from the public,” she told an audience at the University of Hildesheim, which awarded her an honorary degree in January 1990. “The theaters are half empty. Even productions which a short while ago were besieged by audiences who used them to shore up their own protest actions seem deserted now.” The arts had lost a certain public function; as opportunities for political participation expanded, the need for politically engaged artworks dried up. This was a positive development, Wolf insisted: “Too much was laid on [art’s] shoulders, and it is a relief to be free of that long-term strain.” And yet that strain had given artists a purpose, and Wolf could sense that it was all about to change. While warning colleagues against “moaning and self-pity,” she also urged them to get used to a new normal in which they would become “more marginal than in the past.”4 What Wolf and Zagajewski both described was the disappearance of the cultural public sphere. For more than four decades, cultural spaces had been sites of political debate; under dictatorships that limited free speech, they were rare outlets for discussing public affairs. Officials used them to address the public, modeling social norms, signaling policy changes, and showcasing visions of the communist future. But various publics also used them for their own ends. By booing or walking out, viewers conveyed their disapproval of the party line. By demanding certain films, or types of music, they bent that line toward their own desires. Theaters, cinemas, art galleries, youth clubs—what I have been calling the state cultural matrix—made room for conversations that were banned elsewhere: over the meaning of national identity, the role

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of communist officials, or relationships to the USSR and to the West. Because these conversations were expressed through art, artists took on a crucial mediating role. Many came to regard themselves as spokesmen for a higher cause, whether the party, the people, the nation, or the truth. For privileged and persecuted artists alike, the cultural public sphere brought visibility and prestige, along with a sense of purpose. And then, just like that, it was gone.

What Remains In June  1991, eight months after German reunification, a visitor to Leipzig came across a remarkable sight. At a small landfill south of town, amid old furniture and rotting refuse, lay heaping piles of books. “They looked like they had been dumped out of a manure spreader,” Martin Weskott recalled. “Some were still shrink-wrapped, others on pallets or just strewn about.” The books were new and until recently had been in high demand, but with the influx of West German titles interest in GDR literature had waned. Faced with rising rents, Leipzig publishers were forced to empty out their warehouses and sometimes simply threw their contents in the trash. “Millions of these books were supposedly dumped into open-pit mines. Thousands of others lay on the side of country roads,” Weskott continued.5 He rescued close to a million volumes, now stored in an old cloister near Göttingen. But millions more were left to rot away, like much of the communist cultural matrix. It was this matrix that had made the cultural public sphere possible. By nationalizing nearly all artistic institutions, Eastern Bloc governments transformed them from private amusements into public goods. They then worked to ensure that these institutions made a public impact: that they delivered particular artworks to particular audiences, shaping beliefs, identities, and attitudes toward communist rule. While artists were conceived as middlemen in this process, the state’s investment in the arts significantly raised their station. Because officials organized attendance for cultural events, artists could reach more people than ever before; because the same officials censored artists’ work, the public was attuned to every detail of it, looking for signs of protest or a change in course. The public’s taste in art gained new significance too. So long as certain forms of culture were prescribed, rejecting them was a provocative act. Even when prohibitions relaxed, cultural choices

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reflected one’s stance toward communist power: punk concerts or poetry readings attracted dissident circles, which is precisely why officials continued to sponsor them, endeavoring to keep such groups in check. Cultural life was politically charged because communist regimes treated it as political, and funded, planned, and censored it accordingly. But when those regimes fell, state interest in the arts did too. Even before the end of 1989, the communist cultural matrix had started to crumble. Kraków’s House of Culture, the grandest palace on the city’s main square, was handed back to its prewar owners, the Potockis. A branch of the city art museum reverted to the Czartoryski family. After extended negotiations, the House of Writers was restored to descendants of its Jewish owners—who had been murdered in the Holocaust—and several dozen writers moved out.6 Over a hundred works from Leipzig’s Museum of Fine Arts were likewise restituted, thanks to the Commission for Art Recovery of the World Jewish Congress (several ended up at the Met in New York).7 The museum itself was forced to leave its longtime home, which became the seat of reunified Germany’s Federal Administrative Court. Both city governments sold off some cinemas to private buyers, who often adapted them to other uses. Nowa Huta’s showpiece Dawn cinema, built in 1951–53 in the style of a country manor, is now a Tesco supermarket. Most factory clubrooms, Houses of Culture, youth clubs, and community centers simply shut down. Out of 130 such spaces in Leipzig in 1989, just 4 were still active in 1993.8 Those cultural institutions that remained in public hands confronted a financial crisis. Leipzig’s Theater House was forced to cut its ensemble in half, from seventy-two to thirty-five full-time actors.9 The Gewandhaus orchestra chose to raise prices instead: the cost of tickets jumped fourfold between 1991 and 1997. The Gewandhaus also turned to its first private sponsor, RWE Energy, which gained “advisory input” in repertoire planning.10 City officials, meanwhile, adopted a more passive role. In 2007 a Kraków newspaper organized a debate about “the state of culture” in the city, featuring more than a dozen local artists. “Kraków hasn’t developed a plan for culture,” one complained. “The past years have been colorless because there are no ideas. . . . Kraków is stewing in its own juice.”11 More money was essential, the editors concluded, but that alone was not enough. Nothing would change until “city authorities develop a coherent cultural policy and leave it in the hands of [cultural] professionals.”12 This was a comment rich in irony, for it reiterated old complaints from the communist era. Before 1989

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Figure 18.  Dawn Shopping Center, Nowa Huta, May 2010. Built in 1951–53 in Socialist Realist style, Dawn cinema shut down in 2002. Before long, it was selling “cheap clothes,” “cheap textbooks,” and “used furniture.” Photograph by Andrzej Otrębski.

artists lamented that they had too little influence over cultural policy; afterward, they found that they had even less. What upset artists most of all was the decline of public interest in their work. “Almost every night we played to an empty house,” a Leipzig actress recalled of the early nineties. “After the last show I  sat in my dressing room and screamed with rage.”13 At Leipzig’s Opera and Theater House, attendance fell by two-thirds in the half decade after 1989.14 Across Kraków’s two main theaters, the drop was nearly 50 percent.15 Higher prices were partly to blame, but going to the theater was also not the same experience as before. The cultural sphere “is no longer in opposition to power,” one Kraków resident told pollsters, and therefore could not mobilize the way it had under the communist regime.16 The cultural spaces that suffered most were those where visitors had come to read between the lines. In East German art galleries attendance peaked at 8.9 million viewers in 1989 before plunging to 3.6 million just two years later.17 A former researcher at Leipzig’s Central Institute for Youth Research explained the drop-off as follows: “The old partnership between artists and the public in working through social contradictions

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has become obsolete.”18 As other public spheres emerged, the arts became just one more private hobby. “Today,” a Polish critic wrote in 1993, “the only people who still care about art are groups of lovers, no different from philatelists, beekeepers, and ornithologists.”19

Keeping On As the communist cultural matrix disintegrated, thousands of artists found themselves out of a job. “When I was starting music school in the mid-1980s there was a certainty that a musician could always find work somewhere, in the philharmonic or opera or something,” a Kraków harpist recalled. “Now artists get paid per project. . . . It’s impossible to live like that.”20 For many this was the end of the road: the number of registered artists in Kraków fell from 4,200 in the 1980s to fewer than 2,000 a decade later.21 Yet more established artists often thrived in the new environment. For Judy Lybke, the founder of Leipzig’s underground Eigen+Art gallery, contacts formed before 1989 opened the door to Western markets. “We simply kept going,” he explained; by 1994 the gallery had branches in New York, Paris, and London.22 One of its clients, Arno Rink, recalled that he “kept going” too.23 The longtime party member was appointed rector of Leipzig’s Academy of Fine Arts in 1987. He kept this post until 1994, resisting calls to shift the academy’s curriculum away from figurative art. Leipzig thus “preserved traditions of figurative painting that were vanishing in the West,” the New York Times wrote in 2006. “Today the painters of Leipzig have inherited those traditions—and become an international art-world sensation.”24 Thanks partly to Eigen+Art, several of Rink’s students achieved worldwide success with works grounded in East German conventions. Communist training proved remarkably well suited to the postcommunist world. Art from the communist era proved successful too. In 1996 the Kraków poet Wisława Szymborska won the Nobel Prize in Literature, primarily on the strength of her work before 1989. Several years later the director Andrzej Wajda received an honorary Oscar “in recognition of five decades of extraordinary film direction,” four of them under the communist regime. To some extent these were belated honors, acknowledging extraordinary artists who had long been overlooked in the West. But they also provided validation for art from the Eastern Bloc, which turned out to be perfectly legible to Western publics. This would have come as a surprise to those who only knew both artists’ earliest works.

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Wajda and Szymborska began their careers by singing Nowa Huta’s praises; one of the first films Wajda worked on, Three Stories (1953), was the first film screened in Dawn cinema. Wajda revisited this period in Man of Marble (1976), the story of a student trying to understand how Stalinist culture was made. Though this culture was then barely twenty years old, it had already become incomprehensible; tucked away in museum depots, Stalinist statues bore witness to a bygone world. Eastern Bloc art transformed immensely over a short time, paralleling the transformation of Eastern Bloc politics. Artists’ successes after 1989 make clear how much communism had already evolved. Whatever change took place in communist regimes was the result of popular pressure. Szymborska’s poems about Nowa Huta were part of an ambitious plan of social engineering, one that was largely imported from the Soviet Union. The arts were meant to help refashion human nature, allowing communists to build a new society from scratch: “From bricks and proud courage / high buildings will rise,” Szymborska wrote in 1952.25 Yet rather than conforming to the blueprint, East Europeans rebelled. In 1953 and 1956 they staged mass protests against Stalinist rule, forcing the rulers to adjust their tactics. The new approach was less dogmatic, with space for popular initiative and national traditions. It recognized that individuals were not blank slates and encouraged them to take part in shaping communism. For some the shift inspired a new enthusiasm for public life: as Szymborska declared in a 1957 poem, “I’m working on the world, / revised, improved edition.”26 For state officials, though, the scale of popular engagement got to be too much. After another protest wave in 1968, they imposed a more regimented form of rule. To prevent challenges to their power, Eastern Bloc leaders reined in grassroots activism; to secure popular support, they promised to address material needs. The result was a communism that could neither inspire nor satisfy. Like a dinosaur, it had “a mind too small, an appetite too large,” Szymborska wrote in 1972—and was equally doomed.27 Artists did more than document this transformation. They also helped to drive it, thanks to the special role of cultural spaces in the Eastern Bloc. Because these spaces were meant to advance the communist project, they turned into barometers of the project’s success. Officials watched attendance figures, kept track of boos or other interjections, and interviewed audiences about their reactions. Given the lack of feedback loops in communist regimes, such information carried outsized weight. Reports from theaters and museums made their way

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to the highest levels of power, where they informed leaders’ decision making—especially in moments of crisis. In 1956 cultural ferment convinced Eastern Bloc authorities to make room for pluralism and experimentation. In 1968 it had the opposite effect, alarming them so much that they decided to clamp down. Cultural spaces, though, remained an outlet for dissent and critical discussion. Over the 1970s and 1980s they served as gathering places for those disaffected with communist rule, consolidating networks and movements that took to the streets in 1989. That was the irony of communist regimes’ investment in the arts: the cultural matrix that they had built up eventually helped bring them down. At the same time, the legacy of communism endured. In 2014 a Kraków daily ran a poll to identify “the most important Krakovians of the past twenty-five years”—that is, since 1989.28 All of the top finishers, however, were best known for their achievements before then. Szymborska topped the list, followed by Józef Tischner, a Catholic theologian who rose to fame for his embrace of the Solidarity movement. The next three spots went to the science-fiction writer Stanisław Lem (aged sixty-eight in 1989), the actress Anna Dymna (named the “top star of Polish television” in the 1980s), and the priest Adam Boniecki, a writer for the Universal Weekly, the Catholic cultural journal that was long a thorn in the communists’ side.29 The most important Krakovians since 1989, it turned out, had been most active in the 1980s, when they were closely associated with the underground cultural scene. A quarter century after the fall of communism, opposition to it was still at the forefront of respondents’ minds. And yet there were no politicians on the list, no Solidarity activists or nationalist crusaders. Such figures were clearly too divisive: all had been tarred by the factional infighting of the past twenty-five years. It was artists and writers, instead, who stood for something like a shared identity, one rooted in the solidarity of anticommunist struggle. The culture of the late communist era remained the closest thing to a postcommunist national culture. East German culture, too, outlived the GDR. Interest in GDR art cratered in the early 1990s amid a widespread rush to “Test the West”— as a contemporary cigarette ad had it. By decade’s end, however, it was on the rebound: nearly as many viewers saw East German plays in 1999 as in 1989.30 Observers spoke of the new “craze” of Ostalgie, or nostalgia for the East.31 A  N’Ostalgie museum opened in 1999, first on the outskirts of Berlin and then in a grander space in downtown Leipzig. Besides allowing visitors to comb through thousands of East German

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objects—including several hundred music records—the museum billed itself as something of a cultural center. It organized literature readings, film screenings, and other events designed to give “a glimpse of art, culture, and the [youth] scene” in the GDR.32 Two blocks away, Leipzig’s Museum of Fine Arts led a revival of East German painting, with six exhibitions in 2019 alone. “Encounters with GDR art don’t just raise artistic questions,” the curators wrote, “they also promote discussion of political, social, and ethical values while centering the museum’s role as a site of remembrance and education.”33 The exhibitions proved so popular that the museum set a thirty-year attendance record, nearly matching its GDR-era highs. For many visitors this was a way to relive their past, or rather an idealized version of it—without the shortages, the Wall, or Stasi observation. East German culture had become East Germany’s usable heritage, a source of pride and regional identity. Amid the manifest failure of communist politics and economics, it symbolized the positive legacy of the GDR.

Apart and Together When Kraków’s City Council debated redevelopment plans for Nowa Huta in the 1990s, one speaker made a radical suggestion: why not blow it up? As a Soviet undertaking, it was a foreign, hostile imposition, he argued. While its furnaces polluted Poland’s air, Nowa Huta itself polluted the nation’s identity.34 This bit of grandstanding was easily laughed off, but it reflected the prevailing view of the communist era. After 1989 most Poles conceived of communism as an external force foisted on “us,” the national community, by “them,” the Soviet Union’s agents and collaborators. That attitude harkened back to nineteenthcentury independence struggles, but it had not always been ubiquitous. As Katherine Lebow has shown, it was Polish planners, engineers, and bricklayers who built Nowa Huta, many out of a faith in the communist project.35 The notion of a national antipathy to communism developed only over time, and in response to communism’s failures. By the 1990s, however, it was deeply entrenched, allowing Poles to frame themselves as innocent victims of the USSR—and heroic fighters against it. There was no need to consider how they had changed under communist rule or how they had sustained it. The end of communism was understood as a national liberation. East Germans had no such luxury. They faced an identity crisis when communism fell, compounded by the fraught experience of German

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reunification. “No one on either side of the wall had any idea how far apart we had grown in 40 years,” Leipzig’s new mayor, Hinrich Lehmann-Grube, told an American journalist in 1994. “Only now are we beginning to understand it. I can tell you that if West Germany had absorbed Italy or France, the problems would have been far less than they are with the absorption of East Germany.”36 Lehmann-Grube’s choice of words betrayed his West German perspective: he moved to Leipzig in the spring of 1990 after a long career as a city manager in Hannover. Other Westerners arrived to privatize East German factories, reform the country’s schools, and reorient its cultural institutions. To many former East Germans, it felt like a foreign takeover, one that discounted their skills and sidelined their opinions. “I can’t tell you how painful it was for me to see the products of my labor simply dismissed,” a Leipzig worker recalled.37 Encounters with the West also accentuated locals’ sense of difference from it. From slang to work habits to fashion, subtle signs of distinction were impossible to miss. Those who had lived under the GDR became acutely conscious of this, far more than they had been before the Wall came down. They had to face the fact that communism had shaped them, marked them, made them who they were. Poles and East Germans’ disparate experiences of 1989 were rooted in the communist era. From their first days in power, Polish communists portrayed themselves as champions of the nation; they claimed to be defending Poland’s interests and even safeguarding it from the USSR.38 The Polish nation thus remained at the forefront of communist politics. While state officials endeavored to speak in its name, it existed outside of them and could be easily imagined in noncommunist, or even anticommunist, terms. An East German nation, by contrast, was unthinkable without communist rule. While officials took great pains to root it in “progressive” German traditions, they defined it through opposition to a capitalist West Germany. The GDR was conceived as the communist version of a German state, and without communism it had no reason to exist. This difference in national identity made it far harder for East Germans than for Poles to come to terms with communism’s collapse. But it had also shaped the dynamics of the previous forty years, conditioning how communist rule functioned in each country. In Poland, where they saw themselves as caretakers of the nation, communist rulers tolerated autonomous institutions like the Catholic Church. Although these institutions were dependent on the state, and often constrained by it, they still enjoyed considerable freedom,

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especially after the short-lived Stalinist era. In the cultural realm, artists’ unions and civic associations put on events that were not planned or dominated from above. This infrastructure helped sustain a pluralist public sphere with many noncommunist voices. While the regime set limits on permissible expression, it could not set the terms of the debate. East German communists, on the other hand, set out to build a nation in their image and worked to limit all autonomous activity—often with help from the Stasi, the largest secret police force in the Bloc. Even when they promoted grassroots initiative, they funneled it into centralized structures, suppressing any undertaking they could not direct. As a result, East Germany’s public sphere developed within state-run institutions where state officials dictated the rules of engagement. In Poland communists participated in a Polish public sphere, while in East Germany they built a public sphere of their design. The institutional structures of communist rule helped set the two countries apart. Yet institutional structures also brought the two countries together. When Kraków and Leipzig became sister cities in 1973, their partnerships were easy to arrange. Members of the PZPR Provincial Committee hobnobbed with members of the SED District Committee; the Polish Writers’ Union, Kraków branch, sent greetings to the German Writers’ Union, Leipzig branch. A  planning document identified over thirty such pairings, between department stores, schools, hospitals, trade unions, and dance ensembles.39 All the parts lined up; each institution found its mate, as though in Noah’s Ark. On exchange trips the two sides often marveled at the contrasts between them, but they could also understand and learn from each other. Party officials swapped advice on dealing with churches and dissidents; artists groused about censorship and discussed Western trends. For all that separated them, Poles and East Germans were well versed in communist tactics—how to speak the party’s language, how to subvert it, how to read between the lines. Although the cultural public sphere worked differently in these countries, participating in it was a shared experience. In early 1987, as part of the two cities’ exchange, Kraków’s Theater KTO performed at Leipzig’s Karl Marx University. Theater KTO specialized in physical theater, in which actors stay silent and express themselves through movement. That night it put on “The Farewell Performance,” a play ostensibly about the last days of Benito Mussolini. “The show begins with a drum roll and trumpets,” Leipzig’s University Newspaper reported. “And then six clowns jump out with summersaults and

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back flips.” This “tragic clown parade” was meant to lampoon fascist power, the Newspaper explained. “Without forgetting its danger, [KTO] uses laughter to expose it, to shatter belief in its strength and permanence.” The theater’s director was even blunter: “Because the Duce is ultimately just a clown, because the clowns are in charge of reality.”40 It did not take a great deal of imagination to draw connections to a different set of rulers on both sides of the Polish-German border. Thanks to the structures of the Eastern Bloc, a Polish theater could make a comment on East German politics—and be understood without saying a word. Though each state had its national dynamics, they both were part of a transnational space. Protests in one part of the Bloc affected policymaking in others; cross-border networks linked state and nonstate actors alike. The Eastern Bloc was more than Moscow’s sphere of influence. It also constituted a transnational public sphere. That sphere, too, vanished after 1989, though certain legacies remain. Kraków and Leipzig renewed their partnership in 1995; as Kraków’s mayor noted, “we share many special experiences and memories” from the communist era.41 They also shared a plethora of challenges as former Eastern Bloc cities adjusting to a new reality. Between 2010 and 2013 both Kraków and Leipzig took part in the European Union’s “Second Chance” project, which sought to redevelop communist factories into sites of culture—now understood primarily as tourist attractions. Theater KTO returned to Leipzig in 2017, exactly thirty years after its first appearance. Under the same director, Jerzy Zoń, it put on a street play titled Peregrinus, meant to depict “a single day in the life of an individual of the 21st century.” As the program explained, “The world of the ‘Peregrinus’ is a ‘digital’ civilization—sad, terrifying, and grotesque, where consumerism turns into a dominant religion.”42 Once more a Polish theater sought to address German realities, depicting a shared postcommunist world.

The Republic of Viewers On May 9, 2017 a black flag appeared on the façade of Kraków’s Old Theater. The theater’s director, Jan Klata, had just been unexpectedly dismissed; his successor, chosen by Poland’s Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, was a journalist without directorial experience who promised a “reformation” on par with Martin Luther’s. Instead of “glorifying emptiness and destruction,” the Old Theater would focus on building positive values, such as “the joyful celebration of military

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heroism.” This rhetoric reflected the ideas of the ruling Law and Justice Party, whose leaders had long taken aim at “leftist shrieking” in the arts. The theater’s actors and directors saw things differently: “It’s the extermination of living, progressive art and its replacement with propaganda, kitsch.”43 After the theater’s next performance—Klata’s production of The Wedding (1901), a classic play by Stanisław Wyspiański—the ensemble broke the fourth wall, addressing the audience directly. “We believe that theater is a site of encounter, a site of dialogue,” they declared. “We’re standing here on stage and speaking to you about something that’s important to us. That’s what theater is all about, and we hope that it remains that way.” In the same space that had enabled public conversation under communism, the Old Theater’s actors were renewing the tradition. Faced with increasing pressure from the state, they called for “a republic of artists, a republic of viewers”—in other words, a cultural public sphere.44 What happened next also echoed the communist era. The culture minister received the Old Theater’s actors in his office but refused to change his mind. The Polish Directors’ Guild sent an open letter of protest; other theaters issued statements of solidarity. For more than a month a crowd gathered outside the theater before every show, carrying funeral wreaths and dressed in black. Even larger crowds clamored to get inside: “It’s been very full since the directors changed,” observed a staffer.45 The Wedding was particularly popular as an expression of support for Klata and his politics. The audience hung on every word, just waiting to explode. The line “Poland is a great thing: / Let’s throw off this vileness” set off a storm of applause.46 To Anna Dymna, who had a small role in the play, it was all reminiscent of her youth, when people flocked to the Old Theater in search of a sense of community. Once more she felt the same “extraordinary energy when we come out in front of viewers,” once more the theater was a site of civic discussion and political protest. It seemed like her career had come full circle: “I began with The Wedding in 1969 and I will surely finish with The Wedding.”47 Indeed, the phenomenon of the cultural public sphere is not unique to communist regimes. Spaces of art inevitably foster public conversation; to use Habermas’s phrase, they provide “a forum in which private people come together to form a public” and to engage issues of public concern.48 As the Old Theater’s case suggests, however, two factors can transform these spaces into something more. The first is a shortage of outlets for public expression; when citizens feel unrepresented by political institutions, they seek out other ways to make their voices heard.

