When the World Turned Upside-Down : Cultural Representations of Post-1989 Eastern Europe [1 ed.] 9781443816199, 9781443805520

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When the World Turned Upside-Down

When the World Turned Upside-Down: Cultural Representations of Post-1989 Eastern Europe

Edited by

Kathleen Starck

When the World Turned Upside-Down: Cultural Representations of Post-1989 Eastern Europe, Edited by Kathleen Starck This book first published 2009 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2009 by Kathleen Starck and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-0552-1, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-0552-0

For Dad, border crosser between East and West

TABLE OF CONTENTS

POST EAST-WEST? AN INTRODUCTION (KATHLEEN STARCK) ....... 1 TRANSFERENCE, TEMPORALITY, AND IDENTITIES IN TRANSIT ......................................................... 11 DIMENSIONS OF THE PRESENT MOMENT: GEORGE SZIRTES’S BRIDGE PASSAGES AND THE HUNGARIAN EXPERIENCE OF 1989 (JOHN SEARS) .... 12 BOSNIAN WAYS OF BEING AMERICAN: ALEKSANDAR HEMON’S NOWHERE MAN (CORINA CRIùU)....................... 24 MALCOLM BRADBURY: THE QUEST FOR THE PERILOUS EAST (MARIA-ANA TUPAN) .................... 36 EXPLORING THE PRESENT THROUGH THE PAST—WHOSE PRESENT? ...................................................... 49 EMERGING PASTS: RUSSIA’S RELIGIOUS LANDSCAPES IN CONTEMPORARY TRAVEL WRITING (ELMAR SCHENKEL) ........................ 50 ACROSS THE LINE: BRITISH POST-WALL POETRY (CINZIA MOZZATO)..... 61 CAN THE EAST GERMAN SPEAK? IDEOLOGIES OF MEMORY .............................................................. 73 WALK/DON’T WALK: HISTORY AND MEMORY IN POST-WENDE BERLIN (STEVEN QUINN) .............................................. 74 DISTURBANCE EAST. PUNKS IN EAST BERLIN. MEMORY, GENDER AND COLD WAR IN A POST-1989 TELEVISION DOCUMENTARY (ANTJE BUDDE) ............................................................. 85 EASTERN EUROPE AS THE OTHER............................................. 101 REDRESSING ABSENCE: MEDIATISED WITNESSING AND THE REPORTING OF THE BALKAN CONFLICT IN RECENT BRITISH THEATRE (GEOFF WILLCOCKS) .............. 102 AN-OTHER EAST: RE-VISIONS OF ORIENTALISM AND MASCULINITY IN ARTHUR PHILLIPS’S PRAGUE (JOSEP M. ARMENGOL-CARRERA) .......... 111 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS .......................................................... 123

POST EAST-WEST? AN INTRODUCTION KATHLEEN STARCK

Imagine a room full of international scholars from both sides of the former iron curtain. They all work in a number of fields related to social and cultural disciplines. Now further imagine that these scholars are listening to a (West) German photographer’s talk on his documentation of the inner-German border over a period of twenty years. The talk is more or less free of any comments indicating moral judgement. Instead, the focus lies on the intricate technicalities of the border constructions, which for themselves speak of the perversity and inhumanity of a state feeling the need to resort to such measures. But then, it happens. A series of “before” and “after” photographs is presented. They show, for example, border constructions running through the middle of a village first and a new smooth road with no traces of the former division in the second image, or watchtowers and fences in an aerial photo of a forest, followed by a hardly discernable forest aisle, where nature has reclaimed what is hers. In one of these photographs there is also a border guard. The photo was taken during that in limbo time after the wall had come down, but before the reunification (November 1989 to October 1990). At this point, the photographer, after all, has a thing or two to say about morality. He tells his audience how the boarder guard, who in these “new times” was unarmed, was being mocked by some youths riding their mopeds across the border because they knew it was about to be abolished. Taking this as a cue, the photographer further reports, he asked the guard whether in the past he would have shot the boys. He then quotes the guard’s reply that he would have shot his own father if necessary and proceeds relating his, the photographer’s, shock at such determined loyalty to a political system that had been exposed as inhumane and was about to cease to exist in the very near future. The photographer then comments how it is always possible to say “no” to orders and points to other infamous incidents in German history, where people did not “say no.” This then provokes a discussion, which under different circumstances might have become quite heated. Some East German scholars in the audience question the appropriateness of the comparison between GDR

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Introduction

border practices and the Third Reich. They further point out that many border guards were draftees forced into this particular service, stress the sanctions that were awaiting disobeying border guards and warn against generalisation. Although everyone involved in the discussion stays calm and presents his or her points reasonably, it is evident that the debate is not merely about boarder guards, but, instead, about East German identity and how East Germans feel misrepresented by “the West.” All this is translated back and forth from English to German, from German to English, to allow the rest of the international audience to follow the discussion. However, when the discussion is interrupted, the photographer thanked cordially, and the coffee break announced, the international visitors seem genuinely confused by what has just happened. What had just happened was a discussion about very different interpretations of history, interpretations coming from two very close and yet very far sides of the former East-West divide. This episode, which took place at a conference on cultures of the Cold War, was furthermore about Eastern and Western socialisation and how it shapes views of events. Thus, it is a perfect example of how the “lifting of the iron curtain” did not necessarily entail a reconciliation of the different ways of life, which had developed on both sides of the division. It further illustrates the power of cultural representations (in this case the combination of the photograph and the photographer’s comments) and that in their discussion it is crucial to consider who speaks and who is spoken for/of. These seemingly antagonistic East-West differences are the result of a conflict of opposed ideologies–most commonly associated with the United States and the Soviet Union and their satellite states–in which a military struggle was diverted into a psychological one. Robert E. Denton Jr. even speaks of a “rhetorical construction of the political reality called cold war” (Denton Jr. 1991, xvii). He remembers that “[f]or most of us, it was a war of words, not bombs. It was a war of threats, name-calling, fear, and distrust” (Denton Jr. 1991, xiii). Although this Cold War “hyperbole anti-Communism [and one might want to add “hyperbole anti-capitalism”] seems comically naïve today” (Kackmann 2005, Preface), its influence should not be underestimated. Both open propaganda and ideology disguised as popular culture had a strong effect. As Tony Shaw writes, it was impossible to escape the Cold War rhetoric because all areas of life were permeated by it: In a period of information and entertainment overload, stretching from the heyday of radio to the birth of satellite television, it was almost impossible not to be touched in some way by . . . Cold War publicity. Virtually

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everything, from the Olympics and opera to literature and space travel, assumed political significance. (Shaw 2006, 1)

So it comes as no surprise that the (official) view that both blocs had of each other was one of hostility, suspicion, and assumed superiority. Both sides believed to be in possession of the secret of “the right way to live” (Denton Jr. 1991, xiv), while many in the East, however, were at the same time longing for democracy and freedom and experiencing “consumer envy.”1 If such beliefs are also always fostered by a lack of knowledge about the “other,” the end of the Cold War and the collapse of so many Eastern European governments in the years of 1989 and 1990 provided new opportunities to gain more direct and unmediated access to and experience of the cultures of the other. Initially, this free contact was greeted with enthusiasm in East and West alike. Thus, the author of these lines still remembers very clearly the overwhelming images of East Germans dancing on the Berlin Wall and the excited comments of (Western) journalists, documenting the incredible event. Anthropologist Maruka Svaek cites the imaginative metaphors “enthusiastic Western journalists and involved scholars came up with . . . to describe the jubilant mood. Timothy Garton Ash (1990, 62), for example, called the opening of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 ‘the greatest street-party in the history of the world’” (Svaek 2008, 9). The revolutions and the ensuing opening of borders, besides creating new possibilities of getting to know the other side by travelling there, brought about the introduction of Western models of market economy and democracy to the former Eastern bloc. In addition, Eastern Europe has started to reside within the West in the form of thousands of immigrants from new member states of the European Union, such as the Czech Republic and Poland, but also from the former Soviet Union. Padraic Kenney has summed up these developments as not merely changing the former Eastern bloc, but also what he calls the Old Europe. What is more important in the light of this collection of essays, Kenney talks of a mutual shock for East and West in the post-communist era (Kenney 2006, 162). So if throughout Central and Eastern Europe the transition away from state socialism and the party state towards democracy and market economies was generally welcomed as a necessary if uncertain rejection of forms of state power and economic practices that had shaped all aspects of life for over forty years, (Pickles and Unwin 2004, 9)

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in the course of the transition, which was “harsh and cold” (van Hoven 2004, 1), some of the original enthusiasm changed to disillusion and nostalgia, sometimes even anger and outrage, or mistrust and fear on the side of the inhabitants of Central and Eastern Europe (cf. Svaek 2008, 11; 13; 14; 16). As C.M. Hann, Caroline Humphrey and Katherine Verdery have pointed out, “some of those who grumbled most in the old days now share the nostalgia of the less articulate, for an age when they had fewer and less secure rights in a legal sense, yet their needs were more adequately fulfilled than is the case a decade later” (2007, 10-11, see also van Hoven 2004 on post-socialist identities and relationships, 62-96). These insights come from the subject of “post-socialism,” “postcommunism,” or, as it is also often called, “transition,” which has become an established area of academic research and has produced an abundance of writing within a vast number of social sciences. So before looking at cultural representations of Eastern Europe, it is necessary to consider what “transition” means to these countries in terms of political, economic, and ideological changes. As the experience was and still is a very different one throughout Eastern and Central Europe (cf. Kenney 2006, 9; Humphrey 2007, 12; Svaek 2008, 22; Pickles and Unwin, 10-11),2 I shall concentrate on similarities that have been found in post-socialist studies to characterise the process of transition, which, interestingly, are often enough themselves Western accounts of Eastern Europe (cf. van Hoven 2004, 2; Hann 2007, 10). Characteristics found to be shared by post-communist countries are an assertion of independence and the rise of nationalism; a near absence of a culture of compromise (such as party pluralism); high expectations of leaders, a cynicism towards and/or mistrust of political institutions; a rejection of teleologism and grand theories; an ideological vacuum (partly filled by nationalism); a moral confusion (partly filled by religion; however, many citizens are unable to relate closely to religion); temporality, since post-communism is a transitional phenomenon; dynamism; instability; a wide-spread sense of insecurity; and legitimation problems (Holmes 1997, 6-21). Richard Rose even talks of “‘creative destruction’ that occurs when one regime abruptly replaces another or an economy is transformed” (Rose 2009, 20). Regarding the “vacuum” that opened up, he writes: “Transformation voided the institutions of uncivil society but could not provide civil institutions overnight” (Rose 2009, 26). Thus, it is not possible to predict the results of transition. When the transition started happening, theorists were not equipped to predict its outcome. Their knowledge of neo-classical economic systems did not provide any answers as to how economies in transformation are working (Rose 2009, 1).

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As a result, uncertainty is introduced not merely as a factor for Eastern Europeans themselves, but for Western Europeans likewise. Moreover, what distinguishes Eastern and Central European from other transitional countries is their unique sharing of a simultaneousness of a number of transitional processes. Leslie Holmes describes this as follows: [these countries are characterised by a] simultaneous and very rapid transition from a centralized and state-run and largely nationalized economy, a highly centralized and relatively closed polity, a society largely devoid of a bourgeoisie, and from large-standing military and trading blocs, towards a marketized and privatised economy and pluralist democracy and a society with a powerful capitalist class and to new military allegiances and trading blocs. The intended comprehensiveness and pace of change distinguishes the post-communist from other transitional [countries]. (Holmes 1997, 19, original emphasis)

Rose confirms this: While every society is in transition, few have experienced transformation as abruptly and pervasively as the nations once in the Communist bloc . . . . In the case of the Communist bloc, it was more than a political revolution. There was the treble transformation of the economy, society and the political regime–and often of the boundaries of the state as well. (Rose 2009, 1)

Holmes draws attention to the uniqueness of these processes when she writes that they “are unprecedented in their range and ambitions” (Holmes 1997, 329). The state of transition is further emphasised by the fact that terms such as “former communist,” “former Soviet,” “former Yugoslav,” etc. are still in common usage. According to Siban Forrester, Magdalena J. Zaborowska and Elena Gapova, the West still relies on its perceived or imagined distinction from the East– which does the same in turn, having internalized its inferiority and still lacking a new vocabulary to inscribe its new identity . . . . The terms . . . reflect a certain time lag inherent in their identities–as for the “former” this and that, they appear permanently marked by their past, at best struggling to create a new image and fully enter the post-Cold War world. (Forrester et al. 2004, 17)

This focus on Eastern Europe as in a state of “becoming,” as being in a process, is likewise shared by Natasa Kovacevic when she refers to “the reification of Eastern Europe as a civilizing object (task) by the European Union and North America” (Kovacevic 2008, 1, original emphasis).