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Klata’s dismissal came amid efforts by the Law and Justice Party to rewrite Poland’s constitution, transform its courts, and alter its electoral system. Protestors saw this move as one more step in a long march toward authoritarianism. They gathered at the theater because they felt excluded from the structures of power; the atmosphere was “euphoric,” one actress recalled, but also full of “nostalgia and bitterness.”49 The cultural public sphere rises as other public spheres fall. It is most influential where formal participation in politics is restricted. At the same time, a public sphere is more than a forum for private voices. It is also an intermediary between the public and the state—or, to return to Habermas, a space where individuals can “compel public authority to legitimate itself before public opinion.”50 For that potential to exist, a state must be paying attention. If it does not concern itself with culture, whether as a threat or as an opportunity, cultural spaces will remain peripheral to political life. In practice, few governments are indifferent to the arts, and Poland’s Law and Justice Party was no exception. It fired Klata because it feared his theater was imperiling its politics—and because it hoped that with a new director, the Old Theater could advance those politics instead. The more governments care about art, the more responsive they are to it, and it is this responsiveness that sustains the cultural public sphere. In the Old Theater’s case, the new director was dismissed within three years, after dozens of actors refused to work with him. This scandal had become a liability for Law and Justice, outweighing the benefit of a conservative repertoire. Artists’ protests worked because the party was invested in the arts, enough to be concerned about the Old Theater’s slipping reputation. Only when governments want to control cultural spaces do these become effective sites of contestation and resistance. Both state restrictions on free speech and state involvement in the arts were widespread in the Eastern Bloc. In tightly controlled political environments, cultural spaces gained a new significance for publics and regimes alike. To artists and audiences they were an outlet for political expression at a time when such outlets were few. To government officials they became a means to realize state policy—and, by extension, to assess how well this policy worked. What happened in the cultural realm transcended cultural matters. It was there—in opera houses and Houses of Culture, in cinemas and museums, in student clubs and factory clubrooms—that East Europeans debated notions of the public good. These debates were always censored and constricted; different publics had different levels of access and limited opportunities to express their views.

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Still, cultural spaces served to amplify their voices, raising the volume of political discussion in the Bloc. Even in a dictatorship, ordinary Poles and East Germans were able to influence their governments, but they were also influenced by them. The communist cultural matrix formed identities that endure to this day, long after the matrix itself fell apart. The legacy of communism’s public sphere continues to shape Eastern Europe.

Notes

Introduction

  1.  Mary Elise Sarotte, The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 53.   2. Neues Forum Leipzig, Jetzt oder nie—Demokratie! Leipziger Herbst ’89 (­Munich: C. Bertelsmann, 1989), 63.   3.  Ekkehard Kuhn, Der Tag der Entscheidung: Leipzig, 9. Oktober 1989 (Berlin: Ullstein, 1992), 15.   4.  Neues Forum, Jetzt oder nie, 100–101.   5.  “‘Ein Dirigent muss wie ein Vater sein.’ Kurt Masur im Interview.” Stern, May 7, 1998 (nr. 20), 36–39, here 38.   6.  Bernd-Lutz Lange and Sascha Lange, David gegen Goliath: Erinnerungen an die Friedliche Revolution (Berlin: Aufbau, 2019), 96.   7.  Erich Mielke’s order of October 5, quoted in Armin Mitter and Stefan Wolle, Ich liebe euch doch alle! Befehle und Lageberichte des MfS Januar–November 1989 (Berlin: Basis, 1990), 199.   8.  Lange and Lange, David gegen Goliath, 146.   9.  See, e.g., Craig Calhoun, “Civil Society and Political Life,” Contemporary Sociology 19.2 (March 1990): 312–16. 10.  Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 25. 11.  Ibid., 187, 178, 208. 12.  For a summary of these critiques, see Nancy Fraser, “Transnationalizing the Public Sphere: On the Legitimacy and Efficacy of Public Opinion in a Post-Westphalian World,” in Transnationalizing the Public Sphere, ed. Kate Nash (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2014), 14–16. 13.  Geoff Eley, “Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century,” in Calhoun, Habermas, 306. 14.  While many works reference the concept of the “public sphere,” only a few examine it in depth. See David Bathrick, The Powers of Speech: The Politics of Culture in the GDR (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995); Thomas Lindenberger and Jan Behrends (eds.), Underground Publishing and the Public Sphere: Transnational Perspectives (Vienna: LIT, 2014); and Katalin Cseh-Varga and Adam Czirak (eds.), Performance Art in the Second Public Sphere: Event-Based Art in Late Socialist Europe (New York: Routledge, 2018). See also Juliane Schicker, “The Concert Hall as Agonistic Public Space: The Gewandhaus in Leipzig,” New German Critique 49.2 (August 2022).

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15.  Marc Silberman, “Problematizing the ‘Socialist Public Sphere’: Concepts and Consequences,” in What Remains? East German Culture and the Postwar Public, ed. Marc Silberman (American Institute for Contemporary German Studies Conference Report, 1997). 16.  Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind, trans. Jane Zielonko (New York: Vintage, 1990), 202. 17.  Milan Kundera, “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” The New York Review of Books, April 26, 1984. 18.  Although their language varied somewhat over time, Polish and East German administrators generally used the terms “culture” (kultura/Kultur), “art” (sztuka/Kunst) and “the arts” (Künste) interchangeably. I do the same when talking about their project. 19.  For Poland and East Germany, examples include Barbara Fijałkowska, Polityka i twórcy (1948–1959) (Warsaw: PWN, 1985) and Manfred Jäger, Kultur und Politik in der DDR, 1945–1990 (Köln: Deutschland Archiv, 1995). 20.  E.g., Simone Barck, Martina Langermann, and Siegfried Lokatis, “Jedes Buch ein Abenteuer”: Zensur-System und literarische Öffentlicheit in der DDR bis Ende der sechziger Jahre (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1998) and Aleksander Pawlicki, Kompletna szarość: cenzura w latach 1965–1972. Instytucja i ludzie (Warsaw: TRIO, 2001); Heather Gumbert, Envisioning Socialism: Television and the Cold War in the German Democratic Republic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014) and Katarzyna Pokorna-Ignatowicz, Telewizja w systemie politycznym i medialnym PRL. Między polityką a widzem (Kraków: Wydawnicto Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2003); Esther von Richthofen, Bringing Culture to the Masses: Control, Compromise and Participation in the GDR (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009) and Anne White, in De-Stalinization and the House of Culture: Declining State Control over Leisure in the USSR, Poland and Hungary, 1953–89 (London: Routledge, 1990). 21.  Thomas Höpel, “Die Kunst dem Volke”: Städtische Kulturpolitik in Leipzig und Lyon 1945–1989 (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2011). 22.  SStAL SED-BL IV/B/2/9/2/612. For more context, see chapter 7. 23.  Toby Miller and George Yúdice, Cultural Policy (London: Sage, 2002), 12–15. 24.  D. L. LeMahieu, A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain between the Wars (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) and Victoria de Grazia, The Culture of Consent: Mass Organization of Leisure in Fascist Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 25.  SStAL SED-BL IV/E/2/9/2/446/89. 26.  Quoted in Thomas Goldstein, Writing in Red: The East German Writers Union and the Role of Literary Intellectuals (Rochester: Camden House, 2017), 5. 27.  Neues Forum, Jetzt oder nie, 274. 28.  Alan Nothnagle, Building the East German Myth: Historical Mythology and Youth Propaganda in the German Democratic Republic, 1945–1989 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), especially chapter 2. 29.  Fiona Björling and Alexander Pereswetoff-Morath, eds., Words, Deeds and Values: The Intelligentsias in Russia and Poland during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Lund: Department of East and Central European Studies, 2005).

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0.  AAN 1354/XIA/138. For more context, see chapter 3. 3 31.  Cseh-Varga and Czirak, Performance Art, 4–9. David Bathrick identifies three public spheres in the GDR; Bathrick, Powers of Speech, 34. 32.  Richard Bessel and Ralph Jessen (eds.), Die Grenzen der Diktatur: Staat und Gesellschaft in der DDR (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996). 33.  Seth Howes, Moving Images on the Margins: Experimental Film in Late Socialist East Germany (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2019). 34. H. Gordon Skilling, “Independent Communications in Communist East Europe.” Cross Currents 5 (1986): 63. 35.  Klaus Renft, Zwischen Liebe und Zorn: Die Autobiographie (Berlin: Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, 1997), 59. See chapter 6. 36.  Barbara Nawratowicz, Piwnica pod Baranami. Początki i rozwój (1956– 1963) (Kraków: Petrus, 2010), 8. See chapter 4. 37.  BStU, MfS, BV Leipzig, AKG, Nr. 03372: 1–7. See chapter 8. 38. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 66. 39.  Leszek Piskorz, “Zaczęło się od konkursu . . .” In Dariusz Domański, ed., Taki nam się snuje dramat . . . Stary Teatr 1945–1995. Album wspomnień (Kraków: Ati, 1997), 131. 40. SStAL SED-BL IV/A/2/9/2/363. I  discuss this episode at length in chapter 5. 41. Warner, Publics, 116 and 123. 42. Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Popular Opinion under Communist Regimes.” In S. A. Smith, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 43.  Elzbieta Matynia, Performative Democracy (London: Routledge, 2016), 19. 44.  This was, for example, the SED’s claim in discussing the New Course and the uprising of June 17. “Die Generallinie der SED war und ist richtig.” Neues Deutschland, July 30, 1953, 1. 45.  Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” in Havel et al., The Power of the Powerless: Citizens against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, ed. John Keane (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1985), 70. 46.  Paulina Bren, The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 3. 47.  Joshua Feinstein, The Triumph of the Ordinary: Depictions of Daily Life in the East German Cinema, 1949–1989 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 19. 48.  Chalmers Johnson called this “the modification of ideology by reality.” Johnson, “Comparing Communist Nations,” in Change in Communist Systems, ed. Chalmers Johnson (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1970), 18. 49.  Grzegorz Ekiert, The State against Society: Political Crises and Their Aftermath in East Central Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 307 and 319. 50.  Ken Jowitt, “Moscow ‘Centre.’ ” East European Politics and Societies 1: 3 (1987), 296–348. 51.  “Text of Pravda Article Justifying Invasion of Czechoslovakia,” New York Times, September 27, 1968, 3.

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2.  Fraser, “Transnationalizing,” 30. 5 53.  Recent studies include Patryk Babiracki, Soviet Soft Power in Poland: Culture and the Making of Stalin’s New Empire, 1943–1957 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Elidor Mëhilli, From Stalin to Mao: Albania and the Socialist World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017); Rachel Applebaum, Empire of Friends: Soviet Power and Socialist Internationalism in Cold War Czechoslovakia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019); and Molly Pucci, Security Empire: The Secret Police in Communist Eastern Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020). 54.  Andrew Demshuk, Bowling for Communism: Urban Ingenuity at the End of East Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020). 55. Karol Świerczewski, “Rozmowa z Gombrowiczem,” Kultura, January 1956 (1/99), 41–48, here 46. 56.  Katherine Lebow, Unfinished Utopia: Nowa Huta, Stalinism, and Polish Society, 1949–56 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), especially chapter 6. 57.  For example, Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland in Two Volumes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2: 429. 58.  Telegram from Averell Harriman, US ambassador to the USSR, describing Stalin’s conversation with Stanisław Mikołajczyk, August 12, 1944, https:// digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/219988 (accessed April  3, 2022). Mikołajczyk relayed the same conversation to British ambassador Clark Kerr. In Warren Kimball (ed.), Churchill and Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 3: 273. 59. Comparative studies of Poland and the GDR include John Connelly, Captive University: The Sovietization of East German, Czech, and Polish Higher Education, 1945–1956 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Małgorzata Mazurek, Socjalistyczny zakład pracy. Porównanie fabrycznej codzienności w PRL i NRD u progu lat sześćdziesiątych (Warsaw: TRIO, 2005); Jan Behrends, Die erfundene Freundschaft: Propaganda für die Sowjetunion in Polen und in der DDR (Köln: Böhlau, 2006); David Tompkins, Composing the Party Line: Music and Politics in Early Cold War Poland and East Germany (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2013); Thomas Höpel, Kulturpolitik in Europa im 20. Jahrhundert. Metropolen als Akteure und Orte der Innovation (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2017); Andrew Demshuk, Three Cities after Hitler: Redemptive Reconstruction across Cold War Borders (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021); and Pucci, Security Empire. Chapter 1.  Takeover: Reconstruction as Revolution

  1.  Quoted in Laurie Koloski, “Painting Kraków Red: Politics and Culture in Postwar Poland, 1945–1950” (PhD dissertation, Stanford University, 1998), 83.   2.  SAL StVuR (1) 7969: 81.   3. Michał Śliwa, Bolesław Drobner: Szkic o działalności politycznej (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1984), 1.   4.  Jan Tomasz Gross, “Social Consequences of War: Preliminaries to the Study of Imposition of Communist Regimes in East Central Europe,” East European Politics and Societies 3.2 (1989): 198–214.

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  5.  Classic early accounts of Sovietization include Hugh Seton-Watson, The East European Revolution (London: Methuen, 1950); Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Soviet Bloc, Unity and Conflict (New York: Praeger, 1961); and R. V. Burks, The Dynamics of Communism in Eastern Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961).   6.  This biographical sketch is drawn from Śliwa, Bolesław Drobner, and Mirosław Chałubinski, Bolesław Drobner: Wybór prac i artykułów (Warsaw: Książka i Wiedza, 1980). See also Drobner’s own accounts of his life: Bezustanna walka (Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1962–67), and Wspomniki . . . (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1965).   7.  Drobner, “Kraków—miasto mojej matki” [1941/1945], in Chałubinski, Bolesław Drobner, 310.   8.  Śliwa, Bolesław Drobner, 296.   9. Drobner, Wspomniki, 81. 10.  Drobner, “Kraków—miasto mojej matki” in Chałubinski, Bolesław Drobner, 310. 11. This account of Hartig’s life is based on Wulf Kirsten, Apostel einer besseren Menschlichkeit: Der Expressionist Rudolf Hartig (1893–1962) (Eggingen: Edition Isele, 2007); and Thomas Höpel, “Die Kunst dem Volke”: Städtische Kulturpolitik in Leipzig und Lyon 1945–1989 (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2011), 35. 12.  Quoted in Kirsten, Apostel, 11. 13. Kirsten, Apostel, 13. 14.  Quoted in Kirsten, Apostel, 33. 15.  SStAL RdB 30538: 4. 16.  SAL StVuR (1) 7972: 1. Emphasis in the original. 17.  Andrzej Chwalba, Dzieje Krakowa 5: Kraków w latach 1939–1945 (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2002), 439. 18.  See Anna Cichopek, Pogrom żydów w Krakowie. 11 sierpnia 1945r. (Kraków: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2000). 19.  ANK UW 3846: 75. 20.  See Birgit Horn-Kolditz, Die Nacht, als der Feuertod vom Himmel stürzte. Leipzig, 4. Dezember 1943 (Gudenberg-Gleichen: Wartberg, 2003). 21.  Ferdinand May, Die bösen und die guten Dinge. Ein Leben erzählt (Berlin: Neues Leben, 1978), 264. 22.  On the Soviet Military Administration, see Norman Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A  History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1995); Jan Foitzik, Sowjetische Militäradministration in Deutschland: Struktur und Funktion, 1945–1949 (Berlin: Akademie, 1999). 23.  SAL StVuR (1) 7969: 79; StVuR (1) 7972: 6. 24.  Thomas Ahbe and Michael Hoffmann, Hungern, Hamstern, Heiligabend. Leipziger erinnern sich an die Nachkriegszeit (Leipzig: Gustav Kiepenheuer, 1996), 19. 25.  Birgit Horn-Kolditz, Weiß du noch? Von Messeonkels, Muckefuck und ‘Goldenen’ Broilern: Geschichten und Episoden (Kassel: Herkules, 2006), 39. 26.  Andrzej Chwalba, Dzieje Krakowa 6: Kraków w latach 1945–1989 (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2004), 10. 27. On the role of fear in postwar Poland, see Marcin Zaremba, Wielka trwoga (Kraków: Znak, 2012).

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8.  Statistisches Jahrbuch der Reichsmessestadt Leipzig, Band 8: 1929/37. 2 29.  Thomas Höpel, Von der Kunst- zur Kulturpolitik: Städtische Kulturpolitik in Deutschland und Frankreich 1918–1939 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2007), 64. 30.  Janina Bieniarzówna and Jan Małecki, eds., Dzieje Krakowa 4: Kraków w latach 1918–1939 (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1992), 89. 31. Bieniarzówna and Małecki, Dzieje Krakowa 4, 144. See also Koloski, “Painting Kraków Red,” 30. 32.  SStAL RdB 30538: 11; ANK PWRN 2: 17/51. 33.  ANK UW 3846: 493. 34.  See Höpel, Von der Kunst- zur Kulturpolitik. 35.  SAL StVuR (1) 7973: 8. 36.  Hartig, “Kultur im Aufbau,” August 30, 1945, SAL StVuR (1) 7972: 4. Emphasis in the original. 37.  SAL StVuR (1) 8422: 263–370. See also Höpel, “Die Kunst dem Volke,” 83–85. 38.  ANK UW 3846: 705. 39. Chwalba, Dzieje Krakowa 6, 499–500. 40.  SAL StVuR (1) 7972: 20. 41.  ANK UW 3846: 181. 42.  ANK UW 3846: 977. 43.  SAL StVuR (1) 8422: 263. 44.  ANK Kr 5862. 45.  The writer Witold Zechenter, quoted in Wiesław Szymański, “Odrodzenie” i “Twórczość” w Krakowie (1945–1950) (Wrocław: Zakład im. Ossolinskich, 1981), 40. 46.  SAL StVuR (1) 2133: 246. 47.  The original committee members were Max Schwimmer, Kurt Massloff, and Elisabeth Voigt. 48.  SAL StVuR (1) 7973: 10. 49.  SAL StVuR (1) 7969: 162. 50.  SStAL SED-SL IV/5/1/51/264. 51.  SAL StVuR (1) 8107: 1. 52.  SAL StVuR (1) 8107: 24–27. 53.  See, e.g., SAL StVuR (1) 8106: 38. 54.  The ban applied to Zofia Halinska-Pokornowa. ANK UW 3851: 15. 55.  ANK UW 3846. 56.  See Józef Dużyk, “Życie literackie,” in Bieniarzówna and Małecki, Dzieje Krakowa 4. 57.  SAL StVuR (1) 8798: 5. Emphasis in the original. 58.  SAL StVuR (1) 7969: 81. 59.  ANK Kr 5862. 60.  See, e.g., ANK UW 3846: 393–95. 61. Frank Heidenreich, Arbeiterkulturbewegung und Sozialdemokratie in Sachsen vor 1933 (Köln: Böhlau, 1995), 313. 62.  SAL StVuR (1) 7973: 37. 63.  See Diana Poskuta-Włodek, Trzy dekady z dziejów sceny. Teatr im. Juliusza Słowackiego w Krakowie w latach 1914–1945 (Kraków: Teatr im. Juliusza Slowackiego w Krakowie, 2001).

N OT ES TO PA G E S 3 2 – 3 7     271

4.  ANK 29/2089/331/57. 6 65.  SAL StVuR (1) 7969: 127. 66. See Śliwa, Bolesław Drobner, 123. 67.  ANK KW PZPR 371. 68.  SAL StVuR (1) 7972: 142; SStAL SED-SL IV/5/1/406: 56. 69. May, Die bösen und die guten Dinge, 278. 70.  SAL StVuR (1) 8282: 5–7. 71.  ANK 29/828/3792. 72.  See SStAL SED-SL IV/5/01/406. 73.  See Höpel, “Die Kunst dem Volke.” 74.  Koloski, “Painting Kraków Red,” 126. 75.  ANK 29/1431/555/121. 76. Ralph Nünthel, UT Connewitz  & Co. Kinogeschichte(n) aus Leipzig-Süd (Beucha: Sax, 2004), 64. 77.  For detailed studies of this process, see Patryk Babiracki, Soviet Soft Power in Poland: Culture and the Making of Stalin’s New Empire, 1943–1957 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); David Pike, The Politics of Culture in Soviet-Occupied Germany, 1945–1949 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992); and Jan Behrends, Die erfundene Freundschaft: Propaganda für die Sowjetunion in Polen und in der DDR (Köln: Böhlau, 2006). 78.  Ursula Urban, Władza ludowa a literaci: Polityka władz wobec środowiska Związku Zawodowego Literatów Polskich 1947–1950 (Warsaw: Elipsa, 2006), 89. 79. Chwalba, Dzieje Krakowa 6, 483. 80.  SAL StVuR (1) 8039: 312. 81.  SAL StVuR (1) 8148: 9. 82.  ANK UW 3846: 1401. 83.  See Katherine Lebow, Unfinished Utopia: Nowa Huta, Stalinism, and Polish Society, 1949–56 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), chapter 5. 84.  SStAL SED-SL IV/5/1/406/36. Emphasis in the original. 85.  This law was passed in 1949. Annette Schuhmann, Kulturarbeit im Sozialistischen Betrieb: Gewerkschaftliche Erziehungspraxis in der SBZ-DDR 1946 bis 1970 (Köln: Böhlau, 2006), 60. 86.  On the notion of two postwar revolutions in Poland, see Padraic Kenney, Rebuilding Poland: Workers and Communists, 1945–1950 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). 87.  On the role of postwar rebuilding in the communist takeover of Eastern Europe, see Corey Ross, Constructing Socialism at the Grass-Roots: The Transformation of East Germany, 1945–1965 (London: Macmillan, 2000); and Gareth Pritchard, The Making of the GDR, 1945–53: From Antifascism to Stalinism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). 88.  Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956 (New York: Doubleday, 2012). 89.  These statistics are compiled from Diana Poskuta-Włodek, Co dzień powtarza sie gra . . . Teatr im. Juliusza Słowackiego w Krakowie, 1893–1993 (Kraków: ARTA, 1993). Repertoires for the Old Theater are available on its website, http://www.stary.pl/pl/archiwum; those for the Leipzig City Theaters come from Städtische Theater Leipzig, Leipziger Bühnen: Tradition und neues Werden (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1956).

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90.  Karol Estreicher, Jr. Dziennik wypadków, vol. 2 (Kraków: Pałac Sztuki, 2002), 176–79. 91. Estreicher, Dziennik, 2: 176. Chapter 2.  Planning: Workers and Cultural Mass Work

  1.  SAPMO BArch DR 1/5847/20.   2.  AAN 237/XVIII/27.   3. Studies of Socialist Realism in Eastern Europe include Wojciech Włodarczyk, Socrealizm: Sztuka polska w latach 1950–1954 (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1991); Heinz Kneip, Regulative Prinzipien und formulierte Poetik des sozialistischen Realismus. Untersuchungen zur Literaturkonzeption in der Sowjetunion und Polen (1945–1956) (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1995); and Małgorzata Jarmułowicz, Sezony błędów i wypaczeń: Socrealizm w dramacie i teatrze polskim (Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego, 2003).   4.  “Ustawa z dnia 21 lipca 1950 r. o 6-letnim planie rozwoju gospodarczego i budowy postaw socjalizmu na lata 1950–1955,” Dziennik Ustaw 37 (1950): 427–50.   5. “Der Fünfjahrplan zur Entwicklung der Volkswirtschaft der DDR,” Neues Deutschland, July 25, 1950, 18–19.   6. Ibid.   7.  “Ustawa,” 430.   8. Walter Ulbricht, “Der Fünfjahrplan und die Perspektiven der Volkswirtschaft,” Neues Deutschland, July 23, 1950, 3–8.   9.  The newspaper reported that “joyful applause swells continuously with gale-force strength and leads to a collective singing of the youth song ‘Build, Build!’ ” Ulbricht, “Der Fünfjahrplan,” 8. 10.  David Priestland, Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization: Ideas, Power, and Terror in Inter-war Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 293. 11.  Quoted in Manfred Jäger, Kultur und Politik in der DDR, 1945–1990 (Köln: Edition Deutschland Archiv, 1995), 36. 12. Billig, AAN 366/1/676/157. For more on the mass song, see David Tompkins, Composing the Party Line: Music and Politics in Early Cold War Poland and East Germany (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2013), chapter 1. 13.  Kraków City Council meeting on May 30, 1952, ANK PMRN 6. 14.  The description is by steelworks director Jan Anioła from 1954. Quoted in Lebow, Unfinished Utopia, 32. 15. Lebow, Unfinished Utopia, 46; and Jerzy Sulimski, Kraków w procesie zmian. Wspólczesne przeobrażenia zbiorowości wielkomiejskiej (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1976), 133. 16. Sulimski, Kraków, 55. 17.  Statistisches Jahresbericht der Stadt Leipzig, 1955. 18.  Simone Hain, “Die Salons der Sozialisten. Geschichte und Gestalt der Kulturhäuser in der DDR,” in Die Salons der Sozialisten: Kulturhäuser in der DDR, ed. Simone Hain and Stephan Stroux (Berlin: Links Verlag, 1996), 91. See also Anne White, De-Stalinization and the House of Culture: Declining State Control over Leisure in the USSR, Poland and Hungary, 1953–89 (London: Routledge, 1990), chapter 2.

N OT ES TO PA G E S 4 6 – 5 2     273

9.  Leipziger Volkszeitung, July 30, 1949. 1 20.  Adam Wysocki, “W Nowej Hucie z uchwalą w ręku . . . Kultura nadal nie nadąża,” Życie Warszawy, September 26, 1953. 21. Ibid. 22.  ANK 29/828/3961/254–55. 23.  Quoted in Lebow, Unfinished Utopia, 129. 24.  SAL StVuR (1) 8168: 12. 25.  SAL StVuR (1) 8168: 17. 26.  SAL StVuR (1) 7990: 42; AAN 366/1/2891. 27. For details, see Schuhmann, Kulturarbeit, 58–66; Christoph Klessmann, Arbeiter im ‘Arbeiterstaat’ DDR: Deutsche Traditionen, sowjetisches Modell, westdeutsches Magnetfeld (1945 bis 1971) (Bonn: Dietz, 2007), 290; and Sandrine Kott, “A  la recherche d’une culture socialiste: Le cas des entreprises en RDA (1949–1989).” Vingtième Siecle. Revue d’histoire 63 (July–September 1999), 90. On Poland, Witold Kochański, ed., Praca kulturalno-oświatowa: Poradnik (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Związkowe CRZZ, 1956), 4, chapter 13. 28.  SAL StVuR (1) 8424: 81; StVuR (1) 8425: 151. 29.  Centralna Rada Związków Zawodowych, Biblioteka szkolenia związkowego. Nr 20: Upowszechnienie kultury i sztuki oraz organizowanie rozrywek i wypoczynku (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Związkowe CRZZ, 1954), 24. 30. “Pierwsza w Polsce stała opera robotnicza w Krakowie pilnie przygotowuje się,” Echo Krakowskie, September  2, 1954, 1. See also “Opera robotnicza przygotowuje się do wystawienia ‘Halki,’ ” Echo Krakowskie, January 9/10, 1955, 4. 31.  Joanna Nowicka, “Mordechaj Gebirtig’s Work against the Background of Krakow’s Musical Culture,” in Warsaw and Jerusalem: Polish-Jewish History, Culture, and Education between Paradise and Inferno, ed. Nitza Davidovitch and Eyal Lewin (Irvine, CA: BrownWalker Press, 2018), 17. 32.  SAL, StVuR (1) 8287: 175; SAL Kulturinformation und -dokumentation, 5. 33.  SAL StVuR (1) 2147: 132. 34. Kochański, Praca, 142. 35.  SAL StVuR (1) 8154: 13. 36.  SAL StVuR (1) 8154: 16–18. 37.  SAL StVuR (1) 8287: 179. 38.  SAL StVuR (1) 8287: 179. 39.  ANK 29/828/3792. 40.  AAN 366/1/2812. 41.  ANK 29/828/3791. 42.  ANK 29/828/3792. 43.  SAPMO BArch, DY34/1366. 44.  Jerzy Parzyński, “ ‘Halka’ St. Moniuszki w realizacji Opery Robotniczej,” Echo Krakowa, July 7–8, 1956, 4. 45. Zygmunt Lesnodorski, “Przed premierą ‘Sprawy Rodzinnej’ Lutowskiego,” Dziennik Polski, November 11, 1952. 46.  AAN 366/1/2848. 47.  AAN 366/1/2914/1. 48.  Emil Orzechowski, Stary Teatr w Krakowie (1945–1985) (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1987), 16–17.

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49.  On the history of these theaters, see Poskuta-Włodek, Co dzień; and Orzechowski, Stary Teatr. 50.  On the STL, see Wolfgang Engel and Erika Stephan, eds., Theater in der Übergangsgesellschaft: Schauspiel Leipzig, 1957–2007 (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2007). 51.  Rudolf Hartig, in SAL StVuR (1) 7972: 168. 52. Estreicher, Dziennik wypadków, 2: 250. 53.  AAN 366/1/2594. 54.  ANK Teatr Miejski 28. Postwar repertoires are available in PoskutaWłodek, Co dzień. 55.  Ferdinand May, “Die Leipziger Bühnen und ihre neueste Entwicklung, 1950–1956.” In Städtische Theater Leipzig, Leipziger Bühnen: Tradition und neues Werden (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1956). 56.  Playbill for Sprawa rodzinna, in AAN 366/1/2848. 57.  Playbill for Kabale und Liebe, in the STL Programmhefte collection of the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Leipzig. 58.  E.g., SAL StVuR(1) 2147: 133. 59.  Andrei Zhdanov, “Soviet Literature—The Richest in Ideas, the Most Advanced Literature,” in H. G. Scott, ed., Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934: The Debate on Socialist Realism and Modernism in the Soviet Union (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1977), 21–22. Emphasis added. 60.  Ibid., 16. 61.  On the antiformalist campaign in the USSR, see Kiril Tomoff, Creative Union: The Professional Organization of Soviet Composers, 1939–1953 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). 62.  Erich Loest, Durch die Erde ein Riß: Ein Lebenslauf (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, 1990), 156. 63. See Barbara Fijałkowska, Polityka i twórcy (1948–1959) (Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1985). 64.  Walter Ulbricht, “Der gegenwärtige Lage und die neuen Aufgaben der SED,” Neues Deutschland, July 11, 1952, 7. 65.  Boris Groys, for instance, identifies Socialist Realism with “the art of the Stalin period.” Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond (London: Verso, 2011), 72. Similarly, Katerina Clark treats “Soviet Socialist Realism as a canonical doctrine defined by its patristic texts.” Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, 3rd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 3. 66. Kneip, Regulative Prinzipien, 52. 67.  See, e.g., the discussions in AAN 366/1/768. 68.  Ulbricht, “Der gegenwärtige Lage.” 69.  Quoted in Urban, Władza ludowa a literaci, 78. 70. Tompkins, Composing, 101; and Armand Vetulani, “Związek Polskich Artystów Plastyków,” in Polskie życie artystyczne w latach 1945–1960, ed. Aleksander Wojciechowski (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 1992), 113. 71.  SAL StVuR (1) 8152: 23–29; ANK KW PZPR 1080: 1; ANK KW PZPR 1354: 1.

N OT ES TO PA G E S 5 8 – 6 5     275

72.  “Der Kampf gegen den Formalismus in der Kunst und Literatur, für eine fortschrittliche deutsche Kultur,” Neues Deutschland, April 18, 1951, 3–4. 73.  AAN 366/1/676. 74.  SAL StVuR (1) 8558: 20. 75. Miłosz, Captive Mind, 15. 76.  The origins of the term are unclear; Marci Shore attributes it to Miłosz. Shore, “Some Words for Grown-Up Marxists: ‘A Poem for Adults’ and the Revolt from Within,” Polish Review 42.2 (1997): 131–54. 77.  SAPMO BArch DY34/1366. 78. SStAL SED-SL IV/5/1/51/314; Paul Ruhland, “Das Leben auf der Welt ist schöner,” Leipziger Volkszeitung, April  8, 1951. For more on the incident, see Eckhart Gillen, “Die tägliche Schizophrenie. Die ‘Troika’ Kurt Magritz, Kurt Massloff und Max Schwimmer,” in 60.40.20. Kunst in Leipzig seit 1949, ed. Karl-Siegbert Rehberg and Hans-Werner Schmidt (Leipzig: E. A. Seemann, 2009). 79.  SAPMO BArch DY30/84886/278–79. 80.  SAPMO BArch DY34/1366. 81.  See also Inge Stuhr, Max Schwimmer: Eine Biographie (Leipzig: Lehmstedt Verlag, 2010). 82.  AAN 237/XVIII/66. 83. Ibid. 84.  “Od redakcji,” Życie literackie, February 4, 1951, 1. 85. Loest, Durch die Erde, 148. 86.  Koloski, “Painting Kraków Red,” 324–25. 87.  SStAL RdB 2265: 2. 88.  ANK PMRN 11. 89.  Henryk Vogler, Autoportret z pamięci. Część tzecia: Dojrzałość (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1981), 140–42. 90.  Ulbricht, “Der gegenwärtige Lage.” 91.  IPN Kr 010/11915. See also Jan Ciechowicz, Dom opowieści: Ze studiów nad Teatrem Rapsodycznym Mieczysława Kotlarczyka (Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego, 1992), 34–35; and Jacek Popiel, Los artysty w czasach zniewolenia. Teatr Rapsodyczny 1941–1967 (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2006), 62. 92.  Quoted in Ciechowicz, Dom opowieści, 108–9. 93.  See, e.g., “Za kulisami Teatru Rapsodycznego,” Echo Krakowa, November 4–5, 1951, 4. 94. “Życie, czyli taniec,” Dziennik Polski, February 9, 2006. 95. Laurie Koloski, “Realists of Another Kind: Cracow’s Grupa Mlodych and ‘Modern’ Realism in Theory and Practice.” The Polish Review 47.4 (2002): 375–92. 96. Vogler, Autoportret, 140. 97.  Quoted in Fijałkowska, Polityka i twórcy, 301. 98. Marian Brandys, Początek opowieści (Kraków: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1952), 290. 99.  ANK KD PZPR Nowa Huta 1015.

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00.  AAN 366/1/2812. 1 101.  ANK KW PZPR 210. 102.  AAN 237/XVIII/27/13. 103.  AAN 366/1/2812. 104.  AAN 237/XVIII/87/74. 105.  Józef Tejchma, Z notatnika aktywisty ZMP (Warsaw: Iskry, 1955), 25–26. 106.  Ibid., 22. 107.  Cf. Lebow, Unfinished Utopia, 142. 108. Iwona Miernik, Państwowa organizacja imprez artystycznych ‘ARTOS’ (1950–1954). Monografia historyczna (Toruń: Europejskie Centrum Edukacyjne, 2005), 143. 109. Tejchma, Z notatnika, 72–74. 110.  AAN 366/1/2812. 111.  AAN 366/1/2812/148. 112.  SAPMO BArch DY34/1773. 113.  SAPMO BArch DY34/1161. 114.  SAPMO BArch DY30/5841/49. 115.  AAN 366/1/3231. 116. Miłosz, Captive Mind, 197–99. 117.  Ibid., 207. 118.  Ibid., 230. Chapter 3.  Nationalism: Public Protest and the Birth of National Communism

   1.  Bertolt Brecht, Poems 1913–1956, eds. John Willett and Ralph Manheim (London: Methuen, 1976), 440. The Stalinallee was a showpiece street in the heart of East Berlin.    2.  Adam Ważyk, “Poem for Adults,” translated by Lucjan Blit. Dissent 3: 1 (Winter 1956), 129–37.    3.  For accounts of June 17 in Leipzig, see Heidi Roth, Der 17. Juni 1953 in Sachsen (Köln: Böhlau, 1999); Nils Franke, Verstrickung: Der FDGB Leipzig im Spannungsfeld von SED und Staatssicherheit, 1946–1989 (Leipzig: Militzke, 1999); Beate Berger and Heidi Roth, Ausnahmezustand: Der Volksaufstand vom 17. Juni 1953 in Leipzig (Leipzig: Leipziger Universistätsverlag, 2003); and Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, 17. Juni 1953, Volksaufstand in der DDR: Ursachen, Abläufe, Folgen (Bremen: Temmen, 2003).    4.  There are conflicting accounts of whether the statue actually fell; see Roth, Der 17. Juni, 115–16.    5.  Other eyewitnesses remember jazz tunes being played instead: forbidden music rather than prescribed. Kowalczuk, 17. Juni, 156.    6. Eastern Bloc leaders themselves rejected the term “National Communism,” arguing that it obscured the international nature of the communist movement. Nevertheless, the term was widely used in the West: e.g., Paul Zinner, ed., National Communism and Popular Revolt in Eastern Europe: A Selection of Documents on Events in Poland and Hungary, February–November, 1956 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956). For a more recent treatment, see Brian

N OT ES TO PA G E S 7 4 – 7 9     277

Porter-Szücs, Poland in the Modern World: Beyond Martyrdom (Chichester: Wiley, 2014), chapter 9.   7. Roth, Der 17. Juni, 102.   8. Connelly, Captive University, 285.   9.  Peter Grieder, The East German Leadership, 1946–73: Conflict and Crisis (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1999), 58. 10.  Andrzej Jezierski and Barbara Petz, Historia gospodarcza Polski Ludowej 1944–1985 (Warsaw: PWN, 1988), 182. 11.  Barry Eichengreen and Albrecht Ritschl, “Understanding West German Economic Growth in the 1950s.” Cliometrica 3 (2009), 191–219, here 191. 12.  Helge Heidemeyer, Flucht und Zuwanderung aus der SBZ/DDR 1945/1949– 1961: Die Flüchtlingspolitik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland bis zum Bau der Berliner Mauer (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1994), 338. 13.  Cited in Kowalczuk, 17. Juni 1953, 85–87. 14.  “Kommuniqué des Politbüros des Zentralkomitees der SED vom 9. Juni 1953,” Neues Deutschland, June 11, 1. 15. Roth, Der 17. Juni, 115. 16.  Quoted in Roth, Der 17. Juni, 169. 17. “Die Generallinie der SED war und ist richtig.” Neues Deutschland, July 30, 1953, 1. 18.  Quoted in Roth and Berger, Aufnahmezustand, 55. 19.  Roth and Berger, Aufnahmezustand, 119. 20.  SStAL SED-BL IV/2/9/2/531/1. A version of this appeal was published as Erich Loest, “Elfenbeinturm und Rote Fahne,” Börsenblatt für den deutschen Buchhandel, July 4, 1953, 548–49. 21.  Günter Cwojdrak, “Schreibt die Wahrheit!” Neue Deutsche Literatur 1.8 (August 1953): 27. 22.  Manfred Jäger, Kultur und Politik in der DDR, 1945–1990 (Köln: Deutschland Archiv, 1995), 73. 23. Loest, Durch die Erde ein Riss, 222. 24.  SAL StVuR (1) 2152: 2. 25.  On jazz in Leipzig, see Reginald Rudorf, Jazz in der Zone (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1964). 26.  SAL StVuR (1) 2152: 21. 27.  Heinar Kipphardt, Shakespeare dringend gesucht: Und andere Theaterstücke (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1988). 28. Loest, Durch die Erde, 214. 29. On the Soviet Thaw, see, e.g., Polly Jones, ed., The Dilemmas of DeStalinization: Negotiating Cultural and Social Change in the Khrushchev Era (London: Routledge, 2006). 30. Quoted in Hermann Weber, Geschichte der DDR (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, 1999), 169. 31.  SStAL RdB 2265: 40–53. 32.  Verband Bildender Künstler Deutschlands Bezirk Leipzig. Bezirkskunstausstellung Leipzig 1954. Vom 29. August bis 26. September 1954 im Museum der Bildenden Künste (Leipzig: VBKD, 1954).

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3.  SAL StVuR (1) 2150: 169. 3 34. Höpel, “Die Kunst dem Volke,” 163. 35.  Repertoires compiled from Städtische Theater Leipzig, Leipziger Bühnen: Tradition und neues Werden (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1956). 36.  See Klaus Erdmann, Der gescheiterte Nationalstaat: Die Interdependenz von Nations- und Geschichtsverständnis im politischen Bedingungsgefüge der DDR (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang: 1996). 37. “Die Deutsche Demokratische Republik verkörpert die Zukunft Deutschlands,” Einheit 10 (1955): 956–69. 38.  SAL StVuR (1) 7990. 39.  Heidi Martini, Dokumentarfilm-Festival Leipzig: Filme und Politik im Blick und Gegenblick (Berlin: DEFA, 2007), 176. 40.  Quoted in Wojciech Czuchnowski, Blizna. Proces kurii krakowskiej 1953 (Kraków: Znak, 2003), 216. 41.  AAN 336/3/8/329–30. 42. Miłosz, Captive Mind, 24. 43.  AAN 336/3/8/325. 44.  Jezierski and Petz, Historia gospodarcza, 160. 45.  Paweł Machcewicz, Rebellious Satellite: Poland, 1956, trans. Maya Latynski (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2009), 243. 46.  Bierut speaking at the Third Plenum KC PZPR. Quoted in Marta Fik, Kultura polska po Jałcie: Kronika lat 1944–1981 (London: Polonia, 1989), 206. 47.  AAN 336/3/7/325. 48.  Stanisław Witold Balicki, quoted in Anda Rottenberg, “Ministerstwo Kultury i Sztuki,” in Wojciechowski, Polskie życie artystyczne w latach 1945–1960, 193. 49.  Włodzimierz Sokorski, “O rzeczywisty zwrot w naszej polityce kulturalnej,” Przegłąd Kulturalny, April 22–28, 1954, 1–2. 50.  On Ważyk, see Marci Shore, Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918–1968 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). 51. Ważyk, “Poem for Adults,” 130–31. 52. Fik, Kultura polska, 216–17. 53.  AAN 1354/XIA/138. 54. Ibid. 55. Chwalba, Dzieje Krakowa 6, 294. 56.  ANK PMRN 18, Sesja XIV, 35–54. 57.  See Machcewicz, Rebellious Satellite, 87–124. 58.  Quoted in Fik, Kultura polska, 243. 59.  Ibid., 245. 60.  Jan Kott, “Hamlet po XX Zjeździe,” Przegląd Kulturalny, October  11, 1956. 61.  Quoted in Chwalba, Dzieje Krakowa 6, 298. 62. Machcewicz, Rebellious Satellite, 169–70. 63.  Miłosz, “Prasa zagraniczna o wydarzeniach w Polsce,” Trybyna Ludu, ­October  27, 1956, 2. The article originally appeared in Demain, October  25, 1956. Cited in Marcin Zaremba, Komunizm, legitymizacja, nacjonalizm: Nacjonalistyczna legitymizacja władzy komunistycznej w Polsce (Warsaw: TRIO, 2001), 251.

N OT ES TO PA G E S 8 7 – 9 2     279

64. “Address by the First Secretary of the Polish United Workers Party, Gomułka, before a Citizens’ Rally at Warsaw, October  24, 1956,” in Zinner, National Communism, 270–77, here 273. 65.  See Hanna Diskin, The Seeds of Triumph: Church and State in Gomułka’s Poland (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2001). 66.  Estreicher, October 21, 1956, Dziennik wypadków, 2: 466. 67.  “Wir gehen zielbewußt unseren Weg,” Neues Deutschland, October 28, 1956, 1–2. 68. Grieder, East German Leadership, 108–31; and Johanna Granville, “Ulbricht in 1956: Survival of the Spitzbart during Destalinization,” Journal of Contemporary History 41.3 (2006): 477–502. 69.  Verena Blaum, Kunst und Politik im Sonntag, 1946–1958. Eine historische Inhaltsanalyse zum deutschen Journalismus der Nachkriegsjahre (Köln: Wissenschaft und Politik, 1992), 110. 70.  Gerhard Zwerenz, “The Mother of Freedom is Called Revolution,” in Gustav Just, Witness in His Own Cause: The Fifties in the German Democratic Republic, trans. Oliver Lu (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1995), 58–60. 71. Just, Witness, 58. See also Stephen Brockmann, The Writers’ State: Constructing East German Literature, 1945–1959 (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2015), chapter 7. 72.  SStAL SED-BL IV/2/9/02/535/18. 73.  Volker Schulte, “ ‘Unser Publikum reagiert im Durchschnitt normal’. 1953: Eingeplanter Humor, plattgemachte Satire,” in Dürfen die denn das: 75 Jahre Kabarett in Leipzig, edited by Hanskarl Hoerning and Harald Pfeifer (Leipzig: Forum Verlag, 1996), 60. 74. Loest, Durch die Erde, 283. 75.  Ibid., 288–90. 76. Rudorf, Jazz in der Zone, 94. 77.  Ibid., 98. 78.  SStAL SED-BL IV/2/9/02/535/206–11. 79. Rudorf, Jazz in der Zone, 92. 80.  Wolfgang Harich, Keine Schwierigkeiten mit der Wahrheit. Zur nationalkommunistischen Opposition 1956 in der DDR (Berlin: Dietz, 1993), 112–60, here 134. 81.  Granville, “Ulbricht in 1956,” 482. 82. Rudorf, Jazz in der Zone, 101. See also Loest, Durch die Erde, 294. 83.  SAL StVuR (1) 7995. 84. Rudorf, Jazz in der Zone, 103. See also SStAL SED-BL IV/2/9/02/ 535/184–87. 85.  Gerhard Zwerenz, “Die Verteidigung Sachsens und warum Karl May die Indianer liebte. Sächsische Autobiographie in Fortsetzung,” 12 Nachwort: Verteidigung eines Gedichts gegen die Gladiatoren. http://www.poetenladen. de/zwerenz-gerhard-sachsen.htm (accessed August 20, 2019). See also SAPMO BArch DR1/8281/11. 86.  SStAL SED-BL IV/2/9/2/531/158. 87.  Gerhard Zwerenz, Der Widersprich: Autobiographischer Bericht (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1974), 249–50.