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Bettina van Hoven, on the other hand, in line with her objective of “giving voice to the people living through transition” (2004, 2), defines transition in terms of its impact on people’s identities: “For many people transition has meant that all their prior ideologies and beliefs were shattered through the introduction of a new social, economic and political framework” (van Hoven 2004, 59). She further points out that, while for many this resulted in economic hardship, there are also “winners” of the transition: In many countries cities have begun to flourish as a result of wide-ranging renovations and investment opportunities for new (foreign) businesses. Here, places indicating hopes for a better future were developed. People have been able to explore new opportunities and gain new freedoms. People have explored new kinds of work, new interests, travelled abroad and connected with new cultures. (van Hoven 2004, 60)

Considering the new and often critical perception of the West and Western social models and practices by Eastern Europeans, the question arises if and in what way have Western perceptions of the East changed and how twenty years after the Cold War ended this manifests itself in cultural representations of Eastern Europe and Eastern Europeans. Are they still considered post-socialist? How much does the West know, or want to know, about the East? Social anthropologist Miha Buchowski, in reference to Bob Dylan, offers the following view: “How many roads must the post-socialist countries go down, before you call them non post-communist?” Captured into discourse of “escaping socialism,” “joining Europe,” “building democracy,” and “establishing free markets,” people both in the West and the former Soviet bloc perceive the region, stretching roughly in the triangle among the Baltic, Black and Adriatic Seas, as the “land in transition.” It is still a kind of mysterious Bermuda Triangle for many in the west. (Buchowski 2001, 9)

According to Boris Fishman, Western perceptions of Eastern Europe equally provide insights into the self-definition of the West. In his collection of fictional and non-fictional writing on Eastern Europe, Wild East: Stories From the Last Frontier, he comes to the conclusion that, most of the Western protagonists in their [the authors included in Wild East] work are the antagonist kind, which is to say they are oblivious, selfabsorbed and presumptuous about the lands they have come to visit . . . . Flawed as their perceptions were, they were called by a genuine curiosity, by the idea that Eastern Europe, victim of one upheaval after another

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throughout the twentieth century, held out insights that life at home, largely sheltered from catastrophe by geography and the can-do ethic of democratic capitalism, did not. (Fishman 2004, xiii-xiv)

In a way, this is not surprising as Eastern and Western histories are intertwined in many ways and fictitious and real life Westerners seek “Eastern encounters” in order to find answers to their own questions of identity. David A. Kideckel concludes that, “the post-socialist transformation in Eastern Europe is ultimately as much about the West as it is about the East” (Kideckel 1994, 135). Defining the “Western Self” through and in contrast to the “Eastern Other” is a strategy that is likewise pointed out by many of the contributors of this collection of essays. Thus, a concept well known from the area of postcolonial studies has found its way into representations of Eastern Europe. This is a relationship, which has been identified by a number of scholars, most notably in Natasa Kovacevic’s recent book Post/Communism. Colonial Discourse and Europe’s Borderline Civilization. In a similar vein, Sibelan Forrester, Magdalena J. Zaborowska, and Elena Gapova explain their collection of essays on postcommunist cultures, Over the Wall/After the Fall, to have been inspired by African-American studies (Forrester et al. 2004, 30). Moreover, Kideckel draws attention to a phenomenon, which is likewise familiar from postcolonial theory. He explains in his essay “Us and Them” that during the beginning of the transition, the West [was] often evoked as the model to which these societies ought to aspire. The idea that Eastern European society should ultimately approximate a Western model ha[d], in fact, been elevated to unquestioned dogma by many both in the West and East. (Kideckel 1994, 134)

In connection with ideas from postcolonial discourse surfaces the question of memory and power. Who decides what is remembered? In quite a number of the essays in this collection, it seems there is a Western hegemony of memory. The book starts, however, with three essays, which foreground the experience of transference, temporality and identities in transit. John Sears looks at Hungarian/British George Szirtes’s poetic account of his 1989 experiences in Hungary. Sears describes how Szirtes, being in the privileged position of an outsider living in the West, reflects on the “linkage, transference, and transmission between self and other, English and Hungarian, present and past, West and East . . .” and points to Szirtes’ provisional and tentative approach, which mirrors the disorientation and

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uncertainty he witnesses. Corina Crisu analyses Bosnian/American Aleksandar Hemon’s narration of the fictitious journey of a Bosnian character to the United States. Crisu’s focus lies on concepts such as fragmentation, uncertainty, displacement, transnational identities and, ultimately, the need to reinvent one’s own identity in order to survive. Moreover, she depicts the reciprocal relationship between East and West in Hemon’s novel, i.e. the Westernness of Eastern Europe and the Easternness of Western Europe. In a similar way, Maria-Ana Tupan examines unstable identities in Malcolm Bradbury’s novel Doctor Criminale. She points to Bradbury’s depiction of Bulgaria’s loss of a cultural identity, the erasure of memory, the emergence of a cultural void, dehistoricised personalities, and historical dislocation. As in the previous essays, she likewise demonstrates the way the West tries to define itself and its own culture through encounters with the East. This point becomes central to the essays in the second chapter. Elmar Schenkel explores how Western travel writers encounter their own past in their search for religious groups, which were revived after the collapse of the Soviet Union, whereas Cinzia Mozzato looks at the way British post1989 poetry is influenced by Eastern European writers and how Western poets use the former bloc countries to understand incidents in British history, such as the bombing of Dresden during the Second World War. The third chapter revolves around the question of who defines what is remembered and how to tell the history of East Germany. Steven Quinn questions the way the GDR and its inhabitants are mainly remembered through the Stasi (secret police) and how the voices of “the people” are suppressed by looking at Anna Funder’s non-fictional book Stasiland and the American translation of East German Jana Hensel’s biographical account of life in the GDR. Correspondingly, Antje Budde asks why a documentary about East German Punks, although filmed by East German women, presents a West German and male perspective. Finally, the fourth chapter deals with the notion of Eastern Europe as the Other. Geoff Willcocks explores how the war in Yugoslavia is portrayed in British theatre and comes to the conclusion that the othering of the Balkans is a welcome device for making Yugoslavian news more palatable for Western audiences, relieving them of the moral dilemma they might experience when witnessing the war. Josep Armengol-Carrera, on the other hand, applies postcolonial ideas to Arthur Phillip’s novel Prague and reveals how Western characters display colonial attitudes towards the East, which is treated as a new frontier. Ultimately, this collection of essays is an attempt to discover whether Western writers of fiction and poetry, filmmakers, journalists, and

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playwrights are indeed presenting Eastern Europe as Buchowski’s “mysterious Bermuda Triangle” and what depictions of this formerly unknown territory might reveal about the West’s attitude towards the East. Although a multitude of cultural products dealing with post-socialist phenomena have emerged over the last decade or so, literary and cultural criticism have so far generated little on the subject.3 Thus, this book might be a small contribution towards a change of this situation and will, hopefully, initiate further dialogue between East and West.

Notes 1. David A Kideckel even talks of a “sense of failure, inferiority, and shame in the East-Central European mindset” due to the constant presence of the Western way of life as a frame of reference. (Kideckel 1994, 135) 2. In fact, some scholars have started questioning the category “post-socialist.” See Caroline Humphrey’s “Does the Category ‘Postsocialist’ Still Make Sense?”. 3. What should be mentioned at this point are Lynn Guyver’s 2001 book Post Cold War Moral Geography: a Critical Analysis of Representations of Eastern Europe in Post 1989 British Fiction and Drama, Christoph Houswitschka’s 2005 Literary Views on Post-wall Europe: Essays in Honour of Uwe Böker, as well as Katharina Gerstenberger’s 2008 Writing the New Berlin: The German Capital in Post-Wall Literature. Moreover, a growing interest in post-communist cultural studies is evident in publications such as Over the Wall/After the Fall. PostCommunist Cultures through an East West Gaze, edited by Sibelan Forrester, Magdalena J. Zaborowska, and Elena Gapova in 2004.

References Ash, Timothy Garton. 1990. We the People. The Revolution of 89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague. London: Granta Books. Buchowski, Miha. 2001. Transformation. An Anthropological Perspective on Postsocialism. Poznan: Wydawnictwo Humaniora. Denton Jr., Robert E. 1991. Preface to The Cold War as Rhetoric. Eds. Lynn Boyd Hinds and Theodore Otto Wind, iii-xviii. N.Y.: Praeger. Fishman, Boris. 2003. Introduction to Wild East: Stories From the Last Frontier. Ed. Boris Fishman, xi-xvii. London: Random House. Forrester, Sibelan Forrester, Magdalena J. Zaborowska, and Elena Gapova, eds. 2004. Over the Wall/After the Fall. Post-Communist Cultures through an East West Gaze. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

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Gerstenberger, Katharina. 2008. Writing the New Berlin: The German Capital in Post-Wall Literature. N.Y.: Camden House Inc. Guyver, Lynn. 2001. Post Cold War Moral Geography: a Critical Analysis of Representations of Eastern Europe in Post 1989 British Fiction and Drama. Warwick: University of Warwick Press. Hann, C.M., ed. 2007. Postsocialism. Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia. London: Routledge. Holmes, Leslie. 1997. Post-Communism. An Introduction. Cambridge: Polity. Houswitschka, Christoph, ed. 2005. Literary Views on Post-Wall Europe. Essays in Honour of Uwe Böker. Trier: WVT. Humphrey, Caroline. 2007. Does the Category “Postsocialist” Still Make Sense? In Postsocialism. Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia. Ed. C.M. Hann, 12-15. London: Routlege. Kackmann, Michael. 2005. Citizen Spy: Television, Espionage and Cold War Culture. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press. Kenney, Padraic. 2006. The Burdens of Freedom. Eastern Europe Since 1989. London: Zed Books. Kideckel, David A. 1994. Us and Them. In Cultural Dilemmas of PostCommunist Societies. Eds. Aldona Jawlowska and Marian Kempny, 134-144. Warsaw: IFis. Kovacevic, Natasa. 2008. Narrating Post/Communism. London: Routledge. Pickles, Tim and John Unwin. 2004. Transition in Context: Theory in Post-Socialist Transformations. In Europe. Lives in Transition, Ed. Bettina Van Hoven, 9-28. Edinburgh : Pearson. Rose, Richard. 2009. Understanding Post-Communist Transformation. A Bottom Up Approach. London: Routledge. Shaw, Tony. 2006. British Cinema and the Cold War. London: I.B.Tauris. Svaek, Maruka. 2008. Introduction : Postsocialism and the Politics of Emotions. In Postsocialism. Politics and Emotions in Central and Eastern Europe. Ed. Maruka Svaek, 1-33. N.Y.: Berghahn Books. Van Hoven, Bettina. 2004. Introduction. In Europe. Lives in Transition. Ed. Bettina Van Hoven, 1-8. Edinburgh: Pearson. . 2004. Identities. In Europe. Lives in Transition. Ed. Bettina Van Hoven, 57-79. Edinburgh: Pearson. . 2004. Relationships. In Europe. Lives in Transition. Ed. Bettina Van Hoven, 79-98. Edinburgh: Pearson.

TRANSFERENCE, TEMPORALITY, AND IDENTITIES IN TRANSIT

DIMENSIONS OF THE PRESENT MOMENT: GEORGE SZIRTES’S BRIDGE PASSAGES AND THE HUNGARIAN EXPERIENCE OF 1989 JOHN SEARS

A poem by the Hungarian poet Sándor Weöres, “Magyarok,” translated by Edwin Morgan as “Hungarians,” imagines the “thousand years” that comprise the mythic and real history of the Magyars: “all passed in my dream,” culminating in a vision of “Budapest woven of bridges.” Death appears, finally, with a face “clouded by hammer and sickle of froth and foam” (a nightmare vision of repressive history), to lead the narrator and his “little group,” metonymic of the nation, across the Styx (the Danube). The poem concludes with the beginning of the journey of death; “A lerombolt híd tövén a kompot sötétben értük el”—in Morgan’s translation, “We reached the ferry at the end of the broken bridge in the dark” (Turczi 2005, unpaginated). Weöres’ poem is reprinted as 1988’s entry in a recent anthology of twenty-five Hungarian poems spanning the years 1978-2002, titled, after this concluding line, “At the End of the Broken Bridge.” Weöres died in 1989, just before the lifting of Communism and the collapse of the Berlin Wall. George Szirtes elegises him in “In Memoriam Sándor Weöres” as “the conjuror” who could take a parasol and out of it create an ecosystem, or beneath the parasol, meander in the wake of realpolitik and contemplate its dreadful colonnade of teeth.

(Szirtes 1991a, 58, original emphasis) The “parasol” alludes to Weöres’ major long poem “The Red Parasol,” translated and reprinted in Szirtes and George Gömöri’s anthology of modern Hungarian poetry The Colonnade of Teeth (1996), another title borrowed from Weöres.

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Szirtes’s elegy appears towards the end of his 1991 collection Bridge Passages, a book that, in its responses to the events in Hungary in 1989, also “meander[s] in the wake / of realpolitik” (original emphasis). The lyrics in Bridge Passages address the transitions and transformations of 1989 tangentially, through apposite clichés like “Drawing the Curtain” and through natural metaphors of historical agency like the “storm” in the same poem. Language, the collection implies, may be too abrupt in its assessment of the new reality; to the descriptive and declarative assertions available to poetry, caveats need to be added that allow alternative responses to reside within the words used. When “Drawing the Curtain” invokes “the storm / that lays the human pattern waste” (Szirtes 1991a, 3), the metaphorical force is tangible, but “the human pattern” remains indeterminate—patterns of oppression or of survival? A pattern detected or imposed? A pattern of creativity or of destruction? The prevailing metaphor in this poem derives, like that of much of the collection, from architecture, with “the convolutions of this frieze” offering a product of “the human pattern” that symbolises its immersion in history, like the “rooms that live within / and yet without the history” in “The Comfort of Rooms” (Szirtes 1991a, 10). The “sensuous and tangible” reality of buildings is reassuringly solid and present; each endstopped stanza of “Drawing the Curtain” (enclosed rooms, where “stanza” returns momentarily to its literal meaning of “stopping-place”) relates its own evasion of the import of architecture’s friability, itself a metaphor for the “flickering / inconsequentiality / of every human movement” (Szirtes 1991a, 3). Comprising an isolated line, “inconsequentiality” here begs a series of questions about agency, human self-determination and action. The poem seems to imply inertia (those end-stopped stanzas making it repeatedly judder to a halt); but agency resides in “history,” who “packs her bags and pays the bill / long owing,” offering up the raw details of the city as “her discarded materials.” The conception of history indebted to a new economy and a new liberty is also another kind of movement, “a moral fall” or “a moving curtain” in which “everything uncertain / hurts and gathers in the folds” (Szirtes 1991a, 4). Etymologies of the words of the collection’s title shed light on their significances across Bridge Passages. The noun “bridge,” from the Old Frisian brigge and Old Norse bryggja, signifies “A structure forming or carrying a road over a river or ravine, etc., or affording passage between two points at a height above the ground” (Shorter OED, third edition 1975 reprint); other nautical, musical, technical and physiognomical meanings are also listed. The verb “[t]o bridge” is also “[t]o make a bridge over; to span with a means of passage.” “Passage,” from French passer, to pass,