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  88.  Mary Fulbrook, Anatomy of a Dictatorship: Inside the GDR 1949–1989 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 179.   89.  Walter Ulbricht, “Grundfragen der Politik der Sozialistischen Einheitspartei Deutschlands.” Referat auf der 30. Tagung des Zentralkomitees der Sozialistischen Einheitspartei Deutschlands am 30. Januar 1957 ([East] Berlin: Dietz, 1958).   90.  SStAL SED-BL IV/2/9/02/533/318.   91.  SStAL RdB 2955: 25.   92.  The first use of this term appears in Ulbricht, “Lernen für das Leben— Lernen für den Sozialismus,” Neues Deutschland, October 1, 1957, 4.   93.  Resolutions of Leipzig’s Culture Conference, October  11–12, 1957, SStAL SED-BL IV/2/09/02/536.   94.  SStAL SED-BL IV/2/9/02/532/23.   95.  SStAL SED-BL IV/2/09/02/536.   96.  Alexander Abusch, Im ideologischen Kampf für eine sozialistische Kultur: Die Entwicklung der sozialistischen Kultur in der Zeit des zweiten Fünfjahrplanes. Rede auf der Kulturkonferenz der SED am 23.10.57 in Berlin ([East] Berlin: Dietz, 1957), 13.   97.  Walter Ulbricht, “Der Kampf um den Frieden, für den Sieg des Sozialismus, für die nationale Wiedergeburt Deutschlands als friedliebender demokratischer Staat,” Neues Deutschland, July 11, 1958, 3–11.   98.  Jens Schöne, “Ideology and Asymmetrical Entanglements: Collectivization in the German Democratic Republic,” in Collectivization of Agriculture in Communist Eastern Europe: Comparison and Entanglements, ed. Constantin Iodarchi and Arnd Bauerkamper (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2013).   99.  Handwerkskammer des Bezirkes Leipzig, 10 Jahre Handwerkskammer des Bezirkes Leipzig (Leipzig: Handwerkskammer des Bezirkes Leipzig, 1963), 21. 100.  Walter Ulbricht, “Der Kampf um den Frieden, für den Sieg des Sozialismus, für die nationale Wiedergeburt Deutschlands als friedliebender demokratischer Staat. Fortsetzung,” Neues Deutschland, July 12, 1958, 4. 101.  Ulbricht, “Der Kampf um den Frieden,” July 12, 1958, 11. 102.  Walter Ulbricht, “Der Sozialismus Siegt!” Neues Deutschland, July  20, 1958, 3. 103.  See Hope M. Harrison, Driving the Soviets up the Wall: Soviet-East German Relations, 1953–1961 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 139–223. 104. See, e.g., numerous works by Mary Fulbrook and her students, including—in the sphere of cultural policy—Esther von Richthofen, Bringing Culture to the Masses: Control, Compromise and Participation in the GDR (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009). 105. Grieder, East German Leadership, 113. 106.  On the history of this term in Poland, see Józef Kądzielski, O problemie modelu rewolucji kulturalnej (Łódź: PWN, 1964). 107.  Władysław Gomułka, “Przemówienie na XIV zjeździe Związku Literatów Polskich w Lublinie,” Nowe Drogi, October 1964, 3–12. 108.  Janina Smolińska (ed.), O upowszechnienie kultury i oświaty. Materiały krajowej narady dzialaczy kulturalno-oświatowych w dn. 18–19 grudnia 1958 (Warsaw: Książka i Wiedza, 1959), 179.

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109.  See ANK PMRN 18 and 22, as well as Dziennik urzędowy Prezydium Miejskiej Rady Narodowej w Krakowie, 1958–1960. 110.  ANK 701/2575/119. 111.  By 1959 Kraków had a Commission for Art and Culture, a Commission for Disseminating Culture, and a Coordinating Commission for culture. See, e.g., ANK PMRN 23. 112.  SStAL SED-BL IV/2/9/02/536/418–21. See also Höpel, “Die Kunst dem Volke,” 42–43. 113.  Gomułka, “Przemówienie.” 114.  “Declaration of the Twelve Communist and Workers Parties,” in The New Communist Manifesto, ed. Dan Jacobs (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 170–82. 115. Ibid. 116. Ważyk, “Poem for Adults,” 134. 117. Wisława Szymborska, Poems New and Collected, 1957–1997, trans. Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998), 18. 118.  Quoted in Machcewicz, Rebellious Satellite, 52. 119. Brecht, Poems 1913–1956, 440. 120.  Quoted in Chwalba, Dzieje Krakowa 6, 469. Chapter 4.  Pluralism: Individual Choice and Public-Opinion Polling

    1.  ANK PMRN 2575: 39.     2.  SAL StVuR (1) 230: 416. Emphasis in the original.   3.  SStAL SED-BL IV/2/9/2/536/33.     4.  Anna Krylova, “Soviet Modernity: Stephen Kotkin and the Bolshevik Predicament,” Contemporary European History 23.2 (May 2014): 167–92, here 171.   5. See Vladimir Shlapentokh, The Politics of Sociology in the Soviet Union (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987).     6.  On the development of Polish sociology, see Nina Krasko, Instytucjonalizacja socjologii w Polsce, 1920–1970 (Warsaw: PWN, 1996).     7.  On the history of Nowa Huta, see Lebow, Unfinished Utopia.     8. Maskymilian Siemieński, Z badań nad działalnością kulturalnooświatową w Nowej Hucie: budżet czasu pracownika a możliwości jego uczestnictwa w działalności kulturalno-oświatowej (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Osslinskich, 1961), 9.     9.  Ibid., 45.   10.  Ibid., 56.   11.  ANK PMRN 2575: 125.   12. Andrzej Siciński, ed., Społeczeństwo polskie w badaniach ankietowych Ośrodka Badania Opinii Publicznej przy “Polskim Radio i TV” (lata 1958–1964) (Warsaw: PWN, 1966).   13.  Paul Lewis, Central Europe Since 1945 (New York: Longman, 1994), 132.   14. Smolińska, O upowszechnienie kultury i oświaty, 18, 38, and 40.   15.  Ibid., 39 and 139.   16.  Leopold Grzyb, speaking on November 12, 1958, ANK ORZZ 4088: 40.

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7.  ANK PMRN 2575: 35. 1 18.  ANK ORZZ 4088: 40. 19.  Barbara Nawratowicz, Piwnica pod Baranami. Początki i rozwój (1956– 1963) (Kraków: Petrus, 2010), 8. 20.  Janusz Roszko, “Budownicze Brody,” Dziennik Polski, December  24–26, 1956, 3. 21. Vogler, Autoportret, 161. 22. Marta Wyka, Krakowskie dziecko (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1998), 123. 23.  Magdalena Kursa, “Poznali się 60 lat temu Pod Jaszczurami,” Gazeta Wyborcza, May 4, 2013. 24.  Wanda Błońska, quoted in Stanisław Dziedzic and Tadeusz Skoczek, Przygody z metacodziennośćią: Teatr 38 w latach 1960–1972 (Bochnia: Prowincjonalna Oficyna Wydawnicza, 2010), 6. 25.  Krzysztof Jakubowski, “Kawa, cukry i likiery. Krakowskie życie kawiarniane.” Gazeta Wyborcza, Kraków, November 14, 2012, 4. 26.  Leszek Mazan, quoted in Marek Lubaś-Harny, “Przygasły blask Złotej Gruszki,” https://warszawa.naszemiasto.pl/przygasly-blask-zlotej-gruszki/ar/ c1-7117525 (accessed March 26, 2022). 27.  ANK UMK 552: 79–81. 28.  Ibid., 30. 29.  Dore Ashton, “Art: Polish Avant-Garde,” New York Times, October  6, 1960, 81. 30.  Tadeusz Kantor, “The Informel Theater” (1961), in Michal Kobialka, Further On, Nothing: Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 143. 31.  Jacek Mróz, “Efemeryczność teatru Cricot 2 Tadeusza Kantora w latach 1956–1971. Nowe spojrzenie na fałszywe dobrodziejstwa Partii,” in Mecenat artystyczny a oblicze miasta. Materialy LVI ogólnopolskiej sesji naukowej Stowarzyszenia Historyków Sztuki. Kraków 8–10 XI 2007, ed. Dariusz Nowacki (Kraków: Stowarzyszenie Historyków Sztuki, 2008), 376. 32.  Tadeusz Kantor, speaking on December 3, 1956, ANK PMRN 2575: 45. 33.  Quoted in Kobialka, Further On, 72. 34. Leopold René Nowak, “Krakowski eskapizm czyli powojenna awangarda,” in Grupa Krakowska: Dokumenty i materiały z lat 1932–2008, ed. Józef Chrobak and Marek Wilk (Kraków: Cricoteka, 2008), 147. 35.  ANK KW PZPR 246: 180–241. 36.  Aleksander Wallis, Artyści-plastycy: Zawód i środowisko (Warsaw: PWN, 1964), 202–14. 37.  Andrzej Siciński, Literaci polscy. Przemiany zawodu na tle przemian kultury współczesnej (Warsaw: Instytut Filozofii i Socjologii PAN, 1971). 38. Wallis, Artyści-plastycy, 214. 39. Siciński, Literaci, 114. 40.  SStAL RdB 4852: 96–105. 41.  Ibid., 105. 42.  SAL StVuR (1) 8569: 102–3.

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43. O. E. Stephan, ed., 6. Kunstausstellung 1961 des VBKD Bezirk Leipzig (Leipzig: VBKD Bezirk Leipzig, 1961), 7. 44.  SStAL SED-BL IV/2/9/2/536/358. 45.  SStAL RdB 4852: 138. 46.  SStAL RdB 2972: 111. 47.  SStAL RdB 2246: 36–42. 48.  SAL StVuR (1) 8569: 36. 49.  SStAL SED-BL IV/A/2/9/2/362/18. 50.  STL StVuR (1) 576: 70. For more on this painting, see April Eisman, “From Economic Equality to ‘Mommy Politics’: Women Artists and the Challenges of Gender in East German Painting,” International Journal for History, Culture, and Modernity 2.2 (2014): 175–203. 51.  SStAL SED-SL IV/A/5/1/219. 52. Estreicher, Dziennik wypadków, diary entries for August 12–15, 1960. 53.  Greif zur Feder, Kumpel! (Halle: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 1959). 54. Erwin Strittmatter, “An die Basis—gegen Selbstzufriedenheit,” Neues Deutschland, April 28, 1959, 4. 55. Quoted in Christian Eger, “Bitterfelder Konferenz,” http://www.mzweb.de/kultur/bitterfelder-konferenz-ein-dichter-sagte--das-wird-ein-bittererfeldweg-werden-8431102 (accessed February 25, 2022). 56.  For more on the circles, see William Waltz, Of Writers and Workers: The Movement of Writing Workers in East Germany (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2018). 57.  SStAL SED-BL IV/2/9/2/536/222. 58.  SStAL SED-BL IV/2/9/2/538/97. 59.  SAL StVuR (1) 8001: 20. 60.  SStAL SED-BL IV/2/9/2/517/61. 61.  “Heiteres Rendezvous mit Chruschtschow,” Berliner Zeitung, March  7, 1959), 3. See also SStAL SED-BL IV/2/9/2/537/57. 62.  Greif zur Feder, Kumpel! 117. 63.  SAL StVuR (1) 2157: 14. 64.  SAL StVuR (1) 8026: 7. 65.  SStAL RdB 7977: 28. 66. See Dieter Koop, “Soziologie,” in Geschichte der Universität Leipzig, 1409–2009, Band 4/1 ed. Ulrich von Hehl, Uwe John, and Manfred Rudersdorf (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2009). 67.  Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, Protokoll der Verhandlungen des V Parteitages der SED. 10 bis 16 Juli 1958 in der Werner-Seelenbinder-Halle zu Berlin ([East] Berlin: Dietz, 1959), 1401. 68.  Jochen Weyer, “Wenn in unserem Wohngebiet ein kulturelles Zentrum wäre. . . Gedanken zu einer Umfrage in der Leipziger Gießerstraße: ‘Was tun Sie in Ihrer Freizeit?’ ” Neues Deutschland, July 8, 1960, 3. 69.  SStAL SED-BL IV/2/9/2/536/33. 70.  Weyer, “Wenn in unserem Wohngebiet.” 71.  SAL StVuR (1) 8169: 10. 72.  SAL StVuR (1) 8169: 29. 73.  SStAL IV/2/9/2/536/385–8; SAL StVuR (1) 8169: 60.

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4.  SAL StVuR (1) 8169: 75. 7 75.  K. H. Hagen, “Bildung ist das höchste Gut,” Neues Deutschland, December 12, 1961, 4. 76.  Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Leipzig, Band 15 (Leipzig: Grafik-Druck, 1963). 77.  SAL StVuR (1) 577: 75. 78.  Bernd Lindner, Verstellter, offener Blick. Eine Rezeptionsgeschichte bildender Kunst im Osten Deutschlands, 1945–1995 (Köln: Böhlau, 1998), 125–34. 79.  Walter Friedrich, “Geschichte des Zentralinstituts für Jugendforschung,” in Das Zentralinstitut für Jugendforschung Leipzig 1966–1990. Geschichte, Methoden, Erkenntnisse, ed. Walter Friedrich, Peter Förster, and Kurt Starke (Berlin: Edition Ost, 1999). 80.  “Meinungforschung: Sonntag ohne Marx,” Der Spiegel, May  11, 1965, 72–73. 81.  For a study of how GDR television responded to the results of opinion polls, see Michael Meyen, “Surveys on Media Usage in the German Democratic Republic (GDR): Institutions, Validity, and Outcomes,” in The Silent Majority in Communist and Post-Communist States: Opinion Polling in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, ed. Klaus Bachmann and Jens Gieseke (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2016). 82. For more on Kayser, see Kyrill Kunakhovich, “The Red Director: Karl Kayser and the Evolution of GDR Theater,” German Studies Review 40.1 (February 2017). 83.  Hans-Rainer John, “Garderobengespräch mit Karl Kayser,” Theater der Zeit 38.5 (May 1983): 30–34, here 31. 84.  Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Leipzig, Band 15. 85.  SAL StVuR (1) 230: 288. 86.  Karl Kayser, “Theater und Publikum,” Theater der Zeit 19.3 (March 1964): 4. 87.  SStAL SED-BL IV/A/2/9/2/366/226. 88.  SStAL SED-BL IV/A/2/9/359. 89.  SStAL SED-SL IV/A/5/1/219. 90.  SStAL SED-SL IV/A/5/1/219. 91.  Christoph Hamm, “Publikum 2,” Theater der Zeit 20.12 (December 1965): 22. 92.  STL repertoires are compiled from Wolfgang Engel and Erika Stephan, eds., Theater in der Übergangsgesellschaft: Schauspiel Leipzig, 1957–2007 (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2007). 93.  This phenomenon was not limited to theater. See, e.g., Feinstein, Triumph of the Ordinary. 94.  Karl Kayser, “Die Attraktivität unserer Theater. Erfahrungen 30-jähriger Theaterarbeit und neue Aufgaben,” Theater der Zeit 30.1 (January 1975): 4–6. 95.  Ingeborg Pietzsch, “Regisseure antworten,” Theater der Zeit 25.4 (April 1970): 18. 96.  Erika Stephan, “Gespräch mit Karl Georg Kayser,” in Engel and Stephan, Theater in der Übergangsgesellschaft, 124–29. 97. Ibid.

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   98.  Michael Billington, “Edinburgh Festival: Polish Play,” The Guardian, August 23, 1972.    99. William Welsh, ed., Survey Research and Public Attitudes in Eastern ­Europe and the Soviet Union (New York: Pergamon Press, 1981). See also Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Popular Opinion under Communist Regimes,” in The Oxford Handbook of Communism, ed. S. A. Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 100.  Sarah Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 101.  Consumer demand research did exist in the Bloc, as early as 1952 in the case of East Germany, but it remained confined to the economic sphere. See Mark Landsman, Dictatorship and Demand: The Politics of Consumerism in East Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), chapter 5. Chapter 5.  Consumerism: Cultured Consumption and Its Limits

   1.  ANK ORZZ 4088: 40.    2.  Quoted in Judd Stitziel, Fashioning Socialism: Clothing, Politics, and Consumer Culture in East Germany (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 116.    3. Karl-Heinz Gerstner, “Warenhaus Brühl neuste Attraktion unserer Messestadt,” Berliner Zeitung, August 25, 1968, 3.   4.  On consumption in the Eastern Bloc, see Ivan Berend, Central and Eastern Europe, 1944–1993: Detour from the Periphery to the Periphery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Paulina Bren and Mary Neuburger, eds., Communism Unwrapped: Consumption in Cold War Eastern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Mark Landsman, Dictatorship and Demand: The Politics of Consumerism in East Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); and Donna Harsch, Revenge of the Domestic: Women, the Family, and Communism in the German Democratic Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).    5.  Protokoll der Verhandlungen, 68.    6.  See Greg Castillo, Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).    7.  ANK PMRN 2575: 73.    8. Barbara Fijałkowska, Polityka i twórcy (1948–1959) (Warsaw: PWN, 1985), 332, 457, 526.    9.  ANK KW PZPR 1332: 307.   10.  ANK PMRN 2575: 74; ANK KW PZPR 128.   11.  On the surprising overlaps of market theory in East and West, see Johanna Bockman, Markets in the Name of Socialism: The Left-Wing Origins of Neoliberalism (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011).   12. Siciński, Literaci polscy, 175.   13. Wallis, Artyści-plastycy, 66.   14.  ANK KW PZPR 1080: 7.   15.  On church-state relations in Gomułka’s Poland, see Hanna Diskin, The Seeds of Triumph: Church and State in Gomułka’s Poland (Budapest: Central

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European University Press, 2001), and Antoni Dudek, Komuniści i Kościół w Polsce (1945–1989) (Kraków: Znak, 2003). 16.  ANK KW PZPR 1332: 2. 17.  ANK KW PZPR 128: 31. 18.  Janina Orynżyna, ed., Piękno użyteczne: Ćwierćwiecze Cepelii (Warsaw: Zakład Wydawnictw CRS, 1975); and Roman Gmurczyk, Organizacja Cepeliowska w latach 1949–2014. Fakty i ludzie (Warsaw: Madon Media, 2014). 19.  ANK PMRN 2575: 34. 20.  ANK ZPAP ZO 230: 300–314. 21.  For a study of this process in Warsaw, see Ewa Toniak, Prace rentowne: Polscy artyści między ekonomią a sztuką w okresie Odwilży (Warsaw: Narodowe Centrum Kultury, 2015). 22.  ANK KW PZPR 1332: 1. 23.  Quoted in Uta Schorlemmer, Tadeusz Kantor. Er war sein Theater (Nürnberg: Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2005), 72. 24.  Quoted in Bernadeta Stano, Wystawy zapamiętane, wystawy zapomiane: Życie artystyczne Krakowa, Nowej Huty, Rzeszowa i Zakopanego w okresie Odwilży (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Akademii Pedagogicznej, 2007), 47. 25. Wallis, Artyści-plastycy, 140. On the notion of community (środowisko) in Poland of the 1980s, see Janine Wedel, The Private Poland: An Anthropologist’s Look at Everyday Life (New York: Facts on File, 1986). 26. See Maciej Pawłowski, Plakat z krakowskiej Akademii Sztuk Pięknych 1889–2003 (Kraków: Akademia Sztuk Pięknych, 2004). 27.  On Górka’s career, see Zdzisław Schubert, “Wiktor Górka,” in Mrowczyk, VeryGraphic, 170–75. 28.  Świerzy’s quotation appears at http://www.cinemaposter.com. Accessed February 17, 2022. 29.  SStAL RdB 2978: 48; SStAL SED-BL IV/B/2/9/02/593. 30.  Claudia Büttner, Geschichte der Kunst am Bau in Deutschland (Berlin: Bundesministerium für Verkehr, Bau und Stadtentwicklung, 2011), 20–23. 31.  See Thomas Topfstedt, “Baubezogene Kunst in der DDR—das Beispiel Leipzig,” in Kunst am Bau als Erbe des Geteilten Deutschlands: Zum Umgang mit Architekturbezogener Kunst der DDR, ed. Marie Neumüllers (Berlin: Bundesministerium fuer Verkehr, Bau und Stadtentwicklung, 2011). 32.  The so-called “scientific and technological revolution” was widely discussed across the Eastern Bloc, as well as in the West. Its most influential text was Radovan Richta, Civilization at the Crossroads: Social and Human Implications of the Scientific and Technological Revolution (White Plains, NY: International Arts and Sciences Press, 1969). 33.  See Grieder, East German Leadership, 1946–1973, 160–61. 34.  Jeffrey Kopstein, The Politics of Economic Decline in East Germany, 1945– 1989 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 46. 35.  Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, Zweite Bitterfelder Konferenz 1964 ([East] Berlin: Dietz, 1964), 65. 36.  SAPMO BArch DR1 9874: 3. 37.  SAL StVuR (1) 255.

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8.  SAPMO BArch DR1 9874: 19. 3 39.  SStAL SED-BL IV/C/2/9/02/690. 40.  SStAL SED-BL IV/A/2/9/2/368. 41.  SAPMO BArch DR1 9874: 6. 42.  Kyrill Kunakhovich and Pavel Skopal, “Cinema Cultures of Integration: Film Distribution and Exhibition in the GDR and Czechoslovakia from the Perspective of Two Local Cases, 1945–1960,” in Cinema in Service of the State: Perspectives on Film Culture in the GDR and Czechoslovakia, 1945–1960, ed. Lars Karl and Pavel Skopal (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), 290–96. 43.  Norris Houghton, “Daring Polish Stage,” New York Times, March  19, 1961, X1. For more on Western culture in Poland, see Lisa Jakelski, Making New Music in Cold War Poland: The Warsaw Autumn Festival, 1956–1968 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2016). 44.  ANK PWRN 277. 45. Andrzej Friszke, “Kultura czy ideologia? Polityka kulturalna PZPR w latach 1957–1963,” in Władza a społeczeństwo w PRL: Studia historyczne, ed. Friszke (Warsaw: Intytut Studiów Politycznych PAN, 2003), 131. 46 .  Jerzy Płażewski, “Film zagraniczny w Polsce,” in Encyklopedia kultury polskiej XX Wieku. Film, Kinematografia, ed. Edward Zajicek (Warsaw: Institut Kultury, 1994), 343. 47.  ANK Ekspozytura w Spytkowicach, WZK 9/54. 48.  SStAL RdB 2206. 49.  “Satchmo Blows for Leipzig ‘Cats’: 6,000 East Germans Flock to Hear Armstrong and Band,” New York Times, March 26, 1965, 29. 50.  SStAL SED-BL IV/A/2/9/2/363. See Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows up the World. 51.  ANK Ekspozytura w Spytkowicach, WZK 9/54. 52.  ANK KW 128. 53.  ANK KW PZPR 966: 27. 54.  Ryszard Kosiński, “Paszkwil na mamusie,” Dziennik Polski, October  13, 1962, 4. 55.  Patryk Pleskot, Wielki mały ekran: Telewizja a codzienność Polaków w latach sześćdziesiątych (Warsaw: TRIO, 2007), 88. 56.  Cf. national attendance statistics in Główny Urząd Statystyczny, Rocznik Statystyczny 1967, 476. 57.  See Heather Gumbert, Envisioning Socialism: Television and the Cold War in the German Democratic Republic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014). 58.  David Binder, “Talk Scarce, Too, in East Germany: People Speak in Low Tones since Closing of Border,” New York Times, September 10, 1961, 7. 59.  By the 1980s the proportion had risen to two-thirds. Thomas Beutelschmidt, Kooperation oder Konkurrenz? Das Verhältnis zwischen Film und Fernsehen in der DDR (Berlin: DEFA-Stiftung, 2009), 350. 60. Sokorski speaking in March  1962, quoted in Pleskot, Wielki mały ekran, 43. 61.  See Ina Merkel, Utopie und Bedürnis: Die Geschichte der Konsumkultur in der DDR (Köln: Böhlau, 1999), 16–18.

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2.  Quoted in Landsman, Dictatorship, 29. 6 63.  Quoted in Stitziel, Fashioning Socialism, 15. 64. Józef Kądzielski, O problemie modelu rewolucji kulturalnej (Łódź: PWN, 1964), 50. 65.  Quoted in Eli Rubin, Synthetic Socialism: Plastics and Dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 203. 66. Stefan Żółkiewski et al., “Problemy przewidywania przyszłości a model kultury,” Kultura i Społczenstwo 9.4 (1967): 53. 67.  See Julie Hessler, “Cultured Trade: The Stalinist Turn towards Consumerism” and Vadim Volkov, “The Concept of Kul’turnost’: Notes on the Stalinist Civilizing Process,” both in Stalinism: New Directions, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (London: Routledge, 2000). 68.  Protokoll der Verhandlungen, 149. 69.  Neues Deutschland, June 17, 1958, 3; Greif zur Feder, Kumpel!, 112. 70.  Władysław Gomułka, Referat sprawozdawczy Komitetu Centralnego PZPR (Warsaw: Książka i Wiedza, 1959), 128–29. 71.  SStAL SED-BL 1837. 72.  See, e.g., StVuR (1) 8003. 73.  SAL StVuR (1) 2157. 74.  Roman Rutkowski, ed., Podstawowe zagadnienia pracy kulturano-oświatowej (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Związkowe, 1961), 4. 75.  Henryk Olszewski, Organizacja pracy kulturalno-oświatowej: Zakład pracy, dom kultury, klub, świetlica (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Związkowe, 1962), 35. 76. SED, Zweite Bitterfelder Konferenz, 55. 77.  ANK KW PZPR 128. 78.  Quoted in Stitziel, Fashioning, 116. 79.  ANK KW PZPR 128. 80. Antonina Kłoskowska, “Homogenizacja kultury masowej a poziomy kultury,” Kultura i Społeczenstwo 7.2 (1963): 57. 81.  Laura Bradley, Cooperation and Conflict: GDR Theater Censorship, 1961– 1989 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 9. 82.  See Kunakhovich and Skopal, “Cinema Cultures.” 83.  Quoted in David Bathrick, The Powers of Speech: The Politics of Culture in the GDR (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 45. 84. Bradley, Cooperation and Conflict, 48. 85. See April Eisman, “In the Crucible: Bernhard Heisig and the Hotel Deutschland Murals,” in Art Outside the Lines: New Perspectives on GDR Art Culture, ed. Elaine Kelly and Amy Wlodarski (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011). 86. Bradley, Cooperation and Conflict, 107. 87.  ANK KW PZPR 966: 122. 88.  Czarna księga cenzury PRL (London: Aneks, 1977). 89. Quoted in Aleksander Pawlicki, Kompletna szarość: Cenzura w latach 1965–1972. Instytucja i ludzie (Warsaw: TRIO, 2001), 125–26. 90.  For a related argument about the post-Stalinist USSR, see Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 10–11, 13.

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   91.  ANK PMRN 2575: 39.    92.  APK KW PZPR 1358: 489.    93.  Paweł Misior, Ja, Tomasz Strzyżewski: O cenzurze i cenzorach (Kraków: Leon Bonnet, 1997), 60.    94.  Elizabeth Prommer, Kinobesuch im Lebenslauf: Eine historische und medien-biographische Studie (Konstanz: UVK Medien, 1999), 134.    95.  SStAL RdB 2267: 63.    96.  “Vielfältiges Kinoprogramm,” Neues Deutschland, February 13, 1963, 4.    97.  SStAL SED-SL IV/A/5/1/232.    98.  The meeting’s transcript appears in SStAL SED-BL IV/A/2/9/2/363.    99.  SStAL SED-SL IV/A/5/1/232. 100.  SstAL SED-BL IV/A/2/9/2/363. 101.  This was the slogan of the Society’s Third Congress in January 1951. See Kyrill Kunakhovich, “Ties that Bind, Ties that Divide: Second World Cultural Exchange at the Grassroots,” in Exploring the Second World: Socialist Internationalism in the Cold War, ed. Patryk Babiracki and Austin Jersild (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 102.  ANK KW PZPR 949: 15–19. 103.  ANK KW PZPR 966: 12. 104.  Ibid., 50. 105.  SstAL SED-BL IV/2/09/02/536/25–30. 106.  SstAL SED-BL IV/2/9/02/517/180–88. 107.  Ibid., 235–40. 108.  SstAL SED-BL IV/A/2/9/359/3–15. 109.  SstAL SED-BL IV/2/9/02/517/235–40. 110.  Ibid., 268. 111.  SstAL SED-BL IV/2/9/02/531/154–63. 112.  Hans Michael Richter, “Wir und die ‘Weststücke,’ ” Theater der Zeit 19.3 (March 1964): 17–20. 113.  Roman Szydłowski, “Dwa razy ‘Inkarno,’ ” Trybuna Ludu, June 6, 1963. Szydłowski’s review described a performance in Wrocław, but this production— with the same director and stage designer—came to the People’s Theater in Nowa Huta in December 1963. 114.  Daniel Logemann, “Eine Insel? Das Polnische Informations- und Kulturzentrum in Leipzig (1969–1989),” Journal of Modern European History 8.2 (2010), 243–65. 115.  See, e.g., BStU, MfS, BV Leipzig, Abteilung II Nr. 114: 207. 116.  Vera Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). Chapter 6. Reform: The Promise and Peril of Controlled Revolt

     1.  “Jeszcze tylko kilka dni karnawalu,” Głos Nowej Huty, February 15–18, 1958, 4.     2.  SStAL SED-BL IV/2/9/2/538: 75.     3.  Mocne uderzenie, dir. Jerzy Passendorfer (Poland, 1966).

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  4. Anna Idzikowska-Czubaj, Rock w PRL-u: O paradoksach współistnienia (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 2001), 174.   5.  Maria Klotzer, ed., Na peryferiach dwóch miast. 50 lat Teatru Ludowego w Krakowie-Nowej Hucie 1955–2005 (Kraków: Teatr Ludowy, 2005), 40.   6.  Jerzy Broszkiewicz, “Imiona władzy,” Dialog 2.7 (1957): 21.   7.  Broszkiewicz, “Imiona władzy,” 33.   8.  Zygmunt Kałużyński, “Król Filip i jego ofiary,” Życie literackie 7.40 (October 6, 1957): 5.   9.  ANK KW PZPR 1363: 51; ANK KW PZPR 1332: 300. 10. Klotzer, Na peryferiach, 44. See also Jerzy Timoszewicz and Andrzej Władysław Kral, Teatr Ludowy Nowa Huta 1955–1960 (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1962), 22–23. 11.  Kazimierz Braun, A History of Polish Theater, 1939–1989: Spheres of Captivity and Freedom (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), 62. 12. Sławomir Mrożek, “Tango,” Dialog 9.11 (November  1964): 10. The translations are taken from Mrożek, Tango, trans. Ralph Manheim and Teresa Dzieduscycka (New York: Grove, 1968). 13.  Ibid., 43. 14.  For more on Tango, see Halina Stephan, Transcending the Absurd: Drama and Prose of Sławomir Mrożek (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), 126–31; and Agnieszka Kurnik, Wolność w prawdzie w twórczości literackiej Sławomira Mrożka (Kraków: Arcana, 2013), 93–113. 15.  Jerzy Bober, “Tango,” Gazeta Krakowska, January 8, 1966. 16.  ANK KW PZPR 1368: 15. 17.  Dariusz Domański, ed., Taki nam się śnuje dramat . . . Stary Teatr 1945– 1995. Album wspomnień (Kraków: Ati, 1997), 95. 18.  See Jerzy Eisler, List 34 (Warsaw: PWN, 1993), 66–67. 19.  Karol Estreicher Jr., Dziennik wypadków, vol. 3 (Kraków: Pałac Sztuki, 2003), 568. 20.  Ibid., 563. 21.  See AAN 237/XVIII/267. 22.  See, e.g., Braun, A History, 65. 23.  On the history of the institute, see Isabelle Lehn, Sascha Macht, and Katja Stopka, Schreiben lernen im Sozialismus: Das Institut für Literatur “Johannes R. Becher” (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2018). 24.  SStAL SED-BL IV/2/9/2/531/34. 25.  Greif zur Feder, Kumpel! 26. See, e.g., Institut für Literatur “Johannes R. Becher,” Zwischenbericht: Notate und Bibliographie zum Institut für Literatur “Johannes R. Becher,” Leipzig (Leipzig: VEB Bibliographisches Institut, 1980), 21–24. 27.  Brigitte Reimann, Ankunft im Alltag (Berlin: Neues Leben, 1989), 17. 28.  Quoted in David Bathrick, The Powers of Speech: The Politics of Culture in the GDR (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 75. 29.  On the literature of arrival, see Wolfgang Emmerich, Kleine Literaturgeschichte der DDR (Berlin: Aufbau, 2009), 145–47 and 190–214. Emmerich, ­however, treats Reimann separately from Wolf or Neutsch, viewing 1961 as a sharp division.

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30.  On Bräunig’s life, see Bernhard Haberfelner, Zwischen Opposition und Anpassung: Die Literatur der DDR (Norderstedt: Books on Demand, 2009), 57–71; and Angela Drescher, “ ‘Aber die Träume,’ die haben doch Namen: Der Fall Werner Bräunig,” in Bräunig, Rummelplatz (Berlin: Aufbau, 2007), 625–74. 31.  On the phenomenon of “writing workers,” see Waltz, Of Writers and Workers. 32.  Werner Bräunig, “Greif zur Feder, Kumpel!” Neues Deutschland, April 24, 1959, 4. 33.  Werner Bräunig, “Rummelplatz,” Neue Deutsche Literatur 13.10 (October  1965): 7–29. Translations from Bräunig, Rummelplatz, trans. Samuel P. Willcocks (London: Seagull, 2016), 62. 34.  Quoted in Simone Barck, Martina Langermann, and Siegfried Lokatis, “Jedes Buch ein Abenteuer”: Zensur-System und literarische Öffentlicheit in der DDR bis Ende der sechziger Jahre (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1998), 321–24. 35. Herbert Hentschel, Herbert Schönfeld, Helmut Riedel, and Walter Mank, “Das Erz des Lebens und der Literatur,” Neues Deutschland, December 7, 1965, 4. 36.  Werner Bräunig, “Nicht die Schwierigkeiten—Ihre Überwindung,” Neues Deutschland, December 15, 1965, 4. 37.  Quoted in Drescher, “ ‘Aber die Träume,’ ” 651. 38.  SAPMO BArch DY 30 85235. 39.  SAPMO BArch DR 1 9869. 40. “Rock’n’roll—Super-Rytm,” Echo Krakowa, October 11, 1956. 41. Stefan Żółkiewski, O kulturze polski Ludowej (Warsaw: PWN, 1964). 42.  “Nie tyłko dla młodziezy: Rock and Roll itp,” Budujemy Socjalizm, February 18, 1957, 4. 43.  “O konkursie ‘Echa’ i Radia mowią jurorzy,” Echo Krakowa, January 30, 1957, 3. 44. Wacław Kraszewski, “Łaknienie muzyki,” http://www.ryszardy.pl/ kraszewski.html (accessed February 25, 2022). 45.  Quoted in Marek Gaszyński, Mocne uderzenie, część pierwsza: CzerwonoCzarni (Warsaw: Proszyński i S-ka, 2008), 25. 46.  For an early use of this slogan, see Budujemy Socjalizm, 1956, 89, 5. 47.  On popular music in Nowa Huta, see Magdalena Fryźlewicz (ed.), Zagrajmy to jeszcze raz: Muzyka Nowej Huty 1950–2000 (Kraków: Muzeum Historyczne Miasta Krakowa, 2011). 48. See Andrzej Bogunia-Paczyński, “Stan Zatorson—‘polski Chubby Checker,’ ” Kraków, 2011, 3, 57. 49.  Teresa Grobowska, quoted in Przemysław Zieliński, Scena rockowa w PRL. Historia, organizacja, znaczenie (Warsaw: TRIO, 2005), 147. 50.  Michał Radgowski, quoted in Dookoła świata, February 4, 1962, 20–21. 51.  Quoted in Timothy Ryback, Rock Around the Bloc: A History of Rock Music in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 60. 52.  Quoted in Andrzej Icha, Skaldowie: Historia i muzyka zespołu (Gdynia: Professional Music Press, 2004), 63.

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3.  Ibid., 45. 5 54.  Ibid., 271. 55.  Władysław Cybulski, “Giełda słów i melodii,” Dziennik Polski, March 16, 1966, 3. 56.  Quoted in Icha, Skaldowie, 96. 57.  Zbigniew Lech, quoted in Icha, Skaldowie, 140. 58.  Quoted in Icha, Skaldowie, 85. 5 9.  On the notion of pacifying rock, see Idzikowska-Czubaj, Rock w PRL-u, 153. 60.  J. Grant, “Eine Orgie der amerikanischen Unkultur,” Neues Deutschland, October 28, 1958, 6; “Appell an das Gewissen,” Neues Deutschland, November 8, 1958, 6. 61.  Junge Welt, February  5, 1957, 3. Quoted in Michael Rauhut, Rock in der Grauzone. DDR-Rock 1964 bis 1972—Politik und Alltag (Berlin: Basis-Druck, 1993), 7. 62.  See Uta Poiger, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 63.  Greif zur Feder, Kumpel!, 113–14. 64. Ibid. 65. “Alles tanzt Lipsi: Ein neuer Modetanz aus der Messestadt,” Neues Deutschland, February 7, 1959. 66.  Quoted in Poiger, Jazz, 196. 67.  Quoted in Yvonne Liebing, Rainer Eckert, and Uwe Schwabe, All You Need Is Beat: Jugendsubkultur in Leipzig, 1957–1968 (Leipzig: Forum Verlag Leipzig, 2005), 50. 68.  See Lebow, Unfinished Utopia, chapter 5. 69.  Klaus Renft, Zwischen Liebe und Zorn: Die Autobiographie (Berlin: Schwarzkopf und Schwarzkopf, 1997), 50. 70.  Quoted in Liebing, All You Need Is Beat, 50. 71.  Leipziger Volkszeitung, October 14, 1960, quoted in Liebing, All You Need, 45. 72.  Heather Gumbert, Envisioning Socialism: Television and the Cold War in the German Democratic Republic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), chapter 4. 73. Liebing, All You Need Is Beat, 23–5. 74. Renft, Zwischen Liebe, 51. 75.  Hans Modrow, quoted in Kathrin Aehnlich, “Der Leipziger Beataufstand. Der Polizeieinsatz auf dem Leuschner-Platz am 31.10.65,” radio feature, MDR Radio (Leipzig), 2005, http://www.kathrinaehnlich.com/kat/?page_ id=65 (accessed October 9, 2021). 76.  In Hermann Weber, ed., DDR: Dokumente zur Geschichte der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, 1945–1985 (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch, 1986), 276–77. 77. Rauhut, Rock in der Grauzone, 137. 78.  Gunnar Decker, 1965: Der kurze Sommer der DDR (Munich: C. Hanser, 2015). 79.  Report of the Leipzig District People’s Police Office, September 9, 1965. Quoted in Aehnlich, “Der Leipziger Beataufstand.” 80.  Quoted in Aehnlich, “Der Leipziger Beataufstand.”

N OT ES TO PA G E S 1 7 7 – 1 8 5     293

  81. Kopstein, Politics of Economic Decline, 56.   82.  Heinz Stern, “Butlers Boogie: Unmusikalische Betrachtung über eine Leipziger Gitarrengruppe,” Neues Deutschland, April 4, 1965.   83.  Quoted in Rauhut, Rock in der Grauzone, 114.   84.  “Dem Miβbrauch der Jugend keinen Raum!” Leipziger Volkszeitung, October 20, 1965, 5.   85.  Quoted in Liebing, All You Need Is Beat, 9.   86.  SStAL SED-BL IV/A/2/9/2/365/166.    87.  SStAL SED-SL IV/A/5/1/232.    88.  BstU, MfS, BV Leipzig, Au 252/66, 164.    89.  Erich Loest, quoted in Aehnlich, “Der Leipziger Beataufstand.”    90.  Aehnlich, “Der Leipziger Beataufstand.”    91.  Günter Agde, ed., Kahlschlag: Das 11. Plenum des ZK der SED 1965. Studien und Dokumente, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Aufbau, 2000), 230.    92.  “Aus dem Bericht des Politbüros an die 11. Tagung des ZK,” Neues Deutschland, December 16, 1965, 6.    93. Agde, Kahlschlag, 212–15.    94.  Ibid., 224.    95.  In Elimar Schubbe, ed., Dokumente zur Kunst-, Literatur- und Kulturpolitik der SED (Stuttgart: Seewald, 1972), 1098.    96.  “Aus dem Bericht,” 4.    97.  Quoted in Kopstein, Politics of Economic Decline, 59.    98. Ibid.    99.  Ibid., 6 100.  Gustaw Holoubek, quoted in Jerzy Eisler, Polski rok 1968 (Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2006), 167. 101.  Władysław Bieńkowski, quoted in Eisler, Polski rok 1968, 173. 102.  Ibid., 231. 103.  Quoted in Eisler, Polski rok 1968, 325. 104. Chwalba, Dzieje Krakowa 6, 341. 105. Brian Porter-Szücs, Poland in the Modern World: Beyond Martyrdom (Chichester: Wiley, 2014), 251. 106.  ANK KW PZPR 128. 107.  See Richard Hunter and Leo Ryan, From Autarky to Market: Polish Economics and Politics, 1945–1995 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), 26–29. 108.  Jerzy Eisler, “Polskie miesiące,” czyli kryzys(y) w PRL (Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2008), 38. 109.  “The Action Programme of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia,” in Alexander Dubček, Dubcek’s Blueprint for Freedom: His Original Documents Leading to the Invasion of Czechoslovakia (London: William Kimber, 1969), 130, 135, 141, 148, 168, 170. Emphasis in the original. 110. Eisler, Polski rok 1968, 719. 111.  Konstatin Ulmer, VEB Luchterhand? Ein Verlag im deutsch-deutschen literarischen Leben (Berlin: Ch. Links, 2016), 135; Berliner Zeitung, May 3, 1986. 112.  “Text of Pravda Article Justifying Invasion of Czechoslovakia,” New York Times, September 27, 1968, 3.

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Chapter 7.  Dissent: Normalization and Its Discontents

  1.  ANK KW PZPR 1330: 111–12.   2.  Quoted in Uta Grundmann, Klaus Michael, and Susanna Seufert, Revolution im geschlossenen Raum: Die andere Kultur in Leipzig, 1970–1990 (Leipzig: Faber & Faber, 2002), 107.   3.  ANK KK PZPR 607: 13–61 and 139–43.   4.  ANK KK PZPR 632.   5.  ANK KK PZPR 783.   6.  Jan Józef Lipski, KOR: A History of the Workers' Defense Committee in Poland, 1976–1981 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 64.   7.  BStU, MfS, BV Leipzig, Leitung, Nr. 00783: 97; BStU, MfS, BV Leipzig, Abteilung II, Nr. 00470/02: 34.   8.  Joachim Walther, Sicherungsbereich Literatur: Schriftsteller und Staatssicherheit in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (Berlin: Ch. Links, 1996), 186. See also Mike Dennis, “The East German Ministry of State Security and East German Society during the Honecker Era, 1971–1989,” in German Writers and the Politics of Culture: Dealing with the Stasi, ed. Paul Cooke and Andrew Plowman (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 15.   9.  Gale Stokes, ed., From Stalinism to Pluralism: A  Documentary History of Eastern Europe since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 165. 10.  Quoted in Jonathan Bolton, Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, the Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture under Communism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 25. For more on the accords, see Michael Morgan, The Final Act: The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018). 11. Bolton, Worlds of Dissent, chapter 4, especially 143–44. 12.  ANK KW PZPR 1348: 7. 13.  Filip Musiał and Zdzisław Zblewski, “Marzec ’68 i grudzień ’70 w Nowej Hucie,” in Nowa Huta—miasto walki i pracy, ed. Ryszard Terlecki, Marek Lasota, and Jarosław Szarek (Kraków: IPN, 2002), 55–59. 14.  Details on the competition and the winning design can be found in AAN 794 3/38. 15.  New Germany’s first mention of “real existierende Sozialismus” came in October  1968 in a recap of the ninth meeting of the SED Central Committee. Hanna Wolf, “Mit revisionistischen und antisozialistischen Theorien auseinandersetzen,” Neues Deutschland, October 24, 1968, 4. In Pravda, the phrase “real’no sushchestvuiushchii sotsializm” first appeared in September 1967 in a quotation from the KPSS Central Committee’s “Theses on the Fiftieth Anniversary of the October Revolution.” “Moguchee ideinoe oruzhie,” Pravda, September 14, 1967, 1. 16.  SAPMO BArch DY30 85362. 17.  SStAL SED-BL IV/C/2/9/2/685/79. 18.  SStAL SED-BL IV/E/2/9/2/449. 19.  SAPMO BArch DY30 85362. 20.  SStAL SED-BL IV/C/2/9/2/685/111. 21.  Quoted in SStAL SED-BL IV/C/2/9/2/685/23.