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Dimensions of the Present Moment: George Szirtes’s Bridge Passages and the Hungarian Experience of 1989

offers a range of meanings concerned with movement: the passing of people “onward, across or past;” the migratory flight of birds; passing from life to death; a journey or voyage. It also refers to that which is passed along—“a way, road, path, route, channel;” “a crossing, ford, ferry or bridge.” Then there are meanings, which assume significant connotations in Szirtes’s uses of the word, to do with transactions and “negotiations between two persons,” and a “passage” as “a portion of a composition” (as in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India); and, finally, a series of more tangential meanings to do with horse riding. “Bridges” therefore constitute or facilitate “passage,” while “passages” can be a kind of “bridge;” the two terms interlink or mirror each other in their meanings, constituting translations of each other, so that, for example, the “passage” of “a portion of composition” can become, within this etymology, a figure of the way writing can bridge the gap between writer and reader, or translate historical experience into aesthetic form, or the way specific poems act as “bridges” between the different sections into which the book is organised. Bridging and passages together constitute a double movement, a linkage that effects a transference or transmission between self and other, English and Hungarian, present and past, and West and East—indeed, the possibilities of translation of language and experience constitute a major concern of the poems in Bridge Passages. Writing, as a form of passage, contributes to the architecture implied by the bridge; each is a constructed link between things, an attempt to join things together in order to make “sense” out of them. Bridge Passages fully exploits these etymological dimensions, and the translations, derivations and linguistic movements that they mark. Szirtes registers the importance of the Budapest bridges as cross-city passages while reporting on his involvement in the protest marches of June 1989: “Then across the bridge to the last two stations . . . We set off across the bridge towards the palace” (Szirtes 1989, 14). The six Bridge Passages sections of the collection correspond to the six bridges that, in 1989, traversed the Danube in Budapest—a seventh, the Lágymányosi Bridge, was added in 1995. These sequences work as a central and linking group of poems that, together, affords passage through the collection and between the other sections. They also, collectively, stand for Hungary itself at the particular historical moment addressed in the collection. Szirtes commented, in a radio broadcast in November 1989, on Hungary’s emergent position in relation to East and West: “As Austria and Hungary edge closer and Hungary strains to become the international bridge between East and West the concept of President Gorbachev’s ‘common European house’ gains ever greater importance.”1

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Bridge Passages begins where Weöres’ “Hungarians” ends, in a present moment, at the end of the bridge in the dark, with a poem called “Night Ferry.” “Night Ferry” addresses the navigation of history as an experience of disturbed, disturbing motion, “A deep slow swell” as “[t]he vessel rolls.” Seasickness, “the idea of sea,” permeates the poem’s lexis (and punctuates the collection as a contrastive locus differentiating landlocked Hungary from Szirtes’s adopted England; later in the collection, in Hungary, Szirtes writes a poem called “Nachtmusik:” “miles away / from any sea”). It establishes reluctant movement and physical discomfort as the initial conditions to which Bridge Passages responds. Importantly, the poem begins with the word “And:” “And our idea of hell is the night ferry,” conjoining itself to the narrative and final line of Weöres’ poem. The opening in medias res conjunction immediately asserts Bridge Passage’s concern with the linkages afforded by history and poetic translation, just as the poem itself initiates the themes of the bridging of gaps and the interlinking of geographies, languages and histories. The night ferry connects the world preceding the present to that of the present moment and the future, but also establishes that future as potentially infernal, connoting the ferry of Greek myth, which transports the dead across the Lethe to Hades. Szirtes’s ferry, “our idea of hell,” also transports its passengers from an indeterminate origin—the past—towards an uncertain future. At a deeper level, “Night Ferry” (its title also evoking Derek Mahon’s first collection Night Crossing (1968) and the “sleepless night-crossing” in his “The Prisoner”) enacts the transition or passage from a residual, symbolic history of “pain” and “nightmare” from which the poem, and, by extension, the collection as a whole, struggles to awaken. The movement of the night ferry traverses the “deep slow swell” of the unconscious of history, which, in its revolutionary and unknowable forms, will constitute the chronotope across which the poems of Bridge Passages move. The past persists as “emptiness,” “meaning nothing,” and the poem’s express concern is to record, however briefly and indirectly, the “pain that art cannot refine,” to alarm and inform in the face of poetry’s own seeming ineffectuality (Szirtes 1991a, 1). “Hungarians,” Szirtes and Gömöri contest in their “Introduction” to The Colonnade of Teeth, “have tended to cling to the belief that poetry can change social life” (Szirtes and Gömöri 1996, 16). Bridge Passages explores the possibility of sustaining this belief in post-Communist Hungary, focussing its attention on 1989 and its immediate aftermath. Its provisional, tentative approach—characterised by poetry of dense formal consistency, comprised largely of sequences of four-, six- and eight-line end-stopped stanzas that resemble, in their

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Dimensions of the Present Moment: George Szirtes’s Bridge Passages and the Hungarian Experience of 1989

fragmented totality, a shattered sonnet sequence or a dismantled, once monolithic regime—responds to the difficulty of addressing in poetry the events of what is described, in a “Rondeau” late in the collection, as “a furious year” (Szirtes 1991a, 60). The negative, Lethean resonances of “Night Ferry” introduce thematic tensions between memory and forgetfulness, offering in “the bottom line of nightmare” an implicitly modernist, Joycean vision of a history lying beyond aesthetic redemption, in a space that, in a further Joycean echo, “art cannot refine.” The Joycean artist, “refined out of existence” (Joyce 1966, 215), is also the artwork itself in its failure to refine, to “make good again” in some way the “nightmare” experience of history. The poem offers a painful, sluggish transition tainted by a hangover—“a thumping head no aspirin can soothe” suggesting the aesthetic feeling of painful wakefulness, rather than the anaesthetic unfeeling of sleep or the “soothing” aspirin, as a compulsory option in the face of history’s demands. The hangover signifies the trace of the past in the present, a persistence that enacts another kind of connectedness, the ineradicable past symbolically exerting its baleful influence over the present, persisting in the present as a painful disorder of the body politic. “Night Ferry,” its three quatrains like a gate barring entrance to Bridge Passages, both invites and resists movement. It establishes a mood of fraught anxiety of subject and language that it calls, for the moment, “normal,” and which the rest of the collection both resists and explores, through “the continual nightmare / of the wall” (the constraining walls of domestic horror, as well as the Berlin Wall) in “A Game of Statues” (Szirtes 1991a, 42), and the “idea so macabre it cannot picture / its own desperation” in “Smog” (Szirtes 1991a, 17), right up to the concluding translations of Ágnes Nemes Nagy’s Diary, where the second entry reiterates the “Nightmare” of the opening poem. Here, at the end of Bridge Passages, the “nightmare” becomes pure Gothic melodrama, an epigrammatic howl of stock images of horror and mortality—“the corpse,” “the softening skull,” “the naked row of teeth” (another “colonnade”)— depicting the historical realities the collection has negotiated as “a world of rotting rags and clout” on which “the marsh-light of cold reason” shines (Szirtes 1991a, 62). Nagy, a founding editor (along with Weöres, Janos Pilinszky and others) of Ujhold (“New Moon”), a major Western-facing literary magazine, was “silenced” by the Communists—“she found work as a schoolteacher,” Szirtes notes in the “Introduction” to his translations of her poetry, The Night of Akhenaton (Nagy 2004, 10). Szirtes’s translations of her work in Bridge Passages assert an ironic link between his own work and the silenced poets of her generation. Prohibited from

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producing poetry, she instead wrote children’s books and (like Szirtes) translated foreign poets. Bridge Passages seems sometimes burdened by its author’s awareness that the freedoms and choices he has by historical circumstance been able to take for granted have been denied those of whom he writes; choosing to conclude the collection with his translations of Nagy’s work offers something of what Seamus Heaney calls “redress,” the “redress” which is also, for Nagy, “Revenge” (Szirtes 1991a, 62). “Choice” is a concept that troubles Bridge Passages; an essential element of the ideological shift from Communism to free market economics, “choice” and the “freedoms” associated with it undergo intense scrutiny as ethical and aesthetic problems. “Choice” is closely linked to agency and action: To act, to make things happen, to make choices are all conditions of the beautiful and the exact,

asserts “Nachtmusik” (Szirtes 1991a, 27)—“exact” bears the adjectival weight of aesthetic precision but also the verbal implication of the demand and enforcement of payment, history’s “bill / long owing” (Szirtes 1991a, 3). The framing of “choice” in relation to aesthetics is a move that “The Flies” extends further to geographical and historical situations: “Being here is an aesthetic choice / for those who have it” (Szirtes 1991a, 7). For others, of course, there is no choice at all; some, the poem suggests, with a nod to its author’s choice, are more equal than others in the new democratic world. The poem continues: “We give the wall a voice. The cut worm forgives the plough.” Here “choice” rhymes with “voice,” establishing connections between aesthetic choices, liberal values of democratic representation, and introducing echoes of Blakean democratic radicalism. Blake’s sixth Proverb of Hell is appropriate to the “infernal” world of immediately post-1989 Budapest, in its invocation of human destruction and natural forgiveness (Blake 1972, 150-2). “The Flies” (another Blakean echo) imagines the coming of capitalism shrouded in the “stink” of individualism, each “fly” “groping” towards his “personal heap.” At the same time, other flies for whom “the time is wrong” die in the new spring; the “spring,” in turn, heralds the cold wind brewing beyond the Buda hills, the frost making a belated entrance. (Szirtes 1991a, 8)

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Dimensions of the Present Moment: George Szirtes’s Bridge Passages and the Hungarian Experience of 1989

Whether the post-1989 thaw is real or not is already an issue; in “A Sea Change,” things are done precisely as before but feel a little different,

while someone showers “Behind the frosted glass” (Szirtes 1991a, 13-4). The “frosty” dawn of capitalist freedoms is, in Bridge Passages, an ambivalent transformation, constructing “a conjectural landscape” described, in “Nachtmusik,” by the German word Heimat (Szirtes 1991a, 27), possibly alluding to Ottó Orbán’s poem for Sándor Weöres, “Sinking Orpheus,” in which (in Szirtes’s own translation) the “dying poet” “writes in the dust with his blood the word: [H]eimat.” Heimat, post “Waste Land,” resonates with Wagnerian and Eliotesque longing: “Nachtmusik” refers to “The lull / of belonging,” the pause at the line’s end imitating this “lulling,” before we return to the infinitive “to act” and the transitive “to make choices.” The “lull” hesitates before asserting its own choice: music tells us that “though we die / we nevertheless belong,” the poem claims, with another caveat: “It doesn’t tell us where, that is the catch.” We’re left with “something without form,” not art or music or poetry but “The empty noise / of radio waves,” a disorientating dislocation that recurs throughout the collection (Szirtes 1991a, 28). “You could be anywhere,” the next poem, “Bridge Passage,” begins (Szirtes 1991a, 29), repeating a line from the earlier “A Domestic Faust:” “You could be anywhere. Indeed you are . . . ” (Szirtes 1991a, 5). In “Bodies” we’re told that “it is hard to know just where to place a thing” (Szirtes 1991a, 35); “The Comfort of Rooms” worries that “the layers of vision shift in alarming parallax” (Szirtes 1991a, 10). The transitional experience of “Night Ferry” imbues the subsequent poems with this sense of disorientated unreality, of perceptual confusion, a mood corresponding to the giddy uncertainties of the events of 1989. The “furious” year constitutes a historical moment that, to Szirtes’s poems, is also present in all its confusing, sometimes bewildering new dimensions; within the anger and energy implicit in “furious” lies also (in “In a Strong Light”) the tranquillity of a compromised pastoral vision, “the everyday news / of bridges, trees and grass” (Szirtes 1991a, 16). Szirtes’s problematic pastoral forms, their reliance (in poems like “Wild Garden”) on new configurations of the “cold pastoral” of his earlier works, offer the “bridge” and the “passage”—words so etymologically interlinked as to be near-synonyms, and carrying architectural, musical, literary and other meanings—as allegories of multiple interconnections in the ways the words ramify through the collection.

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“A Woman with a Rug” offers “unlit passages / of dialogue;” “somewhere there’s a bridge / between the actor and his ghosts,” opines “Funeral oration,” the “bridge” here spanning the space between stanzas (Szirtes 1991a, 52); in “Chinese White” “An image hangs and drops / in a grey passageway or alley” (Szirtes 1991a, 51); “Bridge Passage” meditates on “passing time, and time too passing on / to things a passage can adjust” (Szirtes 1991a, 29). The “bridge” and the “passage” are in one sense symptoms of the author’s “pretty desperate attempt . . . to discover bridges between my life in England and my history in Hungary” (Szirtes 2000, 14). Nevertheless they transcend this biographical confine to express also the moment and movement—the momentum—which the collection perceives as its responsibility, to which it fastidiously responds, with the “Responsibility / to every piece of unforgiving matter” of “A Domestic Faust” (Szirtes 1991a, 6). Their reiteration, punctuating and emphasising the collection’s rhythm, adds to the poetry’s formalism, its metrical consistency. Miroslav Holub’s essay “The Dimension of the Present Moment,” to which I’ve been alluding, is informative in this context. The “present moment” in Bridge Passages is the immediately historical “now” of the events of 1989 to which the poems respond, the Ted Hughes-like “now and now and again now” of “A Sea Change:” Even now, something begins . . . These things are done precisely as before but feel a little different now . . . Now’s the time perhaps for understanding what remains the same. (Szirtes 1991a, 13)

It’s the “now” of immediate events present too in Szirtes’s prevailing use of the present continuous, as in “the band is gaily signalling” in “A Woman with a Rug.” Holub, considering the limits of human perception in relation to the experience of the immediate “now” (limits with which Szirtes’s poems also grapple), writes that “every musical composition, especially of classic or romantic tradition, has its basic tempo, which the musician either keeps or breaks. This tempo should be in some relation to the dimension of the present moment” (Holub 1990, 3). The “tempo” of Bridge Passages, the rhythmic order and pace underpinning its concerns with surface variations, is perceptible in its tendency towards metrical consistency, its predominantly four- or five-stress lines. Keeping or breaking with such a demand is rather an ideological choice aligning the poems in Bridge Passages with formal traditions rather than with the potential, unformed freedoms implicit in revolutionary contexts, a choice

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Dimensions of the Present Moment: George Szirtes’s Bridge Passages and the Hungarian Experience of 1989

elaborated and adhered to in the collection’s concern with “redress” and reparation (paying the debts of history) and with playing “the language games” of “A Domestic Faust” (Szirtes 1991a, 5) or redressing “the foreignness of languages” and the “losing” of “meaning” in “English Words” (Szirtes 1991a, 33). In “Rain,” this linguistic frailty becomes palpable: You can’t pronounce the words, nor can you shout for lack of vowels. The language starts to ache and slowly crumbles. (Szirtes 1991a, 50; italics original)