N OT ES TO PA G E S 1 9 1 – 1 9 5     295

2.  SAPMO Barch DY 30 18617. 2 23.  ANK KW PZPR 1359: 1. 24.  The decision was taken on December 10, 1963. ANK 29/1334/229/88. 25.  ANK KW PZPR 1359. For membership statistics from Leipzig’s branch of the GDR Painters’ Union, see SStAL, “Einleitung zum Bestand 21760: Bezirksvorstand Leipzig des Verbandes Bildender Künstler der DDR.” 26. Karol Estreicher Jr., Dziennik wypadków (Kraków: Pałac Sztuki Towarszystwa Przyjaciół Sztuk Pięknych w Krakowie, 2006), 5: 589. 27.  AAN 1354/LVI/581. 28.  Czarna księga cenzury PRL (London: Aneks, 1977), 1: 54. 29.  “Nur Schnee: Bürgergruppen sorgen für West-Fernsehen im Dresdner Umland—mit Unterstützung der SED,” Der Spiegel, November 4, 1985, 97–98. 30.  “Aus dem Bericht des Politbüros an die 9. Tagung des ZK,” Neues Deutschland, May 29, 1973, 3. 31.  SStAL SED-BL IV/B/2/9/2/612. 32.  SAL StVuR (1) 26953. 33.  SAPMO BArch DY 30 85423. 34. Peter Czerny and Heinz Hofmann, “Wo die Tanzmusik mißbraucht wird,” Neues Deutschland, October 30, 1968, 5. 35.  SStAL RdB 8019; SAPMO BArch DY 34 12015. 36.  SAPMO BArch DY 30 85359. 37.  See, e.g., SStAL SED-SL IV/D/5/1/232. 38. Ibid. 39.  SAPMO BArch DY 30 85362. 40.  Andrzej Kozieł, Za chwilę dalszy ciąg programu . . . Telewizja Polska czterech dekad 1952–1989 (Warsaw: ASPRA-JR, 2003), 170. 41. Katarzyna Pokorna-Ignatowicz, Telewizja w systemie politycznym i medialnym PRL. Między polityką a widzem (Kraków: Wydawnicto Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2003), 117. 42.  ANK KW PZPR 1325: 451. 43.  “Zakonczyly sie Juwenalia,” Dziennik Polski, May 16, 1977, 1. 44.  ANK KW PZPR 1334. 45.  ANK KW PZPR 1353. 46.  ANK KW PZPR 421. 47.  Annette Schuhmann, Kulturarbeit im sozialistischen Betrieb: Gewerkschaftliche Erziehungspraxis in der SBZ-DDR 1946 bis 1970 (Köln: Böhlau, 2006), 108. 48. Renft, Zwischen Liebe und Zorn, 66, 93. 49.  E. Grigoriev, B. Dubrovin, and V. Zhuravskii, “Praga: Budni, kontrasty,” Pravda, September  6, 1968, 4. See also Kieran Williams, The Prague Spring and Its Aftermath: Czechoslovak Politics, 1968–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 40. 50.  On “normalization” in Czechoslovakia, see Paulina Bren, The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010). 51.  Quoted in Bolton, Worlds of Dissent, 73. 52.  Antonin Liehm, “The Intellectuals and the New Social Contract,” Telos 23 (Spring 1975): 156–64.

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3.  AAN 1354/LVI/145. 5 54. Kopstein, Politics of Economic Decline, 80–84. 55.  Rocznik statystyczny 1980. See also Hunter and Ryan, From Autarky to Market, 30–34. 56. Porter-Szücs, Poland in the Modern World, 280. Cf. Fulbrook, Anatomy of a Dictatorship, 141; and Kopstein, Politics of Economic Decline, 83. 57 Jens Gieseke, The History of the Stasi: East Germany’s Secret Police, 1945–1990 (New York: Berghahn, 2014), 49. 58.  “DDR-Opposition. Die alte Angst ist wieder da,” Stern 50 (1976): 17–19. 59.  ANK KW PZPR 966. 60.  IPN Kr 08/324/CD/1/21. 61.  Stephen Kotkin, with a contribution by Jan T. Gross, Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment (New York: Modern Library, 2009), 29. 62.  SStAL SED-BL IV/B/2/9/2/612. 63.  AAN 1354/LVI/145. 64.  SStAL SED-BL 1100. 65.  Ernest Bryll, Rzecz listopadowa. Kurdesz (Warsaw: Instytut Wydawniczy Pax, 1969), 149, 164, 190–91. 66.  ANK KW PZPR 293. 67. Ibid. 68.  Tadeusz Czubala, in Gazeta Krakowska, September 23, 1969. 69.  “Janusz,” reporting on October 13, 1969, IPN Kr 008/274/1. 70.  IPN Kr 008/274/178. 71.  Ibid., 180. 72.  ANK KW PZPR 1363: 403. 73.  Jan Paweł Gawlik, “Kilka uwag i wspomnień,” in Domański, Taki nam się snuje dramat, 140. 74. Jan Paweł Gawlik, “Słowo o Starym Teatrze,” in Stary Teatr Kraków 1970–1975, ed. Barbara Jasińska and Leszek Kachel (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1981), 9. 75. Ibid. 76. Swinarski, in the program for Forefathers’ Eve, http://www.cyfrowe muzeum.stary.pl/przedstawienie/310/dziady (accessed February 25, 2022). 77.  For a full description of the performance, see Joanna Walaszek, Konrad Swinarski i jego krakowskie inscenizacje (Warsaw: Państwowy Institut Wydawniczy, 1991), 189–212. 78. Józef Opalski, quoted in Emil Orzechowski, Stary Teatr w Krakowie (1945–1985) (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1987), 51. 79.  Attendance statistics can be found in Katarzyna Gliwa, ed., Krytycy o Swinarskim: Wybór recenzji ze spektakli Konrada Swinarskiego (Katowice: Muzeum Historii Katowic, 2001). 80.  Gawlik, “Kilka uwag i wspomnień,” 141. 81.  IPN Kr 008/274/1/292. On the relationship between Wajda and the promoter, Sir Peter Daubeny, see Maciej Karpinski, The Theatre of Andrzej Wajda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 82.  “Janusz,” IPN Kr 008/274/1/367–70.

N OT ES TO PA G E S 2 0 1 – 2 0 8     297

  83.  Gawlik submitted his resignation in May 1973. IPN Kr 008/274/1/310–12.   84.  “Janusz,” IPN Kr 008/274/1/367–70.   85.  ANK KW PZPR 1361: 309.   86.  ANK KW PZPR 1329: 395–445.   87.  The music critic Leszek Polony. ANK KW PZPR 1330: 114.   88.  ANK KW PZPR 1330: 22–25.   89.  ANK KW PZPR 1330: 101–6.   90.  ANK KK PZPR 838.   91.  Komitet Krakowski PZPR, “Stan ideowy środowisk twórczych i warunki uczestnictwa w kulturze w krakowskim województwie miejskim (Materiały na Plenum KK PZPR)” (Kraków: PZPR, 1979), 35.   92.  ANK KW PZPR 155: 44–5.   93.  IPN Kr 008/274/1/370.   94.  Komitet Krakowski PZPR, “Stan ideowy,” 35.   95.  ANK KK PZPR 522.   96.  ANK KW PZPR 1334: 565; IPN Kr 08/327/DVD/1/51.     97.  ANK KK PZPR 819.   98. Höpel, “Die Kunst dem Volke.”        99.  SStAL SED-Bezirksleitung IV/C/2/9/2/690/14. For more on the GDR Writers’ Union in this era, see Thomas Goldstein, Writing in Red: The East German Writers Union and the Role of Literary Intellectuals (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2017). 100.  BStU, MfS, KDfS Leipzig, 1179. 101.  BStU, MfS, BV Leipzig, KD Leipzig-Stadt 04127. 102.  SStAL SED-BL IV/A/2/9/2/360. 103.  SStAL SED-BL IV/A/2/9/2/361/19. 104.  SAPMO BArch DY30/85400. 105.  See Emmerich, Kleine Literaturgeschichte der DDR, 230. Translation by Eric Bentley, in “In Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse,” Partisan Review 33.1 (winter 1966): 106–7. 106. Schubbe, Dokumente, 1078. 107.  BStU, MfS, BV Leipzig, Abteilung II, Nr. 00470/02: 31. 108.  BStU, MfS, BV Leipzig, Leitung, Nr. 00783: 97 109.  SStAL SED-BL IV/D/2/8/2/497/8. 110.  SStAL SED-BL IV/D/2/8/2/497/23–4. 111.  SStAL SED-BL IV/D/2/8/2/497/8. 112.  Václav Benda, “The Parallel ‘Polis,’ ” in Civic Freedom in Central Europe: Voices from Czechoslovakia, ed. H. Gordon Skilling and Paul Wilson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 35–41. 113.  See the text of the Letter of 59 in The Polish Review 51.1 (2006): 95–97. 114. Ryszard Terlecki, “Opozycja demokratyczna w Krakowie w latach 1976–1980,” in Solidarność: kruszenie muru, ed. Gąsowski (Kraków : Fundacja Centrum Dokumentacji Czynu Niepodległościowego, 2000), 81–83. 115.  Quoted in Chwalba, Dzieje Krakowa 6, 381. 116.  For more on Poland’s student politics and organizations, see Tom Junes, Student Politics in Communist Poland: Generations of Consent and Dissent (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015).

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117.  On the technology of Polish underground publications, see Siobhan Doucette, Books Are Weapons: The Polish Opposition Press and the Overthrow of Communism (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), 40–45. 118. Wojciech Wiśniewski, “Niezależny ruch wydawniczy w Krakowie, 1977–1980,” in Gąsowski, Solidarność, 159–65. 119.  Quoted in Henryk Glębocki, Studencki Komitet Solidarności w Krakowie, 1977–1980: Zarys działalności (Kraków: NZS, 1994), 104. 120.  Terlecki, “Opozycja.” 121.  For more on this practice, see Doucette, Books Are Weapons, 39–42. 122.  Jan Kubik, The Power of Symbols against the Symbols of Power: The Rise of Solidarity and the Fall of State Socialism in Poland (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994). 123. Walther, Sicherungsbereich Literatur, 182–90. 124.  BStU, MfS, BV Leipzig, Leitung, Nr. 02670: 11–23. 125.  BStU, MfS, BV Leipzig, Abteilung II, Nr. 00585/16: 14. 126.  BStU, MfS, BV Leipzig, AKG, Nr. 00547: 42. 127.  BStU, MfS, BV Leipzig, AKG, Nr. 00244: 135–43. 128.  In 1977 almost a third of the students in Leipzig’s art academies belonged to the party, compared with barely 3 percent in Kraków. SStAL SED-BL IV/D/2/8/2/493; ANK KK PZPR 838. 129.  BStU, MfS, BV Leipzig, AKG, Nr. 00245/02: 186. 130.  BStU, MfS, BV Leipzig, Leitung, Nr. 02670: 6. 131.  Erich Loest, Es geht seinen Gang, oder, Mühen in unserer Ebene (Munich: Deutcher Taschenbuch, 1978), 23. 132. Deutschlandfunk, Harte Gangart: Aufstieg und Fall des Romans “Es geht seinen Gang, oder, Mühen in unserer Ebene” von Erich Loest. Ein Stück DDR-­ Literaturpolitik (Köln: Deutschlandfunk, 1983). 133.  BStU, MfS, BV Leipzig, AKG, Nr. 00244: 135–43. 134.  Benda, “Parallel ‘Polis,’ ” 40, 36. 135.  Between 1978 and 1980 Mattheuer made 17,500 marks from foreign sales. SAPMO BArch DY-30 18842. 136.  SStAL SED-BL 10. 137. Miłosz, Captive Mind, 16. 138.  Ibid., 20. 139.  Ibid., ix, 197. 140.  On the notion of human rights as the last utopia, see Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 141.  SAPMO BArch DY-30 18842. 142.  Quoted in Glębocki, Studencki, 200. Chapter 8.  Protest: Spaces of Opposition, Spaces of Dialogue

    1.  Quoted in Diana Poskuta-Włodek, Co dzień powtarza sie gra . . . Teatr im. Juliusza Słowackiego w Krakowie, 1893–1993 (Kraków: ARTA, 1993), 223.     2.  Steffen Lieberwirth, “Wer eynen Spielmann zu Tode schlägt . . .” Ein mittelalterliches Zeitdokument anno 1989 (Leipzig: Peters, 1990), 191, 200.

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  3.  On folk music in the GDR, see Wolfgang Leyn, Volkes Lied und Vater Staat: Die DDR-Folkszene 1976–1990 (Berlin: Ch. Links, 2016).   4.  BStU, MfS, KDfS Leipzig-Stadt, Nr. 01374: 27.   5.  Padraic Kenney, A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).   6. Kotkin, Uncivil Society.   7. “Konstruktives, freimütiges Gespräch beim Vorsitzenden des Staatrates,” Neues Deutschland, March 7, 1978, 1.   8. Fulbrook, Anatomy of a Dictatorship, 109–18.   9.  BStU, MfS, BV Leipzig, AIM Nr. 1091/91 II/1: 36. 10.  SStAL SED-BL IV/D/2/8/2/494/78. 11.  On punk rock in Leipzig, see Connie Mareth and Ray Schneider, Haare auf Krawall: Jugendsubkultur in Leipzig 1980 bis 1991 (Leipzig: Connewitzer Verlagsbuchhandlung, 2010). 12.  Leonard Schmieding, “Das ist unsere Party”: HipHop in der DDR (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2014), 123. 13.  BStU, MfS, BV Leipzig, KDfS Leipzig-Stadt, Nr. 00441: 70. 14.  SStAL SED-BL IV/E/2/9/2/448/169–84. Emphasis in the original. 15.  SStAL SED-BL 1100; SAL RdB 21846: 53. 16.  Paulina Bren found similar phenomena in Czechoslovakia. Bren, The Greengrocer and His TV, 7. 17.  BStU, MfS, KDfS Leipzig-Stadt, Nr. 01374: 29. 18.  BStU, MfS, KDfS Leipzig-Stadt, Nr. 00944: 14–19. 19.  Quoted in Grundmann, Michael, and Seufert, Revolution im geschlossenen Raum, 66. See also SAPMO BArch DY30 18617. 20.  Karim Saab, quoted in Grundmann, Michael, and Seufert, Revolution im geschlossenen Raum, 67. 21.  BStU, MfS, BV Leipzig, AKG, Nr. 03372: 1–7. 22.  Günter Gaus, Wo Deutschland liegt: eine Ortsbestimmung (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch, 1986), 126. Translation by Jeremiah Riemer, https://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/docpage.cfm?docpage_id=44 (accessed April 1, 2022). 23.  See, e.g., Paul Betts, Within Walls: Private Life in the German Democratic Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 9–12. 24.  See the text of the Gdańsk Agreement in Stan Persky and Henry Flam, eds., The Solidarity Sourcebook (Vancouver: New Star Books, 1982), 93–100. 25.  Terlecki, “Opozycja,” 81–83. 26.  See Andrzej Krajewski, Między współpracą a oporem: Twórcy kultury wobec systemu politycznego PRL (1975–1980) (Warsaw: TRIO, 2004). 27. Peter Osnos, “Polish Crowds Bid Farewell to Pope,” Washington Post, June 11, 1979. On officials’ reactions, see Chwalba, Dzieje Krakowa 6, 374. 28.  Quoted in Chwalba, Dzieje Krakowa 6, 392. 29.  See Marian Mazgaj, Church and State in Communist Poland: A  History, 1944–1989 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010), 77–79. 30.  Ewa Zając, “Pierwsze miesiące małopolskiej Solidarności,” in Gąsowski, Solidarność, 183. 31.  Andrzej Paczkowski, Revolution and Counterrevolution in Poland, 1980– 1989: Solidarity, Martial Law, and the End of Communism in Europe (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2015), 7.

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2.  ANK KK PZPR 803: 83. 3 33.  ANK KK PZPR 819: 170–74. 34.  ANK KK PZPR 600: 19–24. 35. Doucette, Books Are Weapons, 93. 36.  See Wojciech Frazik, ed., Wydawnictwa podziemne w powojennym Krakowie (Kraków: Secesja, 1993). 37.  Krystyna Skuszanka, “Wspomnienia może zbyt osobiste,” Dwadzieścia kroków wszerz i wzdłuż. Wspomnienia w 100-lecie Teatru im. Juliusza Słowackiego, ed. Krystyna Zbijewska (Kraków: Fundacja “Bractwo Sympatyków Wielkiego Budynku Przy Placu Św. Ducha w Krakowie,” 1993), 256–69. 38.  Barbara Natkaniec, “Ponury ‘spektakl’ w Teatrze im. J. Slowackiego,” Echo Krakowa, April 23, 1981. 39.  ANK KK PZPR 803: 21. 40.  Ibid., 31–32. 41.  ANK KK PZPR 528: 39. 42.  Kongres Kultury Polskiej (Publisher unknown, 1981), 2. 43.  Ibid., 98. 44.  ANK KK PZPR 629. 45.  Kongres Kultury Polskiej, 98. 46. Chwalba, Dzieje Krakowa 6, 430. See also IPN Kr 08/324/CD/1/92. 47.  ANK KK PZPR 808: 47–53. 48.  ANK KK PZPR 803: 85; ANK KK PZPR 733: 22. 49.  ANK KK PZPR 535: 77. 50.  ANK KK PZPR 818. 51.  Jan Józef Szczepański, Kadencja (Paris: Libella, 1988), 220, 227–28. 52.  Wojciech Frazik, “Niezależny ruch wydawniczy w Krakowie po 13.12.81,” in Frazik, Wydawnictwa, 34. 53.  Paweł Wierzbicki, “ ‘Tygodnik Mazowsze’—cudowne dziecko drugiego obiegu,” Dzieje najnowsze 44.4 (2012): 64. 54. Zając, “Pierwsze miesiące.” 55. Bronisław Maj, “Pismo mówione ‘Na Głos’ (1983–1989),” in Frazik, Wydawnictwa, 50. 56.  Frazik, “Niezależny ruch,” 42. 57.  See, e.g., Echo Krakowa, May 4, 1982, 5. 58. Chwalba, Dzieje Krakowa 6, 401. 59.  ANK KK PZPR 850. 60.  ANK KK PZPR 808: 141. For more on Solidarity’s musical cultures, see Andrea Bohlman, Musical Solidarities: Political Action and Music in Late TwentiethCentury Poland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). 61.  ANK KK PZPR 808: 153–59. 62.  Cited in ibid., 157. 63. Szczepański, Kadencja, 228. 64.  BStU, MfS, BV Leipzig, Abt. II, Nr. 00116/06: 2–6. 65.  Dieter Kalka, http://www.logopaedie-connewitz.de/kalka/meuselwitz/ meuselwitz-vaterland.htm (accessed April 1, 2022). See also Dieter Kalka, ed., Leipziger Liederszene: Der 1980er Jahre (Leipzig: Lœwenzahn, 2019).

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66. Cited by Dieter Kalka, http://www.logopaedie-connewitz.de/kalka/ lied/fliegenfalle2.htm (accessed May 20, 2020). 67.  BStU, MfS, HA XX, ZMA, Nr. 21452, 1–3. 68. Cited by Dieter Kalka, http://www.leipziger-liederszene.de/leipziger_ liederszene_dieter_kalka.html (accessed May 20, 2020). 69. Cited by Dieter Kalka, http://www.logopaedie-connewitz.de/kalka/ lied/fliegenfalle1.htm (accessed May 20, 2020). 70.  Adolf Endler, in Grundmann, Michael, and Seufert, Revolution im geschlossenen Raum, 121. 71.  Ibid., 124. 72.  Karim Saab, in ibid., 74–86. 73.  BStU, MfS, BV Leipzig, AIM Nr. 1091/91 II/3: 44. 74.  Schumann, in Grundmann, Michael, and Seufert, Revolution im geschlossenen Raum, 88. 75.  On church-sponsored publications in Leipzig, see David Doellinger, Turning Prayers into Protests: Religious Activism and Its Challenge to State Power in Socialist Slovakia and East Germany (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2013), 92–95. 76.  Grundmann, Michael, and Seufert, Revolution im geschlossenen Raum, 130. 77.  Jacques Poumet, “Die Leipziger Undergrundzeitschriften aus der Sicht der Staatssicherheit,” Deutschland Archiv 29.1 (January/February 1996): 69. 78.  Ibid., 80–81. 79.  BStU, MfS, BV Leipzig, AIM Nr. 1091/91 II/3: 27. 80.  Poumet, “Die Leipziger,” 69. 81.  Grudmann, Michael, and Seufert, Revolution im geschlossenen Raum, 132. 82. Szczepański, Kadencja, 227. 83.  Adam Zagajewski, Solidarity, Solitude: Essays by Adam Zagajewski, trans. Lillian Vallee (New York: Ecco Press, 1990), 93–94. 84.  ANK KK PZPR 804: 143. 85.  ANK KK PZPR 803: 137–41. 86.  ANK KK PZPR 831: 183. 87.  ANK KK PZPR 801: 119–20. 88.  IPN Kr 08/324/CD/1/61. 89.  Quoted in Kozieł, Za chwilę dalszy ciąg programu, 254. 90.  ANK KK PZPR 830: 23–31. 91.  ANK KK PZPR 850. 92.  Andrzej Szewczuwaniec, quoted in Kenney, Carnival, 218. 93. Zagajewski, Solidarity, Solitude, 68, 56–57, 71. 94. Doucette, Books Are Weapons, 198. 95.  Artur Janicki, “Beczka radości i kilka łyżek dziegciu,” in Wybory ’89 w Krakowie, ed. Tomasz Gąsowski (Kraków: Księgarnia Akademicka, 1999), 30–40. 96. Grażyna Makiełło-Jarża, “Solidarność dom twój smieni . . ., ” in Gąsowski, Wybory ’89. 97.  Jacek Stefański, “Wyborcze wspominki,” in Gąsowski, Wybory ’89, 80. 98. Lieberwirth, Spielmann, 82. See also Archiv Bürgerbewegung Leipzig, doku 001.021.010, doku 001.021.015, and doku 001.021.021.