The dimension of the present moment, Holub’s scientific allegory of endurance and suffering, is translated in Szirtes’s poetry into a possession of the Hungarians who populate it, but not of the poet himself: “A Woman with a Rug” addresses, as does all of Bridge Passages, “The tragic dimension which is rightly theirs,” the “dimension” repositioned by a crucial shift of pronoun from the hitherto prevailing second person singular (Szirtes 1991a, 11). In doing so, it also establishes the poetic dimensions—form, metre, density and responsibility of language, the proper and the due—of what Holub (citing Turner and Pöpel’s “Poetry”) calls “rhythmic community:” In addition, metre clearly synchronises the speaker with the audience and provokes a “rhythmic community” essential to the “social solidarity”—the great presence and simultaneity of people—which is about the best that poetry can do. (Holub 1990, 3)

Synchronicity of poem and audience—“about the best poetry can do”—is a form of “bridging,” the establishment of passages for intercommunication and exchange between reader and text. “Wild Garden,” a key poem in “Bridge Passages,” grounds this intercommunication and exchange in translation, the process of linguistic exchange and transformation implicit throughout Bridge Passages, and foregrounds etymology as the dimension of poetry’s effect. The poem opens with the Hungarian word Vadkert (a compounding of vad, “wild” or “untamed,” from Lapp vuowde meaning “forest,” and kert meaning “garden,” giving the familiar Hungarian surname Kertész, meaning “gardener”), which it immediately glosses as “The wild garden,” an English phrase for a Hungarian neologism that roughly translates as “nature reserve.” The “wild garden” offers another pastoral interlude, a space circumscribed by “bridges, masonry and trees / which spread

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themselves like railway stations:” the “airless music” repeating the “dissolving” airs of “Nachtmusik.” But the pastoral is tainted: its “grave / ceremonial greenness” suggests a Marvellian tincture hamstrung in its potential liberation by that hanging “grave,” both a demeanour (the garden personified) and a final resting place. The penultimate stanza of “Wild Garden” alludes to Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin: where Isherwood writes of a Berlin about to elect the Nazis and of an act that has been accomplished—“Over there, in the city, the votes were being counted” (Isherwood 2004, 453). Szirtes emphasises the popular voice of democratic freedom as offering a potential future: “In the city they’re counting votes / and learning how to speak” (Szirtes 1991a, 57). In 1989, speech and freedom of speech accompany, and are the projected or desired end product of, the moment of and the movement towards democracy: “Wild Garden”’s “grave / ceremonial greenness” is also, in relation to “learning how to speak,” the “greenness” (Blake’s “Ecchoing Green”; Blake 1972, 116-7) of innocence and inexperience, a colour for a nation finding its voice. Holub warns us that “The dimension of the psychological present probably does not only concern speech; speech is a phenomenon suitable for demonstration and measuring” (Holub 1990, 5). Speech, in “Wild Garden,” leads almost inexorably to the “society of worms and ants and clods,” which “lived in terror of the creatures / of the garden.” The garden’s wildness is now not untamed but bestial; as the thrice-mentioned peacock alerts us to the deception of appearances, so the ambiguity of “lie” is embedded in the otherwise Audenesque “Bucolics” of the world outside: And beyond them lie the woods, the lakes, the sea and the enormous waves on which we inscribe our human features. (Szirtes 1991, 57)

The poem concludes with the immense force of the “enormous waves” as figures of irresistible historical transformation; not speech, but the “inscription” of “human features”—the anthropomorphisation of nature, the laying-bare of pastoral myths—provides the closing image, leading to the next poem—the elegy to Sandor Weöres, who, continuing writing’s sudden pre-eminence, “signed my book / in a childish trembling hand” (Szirtes 1991a, 58). In an essay published in the “Times Literary Supplement” in November 17, 1989 (amid the events in Eastern Europe), Geoffrey Hill wrote of the contemporary world as “the world of amnesia and commodity” (Hill 2003, 27).

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Dimensions of the Present Moment: George Szirtes’s Bridge Passages and the Hungarian Experience of 1989

Szirtes, writing at the same historical moment, offered his own version of this world in his essay “Learning from Brezhnev” where he notes the different relations of East and West to history: The history of Eastern Europe is unhappy and that unhappiness permeates its consciousness. We live in a world that is losing its history. We know it as consumable unexperienced information. In Eastern Europe writers could articulate and preserve historical experience in the face of tyranny. We appear to be haunted by historical thinness, they by historical density. (Szirtes 1991b, 22)

This perception of the “density” of Eastern European history saturates Bridge Passages, not least in its relation to the words it uses; etymological density manifests the collection’s concern with “the dimensions of the present moment” as a fundamentally lexical pre-occupation, an awareness that “learning how to speak” involves also being aware of and responsible for the freight that one’s words carry with them. Bridge Passages’ responses to Hungary’s experience of “the present moment” of transition, its potential becoming an “international bridge,” are cagily evasive. Szirtes offers, in the final stanza of “Street Entertainment,” a poetic disclaimer—“I’m only a reporter whose truth lies / in diction clear as water,” water (over which the bridges stride) which “darkens like a bruise” (Szirtes 1991a, 44). The collocation of “truth” and “lies” renders each, in a further Blakean moment of “staining the water clear” (Blake 1972, 111), fatally ambiguous: the non-values they assert muddy into a careful ambivalence the status of a poetry and a speech (the popular “voice” of capitalism, a speech imbued by its very possibility with ideological “freedoms”) that position themselves throughout the collection somewhere between “truth” and “lies,” things to be learnt and burdens of guilt, tools for the gauging of the dimensions of the present moment, seeking ways of bridging the passage or transition from Communism to capitalism.

Notes 1. Szirtes, George. “The Underground in the Underground.” BBC Radio 4, aired on November 28th 1989. Transcript available at http://www. georgeszirtes.co.uk/index.php?page=articles.

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References Blake, William. 1972. Complete Writings. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hill, Geoffrey 1989/2003. Of Diligence and Jeopardy. Times, November 17. Literary Supplement. Repr., New York: Counterpoint. Holub, Miroslav. 1990. The Dimension of the Present Moment. Ed. David Young. London: Faber. Isherwood, Christopher 2004. The Berlin Novels: Mr Norris Changes Trains & Goodbye to Berlin. London: Vintage. Joyce, James 1966. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Nagy, Ágnes Nemes. The Night of Akhenaton. Trans., ed. George Szirtes. Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2004. Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Szirtes, George. 1991. Bridge Passages. Oxford: Oxford University Press. . Learning from Brezhnev. Poetry Review, vol. 81 no. 3 (Autumn 1991): 20-2. . 2000. The Budapest File. Tarset: Bloodaxe. . 1989. The March Marches: A Progress Report from Budapest. Poetry Review, vol. 79 no. 3 (Autumn): 12-15.  and George Gömöri, eds. 1996. The Colonnade of Teeth: Modern Hungarian Poetry. Tarset: Bloodaxe. Turczi, István, ed. 2005. At the End of the Broken Bridge: XXV Hungarian Poems 1978-2002. Edinburgh: Scottish Poetry Library.

BOSNIAN WAYS OF BEING AMERICAN: ALEKSANDAR HEMON’S NOWHERE MAN1 CORINA CRI U If you speak English with an accent, you speak at least two languages. Aleksandar Hemon, Nowhere Man, 177.

Multiple Frontier Quest Writing an essay on Aleksandar Hemon’s Nowhere Man means entering a barely charted territory. Since its publication in 2002, few academic responses have appeared on a novel that was selected as a National Book Critics Circle finalist and whose author’s astonishing mastery of English was compared with Nabokov’s. The novel presents Jozef Pronek’s convoluted existential trajectory from his native Bosnia to the U.S.A., at a time when war broke up in the former Yugoslavia, thus echoing in many ways Hemon’s own biography.2 Skilfully told from the multiple perspectives of several narrators, Pronek’s story follows a non-linear thread that eludes chronology and allows repeated territorial crossings between Eastern Europe and America. It is this repeated movement from the East to the West (Bosnia to America) and from the West to the East (America to Ukraine) that delineates the main interest of the present paper. How do Western values permeate the cultural soil of a communist country? How do Eastern European geographies coexist in the American mind? Drawing on critical and philosophical writings of displacement and migration, the paper explores Hemon’s representations of transnational identities by insisting on the significance of border-crossing, cultural hybridity, and centre/margin dynamics. Suggestively, on a micro-level, Hemon’s signature topoi gravitate toward the loss of home and the dissolution of the family, while on a macro-level, the novel points to the fragmentation of the public space and the instability of socio-political systems (exemplified through the rapid turnover of events: The Putsch in Ukraine and the War in Yugoslavia).

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The following sections analyse Hemon’s novel as a multiple frontier quest, where the borders between the East and the West become porous in a never-ending cross-cultural exchange. On the one hand, the West is transplanted to the East of Europe. Sarajevo in the 1980s resonates with the Beatles’ songs, which are an escape for young Jozef from the confines of an uneventful existence. Later on in the novel, there is a stereotypical speech on American democracy, when President George Bush (the first) comes to visit Ukraine. On the other hand, the East of Europe is a recurrent topic in America, where it is represented either as a terra incognita, a blank page for most of the Americans, or as a nostalgic place of idyllic youth for first-generation emigrants. Mostly, by playing with Bildungsroman motifs in atypical Eastern/Western scenarios, Hemon inscribes his characters’ stories into the broader mosaic of displaced identities. As the paper demonstrates, the novel reveals the Western-ness of Eastern Europe, inasmuch as the Eastern-ness of America, thus proposing new ontological definitions that question the fundamentals of a fixed national/cultural/sexual identity. In this complex process of self-translation, identity becomes ubiquitous pertaining to everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

“Being Vague:” Visible Invisibility Discussing migrants’ displacement to a new land, the Romanian writer Bujor Nedelcovici identifies four important stages: 1. Migrants feel more “there” than “here,” 2. they belong both “here” and “there,” 3. they feel neither “here” nor “there,” 4. they are “everywhere” (Nedelcovici 1997, 12). The last stage moves beyond binary, Manichean models of identity construction and “confers on the migrants a supranational, global identity, which ultimately saves them from the pains of in-betweenness” (Brînzeu 1997, 165). In Nowhere Man, Hemon saves his main hero from “the pains of inbetweenness,” as his novel combines the last two stages described by Nedelcovici and concentrates on a hero who does not feel at home anywhere. Inspired by one of the Beatles’ songs, the novel’s emblematic title renders identity uncertain by placing it in relation to an elusive space—the nowhere—that sends us semantically to its counterpart, the “everywhere.” Hemon draws attention to the fictitious nature of his character and world, since we “are never nowhere” (Bender 2001, 8). And still, the immigrant’s uprooted mind can deny the present spatial and temporal dimensions and continuously return to the terrifyingly fascinating topographies of “the vague nowhere” situated at the limit of the possible.

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Bosnian Ways of Being American: Aleksandar Hemon’s Nowhere Man

This feeling of omnipresent nostalgia is called by Emil Cioran “the apotheosis of the vague,” i. e. “the obsession of an elsewhere that means the impossibility of the moment” (Cioran 1992, 52). The idea of a fictitious existence is also stressed in the novel’s subtitle, “The Pronek Fantasies,” referring to the main character’s ability to fantasise, to bring the invisible to the surface of the real. The centrifugal forces of fantasy imply at the instability of the self and its dissolution in multiple identities, embodied by several unreliable narrators and main protagonists. As the seven chapters of the novel subversively complete their meaning, these characters intersect throughout the novel, glimpsing into each other’s lives, blending the fictional and metafictional levels. In true postmodern fashion, Hemon decentres the narrator as a symbolic point of representation, so that identity is lost and the subject slips away. Since the author as a guiding presence becomes unreliable, the reader is often summoned to discover “all the traces by which the written text is constituted” (Barthes 1997, 123). The text’s metaphoric “traces” are to be found in the introductory part of the novel that prefigures the important themes to be later developed: the constant territorial oscillation, the blurring of temporal borders, and the alternation of insider-outsider positions. Entitled “Passover” (Chicago, April 18, 1994), this introductory part transposes the Biblical connotations of the Hebrews’ liberation in a new transatlantic scenario: a nameless narrator leaves his native Bosnian land and moves to the U.S.A., as a consequence of the war in the former Yugoslavia. The narrator’s geographic displacement in the foreign American cityscape is accompanied by a mental quest for familiar signs, for news coming from his birthplace: “I had obsessively read the papers and watched TV (until I sold it) to see what was happening back home” (Hemon 2003, 5-6). James Clifford’s idea that “roots precede routes” is exemplified here by the narrator’s sense of belonging to a cultural space that gives a sense of direction to his present itinerary (1997, 3). These familiar signs revisited in the mind have a stabilising role that counterbalances “the exhilarating and unsettling” thought of inhabiting a boundless, unknown space, where one risks being lost in an indistinct mass of people. Hemon’s metaphoric image of the pockets as the “hands’ home” suggests the loss of home as a fixed centre of reference, its territorial dislocation and relocation in memory (Hemon 2003, 9). This selfcontained posture evokes the weighing feeling of solitude that infiltrates the immigrant’s life. “Thrown” out of the familiar cocoon into an alien world, the immigrant transfers his own feeling of anxiety and

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“homelessness” from a physical to a metaphysical level and becomes keenly aware of his own mortality (Heidegger 1996, 282). “There was a hole in the world, and I fit right into it; if I perished, the hole would just close. Like a scar healing” (Hemon 2003, 27), the character confesses. The quotation brings to mind the well-known opening of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, where the African American narrator’s hiding in a subterranean hole hints at his own effacement as a consequence of the others’ refusal to see him. Even if Hemon’s narrator does not feel the racial discrimination present in Invisible Man, he still has to overcome the others’ prejudices toward someone coming from the hardly known area of the East of Europe. As his ties to his former country are severed, he faces the same social marginalization and “visible invisibility”—so that his being-in-the-world is defined in terms of dispossession, of not having a permanent home, a family, and a job.3 In a deceitful way, the narrator uses his invisibility as a protective shield to cover all signs of identification: “I preferred being a vague, pleasant memory to having to explain who I was” (Hemon 2003, 6). He puts on the mask of the naive newcomer, playing with the well-worn tropes of generalised (lack of) knowledge about immigrants, in order not to disclose too much about his own person and secretly maintain his tricky position of an insider-outsider. While the narrator keeps silent, “home” becomes a distant point on the map, untranslatable to a foreign audience for whom all the countries in the former Yugoslavia are an almost undifferentiated block. The unexpected encounter with a fellow countryman after a job interview at the ORT Institute triggers the narrator’s return to the past, to a “Bosnia of the mind,” resonating with childhood memories. “There he was out of nowhere,” our protagonist Jozef Pronek, “reading in heavily accented English,” transformed by the passage of time, but still preserving his awkward gestures, defensive attitude, and restrained anger (Hemon 2003, 24, my italics). Since the meeting takes place in a foreign land where former networks are erased, Jozef represents a human connection, a visitor from the narrator’s past, and a concrete presence giving shape to an insubstantial absence. While the narrator is preparing to exit the narrative stage and let Jozef take the main role, he launches a series of open questions that pave the way for the character’s ontological redefinition: How did he get here? Was he in Sarajevo under siege? Or was he besieging it? I hadn’t talked to him in years, if ever. He leaned back in his chair, but my gaze was avoiding his. What should I say to him? What was his story? What was his life like? (Hemon 2003, 25)

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“Being Complicated:” Territorial Dis/Re-Location In several meta-fictional instances, the implied author insinuates himself into the story weaving his personal ideas and doubts into its texture, so that the illusion of a self-contained world is dispelled and the structural mechanisms of its creation laid bare. He makes us accomplices with the text’s genesis, drawing our attention to the importance of insignificant existential moments, at the same time signalling the impossibility of writing about all relevant moments. This thought is also present in the novel’s epigraph by Bruno Schulz that contrasts the chronological order of ordinary events that give continuity to any narrative with the displaced belatedness of unordinary events that are “nowhere” to be seen in a text, “events that have been left in the cold, unregistered, hanging in the air, errant and homeless” (Schulz 1998). Jozef’s triangular movement—from Bosnia to Ukraine, and later to the U.S.A.—can be visualised as a succession of micro-climaxes, as a series of insignificant events made significant. By using close-up techniques from movies, Hemon’s camera lens “zooms in” on certain events that mark Jozef’s biography: his childhood and adolescence in Sarajevo in the 1980s, his degrading experience in the army, his studies of General Literature, his summer in Kiev, and his emigration to the U.S.A. A multiple sense of territorial displacement marks Jozef’s life. He is first of all a foreigner in his own country, since he comes from a family of Ukrainian immigrants living in a part of Sarajevo inhabited by people “with strange non-Sarajevan accents” (Hemon 2003, 24). Long before Jozef’s emigration to the U.S.A., the West is a constant presence anticipated through repeated movement across cultural boundaries. Jozef’s growing up in a communist country with closed borders does not necessarily imply a total ignorance of the West. Our protagonist learns about Great Britain during the English lessons, when he gazes at “a map of England, with London like a wound in its side” (Hemon 2003, 36). Moreover, Jozef shapes his adolescent experience in accordance with a foreign ideal: he becomes part of a band that emulates the Beatles’ lifestyle and writes English songs that naively condense his juvenile dreams. The adoption and adaptation of a foreign model to the local Bosnian tune may obliquely remind us of Andrei Makine’s Once Upon the River Love, where a couple of teenagers escapes the Siberian reality by watching Belmondo’s movies. Both novels lay stress on the importance of self-creation through escape to another reality and highlight that the fictional self is no longer a given entity anchored in one cultural soil, but a context-dependent notion created through cultural choice.

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By letting the reader find out that Jozef will later emigrate to the U.S.A., the novel operates a narrative trick that places Jozef’s Bosnian present into a future Western perspective. Through the intricate routes of memory, Jozef’s Bosnian past is powerfully re-lived in the New World. In a flash-forward, we find out how an adolescent love-story can mark Jozef’s future erotic encounters and bring to mind in a Proustian way a fragment of sensuous past: “Many years later, in Rolling Meadows, Illinois, while canvassing for Greenpeace, Pronek would for a few instances stand in front of a woman who had Sabina’s eyes” (Hemon 2003, 55).4 Relevantly, the summer spent in Ukraine (in 1991) has the function of an intermezzo, preparing the passage from Bosnia to the U.S.A. Ukraine can be seen as a limbo-like space of transition, where Jozef finds out more about the U.S.A. via interaction with the other Americans who, in their turn, learn about the East of Europe. If for the Bosnian Jozef, Ukraine is a strangely familiar country with a typical aura of communist scarcity, for Victor Plavchuk, an American of Ukrainian origin, exploring Kiev means charting a barely known territory. As in Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Foer, we discover the novelty of an Eastern European country through the lens of an American character/narrator. In Hemon’s novel, the American narrator’s passport “with the plentiful freedoms it implied” and its “rich collection of visas” grants him free passage to a communist country. As if “collecting random particles of someone else’s life,” the narrator is objectively noticing the outside reality and, at the same time, introspectively analysing it. The foreignness of the place deflects the newcomer who notices: the streets of Kiev “covered with a dark, oily placenta,” in the “humid evening heat;” the “spectacularly unremarkable” cafeteria with its smell of pierogi; “the sweat, the yeast, the ubiquitous onionness” of a Soviet train going to Lvov; the “muddy” coffee “that you could spread on a slice of bread” in Armenian coffee shops (Hemon 2003, 77; 80; 85; 91). Yet, it is not only the place that leaves its deep imprint upon the American narrator. By meeting the Eastern European Jozef Pronek, the American undergoes a transformative, coming-of-age experience, at a moment when his former ties to his native country are severed and selfreflection becomes possible through territorial and mental distancing. It is this proximity of the other’s foreign presence that shapes the core of the American’s most intimate being—so that the other’s Eastern European “alterity” lays its imprint on the very nature of his Western identity. Rimbaud’s “je est un autre” should not be read here by placing an equating mark between the self and the other; on the contrary, by realising the

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difference between himself and the other, the American is able to see himself in the most unexpected light—as Another (un autre). During this encounter, the American most significantly views the pointlessness of his own existence counterbalanced by Jozef’s “ability to respond and speak to the world” (Hemon 2003, 87). He reconsiders his own life—marked by his parents’ failed marriage and his brother’s death in Vietnam—through the cultural filter of an Eastern European, whose irony and humour alleviate its tragic significance. In their conversations, the American narrator and Jozef discover their paternal roots: for both, Ukraine is “Fatherland.” However—since the country of departure is never the same as the country of return—the fathers’ Ukraine no longer corresponds to the place to which the children come back. While Pronek and Plavchuk unfold their parents’ stories, the thoughts of the first generation of immigrants are projected through their children’s eyes, reflected onto distorting mirrors that reverse and question their fathers’ national values. This twice-told story passed from father to son has a redemptive function, liberating the young protagonists from the burden of nostalgia, from the everlasting pain of looking back. If the former generation of emigrants sees expatriation as a form of exile that acts as a self-conscious preserver of the past, the younger generation sees the relationship with the new land as a form of (more or less) accidental displacement. The dialogue between Jozef and the American narrator also strikes a more intimate chord. Through Emmanuel Levinas’ philosophical perspective, the conversation between an American and an Eastern European has the profound meaning of an epiphanic experience, a privileged “face-to-face” encounter that “acknowledges the presence” of the other, so infinitely different, and yet so capable of truly comprehending the person in front of him (2000, 14-15). A deep sense of reciprocal understanding appears in the American narrator’s confession: “[Jozef] understood me better than anybody, precisely because he could go beyond my vapid words” (Hemon 2003, 89); “he spoke in his broken English, with articles missing, with subject, verb, and object hopelessly scrambled—yet I understood him perfectly” (Hemon 2003, 90). Being in a relationship with another implies talking to that person in the true sense, since “expressing yourself does not consist in articulating the comprehension that one shares with another.” True expression of thoughts means “participating at a common content via comprehension” (Levinas 2000, 16, original emphasis). This is why, the American narrator does not really care if Jozef speaks bad English with an accent; he is able to go

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beyond the way in which Jozef’s ideas are articulated into the real significance of his thoughts. Still, there is a disquieting sense of being watched by hidden cameras that undoes the very nature of an intimate relationship, situated at the verge of homoerotic desire. While Jozef clowns his way out of this absurd situation, using his mocking cheerfulness, the American is paralysed by this far-reaching stretching of panoptic power. The hidden cameras destroy any feeling of privacy and induce a conscious and permanent feeling of “uncertainty” about the “impersonal” presence of the unknown supervisor (Foucault 1997, 286). If the American narrator is able to realise the horror of the communist regime that violates all forms of privacy, in his turn, the Eastern European Jozef has occasion to find out about a simplistic American mentality that levels individual particularities. When George Bush (the first) comes to Ukraine and addresses a group of Ukrainians, Jozef is “bedazzled by the uncanniness” (Hemon 2003, 106) of the president’s absurd, disarticulated speech, punctuated by phoney ideals and lacking in real substance. The summer spent in Ukraine ends abruptly with the Putsch that overthrows the Soviet regime led by Gorbachev. The American narrator finds himself in the difficult position of a foreigner trapped in a country torn apart by political conflicts. As the narrative focus moves beyond the external plot, we plunge into the narrator’s dreamy fantasy that transforms the coup d’État into a pretext for a personal adventure, a Hollywood movie, starring Jozef Pronek. This unexpected lurch from the real into the imaginary brings about an abrupt change from a sense of friendly camaraderie to a painful awareness of impossible desire. When the American narrator leaves Ukraine hurrying to attend his father’s funeral, Jozef remains a figment of the past, a mask worn by various characters, a constant visitation of his own fantasy similar to “the voices of the dead talking to him” (Hemon 2003, 126). There is a recurrent brush with death in the novel, a memento of the brevity of one’s interval spent in the world, a poignant way of reminding us of the Pascalian reflection on the fundamental anxiety of our mortal existence. As the novel reveals, this state of existential uncertainty is even more acutely perceived by the emigrant—the transient par excellence. For Jozef, the Eastern European emigrant, displacement is a form of “interior death, a temporal annihilation of his petite, conceited ego” (Cîrneci 1997, 320, original emphasis). While the very core of his being seems to dissolve in the foreign environment, he turns into a stranger to himself and to the others.

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Significantly, displacement has for Jozef the meaning of a dramatic change from a prelapsarian state of fullness and communion with nature to a fallen state of aimless wandering in a barren world. Being “thrown” into the American space, Jozef loses not only the terrestrial Paradise of his native land, but also the purity of his former soul.5 Is this experienced Jozef who has lived in two worlds a true connoisseur who can understand America better than its inhabitants do themselves?6 Or is he just a puppet who unquestioningly does what he is told to do? During his mundane peregrination, is he attentive to the subtle reconfigurations of his Bosnian ways of being American? Jozef realises that his survival depends on his ability to reinvent himself by multiplying his point of origin and giving up a single national identity. When asked to define himself by choosing between a Serb and a Muslim, Jozef evasively answers “I am complicated” (Hemon 2003, 146), hence disclosing that he no longer defines himself as a Bosnian, but as a ubiquitous “Nowhere Man.”7 Moreover, while canvassing for Greenpeace in Chicago, Jozef adopts a series of different names, awakening the curiosity of his audience: To a young couple in Evanston who sat on their sofa holding hands, Pronek introduced himself as Mirza from Bosnia. To a college girl . . . he introduced himself as Sergei Katastrofenko from Ukraine. . . . To a bunch of pot-bellied Christian bikers barbecuing on a Walgreen’s parking lot in Elk Grove Village, he was Joseph from Snitzlland (the homeland of the snitzl.) To a woman in Hyde Park who opened the door with a gorgeous grin, which then transmogrified into a suspicious smirk as she said, “I thought you were someone else,” he was Someone Else. (179-80, original emphasis)

The humorous juxtaposition of real or imaginary topographies confers on Jozef a Protean identity that challenges the clichés about Eastern Europeans. By highlighting that the “Other” is always “Another,” Jozef presents himself as “Someone Else,” an elusive Nobody who avoids stereotypical projections by de/re-constructing his previous self. This plurality of self-definitions can be easily interpreted as a way of being immune to a world that labels him, classifying him in reductive ways. In this sense, Jozef appears either as an exotic presence with a foreign accent that sounds strange to the others, or as “the wretched refuse coming and becoming American,” evoking Kristeva’s interpretation of the abject (1982, 144). Since the greatest danger here lies in Jozef’s internalisation of these degrading images by seeing himself through the

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eyes of the others, his self-invention counteracts the intrusive effect of these negative views. However, Jozef’s meandering movement from home to home aims at more than simply recording Jozef’s sense of isolation in an atomised American society, his drifting in a “virtual realm” of “hyperreality” (Baudrillard 1988, 72). He manages to glimpse beneath the surface of a levelled society, discovering how miscellaneous people live different lives beyond the colourless banality of identical homes. Lonely people who would give him “money for listening,” old men who would tell him their war stories, and deprived women who would see in him a Prodigal Son (Hemon 2003, 169). Following Jozef’s American itinerary, we can return to the initial argument of this paper and re-envisage Jozef as a hero who does not find his place anywhere. We close the book puzzled by its open-ending showing Jozef’s existence suspended between territorial negations. This “Nowhere Man” can never find a home in America, while he cannot go back to his native country—concluding that “there was nowhere he wanted to be” (Hemon 2003, 219). Ultimately, Pronek’s displacement does not have the soft-spoken tones of nostalgia, but the destructive anger of powerlessness. Caught between worlds, he damages his old possessions as a useless way of finding compensation in self-erasure, a way of destroying all markers of alterity. He does not realise that his most important cultural difference—his foreign accent—will never be erased and he will always remain a foreigner, a “translated man,” or better said, a mistranslated man (Breytenbach 1996, 98). As the narrative crescendo of the novel’s Epilogue finally suggests, the emigrant’s self undertakes a number of (mis)translations when put to the trial of othering. In various places, in front of different people, the foreigner simultaneously tells the same and another story, disclosing once more the deeply fictionalised, uncertain, fragmentary nature of his/her identity.