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  99.  Umweltblätter, July 1989, reproduced in Lieberwirth, Spielmann, 157–58. 100.  See Kenney, Carnival. 101.  Neues Deutschland, April 10, 1987, 3. 102.  Mareth and Schneider, Haare auf Krawall, 199. 103.  Gareth Dale, The East German Revolution of 1989 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 6–7. 104. Liebertwirth, Spielmann, 190. 105.  Ibid., 188, 194. 106.  Neues Forum Leipzig, Jetzt oder nie, 284. 107. Liebertwirth, Spielmann, 206. 108.  Ibid., 203. 109.  Bernd-Lutz Lange, Dämmerschoppen: Geschichten von drinnen und draußen (Berlin: Aufbau, 2012), 59. 110. Ibid. 111.  Neues Forum Leipzig, Jetzt oder nie, 279. 112.  Ibid., 284. 113.  Andrew Demshuk, Bowling for Communism: Urban Ingenuity at the End of East Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020). 114. Dale, East German Revolution of 1989, 7. 115.  Mielke’s order of October  5, quoted in Armin Mitter and Stefan Wolle, Ich liebe euch doch alle! Befehle und Lageberichte des MfS Januar–November 1989 (Berlin: Basis, 1990), 199. The deployment figures come from Mary Elise Sarotte, The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 53. 116.  Neues Forum Leipzig, Jetzt oder nie, 274. 117.  Ekkehard Kuhn, Der Tag der Entscheidung: Leipzig, 9. Oktober 1989 (Berlin: Ullstein, 1992), 116. 118.  Ibid., 113. 119.  Ibid., 116. 120.  Neues Forum Leipzig, Jetzt oder nie, 285. 121. Lange, Dämmerschoppen, 63. 122.  See the text in Neues Forum Leipzig, Jetzt oder nie, 82–83. 123. Kuhn, Tag der Entscheidung, 142. 124. Sarotte, Collapse, 71. 125. Kuhn, Tag der Entscheidung, 134–35. 126.  Ibid., 106. 127.  Engel and Stephan, Theater in der Übergangsgesellschaft, 152. 128.  Thomas Ahbe, Michael Hofmann, and Volker Stiehler, eds., Redefreiheit: Öffentliche Debatten der Leipziger Bevölkerung im Oktober und November 1989. Problemwahrnehmungen und Lösungsvorstellungen aus der Mitte der Gesellschaft (Leipzig: Lepziger Universitätsverlag, 2014), 620. 129.  Ibid., 91. 130.  Ibid., 344. 131.  Ibid., 632. 132. Stadt Leipzig, Leipzig-Krakau. Zwei Städte—Eine Geschichte (Leipzig: Stadt Leipzig, 2020), 74.

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133.  “W drzwiach ośrodka NRD stanął mur . . ., ” Dziennik Polski, October 6, 1989, 7. 134.  Stadt Leipzig, Leipzig-Krakau, 75. 135.  Klaudia Naceur and Volly Tanner, “ ‘Wir erlebten eine riesige Überraschung,’” in Grünau: Das aktuelle Stadtteilmagazin für Leipzig-Grünau und Umland, 23.10 (2019): 5. Epilogue

    1. Zagajewski, Solidarity, Solitude, 37.     2.  Speech given at the University of Hildesheim, January 31, 1990. Christa Wolf, The Author’s Dimension: Selected Essays, trans. Jan van Heurck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 326–27.     3. Zagajewski, Solidarity, Solitude, 37–48.     4. Wolf, Author’s Dimension, 326–27.     5. “Pastor mit Bücherschatz,” Hessische Niedersächsiche Allgemeine, http:// www.buecherburg.de/medienberichte/hessischniedersaechsischeallgemeine/ hnavom05071976.html (accessed April 1, 2022).     6.  ANK ZLP 1491/165.     7.  Hans-Werner Schmidt, ed., Das Buch zum Museum (Leipzig: Museum der bildenden Künste, 2004), 46–56.     8.  Uta Starke, “Young People: Lifestyles, Expectations and Value Orientations since the Wende,” in Between Hope and Fear: Everyday Life in Post-Unification East Germany. A Case Study of Leipzig, ed. Eva Kolinsky (Keele: Keele University Press, 1995), 160.     9.  Engel and Stephan, Theater in der Übergangsgesellschaft, 160, 204.   10.  Claudius Böhm, Neue Chronik des Gewandhausorchesters, vol. 2, 1893– 2018 (Altenburg: Kamprad, 2019), 350.   11.  Krzysztof Gluchowski, “To miasto co jakiś czas rodzi Kantora,” Gazeta Wyborcza—Kraków, February 3, 2007.   12.  Ryszard Kozik and Tomasz Handzlik, “Czego potrzeba krakowskiej kulturze?” Gazeta Wyborcza—Kraków, February 22, 2007.   13.  Engel and Stephan, Theater in der Übergangsgesellschaft, 168.   14.  Frauke Gränitz, Daten und Fakten zur Leipziger Stadtgeschichte (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2013), 337.   15. Joanna Szulborska-Łukaszewicz, Polityka kulturalna w Krakowie (Kraków: Attyka, 2009), 168–69.   16.  Ibid., 238.   17. Lindner, Verstellter, offener Blick, 258.   18.  Ibid., 297.   19. Andrzej Werner, “Kultura po przecenie,” Gazeta Wyborcza, December 30, 1993.   20.  Kinga Pozniak, Nowa Huta: Generations of Change in a Model Socialist Town (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014), 133.   21. Szulborska-Łukaszewicz, Polityka kulturalna, 176.   22.  Yvonne Fiedler, Kunst im Korridor: Private Galerien in der DDR zwischen Autonomie und Illegalität (Berlin: Links, 2013), 291.

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23.  “Im Gespräch mit der ersten Kunstszene der BRD: Arno Rink,” https:// cafedeutschland.staedelmuseum.de/gespraeche/arno-rink (accessed June  18, 2021). 24.  Arthur Lubow, “The New Leipzig School.” The New York Times, January 8, 2006, F38. 25.  Wisława Szymborska, “Na powitanie budowy socjalistycznego miasta,” in Dlatego żyjemy (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1952). 26. Szymborska, Poems New and Collected, 1957–1997, 3. 27.  Ibid., 125. 28.  Magdalena Kursa, “Czy Kraków jest inny?” Gazeta Wyborcza—Kraków, February 17, 2014. 29. “Anna Dymna przed Hansem Klossem,” Dziennik Polski, August  31, 1984, 1. 30.  Skadi Jennicke, “Theater als soziale Praxis: Ostdeutsches Theater nach dem Systemumbruch,” PhD dissertation, Martin-Luther-Universität, 2009, 101. 31.  Paul Cooke, “Ostalgie’s Not What It Used to Be: The German Television GDR Craze of 2003,” German Politics and Society 22.4 (Winter 2004). 32. N’Ostalgie Museum Leipzig, home page, https://www.nostalgiemu seum-leipzig.de/index.php/de/ (accessed June 18, 2021). 33. Leipzig Museum of Fine Arts, online archive, “DDR auf Wänden,” https://mdbk.de/ausstellungen/ddr-auf-waenden/ (accessed June 18, 2021). 34.  Renata Radlowska, “Nowe życie Nowej Huty,” Gazeta Wyborcza—Kraków, May 4, 2006. 35. Lebow, Unfinished Utopia. 36.  Stephen Kinzer, “A  Wall of Resentment Now Divides Germany,” New York Times, October 14, 1994, A1. 37.  Daphne Berdahl, “ ‘(N)Ostalgie’ for the Present: Memory, Longing, and East German Things,” Ethnos 64.2 (1999): 198. 38. Teresa Torańska, ‘Them’: Stalin’s Polish Puppets (New York: Perennial, 1988). 39.  ANK KK PZPR 607: 139–43. 40. Mandy Ehnert, “Der Diktator im Zirkus—ein Spektakel in vier Sprachen.” Universitätszeitung, February 13, 1987, 6. 41.  Leipzig-Krakau, 12. 42.  KTO Theatre: Peregrinus, http://www.krakow.travel/en/12499-krakowkto-theatre-peregrinus (accessed June 18, 2020). 43.  Łukasz Grzesiczak and Małgorzata Skowrońska, “Taki ma być Stary Teatr w koncepcji Marka Mikosa,” Gazeta Wyborcza—Kraków, May 13, 2017. 44. Stary Teatr, “Oświadczenie zespołu Narodowego Starego Teatru im. Heleny Modrzejewskiej w Krakowie z dnia 12 maja 2017,” https://stary.pl/pl/ oswiadczenie-zespolu-narodowego-starego-teatru-im-heleny-modrzejewskiejkrakowie-12-maja-2017/ (accessed June 18, 2021). 45.  VAN Magazine, “Death and the Theater: Polish Artists Resist the Government,” https://van-magazine.com/mag/death-and-the-theater/ (accessed June 18, 2021).

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46. Stanisław Wyspiański, The Wedding, trans. Gerard T. Kapolka (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1990), 107. 47.  Aleksandra Pawlicka, “Dzieło stało się działem,” Newsweek Polska, November 12, 2017, 6. 48. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 25. 49.  Pawlicka, “Dzieło stało się działem,” 6. 50. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 25.

B i b l i og raphy

Archives

Archiv Bürgerbewegung Leipzig Archiwum Akt Nowych, Warsaw (AAN) Archiwum Narodowe w Krakowie, Kraków (ANK) Bundesarchiv, Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR (SAPMO BArch), Berlin Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen DDR (BStU) Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Leipzig Instytut Pamięci Narodowej (IPN), Kraków Sächsisches Staatsarchiv, Außenstelle Leipzig (SStAL) Stadtarchiv Leipzig (SAL) Periodicals

Berliner Zeitung Börsenblatt für den deutschen Buchhandel Budujemy Socjalizm Dialog Dookoła Świata Dziennik Polski Dziennik urzędowy Prezydium Miejskiej Rady Narodowej w Krakowie Dziennik Ustaw Echo Krakowa/Echo Krakowskie Einheit Gazeta Krakowska/Gazeta Południowa Gazeta Wyborcza Głos Nowej Huty Grünau The Guardian Kraków Kultura Kultura i Społeczeństwo Leipziger Volkszeitung Neue Deutsche Literatur Neues Deutschland The New York Review of Books

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The New York Times Newsweek Polska Nowe Drogi Pravda Przegłąd Kulturalny Rocznik Statystyczny Sonntag Der Spiegel Statistisches Jahresbericht der Stadt Leipzig/Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Leipzig/Statistisches Jahrbuch der Reichsmessestadt Leipzig Stern Theater der Zeit Trybuna Ludu Universitätszeitung The Washington Post Życie Literackie Życie Warszawy

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I n de x

Actually Existing Socialism, 14 – 15, 185, 189 – 90, 192, 194, 294n15 Adamski, Jan, 47 anticommunism, 6, 13, 17, 163, 189, 209, 256, 258, 267n44 antisemitism. See Judaism and antisemitism Ark, 227 “Around Graphics,” 227, 235 Arrival in the Everyday (Reimann), 164 – 65 art, commissioned, 42, 60, 115 – 16 art, modernist, 62, 73, 110, 152 – 53 art and artists (GDR) amateur art encouraged, 118 artists and uprisings, 77, 79, 88 – 89 censorship of, 146 cultural exchange and, 93 cultural spending and, 204, 213 dissidents and, 232 Eigen+Art, 232, 254 employment of, 135 – 36 politics and, 58, 115 post-unification, 253 protests and protest letters, 187, 205, 213 SED and, 79, 115 – 16, 190 small exhibition spaces, 218 – 19 study trip to Poland, 113 – 14 Third German Art Show, 61f art and artists (Poland) after Polish October, 161 amateur groups and, 62 applied art and literature, 62 – 63, 133 autonomy of, 110 – 11 funding for the arts, 132 – 33, 202 – 3, 213 Kraków Group, 111 – 12 Polish posters, 133 – 35 protests and protest letters, 187, 213, 225 – 26 response to reform, 83

Solidarity and, 222 transformation of, 255 – 56 See also National Communism arts, centralization of, 65 – 66, 79, 85 Ashton, Dore, 111 Attack (journal), 232 – 34, 238 Barbusse, Henri, 23 Barthels, Kurt, 117 Basic Treaty (1972), 197 Becher, Johannes R., 79 Beginning of the Story, The (Brandys), 64 Benda, Václav, 187, 206 – 7, 211 Bentzien, Hans, 136, 143 Berlin Daily, 129 Biermann, Wolf, 187, 204 – 6, 209 – 10, 231 Bierut, Bolesław, 63, 82, 84 Big Beat (Passendorfer), 157 – 58 “Bikiniarz,” 66 Bitterfeld Way, 117 – 19, 122, 124, 164 – 65, 167, 175 Black Book of Polish Censorship, The, 146 – 47 Blaum, Verena, 88 Blok, Alexander, 152 Bober, Jerzy, 162 Bolton, Jonathan, 188 Boniecki, Adam, 256 Bradley, Laura, 146 Brandt, Willy, 196 Brandys, Kazimierz, 153 Brandys, Marian, 64 Braun, Volker, 125 Bräunig, Werner, 165 – 68, 179 Brecht, Bertolt, 99, 199, 230 Brezhnev, Leonid, 184 – 85, 188 Broszkiewicz, Jerzy, 159 – 60, 183 – 84, 202, 223 Brother of Our God, The (Wojtyła), 223 Bryll, Ernest, 198 Butlers, The, 175 – 78, 184 327

328    I N D E X

Cabaret (Fosse), 134 Captive Mind, The (Miłosz), 6, 67, 69, 82, 223 Catholic Intelligentsia Club, 227, 229 – 30 Catholicism and Catholic Church, 37 – 38, 61 – 62, 81, 100, 132, 208, 213, 221 – 22, 227 – 28, 228f censorship, 6 – 7, 16, 38, 58, 145, 151 – 52, 223 censorship (GDR), 3, 145 – 46, 152 censorship (Poland), 146 – 47, 152, 162, 196 Letter of 34, 163 Center for the Study of Public Opinion (OBOP), 105 – 6, 113, 122, 127 Central Institute for Youth Research (Leipzig), 13, 122, 193, 218, 253 Central Trade Union Commission (Poland), 44 Cepelia, 132 – 33 Charter 77, 187 – 88, 206 Chopin’s Polonaise in A-Major in the Forge of the Kościuszko Steel Mill (Serwin-Oracki), 40 – 42 cinema, 138 – 39, 147 – 51 cinemas (Kraków) profitability of, 131 public education and, 38 trade union tickets, 32 cinemas (Leipzig) Battle of Stalingrad, The (poster), 35f censorship and, 147 – 51 former Nazi control, 27 government control, 35 profitability of, 127, 136 “The City: Leipzig Images,” 240, 244 clubrooms, 25, 67, 69 – 70, 252, 262. See also Nowa Huta Commission on Culture (Kraków), 19 Commission on Writers (Leipzig), 30 Committee for Entertainment Art, 193 Communiqué (underground journal), 207 Communist Party of Germany (KPD), 20, 23 Congress of Polish Culture, 224 – 25 cultural mass work abandonment of, 131, 159, 194 alternative use of, 175 amateur music societies and, 49 – 50 communist message and, 41 – 42, 46 factory funds for worker tickets, 47 – 48 field trips and workers, 62 implementation problems, 64 – 65

obsolete, 159 official propaganda and, 81 pioneer choir, 48f popularity of, 66 Stalinism and, 54, 100, 170 success of, 67 – 68 cultural matrix administrators and, 16 artists’ role, 9 – 11, 101, 214 audiences and, 8, 13 communism and, 7, 12, 39, 256, 263 cultured consumerism, 154 government attention, 7 – 8 gray zone, 10 – 11 public sphere, 18, 71 Stalinism and, 101 transformation of art, 70 See also Actually Existing Socialism; National Communism; Stalinism cultural matrix (GDR) administrators and, 14, 67 censorship and, 145 communism and, 251 dissidents and, 216 – 17, 220, 242 government channels, 209 – 11 government control of, 218 – 19 obsolescence of, 194 social peace and, 192 stability of, 230 state sponsored underground, 250 working within the state, 244 cultural matrix (Poland) alternative matrix, 209, 229, 247 audiences and, 11 Church commissions and, 132 communism and, 252, 254 independent culture outside, 227 political loyalty and, 234 rock and roll in, 173, 176, 178 Stalinism and, 100 cultural reconstruction, 20 cultural spaces arts oversight, 34 – 35 definition of, 6 – 7 disappearance of, 250 dissidents and, 256 Eastern Bloc commonality, 4 gathering places, 12 GDR Culture and Information Center, 246f political role of, 3, 262 public opinion polls in, 13 repression in, 217

I N D E X     329 socialist prosperity and, 154 Stalinist model, 17 – 18 transformation of, 255 See also National Communism cultural spaces (GDR) dialogue in, 240, 244 dissidents and, 213 public expression of taste, 184 public opinion polls in, 122 cultural spaces (Poland) factory clubs, 71 future of, 249 galleries, 111 public education and, 38 repression in, 234, 247 social interaction in, 11 underground spaces, 235 – 36 Culture Department (Kraków), 26 – 34, 112, 162, 170, 201, 234. See also Kraków House of Culture Culture Department (Leipzig), 23, 26 – 34, 36, 80, 96, 143, 177 – 78, 215, 219, 224. See also Drobner, Bolesław; House of the Light Muse; Leipzig City Theaters Culture League (GDR), 57, 78, 88, 93 Curia Trial (Kraków), 81, 161 Cyrankiewicz, Józef, 110, 162 Czechoslovak Communist Party, 183 – 84 Czechoslovakia, 10, 23, 127, 129, 162, 184 – 85, 187 – 88, 195. See also Prague Spring Dialog (journal), 161 Divided Heaven (Wolf), 165, 184 Drobner, Bolesław, 19 – 22, 26 – 34, 36 – 39. See also Culture Department (Kraków) Dubček, Alexander, 184 – 85 Dubianski, René, 174 Dunham, Vera, 154 Dymna, Anna, 256, 262 Eastern Bloc censorship and, 38 communism’s rise and collapse, 20, 216 – 17 consumerism, 129 – 30, 140 – 45, 154 – 56 crisis moments, 15 cultural preference polling, 102 – 3 culture and social transformation, 41 culture oriented to East, 35, 37

five- or six-year plans, 42 – 43, 45, 51, 59 – 60, 70 Moscow Center, 15 normalization policy, 188, 195 – 97 oppositional attitudes, 215 – 16 perestroika, 238 public-opinion research on culture, 127 – 28, 285n101 socialist culture, 141 – 43, 197 social pressure, 16 Sovietization, 20, 37, 75, 272n9 See also parallel polis; Warsaw Pact East German Graphic Artists’ Union. See Union of Graphic Artists East Germany. See German Democratic Republic economics of culture applied art (GDR), 135 consumption (GDR), 141 financing and profitability, 136 – 37 government support, 44 – 45, 131, 213 lack of funding, 202 – 4 Polish funding model, 131 – 32 Ehrenburg, Ilya, 79, 88 Eigen+Art gallery (Leipzig), 232 – 33, 238, 254 Electoral Voice (Kraków), 237 Elephant, The (Mrożek), 108 Eley, Geoff, 5 Estreicher, Karol, Jr., 38 – 39, 52, 88, 117, 126, 163, 191 Examination Commission (Leipzig), 30 “Fairground” (Bräunig), 165 – 67, 179 Family Matter, A (Lutowski), 51 – 52, 54, 62 Federal Republic of Germany economic miracle, 75 GDR and, 80, 210 – 11 German unification and, 92 open borders, 70, 76 press response to, 174 Federation of Evangelical Churches, 217 Filipowicz, Kornel, 237 Flying University, 208, 210, 223, 230 Folk Music Workshop (GDR), 215, 217 – 18 Forefathers’ Eve (Mickiewicz), 180 – 82, 198 – 200 Fraser, Nancy, 15 Free German Youth (FDJ), 93, 148 – 49, 165, 175 – 76, 178 – 80, 193, 218 Freyer, Hans, 120 Fröhlich, Paul, 145, 179 Fuchs, Jürgen, 205, 210

330    I N D E X

Fuhrmann, Eberhard, 215 – 17 Fulbrook, Mary, 217 Gallery of Socialist Realism, 41, 64 Gawlik, Jan Paweł, 199 – 202 Gdańsk Accords, 223 – 26, 229 GDR Writers’ Union, 77 – 78, 92, 204 – 5 German Communist Party (KPD), 20, 23 German Democratic Republic (GDR) Berlin Wall, 95, 114, 165, 175 co-opting opposition, 216 – 17, 238 cultural exchange with West Germany, 80 – 81 expulsions and emigration, 45, 75, 95, 187, 205, 210, 215, 238 Five-Year Plan, 43, 46, 49, 57, 93 founding, 34 German road to socialism, 90 – 91 jazz concerts in, 92 June 17th uprising, 72 – 74, 76 – 78, 276n5 national identity, 114 niche society, 217, 220, 233, 238 – 39, 247 Polish reform model, 89 – 90 protests and protest letters, 187, 196, 238, 240 – 45, 250 reunification prospect, 75 – 76, 80, 251 socialist national culture, 93 – 94 Soviet Union and sovereignty, 80 Stalin’s proposal for neutral Germany, 56 transformation of, 256 – 57, 259 – 60 unification and, 258 uprisings in, 185, 239 – 41 See also Federal Republic of Germany; New Course; Socialist Cultural Revolution German Sociological Association, 120 German-Soviet Friendship Society, 151 Getz, Stan, 110 Gewandhaus orchestra and concert hall (Leipzig) city control, 28 financing of, 27 rally and protests, 1, 2f, 245f workers at, 7 See also Leipzig Six Gierek, Edward, 183, 185, 188 – 89, 193 – 97, 200 – 201, 207, 212 – 13, 221, 235 Gombrowicz, Witold, 17 Gomułka, Władysław anti-Soviet sentiment and, 151 – 52 Catholic Church and, 132

civic engagement, 183 Gomułka Blues, 90 market importance, 131 National Communism and, 87 – 88, 163 party power, 222 Polish posters and, 135 Prague Spring critic, 184 – 85 reforms of, 99, 137 reinstated in PZPR, 86 social critiques, 161 – 62 theater references, 160 Ulbricht and, 95 – 97, 142, 184 – 85 Warsaw speech, 100 Górka, Wiktor, 134 Graphic Art (journal), 232 Grieder, Peter, 75 Gross, Jan Tomasz, 20 Grotewohl, Otto, 44, 76 Grotowski, Jerzy, 86 Gumbert, Heather, 175 Guminer, Iakov, 43 Habermas, Jürgen, 4 – 5, 261 – 62 Hackenberg, Helmut, 243 Hager, Kurt, 191, 238 Haley, Bill, 168 – 69, 173 Halka (Moniuszko), 48, 50 Harich, Wolfgang, 90 – 92 Hartig, Rudolf, 20 – 21, 22f, 23, 29 – 39. See also Culture Department (Leipzig) Häussler, Helmut, 150 Havel, Václav, 13, 187, 232 Helsinki Accords, 187 – 88, 201 Herbert, Zbigniew, 108 Hołuj, Tadeusz, 202 Honecker, Erich on Actually Existing Socialism, 185 cultural life and, 179, 194 – 95 on expatriation, 187, 205 – 6 fear of dismissal, 238 new generation of communist leaders, 188, 191 popularity of, 196, 212, 244 revisionism and, 189 on rock and roll, 180 selling art to the West, 211 transformative future, 213 on Western television, 192 “Hope for Nicaragua,” 219, 230, 233 Houghton, Norris, 137 – 38 House of the Light Muse (Leipzig), 119, 125