Notes 1. I would like to thank Jane Read, senior editor at Heinemann, for her helpful suggestions and support. 2. Born in Bosnia in 1964, Aleksandar Hemon graduated from the University of Sarajevo with a degree in literature in 1990. He came to the United States in 1992 and, when Sarajevo came under siege, he was unable to return home. Stranded in America, he could not publish in his native language and resolved to learn to write in English. In 1995, he began to write in English, and his work soon

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appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. In 2000, he published his first collection of short stories, The Question of Bruno, followed in 2002 by his first novel, Nowhere Man. 3. Discussing the double nature of the displaced person, the Romanian theoretician Sorin Alexandrescu stresses “the invisibility of the emigrant” whose cultural and social baggage is left behind in the country of origin, while in the new country he/she becomes “a person without a face, but with a mask (‘the Southerner,’ ‘the Easterner,’ ‘the Asian,’ ‘the African’)” (2000, 293-94). 4. This recollection of a past experience via an erotic encounter is also skilfully presented in Josip Novakovich’s short story “Spleen” (in Fishman, Boris, ed. 2004. Wild East: Stories from the Last Frontier. New York: Random House, 99-114). 5. In a very short chapter, we discover one of the most disquieting intermezzos of the novel, in which Jozef acts as a translator presenting to the reader a letter from his friend, Mirza, telling us about the horrible aspects of the war in the former Yugoslavia. 6. Jean Baudrillard underlines that the true face of America can be seen only by a foreigner who, unlike the other Americans, cannot be blinded by the virtual reality of simulation (1982, 72). 7. It is the role of his girl friend, Rachel (the one who has Eastern European blood), to reveal to Jozef that he is no longer a “stranger,” underlining the positive aspects of his cultural inheritance: “If you speak English with an accent, you speak at least two languages” (Hemon 2003, 177).

References Barthes, Roland. 1997. The Death of the Author. In Twentieth-Century Literary Theory: A Reader, ed. K. M. Newton, 120-23. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 1988. America. Trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso. Bender, Barbara. 2001. Introduction to Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile and Place, eds. Barbara Bender and Margot Winer, I-XVIII. Oxford: Berg. Breytenbach, Breyten. 1996. Translations of the Self: Interview with Ileana Dimitriu. Current Writing 8.1: 90-101. Brînzeu, Pia. 1997. Corridors of Mirrors. The Spirit of Europe in Contemporary British and Romanian Literature. Timioara: Amarcord. Cioran, Emil. 1992. Tratat de descompunere [A Short History of Decay]. Bucureti: Humanitas. Cîrneci, Magda. Exilul provizoriu [The Provisional Exile]. Secolul XX 1012 (1997): 313-23.

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Clifford, James. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Ellison, Ralph. 1952. Invisible Man. New York: The Random House. Foer, Jonathan. 2005. Everything is Illuminated. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. Foucault, Michel. 1997. A Supraveghea i a pedepsi. Naterea închisorii [Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison]. Trans. Bogdan Ghiu. Bucureti: Humanitas. Heidegger, Martin. 1996. Letter on Humanism. In From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence Cahoone, 274-308. Cambridge: Blackwell. Hemon, Aleksandar. 2003. Nowhere Man. London: Picador. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 2000. Între noi. Încercare de a-l gândi pe cellalt [Entre Nous. Essais sur le penser-à-l’autre]. Trans. Ioan Petru Deac. Bucureti: ALL. Makine, Andrei. 1996. Once Upon the River Love. Paris: Éditions du Félin. Nedelcovici, Bujor. Exilul este una din probele cele mai dure pe care le poate suporta un intelectual [The Exile Is One of the Thoughest Trials that an Intellectual Can Bear]. România Literar XXX 3 (22-28 January 1997): 12-13. Schulz, Bruno. 1998. The Collected Works of Bruno Schulz. Ed. Jerzy Ficowski. London: Picador. Sorin, Alexandrescu. 2000. Identitatea în ruptur [Identity in Breach]. Bucureti: Univers.

MALCOLM BRADBURY: THE QUEST FOR THE PERILOUS EAST MARIA-ANA TUPAN There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home. (T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land) Unlike his fictional pilgrimages of the eighties, Malcolm Bradbury’s Post-Cold War revisit of the European East in Doctor Criminale (Bradbury 2000) unfolds within conventional geopolitical frames, yet its humanity is hardly more intelligible to Francis Jay, its quester from the West. Reared on theories about the death of man and of the end of history, Francis Jay is ill-equipped to cross the spiritual desert left behind by the totalitarian regimes, which threatens to entice and assimilate him into the ethical void of suspended judgement. My essay is focused on this intercultural encounter, which develops into a study of cultural syndromes. The social comparisons of Bradbury’s Slaka novels (Rates of Exchange, 1983, and Why Come to Slaka?, 1986), polarised between western favouritism and eastern devaluation, seem now to have been touched by the spirit of multiculturalism which had set in after the thaw. Instead of being woven into a picture of sharp contrasts, the cultural differences between East and West yield, in Doctor Criminale, a shared pattern of ethnic stereotyping with the genealogy of evil cutting across the Eastern-Western divide. The rhetorical devices are concomitantly discussed whereby the claim to cognitive privilege is being subverted. Bradbury inverts the generic forms to which a revelatory function is ascribed, such as: the quest plot, the Eucharist, or, the consecrating meeting, the education novel, and the nostum (return) plot.

The Inverted Quest The novel is cast in the convention of the “innocent abroad:” Francis Jay is hired by a TV channel, called “Eldorado,” to document the case of a philosopher of mixed East-European identity for “Nada Productions” in the early nineties. The conspicuously queer names of the channel and of the TV producers function as signs of recognition for the place-less-ness

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(ou-topos) of imaginary travels: as the plot unfolds, the Western traveller exchanges the utopian project of a spiritual encounter for its dystopian actualisation, without ever losing contact with the firm ground of a Europe known from maps. The last decade of the century was dawning over a battlefield of signs and symbols instead of armies: statues and busts fell, the Berlin Wall had toppled to an art collection of sorts, “whose pieces were fetching high prices on the art marketplace, especially if signed by Honecker” (Bradbury 2000, 3). Readability and interpretation are difficult, even for an Oedipus versed in French poststructuralism, like Francis Jay, called upon to unravel the mystery of Bazlo Criminale, the “Lukács of the Nineties” (Bradbury 2000, 20), who had not merely survived but bested the second half of a dark century. As Jay suspects Criminale of some secret covenant with networks of power, he sets off besieged by doubts and ends up deceived, thereby reversing the traditional progress towards enlightenment and revelation which reward the virtuous hero in quest-related romances. Going eastwards in the marshy early nineties, Jay fails the test of this Chapel Perilous of sorts: the phoney Grail was bound to poison his own vision. Robert A. Morace places David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury within a distinct tradition of contemporary writing, the Anglo-liberal novel, which asserts individual responsibility (Morace 1989, 188) at a time of moral latitudinarianism, nihilism and agnosticism. Contrariwise, in The Theory of the Novel, which Jay is leafing through on the train to Budapest, Georg Lukács extols the politics of compromise. The hero of mature manhood is resigned before the ineluctable flow of time: he comes to accept the objectivity of the outer world only through struggle and by committing errors: the seeds and the traces of the lost meaning can be seen everywhere; . . . the Enemy has his origin in the same lost land as the Knight of essence; life has had to lose the immanence of meaning so that immanence might be everywhere in view. From now on . . . time will possess a merciless force, and nobody will be able to swim against its current, or to check its unpredictable course with the dams of apriorism. However, a sense of resignation sets in: . . . even if the direction is meaningless, it is a direction for all that. (Lukács 1977, 127, our translation)

The individual who chooses to remain faithful to the commandments of his inner self is isolated and defeated, spells out the politicised aesthetics of Lukács, Criminale’s frequently quoted master. Political necessity is elevated to an absolute.

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Guilt is shared by the whole community—an anonymous political system taking all the blame—while the human agents are proclaimed heroes just for having survived and pitied merely for having experienced it. Jay’s reference to Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain on his way to Budapest, where Lukács is cast as a figure of wisdom, reflects back on his failing initiation in light of a philosophy which can no longer tell the Knight from the Enemy.

The Failed Eucharist The multiplication of quest schemata is a narrative device meant to subvert myths and monologism. Jay features as a neophyte in an education novel, which, in the twelfth chapter, takes the form of a reverse Holy Supper, with Criminale playing Jesus, pastor, and Jay, his apostle. They are together on the deck of a steamer on Lake Geneva, during one of the three conferences starring Criminale in the novel, on which occasion Jay, the investigating journo, sees himself reduced to the object of “his teacher’s unquenchable desire to instruct and explain” (Bradbury 2000, 235). Criminale’s discourses are underwritten by the ethical relativism of the zig-zag myth, which reconciles the opposite demands of ideologically unstable societies, leaving room for successive revisions and radical, unpredictable changes. You see, my dear young fellow, history always goes on, always takes a shape, whether we like it or not . . . . What I was talking about, I think, was the end of homo historicus, the individual who finds meaning or an intention in history. (Bradbury 2000, 234)

Homo historicus used to “look before and after” and feed his visions into designs of setting the world right no less exacting than Hamlet’s. Contrariwise, in totalitarian societies, political abuse and compromise displace justice. What people do goes down in the records, which are periodically brought up as evidence of political crimes. As the notion of “political orthodoxy” changes overnight, what used to be right looks bad now, so that people have to run for cover and negotiate their freedom or lives with the new party. Criminale plays by the rules, and survives, while dissenting Irini, his former lover in Budapest, disappears in the mists of the short-lived Hungarian Revolution. No wonder, therefore, that Criminale should feel uncomfortable about the past, which embarrasses him, and helpless about the future, which is looming ahead as a chaotic mystery.

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His talk on ethics is summed up as a latter day version of fideism: “we cannot tell good from evil, reality from illusion” (Bradbury 2000, 234). The only religion he can pass on to Jay is the fetishist cult of the cigars he had got from Castro: they must be respected, that is, smoked in the proper manner. As shown a bit later, in his panel address to an audience at Montreaux on the subject of photography and desire, which celebrates the libidinal body “to the point of shockability and outrage” (Bradbury 2000, 238), his reverse Eucharist is the revelation of the body, and his apostle, a lady who wants him to take her photo. Is living in the unstable East a fatality, or, rather, the fruit of conniving in evil until it escapes control? Criminale’s philosophy of political expedience allows the individual to hide behind the anonymous “masses” and escape judgement. He had lived to the end of an epoch when survival was often conditional on betraying others. The Judas role is now played by Ildiko, Criminale’s publisher in Budapest, and, probably, his former mistress. She informs Jay that, while that globe-trotting philosopher was parading as anti-Communist dissident in the West, his wife, Gertla, was reporting back to the secret police. Although Criminale affects to ignore Ildiko’s presence at a conference in Italy, where Jay is trying to track him down, she is privy to his private life back in Budapest, as well as his Swiss bank accounts. Or is she just a member of a secret network of political and financial interests which had used Criminale as “bag-man” and had sent her over to recover its fraudulent funds? Ildiko’s failure to show up at a conference in England toward the end of the novel may, indeed, suggest that she knew too much for her own safety. Her unopened conference wallet is, for Jay, one of the unreadable signs of the baffling East. Shocked by Ildiko clearing out Criminale’s hard-currency bank account and disappearing, Jay feels suddenly projected into a state of what he calls “adult innocence.” That is, possessed of the capacity to take the world as it is, to reconcile one’s inner scruples to the hard and amoral, objective facts. As Jay cashes, from the allegorical “Crédit Mauvais,” the cheque left behind by Ildiko as his cut from her illicit gains, he tends to attribute his loss of innocence to life in general. Having learned from Criminale that humans are born in conflict and deception, he gives up on his hermeneutic quest. Concomitantly, the narrative voice shifts from first to third person: He was last seen going through passport control, one of a long line of people, quite evidently no longer looking for Doctor Bazlo Criminale. (Bradbury 2000, 256)

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The prospective hero of singular and memorable deeds gets lost among the anonymous crowds going the way of all flesh.

A Blurred Moral Pattern. The dragons confronting Bradbury’s pilgrim to the East in the nineties are mainly counterfeited identities. The politics of the former totalitarian societies in Eastern and Central Europe had unpersoned people, forcing upon them roles that conformed to their ideologies. They can only speak the truth of masks, which even after the collapse of the system are sticking to their character as a compulsive secondary nature. Criminale had paraded as a scholar in the West, while acting as informant and bag-man. The book on him, signed by Prof. Otto Codicil of Vienna and selling well in the West, had actually been written by an embittered ex-wife and police informant. Codicil himself neglects teaching for the sake of political conspiracies, while his latest book is being written by his assistant, who is doing his doctoral dissertation with him. A Russian conferee to Italy has never done any research; another, sells his identity. The one-time “professional” dissenters are at a loss to discover what it is they are dissenting from. As for Sandor Hollo, Criminale’s disciple, he is a hollow-man and shape-shifter who goes through an entire paradigm of roles in a society caught in the grips of a ruthless fight for survival. Amoral tycoons shape the community in their own image, as the linkage actors of the return to Europe have but a shallow indigenous basis of support. The totalitarian East had generally spawned a parasitic culture of opposition, based on an automatic procedure of turning upside down, for political purposes, theories of the intellectual West: In fact he had simply to catch sight of a German philosopher and he was in there after the jugular, only to glimpse a key modern idea and he was gnawing it like a bone. (Bradbury 2000, 24)

As the scaffolding of the power system is removed, this mushroom outgrowth of pseudo-culture becomes as pointless as the work of the former dissidents whose métier had been a parody of political resistance. The end of the Cold War had dissipated the Westerners’ hermeneutics of suspicion concerning the East. A case like Criminale’s provokes no more moral anxieties: Maybe that’s what a modern master really is. Someone who learns to swim with the flow, turn with the tide. But still bends history to his own advantage, so he can still do something. (Bradbury 2000, 34)

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This is the fiction Bradbury interrogates and progressively dismantles through Jay’s application of the deconstructionist grid on the Criminale text: a life full of contradictions, blanks and deceptions shows through. He discovers that travellers from the East, such as Criminale, had been used as spy-channels by corrupt men of power, who were living a double life themselves, depositing money in western banks, bribing, buying technologies, and secretly enjoying the comforts of an advanced civilisation, while denouncing it publicly. Bradbury’s 1992 novel casts a wider net than that of a study in mirror societies, that is, in alternative ways of being. He opens a wide vista into Europe’s past history, identifying the germs of moral atrophy particularly in the Vienna of the early twentieth century: the irrational tendencies of vanguard movements, their break with the tradition of the Enlightenment and attack on reason and high culture. He looks ahead, hunting for signs of corruption among the Euro-framers and Euro-fixers at the very heart of New Europe. The shifting focus, the panning of the narrative camera now this way, now that way, as Jay exchanges the puzzles of the East for the political arcana in the West, or the marshy polis life in the Latino Third World, lend the novel an air of objectivity and allow Bradbury to emerge as a trustworthy referee on the ethical battlefield of a radically changing world.

Homelessness: or, the East in the Nineties “Homeless,” the title of Criminale’s most acclaimed book, labels the condition of the East emerging from behind the Iron Curtain as a scorched ground. He himself is a new type of intellectual as frequent flyer from one place to another, travelling to foreign congresses, advising ministers, and sitting on committees, living a life in the jumbo-jet, with stopovers which are as many occasions for staging some Criminale show as political star in any land, across the former political frontiers. Constructed as Criminale’s foil for depth of effect, Otto Codicil, his pseudo-biographer in Vienna, parades as an awesome public figure and keeps moving in diplomatic circles, looking down on English philosophers, such as Earl Russell or G. E. Moore, who, as his docile assistant, Gerstenbäcker, scoffingly remarks, will withdraw to some country-seat, doing part-time philosophy and posing such odd questions as “Do I mean what I say when I say what I mean?” (Bradbury 2000, 71). The queries of logical semantics are superfluous to cynical philosophers who allow themselves to be used as pawns “in the power’s project which can range from extreme left to extreme right” (Bradbury 2000, 235).

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The sense of emptiness caused by historical dislocation and discontinuity breeds bitterness and nihilism, makes social contacts tense and difficult. Criminale, Codicil and Ildiko are restless souls, travelling from nowhere to nowhere, as if trying to escape their traumatic memories. All of them are dehistoricised personalities, in perpetual flight from their past which, however, keeps haunting them and finally destroys them. Having been bereft of the support of a national tradition in occupied countries, which, moreover, were being demonised by the Western Cold War propaganda, their minds have come to act in a way similar to the migrant’s (Ward et al. 2001, 104-5), that is, they subject out-group cultures to negative stereotyping. Codicil and Criminale’s overbearing attitude and critique of the West, as well as Ildiko’s patronising attitude to Jay, may very well be symptoms of their envy of the self-centred, traditional societies. In the early twentieth century it was the English countryside and the English language, cherished by “countryside philosophers” of timeless values, rather than the “vainglorious Empire” cult that would provide the cultural narratives used to define “Englishness” (see Gervais 1996, 69-70). By contrast, the contemporary history of Bulgaria, Criminale’s birthplace, may be said to have been the record of its loss of origin, in so far as the mythology unifying the nation over the Cold War years had centred on the tomb of Georgi Dimitrov, the “hero” who had “liberated them to the Russians” (Bradbury 2000, 30). Veliko Turnovo, “the ancient capital of Bulgaria, situated on the old trade routes that had run from east to west” (Bradbury 2000, 30) had gyrated from West to East, from the intrinsic to the ex-centric hearth of the nation. The glory of the former site of pilgrimage had been short lived: “since the winds of change blew, his resting place has been gutted and is up for commercial development, probably by McDonald’s Hamburgers” (Bradbury 2000, 30). This is not the tomb of Jesus, out of which He has risen to give a new faith to the world, but the Chapel Perilous of dead bones blown over by the winds, a proper symbol for whole nations violently dislodged from their traditional course and cast into alien moulds. Jay’s journey starts in Vienna, wherefrom, as it is suggested, the original shock wave of the twentieth-century political overthrows had extended. The loss of the Empire in 1918 (“our empire, our borders, our pride” [Bradbury 2000, 69]) had been perceived, according to Gerstenbäcker, as the loss of “everything:” “our meaning, our history, our reality” (Bradbury 2000, 70). Vienna had become a place where one thing quickly turned into something else long before its disappearance as a political-administrative entity into four zones in mid-century.

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In occupied Vienna, “you could go in the front door of a building and still be in Russia. But if you had a key to the back door you could walk out and now be in America” (Bradbury 2000, 73). Memory erasure and brainwashing were the absolute conditions for survival in a place where to have an idea or a side is one day right and the next day wrong, where every choice, every thought, is a gamble that maybe you win or maybe lose, where what is patriotic now is treachery then. (Bradbury 2000, 73)

Going from here to Budapest, Jay moves into a similar landscape, successively written over and erased. Living in Post-Cold War Budapest, Hazy Ildiko and Sandor Hollo, Jay’s next links on his Criminale chase, feel suspended in some hazy and hollow no-man’s land. Bradbury shows a remarkable insight into the international dimension of transition in the nineties, which, as Geoffrey Pridham remarks, called for a correlation between domestic contexts and legitimacy within European organisations: Regime change usually involves some form of confrontation with national history. This is invariably uncomfortable and perhaps painful, since it requires not merely a rejection of the preceding regime but also a slice of national experience which may have longer roots. It is very likely that international factors are involved here, as such questions like national pride and credibility, the international component of system legitimacy and the need for establishing or reviving national influence in the international community arise. (Pridham 1997, 24)

The ideologies of the East had collapsed at the same time as the political structures sustaining them, leaving behind a cultural void, while the poverty inherited from the communist regime was not propitious to the rebuilding of a national tradition. The low costs of production attract moviemakers, who further defamiliarise the local space: “Now we are Paris, now we are Moscow, now we are Nice, now we are London, now we are Sydney, Australia. Never of course Budapest” (Bradbury 2000, 95). Budapest can only be defined negatively: “unreal city,” “Disney Land,” “pretend world” (Bradbury 2000, 99). Whereas the last war had modified geographical maps, rendering some nations “homeless,” over the beginning of the nineties was brooding a sense of lack in cultural identity. The monuments of the recent past were now staring at Hungarians emptied even of the alternative value they had been ascribed: the monument with the winged victory on the top, erected on Gellert Hill dedicated to the Russian soldiers, or the white building, Budapest Hilton, built on Castle Hill as a monument of grateful thanks to the Americans who had sent them

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Coca-Cola. Life in the East had taught Hollo that history was “either one of these, or the other. This year we are all for the Hilton” (Bradbury 2000, 97). Having gone through so many upheavals, he has come to see change as the rationale of social life and surviving as the ultimate test of a man’s worth. The Wende rendered permanent does not call for agents but for the instruments and channel—Wendehals—of some unintelligible political design. .

Changing Frames An experience of otherness is a defence against dogmatism. Analogies between the former sworn enemies, the Eastern and Western political blocs, are pressed home through a range of devices: the interplay of points of view, repeated situations, and incremental symbols. Jay, for instance, learns about the rise of the Iron Curtain and puzzles over the practical efficiency of duplicitous conduct under extreme political circumstances while still in England. Likewise, he reads about the end of the Thatcher Era in an Austrian paper, where the Iron Lady is presented as a heroine of our times (an opinion shared by Hollo, the advocate of the free-market), while Jay’s insider view is that her time had been one of deception and betrayal. From individual cases in the East, the protagonist rises to generalisations about the condition and standards of contemporary civilisation on either side of the Atlantic; with its political insecurity and precarious cultural order, constantly threatening to break down into the deterritorialised expanse of indifferent nature, Buenos Aires bids no favourable comparison to the Budapest of Jay’s memory: By the same token, Buenos Aires was the Budapest of Latin America, a European city that was not built in Europe at all. Its fine early modern buildings—ministries and synagogues, merchants’ palaces, great apartments, grand banks—had evidently been designed for some other site or country entirely, and then set down on strange soil amid sub-tropical vegetation, European tastes and cultural dreams laid over a world of lost history and chaotic libertarian adventuring. (Bradbury 2000, 261)

In this way, the author cannot be blamed for demonising the European East; he is sooner trying to define himself and his own culture through an encounter with the Other and to carry out experiments in the nature of man and the world under different historical conditions. Bradbury’s view of character, however, may be said to err on the side of metaphysical essentialism. Could Criminale have remained identical

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with himself through time? We see Doctor Criminale engineering his public self, dressing up expensively, posing to photographers, stagedirecting his own entries and exits on public occasions, modulating his voice and controlling his gestures, while the inside man is untouched. He is a narrative device, a carrier of ideology: the spokesman of the ambiguous “Perestroika” age of political cosmetics in the East. While Jay is being hypnotised by Criminale’s cunning sophistry, a visitor to England from the philosopher’s Bulgarian birthplace is allowed to act as the moral centre of the novel. Dr. Ludmilla Markova, from Veliko Turnovo, will not follow the example of her famous compatriot. He had lived in chaos, he had written of chaos. In the West, chaos theory was the latest fashion. In the East, chaos had been the grim reality. Westerners, therefore, had better stop playing with their dangerous fictions, for they could take root. “Perhaps you do not see what seeds you are sowing” (Bradbury 2000, 335), she warns a “late liberal” version of Francis Jay, who had opened the door to scepticism. Philosophical latitudinarianism inhibits the ethically discriminating Kantian subject, allowing of the birth of Criminale social types, who are in for any compromise.

Conclusion What was, actually, Eastern Europe like in the nineties? Who were the people who had got the freedom to walk over the ruins of the Berlin Wall? Were they bodies in which the souls were stirring with new life? Or had only their bodies been beamed up into the Western skies? Whom had Doctor Criminale killed, as his name suggests? It is true that he had not raised a finger to save Irini, knowing it would have been useless anyway. Cornered by Jay, Criminale is forced to make a statement on his own, “strange,” case. But it is not a confession. Just one more fashionable lie about some presumed sexual abuse he had suffered as a child. He insists on pleading non-guilty. The very moment his disreputable past is assumed by him as inevitable rather than as something to be exorcised, it becomes a sin of conscience. Whatever motives the readers might have had so far to sympathise with Criminale, they are gone now. Criminale’s soul had long been dead, actually. It is only his body that gets launched, in jumbo jets, into the sky of the West. Not the whole East is dead, though, considering that the author’s spokeswoman against the spiritual death going by the name of “posthumanism” is Bulgarian Ludmilla Markova. Historical Evil, in Bradbury’s novel of the nineties, is unstuck in space, being often spawned

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by the “danger artist” or philosopher. It is a political liability, not an ethnic fatality. What Doctor “Criminale” has killed, it seems, is only his spirit: he is incapable of coming clean, of telling the truth about himself. But which self? For in those times everybody was split into several. What is it that gives substance to a self? Jay realises it dimly at the end of his quest: “few of us have worked up enough of a self to resist giving in, giving up, going over . . . to resist the ‘mule philosophy’ that ‘everything is an acceptable worldview’” (Bradbury 2000, 340). The self is thus defined as Will, what Stoic Epictetus understood by proaieresis: the inviolable, highest form of selfhood, which not even God can conquer: “But nothing else can conquer Will except Will itself” (Epictetus, Discourses, 1.29). Kirk Hallahan’s dissociation between consequences-based ethics and duty-based ethics may profitably be brought up at this point, as it is the crux of Criminale’s ethical dilemma as well: Consequences-based ethics also incorporate a teleological approach to ethics, which suggests that the obtained result is what’s important. Teleos is the Greek word for “the good” or “the end.” Using this rationale, the end justifies the means because the benefits exceed the costs. This is particularly true if the results produce happiness, pleasure, or the greatest social good . . . . Duty-based ethics are grounded in deontological ethics, which rejects utilitarianism and argues that people must employ proper means and act with good intentions regardless of outcomes. Deontology is based on the Greek word deon, for “duty” or “obligation.” (Hallahan 2006, 118)

Criminale’s amoral “efficks”1 spells out social success, but also danger for the intellectual standing on the outer circle of the whirlpool of power. As his career of “happiness, pleasure” and “the greatest social good” comes to an abrupt end on being knocked over by a suspect helmeted cyclist in the New World (Bradbury 2000, 327), Bradbury’s 1992 novel may be read as a throw back on the pre-Machiavellian, Ciceronian ethics of honesta utilitas: only that is useful which is also good. The political battlefield between East and West recedes behind the shared trial scene of ethical judgement.

Notes 1. “You may be tempted to adopt the cynical, amoral approach. This was summed up by a national newspaper editor, invited to a London journalism school to give a talk on ethics. ‘Efficks / wot’s that?’ he asked, bemused . . . . Or cynicism

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may be linked to a philosophical, existential position which regards all human experience as essentially amoral. Ethical egotism takes a cynical view of the altruism behind moral conduct, suggesting that all actions (however much they are clothed in the rhetoric of morality) are essentially motivated by self-interest” (Keeble 2001, 124).

References Bradbury, Malcolm. 1983. Rates of Exchange. New York: Knopf. . 1986. Why Come to Slaka? London: Secker and Warburg. . 2000. Doctor Criminale. London: Picador. Duff, David ed. 2000. Modern Genre Theory. Harlow: Longman, Pearson Education Limited. Epictetus. Discourses. http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/e/epictetus/e65d/ book1.html (accessed January 21, 2009). Gervais, David. 1996. Literary Englands. Versions of “Englishness” in Modern Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hallahan, Kirk. 2006. Responsible Online Communication. In Ethics in Public Relations. Responsible Advocacy. Ed. Kathy Fitzpatrick and Carolyn Bronstein, 107-30. London: Thousand Oaks. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Keeble, Richard. 2001. Ethics for Journalists. London and New York: Routledge. Lukács, Georg. 1977. Teoria romanului. Bucureti: Editura Univers. Morace, A. Robert. 1989. The Dialogic Novels of Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. Pridham, Geoffrey. 1997. The international dimension of democratization: theory, practice and inter-regional comparisons. In Building Democracy? The International Dimension of Democratisation in Eastern Europe. Ed. Geoffrey Pridham, Eric Herric and George Sanford, 7-29. London and Washington: Leicester University Press. Ward, Colleen with Stephen Bochner and Adrian Furnham. 2001. The Psychology of Culture Shock. Bungay, Suffolk: Routledge.

EXPLORING THE PRESENT THROUGH THE PAST—WHOSE PRESENT?