I N D E X     331 Houses of Culture, 12, 32 – 34, 46 – 49, 64, 143 Hungary, 73, 87, 90 – 91, 98, 238 Husák, Gustáv, 188, 195 Independent Bureau for Public-Opinion Research, 226 Index (student publication), 208 Industrial Landscape (Schwimmer), 59 Information Bulletin (underground journal), 207 Inkarno (K. Brandys), 153 Institute for Public Opinion Research (GDR), 122 Interfactory Strike Committee (Gdańsk), 220 It Goes Its Way (Loest), 211 Jagiellonian University (UJ), 88, 104 – 5, 110, 117, 120, 162 – 63, 170, 182, 191, 207 – 9 Jaruzelski, Wojciech, 225 – 26, 236 Johannes R. Becher Literature Institute, 146, 163, 165, 167, 205, 209, 211, 230 John Paul II (pope), 16, 221 Judaism and antisemitism, 24 – 25, 182, 204, 252 Kalka, Dieter, 230 – 31, 238 Kantor, Tadeusz, 62, 111 – 12, 126, 133 Kayser, Karl, 123 – 26, 128 Kędra, Władysław, 41 – 42 Khrushchev, Nikita, 84 – 85, 87 – 90, 95, 108, 119, 130, 238 Kijówski, Andrzej, 223 – 24 Kipper, Die (Braun), 125 Kipphardt, Heinar, 79 Kirov Machine Works, 67, 80, 91 Kirschner, Harald, 244 – 47 Kitliński, Zdzisław, 145 Klata, Jan, 260, 262 Kołakowski, Leszek, 192 Koloski, Laurie, 62 Konieczny, Marian, 189 Konsument (The Consumer), 129, 154, 186, 211 Kopstein, Jeffrey, 136, 177, 180 Kotlarczyk, Mieczysław, 61 – 62 Kott, Jan, 86 Kraków access to the arts, 31 – 32 amateur music societies, 49 – 50

arts oversight, 34 City Council, 44 denazification, 25 leftist politics, 25 – 26 mass events in, 194 post World War II, 23 – 24, 39 transition to peacetime, 25 See also Main Market Kraków Center for the Study of the Press, 105 Kraków clubs Club of Creative Youth, 108 Palace under the Rams, 107 – 8 Under the Lizards, 110 Kraków Echo, 168 Kraków House of Culture, 32, 34, 46 – 47, 50, 107 – 8 Krakowiacy Song and Dance Ensemble, 62 Kraków Newspaper, 65, 186, 198, 201 Krasowski, Jerzy, 159, 223 Krenz, Egon, 243 Krylova, Anna, 104 Krzysztofory Gallery, 110 – 11, 126 Kuckhoff, Armin, 148 – 49 Kundera, Milan, 6 Kunert, Christian, 210 Kurdesz (Drinking Song) (Bryll), 198 – 201 Kurella, Alfred, 117, 146 Lange, Bernd-Lutz, 240, 242 – 44 Lebow, Katherine, 257 Lehmann-Grube, Hinrich, 258 Leipzig access to the arts, 31 – 32, 34 amateur music societies, 49 – 50 denazification, 25 interwar period, 27 leftist politics, 25 – 26 post World War II, 24, 39 transition to peacetime, 25 Leipzig City Theaters (STL), 52 – 54, 93, 123 – 26, 153 Basement Theater, 126 comedies added to repertoire, 78 – 79 Millionenschmidt, 124 – 25 Polish influence, 126 questionnaires to theatergoers, 125 repertoire and party goals, 124 Soviet plays performed, 80 Western culture at, 138 Leipzig Lathe Works newspaper, 53f Leipzig People’s Paper, 46, 77, 175, 177, 186

332    I N D E X

Leipzig Six, 3 – 4, 242, 247 Lem, Stanisław, 256 Lenin, Vladimir, 63, 189, 190f, 192 Lenin Steel Mill, 50, 189 Song and Dance Ensemble, 64, 66 – 68, 169 House of Culture, 181f, 144f Letter (Zagajewski), 208 Letter of 34, 162 – 63 Letter of 59, 187 – 88, 203, 207 – 8 Liberation (Wyspiański), 200 Liebknecht, Karl, 23, 25 Literary Life, 59 – 60, 63, 108, 112, 160, 223 Literary Press, 108 Loest, Erich, 56, 60, 78, 89, 91 – 92, 146, 178, 206, 209 – 11 Lovell, Jerzy, 171 Lutowski, Jerzy, 51 Lybke, Judy, 232 – 33, 254 Machejek, Władysław, 59 Magnificent Seven, The (film), 147 – 50 Main Market (Kraków), 107 – 10, 182 Main Office for the Control of Press, 146 Malige, Fred, 58 – 59 Malinowski, Bronisław, 104 Mandecki, Tadeusz, 131 Masur, Kurt, 1 – 3, 9 – 10, 204, 239 – 40, 242, 244 Mattheuer, Wolfgang, 209 – 12, 214, 298n135 Meetings in the Gewandhaus, 2, 239 Meyer, Kurt, 239 – 40, 242 – 43 Michnik, Adam, 208 Mickiewicz, Adam, 180, 182, 200 Miller, Toby, 8 Miłosz, Czesław, 6, 58, 69 – 70, 82, 87, 192, 212, 223 Ministry of Culture and Art (Poland) artists’ demands of, 202 arts oversight, 34 – 35 on censorship, 223 commissioned art, 60 drama contest, 198 financial support, 67 open discussion and, 84 on positive values, 260 Red-and-Blacks and, 169 stipend to Polish Writers’ Union, 59 subsidies to Rhapsodic Theater, 61 Ministry of Culture (GDR), 79, 136 – 37, 145, 150, 167, 177, 204, 215 Mittag, Günter, 141

Monday demonstrations (Leipzig), 2f, 244 Moniuszko, Stanisław, 48 Morawski, Jerzy, 106 – 7 Moscow Declaration (1957), 97 – 98, 100 “Mother of Freedom, The” (Zwerenz), 88 – 89, 91 Mrożek, Sławomir, 108 – 9, 112, 161 – 62, 183 – 84 music and musicians (GDR) censorship and, 216 folk music protests, 215 – 16 jazz, 78, 90 – 91 Leipzig protest march, 178 – 79 Leipzig Song Scene, 231 Leipzig Street Musicians, 237 – 40 Lipsi, 174 National Song Days, 231, 234 professional dissidents, 230 rock and roll or “big beat,” 174 – 78, 193 state control by licensing, 217 – 18 Western popular music, 153 – 54, 155f, 173 – 74 Youth Communiqué, 175 – 76, 178 – 79 music and musicians (Poland) at Under the Lizards, 91 rock and roll or “big beat,” 168 – 72, 172f, 173 rock musical, 157 – 59 students and youth, 170 – 71 unregistered festivals, 237 – 38 Mutterlose, Heinz, 116 Names of Power, The (Broszkiewicz), 159 – 62, 183, 202, 223 National Communism accountability to the nation, 18 admission of failure, 97 – 98 arts’ centrality in, 100, 128, 161 censorship and, 147 consumerism and, 137, 155 contact with the West, 179 controlled revolt, 158 – 59 cultural matrix and, 101 end of, 185, 213 Forefathers’ Eve demonstration, 182 in GDR, 95, 99 – 100, 178 Gierek and, 189 Gomułka and, 87, 98 – 99, 162 Letter of 34 and, 163 Names of Power, The and, 202 New Course, 90 normalization policy, 195 openness to the West and, 173

I N D E X     333 opinion polling and, 103 – 4 personal choice and, 130, 184 Polish October and, 162 popular culture and, 182 – 83 revision after Stalinism, 74 SED and, 91 socialist democracy and, 183 – 84 Soviet Union and sovereignty, 151 vision for the public, 14 – 15 young people and, 176 National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), 27 Nawratowicz, Barbara, 108 Nazis and Nazism, 19 – 20, 23 – 27, 29 – 30, 38 Neumann, Gert, 211 Neutsch, Erik, 75, 165, 184 New Course (GDR), 76 – 79, 82, 88, 90 – 92, 95, 206 New Culture, 83 – 84, 89 New Economic System of Planning and Management (NES), 136, 141, 176 – 77, 179 – 80, 286n32 New German Literature, 78, 165 – 66 New Germany (newspaper), 120 – 21, 142, 166 – 67, 173 – 74, 177, 294n15 New York Times, 111, 137 November Night (Wyspiański), 200 – 201 Nowa Huta clubrooms, 46 – 47, 65 Dawn Shopping Center, 253f field trips and articles about, 59 – 60 model community, 45 performances at, 66 redevelopment plans, 257 Rhapsodic Theater at, 62 Seventh Festival of Soviet Films, 68f socialist utopia, 81 sociology study in, 104 Song and Dance Ensemble, 50 See also Lenin Steel Mill; People’s Theater (Kraków) Ochab, Edward, 85 – 87 Oelssner, Fred, 141 Olczak-Ronikier, Joanna, 100 Old Theater (Kraków) building condition, 201 – 2 “Hamlet after the Twentieth Congress,” 86 Kurdesz popularity, 198 – 99 national classics in, 199 power of the public, 12

success of, 200 – 201 Tango at, 161 transformation of, 261 – 62 Western culture at, 137 “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences” (Khrushchev), 84 Out Loud (spoken journal), 227 Pannach, Gerulf, 210 parallel polis Charter 77 protest and, 187 definition of, 207 goals of, 211 – 12 response to reform, 246 underground and, 216, 235 – 36 See also students and youth parallel polis (Poland) artists and, 217 Catholic Church and, 213 legalization of, 221 SKS and KOR, 209, 226, 229 Solidarity and, 222, 225, 237 underground and, 247 Passendorfer, Jerzy, 157, 173 People’s Theater (Kraków), 159, 161, 163, 223 People’s Tribune, The, 153, 170, 289n113 Peppermill cabaret, 89, 91 Piskorz, Leszek, 12 “Poem for Adults” (Ważyk), 83, 89, 98 Poland consumer price increases, 183 co-opting opposition, 222, 229 elections, 237 expulsions and emigration, 212 martial law, 11, 224 – 27, 229, 234 – 35, 247 postcommunism in, 258 – 59 protests in, 187 – 88, 196, 203 repression in, 216 – 17, 221, 225 Six-Year Plans, 59 – 60 Sovietization, 75 uprisings in, 85 – 86, 100, 182 – 83, 185, 221 See also Nowa Huta; Socialist Cultural Revolution Polish October chronicle of, 159, 161 consumerism and, 183 cultural energy of, 100 effects of, 131 funding for the arts, 132 Kraków House of Culture and, 107 literary scene and, 108

334    I N D E X

Polish October (continued) Market Square and, 112 – 13 new regime, 88 posters and, 135 Stalinism rejection, 104 – 5 view in Leipzig, 89 Westward turn, 138 Writers’ Union and, 92, 227 See also Names of Power, The Polish Socialist Party (PPS), 19, 21, 25 Polish-Soviet Friendship Society, 151 Polish Students’ Association, 110, 170 Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR) artists and, 203, 223, 226 – 27 censorship and, 184 Church and, 88, 229 crackdown by, 247 cultural policies and, 82 dissidents and, 187 economics and, 196 founding, 34, 56 Leipzig visit, 186 Letter of 34 and, 163 limited reach, 96, 99 National Communism and, 159 official propaganda and, 81 – 82 “Poem for Adults” response, 84 rock and roll and, 170 Sixth Congress, 197 Solidarity and, 221, 225, 236 stability and, 230 Third Congress, 142 Unification congress, 61 Western entertainment and, 235 Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR), Central Committee art and culture in, 197 – 98 artists and, 191 – 92 consumerism and, 141 criticism of USSR, 85 decree on “Overcoming the Cult of Personality,” 86 Gomułka in, 87 living standards promises, 59, 82 political loyalty and, 234 students and, 167 theater and, 153, 182 Writers’ Union and, 222 Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR), Kraków Provincial Committee (KW), 67, 131, 133, 147, 162, 182 – 83, 191 – 92, 194, 198 – 99, 202 – 3, 224, 234, 259 Politics (journal), 170, 200

Pomian, Krzysztof, 192 Pommert, Jochen, 242 – 43 Poplavskii, Stanislav, 86, 88 Poznań protests, 51, 85 – 88, 160, 229 Prague Spring, 13, 127, 184 – 85, 193, 213 Pravda, 15, 189, 195, 294n15 Presley, Elvis, 168, 174, 193 Preuß, Gunter, 205 – 6 Protestantism (GDR), 217 Przyboś, Julian, 58, 63 public opinion polling (GDR), 121 – 23, 125, 193, 218 public opinion polling (Poland), 106 – 7, 193 – 94. See also Center for the Study of Public Opinion public sphere artists and, 217 bourgeois, 38 communism and, 6, 10, 18, 263 consumerism, 156 cultural, 11, 16 – 17, 39, 261 – 62 cultural spaces and, 236, 244, 247 – 48, 250 – 51 GDR and Polish comparison, 17, 259 Habermas’ definition, 5 Letter of 34 and, 163 local traditions and, 71 modifiers and, 6 normalization, 206 protests and, 213 rock and roll in, 159, 185 West Germany and, 210 – 12 See also parallel polis Pyjas, Stanisław, 207 Radio in the American Sector (RIAS), 72, 78, 174 Radio Luxembourg, 174 Rational Cattle Breeding, 65 Raupach, Rudi, 215 – 16 Reimann, Andreas, 230 Reimann, Brigitte, 164 – 65, 167, 290n29 Rendezvous with the Light Muse, A, 119 Renft, Klaus, 174 – 77, 194 Rhapsodic Theater (Kraków), 61 – 62 Richter, Hans Michael, 153 Rink, Arno, 254 Rudorf, Reginald, 90 – 92 Rumpf, Willi, 180 Sacrosong music festival, 228 samizdat publications, 208, 210 – 12, 217, 233

I N D E X     335 Schmidt, Hubertus, 230 – 31, 233 Schumann, Henry, 232 Schwimmer, Max, 58 – 59, 270n47 “secret speech.” See Khrushchev, Nikita “SED’s New Tasks, The” (Ulbricht), 56 Serwin-Oracki, Mieczysław, 40 – 42, 47 Siciński, Andrzej, 113 Siekierska, Jadwiga, 84 Siemieński, Maksymilian, 104 – 5 Signal (student publication), 208 Silberman, Marc, 6 sister cities, 186, 224, 244, 259 – 60 Skalds (Skaldowie), 171 – 73, 176, 184 Skilling, H. Gordon, 10 Skuszanka, Krystyna, 223 Słowacki Theater (Kraków), 7, 31 – 32, 50 – 52, 64, 200, 223 Socialist Cultural Revolution, 98 Socialist Cultural Revolution (GDR), 93 – 96, 99, 123, 135, 142. See also worker productivity Socialist Cultural Revolution (Poland), 95, 97 socialist democracy, 97, 183 – 84 Socialist Realism, 57 – 59, 73 – 74, 108, 152, 275n76 Socialist Realism (GDR) artists and, 61, 70, 114 – 15 Graphic Artists’ Union and, 60 ideological commitment, 56 USSR and, 55 Socialist Realism (Poland) artists and, 63, 114 rules of, 100 Stalinist art, 35 students and, 163 terroreticians, 62 theater and, 64 writers and, 83 Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), 2, 56 “Clear-Cutting Plenum,” 179 – 80 consolidation of control, 75 expansion of, 94 Fifth Party Congress, 120 – 21 ideological crackdown on members, 92 Johannes R. Becher Literature Institute and, 163 – 64 June 17th uprising response, 77 – 78 literature of arrival and, 165 new Ten Commandments, 94, 142 popularity of, 196 reunification prospect, 92 – 93, 99

Second Party Conference, 75 West Germany and, 90 See also New Course Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), Central Committee, 58, 92, 122 – 23, 179, 189, 193, 294n15 Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), Leipzig District Committee, 3, 242 – 3, 259 sociology study (GDR), 120 sociology study (Poland), 104 – 5, 112 – 13 Sokorski, Włodzimierz, 81 – 83, 140 Solidarity trade union, 217, 221 – 29, 235 – 37, 246, 256 “Solution, The” (Brecht), 99 “Song of Germany,” 72 Soviet Thaw, 79 Spiegel, Der, 123, 168, 192 Stalin, Joseph communism fits Poland quip, 17 death of, 73, 79 Katyń massacre, 85 neutral Germany proposal, 56 statue torn down, 276n4 writers as engineers of human souls, 43 – 44, 55 Stalinism administrators and society, 14 artists and, 114, 132 Bitterfeld Conference and, 118 cultural forms and, 73 cultural matrix and, 100 – 101 factory workers and arts in, 41, 64 forum on, 244 legacy of, 109 Market Square and, 112 music and, 49 normalization policy, 195 Polish October and, 104 posters and, 133 postwar reconstruction and, 34, 36 – 37, 271n85 Socialist Cultural Revolution and, 98 theater and, 54, 111 transition to National Communism, 15 writers and, 113 Starke, Johanna, 113 – 16, 126 Stasi Biermann affair and, 187, 209 communists and, 259 Eigen+Art and, 232 Gert Neumann and, 211

336    I N D E X

Stasi (continued) growth of, 196 Hungarian affairs and, 90 professional dissidents and, 230 – 31 protest flyers and, 178, 244 Soviet invasion of Hungary and, 90 underground press and, 233 State Commission for Cultural Affairs (GDR), 44, 79 State Dramatic Theaters (PTD), 52 – 53, 62, 65 Stern, Heinz, 177 Strittmatter, Erwin, 117 Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The (Habermas), 4 Strzyżewski, Tomasz, 147 Student Revolutionary Committee, 86 – 87 students and youth (GDR), 204 – 5, 218. See also Bitterfeld Way; Johannes R. Becher Literature Institute students and youth (Poland), 110, 182, 198 – 99, 203, 207 – 8. See also Jagiellonian University; music and musicians; Polish Students’ Association; Student Revolutionary Committee; Student Solidarity Committee Student Solidarity Committee (SKS), 207 – 12, 214, 221, 226 – 27, 229 Sunday (journal), 88 – 89 Surdykowski, Jerzy, 203, 237 Świerzy, Waldemar, 134 Swinarski, Konrad, 199 – 201 Szajna, Józef, 159 Szczepański, Jan Józef, 182, 226, 229, 234 Szymborska, Wisława, 98, 108, 254 – 56 Tango (Mrożek), 161 – 62 Tęcza, Władysław, 51 Tejchma, Józef, 66 television, 139 – 40, 192 – 93, 235 Thaw, The (Ehrenburg), 79, 88 theater, 51 – 52, 111, 146 theater (GDR), 52 – 53, 153. See also Leipzig City Theaters theater (Poland), 253 censorship and, 199, 223 choice of plays, 54 – 55, 198 – 200 contemporary plays in, 159 – 60 Cricot 2, 111 – 12 literatura rozrachunkowa (settling of accounts), 160 – 62

nationalization of theaters, 52 Theater 38, 110 See also Forefathers’ Eve Theater House (Leipzig), 243, 252 – 53 Tischner, Józef, 256 Tito, Josip, 97 Tomorrow (magazine), 87 Trace of Stones (Neutsch), 165, 184 transnational public sphere, 4, 15, 260 Trela, Jerzy, 225 Tübke, Werner, 209 – 10, 244 “Twelve, The” (Blok), 152 Ulbricht, Walter artists and, 57, 117 Berlin Wall, 97 Bitterfeld Conference and, 119, 174 collectivization and, 94 Fifth Party Congress, 121, 142 Five-Year Plan, 43 Goatee, gut, and glasses slogan, 76 Gomułka and, 96 on Leipzig protest march, 179 New Course and, 91 political power of, 86 Prague Spring critic, 184 – 85 socialist national culture, 114, 164 Socialist Realism and, 56, 61 sociology study, 120 unification debate, 92 – 93, 95 West Germany and, 130 underground press (GDR), 233 underground press (Leipzig), 230, 232 underground press (Poland), 208, 221, 223, 226 – 27, 235 – 36 Union of Graphic Artists, GDR (VBK), 60, 114 – 16 Union of Polish Composers, 57 Union of Polish Graphic Artists (ZPAP), 57, 60, 79, 132 – 34, 189 – 90, 203, 222, 226 Union of Polish Patriots, 21, 24 Union of Polish Stage Artists, 29 – 30, 270n54 Union of Polish Visual Artists, 29 Union of Polish Writers, 29, 57, 59 – 61, 81, 83, 96, 108, 202, 259 resolution and antireligious campaign, 59 Union of Socialist Youth, 170 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), 43 – 44, 55, 70, 142 Universal Weekly, 228, 256 “Unknown Man with Mustache,” 228

I N D E X     337 Urgently Seeking Shakespeare (Kipphardt), 79 Valley of the Clueless, 140, 192 Vaudeville Romance, A, 52 Visual Arts Workshop (Kraków), 227, 229 Vogler, Henryk, 60, 63, 112 Völkel, Heinz, 113 – 15, 126 Wagner, Siegfried, 91 – 92 Wajda, Andrzej, 200 – 201, 254 – 55 Wałach, Stanisław, 110 Walicki, Franciszek, 169 Wallis, Aleksander, 113, 132 – 33 Warner, Michael, 12 Warsaw Pact, 80, 87, 129, 184 – 85 Water Hen, The (Witkiewicz), 126 Ważyk, Adam, 83 – 84, 89, 98, 100 We Are Building Socialism, 168 Weigel, Helene, 146 Weskott, Martin, 251 Western culture attack on, 179 – 80 attraction of, 114, 120 consumerism, 140, 144 elimination of, 93, 112 fashions of, 174 – 75 in GDR, 138 – 39, 192 insult of, 91 isolation from, 35 LPs of Western bands, 153 – 54 materialism of, 130 in Poland, 137 – 39 West Germany. See Federal Republic of Germany Wieczysty, Marian, 62 Witkiewicz, Stanisław, 111, 126 Wojtyła, Karol, 61, 221, 223, 228 Wolf, Christa, 9 – 10, 165, 184, 250 worker productivity, 42 – 44, 70, 75, 94, 136, 143

Workers’ and Peasants’ State, 76, 94 Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR), 187, 203, 207 – 8, 210, 220 – 22, 226 – 27, 229 Workers’ Lute (Kraków), 49 Workers’ Opera, 48 – 51 Wötzel, Roland, 239 – 40, 242 – 43 writers (GDR) anti-formalism campaign, 55 – 56 Bitterfeld Way and, 117 – 18 Circles of Writing Workers, 118 dangerous tendencies, 166 – 67 dissidents and, 231 – 32 literature of arrival, 164, 166, 290n29 Reading Lamp speaker series, 231 – 33, 238 supervision of, 55 – 56 writers (Poland) after martial law, 227 after Stalinism, 113 expanded freedom, 108 – 9 party officials and, 112 – 13 supervision of, 55 – 56 Wyspiański, Stanislaw, 200, 261 Wyszyński, Stefan, 81, 87, 100 Young World, 174, 176 Yúdice, George, 8 Zagajewski, Adam, 208, 234, 236, 249 – 50 Zamoyski Museum, 63 Zhdanov, Andrei, 55, 63 Zieliński, Andrzej, 171, 173 Zimmermann, Peter, 242 Znaniecki, Florian, 104 Żółkiewski, Stefan, 141 Zoń, Jerzy, 260 Zwerenz, Gerhard, 88 – 89, 91 – 92