EMERGING PASTS: RUSSIA’S RELIGIOUS LANDSCAPES IN CONTEMPORARY TRAVEL WRITING ELMAR SCHENKEL

When the Iron Curtain fell, not only physical and political, but also metaphysical landscapes were gradually rediscovered in the East by Western writers. Travel writers were the first to explore forgotten religious groups emerging from the totalitarian past, ranging from “Jumpers” and “Milkdrinkers” to Siberian shamans. These writers have been both intrigued and appalled, but they brought back a message of multiple worlds and the ongoing power of myth, image and belief. The reported phenomena are fascinating in themselves, but the travelogues inevitably also reflect the writers’ Western perceptions and religious or ideological needs. In this paper, I shall concentrate on travel writing produced by Western travellers during or after perestroika taking Christopher Hope and Philip Marsden as examples. When we look at the position of religion in the Soviet system the first thing to be noted is that Soviet modernisation was not comprehensive. It produced different speeds in terms of industrialisation and ideology, urbanisation and religion. Thus the term “pseudo-modernisation” has been applied to what happened after the October Revolution (Varga 195, 233). Or, put differently: The incomplete and forced character of Soviet modernization and secularization helps explain why the religious renaissance was possible and became so influential in post-Soviet societies. (Titarenko 2007, 35-6)

Western travellers during the Cold War period have registered this incomplete modernisation as the survival of religious feelings and rituals under the cover of personality cult and the belief in rodina, the motherland (e.g. Thubron 1989, 133-134.). The triumphant return of the Russian Orthodox Church is one of the important phenomena noted by Western travel writers in the posttotalitarian period. A key experience for some of them is the stories they

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are told about the famous Christ the Saviour Church. It can be seen as a religious barometer of the country. The Polish journalist and travel writer Ryszard Kapu ci ski, who reported about the crumbling Soviet Empire in his Imperium (1994), devoted a chapter to the foundation, destruction and subsequent rebuilding of the Moscow church intended to commemorate the fact that Russia was saved from Napoleon in 1812. Kapu ci ski writes about the difficulties of building the church over several generations before it was finally consecrated in 1883. This national symbol, the “largest sacral object in Moscow” (Kapu ci ski 1994, 99) was rased by Stalin, and Kapu ci ski compares this act to the destruction of St. Peter’s in Rome. Stalin then ordered a gigantic Palace of the Soviets to be built on this ground. However, this plan to realise one of his greatest dreams, including a statue of Lenin that was to surpass the Statue of Liberty, did not come true. Kapu ci ski gleefully records the subsequent obstacles and the fact that eventually Khrushchev had to order a swimming pool be built there. It is interesting to see what happens to this oft-repeated story about the Church of Christ the Saviour in a travelogue written by a South African novelist who visited Moscow a decade or so later. Christopher Hope’s Moscow! Moscow! (Hope 1990) is a fascinating glimpse not only into a transforming society but also into the observer’s own society undergoing similar changes. Hope resorts to a Russian eye-witness, thus conveying a deeper sense of authenticity. An old archaeologist tells him about the destruction that took place when the Moscow Metro was built, and “he winces when he summons up the ghosts of palaces, churches and houses swept away” (Hope 1990, 44). Hope’s witness adds more details to the story, e.g. that the statue of a giant Lenin was to cast a bright red beam visible for miles while Khrushchev’s swimming pool foreshadowed later events. The archaeologist sees it as a “giant baptismal font where all of Moscow goes to bathe but cannot wash away their sins” (Hope 1990, 46). Hope’s book covers several visits to the city in the 1980s and thus is a fascinating guide to effects of perestroika. His writing is inspired by parallels to the South African transformation taking place simultaneously: “Nowhere, since I left South Africa, had I found a society where the talk was all of reform, of change, nor any place where less of it was to be seen” (Hope 1990, 2). His place of origin often elicits racist comments or at least undermines expectations. If he is from Africa, why is he not black? A soldier who tries to defect from his country considers going to South Africa because there he could kill black Africans. Hope also draws parallels to political processes and to political language back home.

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The Communist Party faces similar problems as the National Party in South Africa: “It claims to be leading the reform, while all the time its credibility leaks away” (Hope 1990, 110). All his chapter headings are quotes from Hamlet and thus surreptitiously respond to the Hamlet cult in Russian literature. Hope actually meets someone in Moscow who is the epitome of Hamlet “and, as expected, he wore black and spoke well” (Hope 1990, 61). This Hamlet turns out to be an Armenian from NagornoKarabakh who is the leader of some religious sect. The meeting of this group takes place in an apartment and is part of a network of secret places that evolved after the Revolution. But there is something uncanny about this Hamlet. When he begins to preach, using his fresh experience of Moslem-Christian clashes in Nagorno-Karabakh, Hope suddenly remembers why all this seems so familiar to him. It is exactly the same combination of religion and nationalism that he experienced in South Africa, expressed by black nationalists in Soweto and by white Afrikaner nationalists. The tribal argument, that is when nationalism and religion become identical and the “will of God” is seen to be behind historical acts, uses “rhetoric of special destinies,” all of which makes Hope feel “rather sadly at home” (Hope 1990, 65). This is one of several religious manifestations in his book and all of them point to suppression by a rival religion. Hope goes out of his way to describe the pseudo-religious nature of the Communist cityscape. Lenin serves as a good example. Hope becomes fascinated with the different versions of statues and busts of the great leader and of course he does not miss out on the Lenin Mausoleum. Lenin’s preserved corpse is simply one example in a long tradition of keeping the bodies of saints, heroes or pharaohs: “And so it is for religious reasons that we have come here, waiting our turn patiently to file past the miraculously preserved body of the saint. We are pilgrims in anorak” (Hope 1990, 165). On the whole, Hope perceives a spiritual tenacity in Russian society, which may take many guises. One of them is poetry, which is “a broad church for many” (Hope 1990, 85). Thus he witnesses the first public poetry reading by a woman who had been silenced by the authorities because she wrote on religious themes. The reading is indeed imbued with the atmosphere of a religious service and Hope stresses the religious devotion of the audience. However, he may just not be familiar with Russian poetry readings, which are very different from Western style readings. Declamation and incantation have always been part of Russian public performances (cf. e.g. Nitzberg 2003, 3-8). When Hope visits an important Russian Orthodox place he becomes fully aware of the strange position of the Church vis-à-vis the State, a

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question that has never been absent from Russian history to this day. At the same time, the view granted is one of transitions and processes. He is guided through Danilovsky Monastery by Father Sergius, who points out to what extent the monastery suffered from the post-revolutionary persecution. After 1926 it became a children’s home for orphans whose parents had been killed in the Stalinist purges, a kind of penitentiary place where the children had to thank Stalin and the Motherland for the air they breathed. When Hope asks Sergius whether they would put up a plaque to commemorate the children, the priest replies: It isn’t needed. Their presence is still felt. We welcome their ghosts, and the ghosts of the clergy who were lost to us. I am also against a memorial of the sort being suggested for the victims of Stalin. Do we wish to give the impression that remembering is limited to one person, one period? What of the crimes committed before, and after? (Hope 1990, 92)

This answer seems to confirm the impression that the Orthodox Church is somehow out of step with social developments and public understanding in general. Its view of history is bound to be different from the official one, in East or West, since history is seen in the light of transcendence. Possibly the term “history” does not really cover what is meant when someone like Father Sergius reflects on the past. Rather, the past seems to be simultaneous with the present. When Sergius tells about events in the history of the monastery that took place some seven hundred years before, Hope has the impression “as if all had happened within living memory, with a regrettable hiatus after 1918” (Hope 1990, 89). A transcendental view of history is what Philip Marsden is looking for on his travels which he described in The Spirit Wrestlers (Marsden 1999). In contrast to Hope, he is a profound student of Russian culture and has travelled extensively in Russia, Armenia and Eastern Europe. His best known work is the narrative travel book The Bronski House (Marsden 1995) which is an account of a woman’s journey back to Poland, from which she had to flee when the Germans invaded the country. Like The Bronski House, The Spirit Wrestlers shows strong narrative qualities. Marsden tries to use elements of suspense (surprising chapter endings, endings that raise expectations) and of plot. The pattern of his travels in Russia resembles a quest. It seems to be both a spiritual and intellectual adventure that Marsden has embarked upon when he begins to investigate Russia’s secret religions and sects. Marsden, too, takes a view of the Church of Christ the Saviour before he starts on his journey. While Hope and Kapu ci ski only saw the swimming pool, Marsden witnessed the consecration of the cornerstone in 1991. The story of the site serves as a

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prelude to Marsden’s extraordinary journey into religion, which is also a descent into Russia’s past. Here he hopes to find traces and survivors of the suppressed sects. However, the journey begins in the Lenin Library where he finds plenty of books on dissenters. But more detective work needs to be done to find out if and where they lived. Thus with a doctor, he studies maps of Southern Russia trying to locate possible groups of those survivors who have not emigrated.1 There is a youthful breeze of adventure, something like Treasure Island, over these pages. One afternoon Marsden decides it is time to leave Moscow and enters a list of topics into his brand new notebook, such as “Scythians” or “Spirit Wrestlers.” Marsden obviously prefers the margins of history, somewhere in the depths of what is called the province, because he feels that the most significant changes in history have come from these very backwaters. Empires have been toppled by provincial peoples and it is certainly in these margins that the Empire has been weakest. The Czar was remote and therefore sects and dissent could thrive without too much intervention. One of the most important places where dissent has bred over the century and produced more sects than anywhere else is the Southern town of Tambov. Time and again, Marsden will find traces of the Tambov legacies on his route.2 His interest in the Doukhobors is probably also motivated by the intuition that the truth is hidden and has to be searched for in unlikely places. The “Spirit Wrestlers” are descendents of radical sectarians of the eighteenth century; they are related to other groups like the Khlysty (flagellants) or the Skoptsy (the castrated ones) or the Ikonobortsy (iconoclasts). Some of them trace their origin back to the fiery furnaces of ancient Babylon. Light is their central metaphor. Since the spirit is in every one of us, they resent priesthood, liturgy and the church. Leo Tolstoy supported the Doukhobors and donated the proceedings of his novel Resurrection so they could emigrate to British Columbia. The writer and his disciples shared features of lifestyle and attitude with the Doukhobors, not least among them that many were and are vegetarians and pacifists. Marsden uses all kinds of literary devices to convey interesting historical information. Thus individual encounters are important, but they are often complemented by brief historical surveys that locate the individual or the episode in the larger setting of history. All the religious groups he gradually looks up while going south toward the Caucasus have a terrible story of persecution and torture to tell. This is why meeting with these people and listening to their stories has become possible only after perestroika. Most of the evidence had been suppressed by the Communist

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regime and it was dangerous even to talk about experiences. Now Marsden does not find it too difficult to learn about what really happened. From the Doukhobors he is led to an Old Believer, who is also a great collector of icons. Viktor Stepanovich was betrayed by a neighbour and had to spend five years in a Siberian bauxite mine. But collecting sacred objects had been a protection for him as well. It helped him survive the ideological violence done to him and his creed not only in Soviet times, but for the last 350 years. Marsden uses the opportunity to take his readers on a brief trip into the history of the Orthodox Church and the schism that produced the Old Believers and their dogma. The persecution of the Old Believers is a well-known fact (Bremer 2007, 233-37), and to some extent the continuous splitting-up of beliefs may be a testimony to non-Christian tensions or pagan remains informing certain religious practices. Thus dvoeverie, the dual forms of belief, may be part of a religious folk tradition fusing Orthodox and pagan values (Bremer 2007, 25, 68). But as long as dvoeverie is suppressed either by the Church or the State, such deviant forms of belief will be forced underground or find new ways of being expressed. Marsden’s trip coincides as it were with the re-awakening of dvoeverie, which also presupposes new levels of tolerance. After overcoming some adventurous obstacles, Marsden reaches Pokrovka, a village of Old Believers on the shores of the Sea of Azov, and meets Father Gyorgi who provides him with more recent information. The Old Believers had been persecuted from the time of Peter the Great onwards and many had left the country, migrating to Turkey or to the Danube Delta. Some had lost their culture and belief having become fishermen in the Bosphorus, others like Father Gyorgi’s group had settled comfortably in Romania. But after the Second World War, Stalin tried to gather stray Russian communities abroad and invited them back. The return was a disaster, many of them died and the village in which they were to settle was but a row of ruins. It is altogether a wonderful story of belief and strength which helped them rebuild their village and establish a flourishing community against all odds: “They would continue to pray until they had a solution” (Marsden 1999, 77). But Marsden’s explorations also incite the Old Believers to become more interested in their own history. So together they visit remote settlements of Old Believers outside the village. Marsden and his companion hear all kinds of stories of persecution, famine, of Cossack rebellions and the revolution. The priest in a sense has to take the burden over from them, the previous generation. They need him because he can face and communicate the past to the future: “‘You’re young, you’re allowed to look at the past’” (Marsden 1999, 81).

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In contrast to the Doukhobors, the Old Believers as well as Orthodox Christians cherish icons. Hence Marsden does not miss the opportunity to tell us about this important part of religious culture. For many Western travellers, who are likely to underrate or downplay the importance of visual religious symbolism, icon worship has been a continuous source of fascination and puzzlement. Marsden is no exception: “For me, icons themselves have never been as interesting as the passions they produce in others” (Marsden 1999, 85). These passions included not only extreme forms of worship and strange legends, but also the passion with which Communists were apt to destroy them. Marsden tells one of these stories in which Stalinists ripped icons from the walls and scattered them on the floors of the kolkhoz piggeries.3 Marsden and Father Gyorgi then visit an old icon-painter, Father Yevgeny, who is not himself an Old Believer. After discussing the craft and its materials, Marsden wants to know what it was that had made him paint. It seems to be a question that releases the painter from his religious “dogma” and returns him to the original impulse of his childhood. When he saw icons as a child he felt a light and an ecstasy in himself and ever since I have felt the same ecstasy in the face of beauty—not just joy but an ecstasy so intense I do not know what to do. That is what makes me paint. (Marsden 1999, 88)

The foreign traveller once again has succeeded in eliciting a response that without his presence might possibly never have been articulated. It is at such points that Marsden’s travel narrative gains momentum. It is no longer a simple recording of facts and events encountered on the road but a moment of mutual illumination. Marsden is, however, not only interested in meeting with Christian sects, Orthodox Christians or Old Believers. He certainly is also fascinated with pagan and non-Christian religions. In post-totalitarian Russia, eclecticism thrives and includes both ancient and very recent religious and esoteric groupings.4 Russia today is apparently rich with so-called New Religiosity, though this need not be a specifically Russian phenomenon. In fact, the growing uncertainty of beliefs, the individualisation of Orthodox believers and the new eclecticism seems to point to the fact that Russia has joined the globalised community (Titarenko 2007, 47). Hence a traveller reared on the charms of the Western New Age will not find it too difficult to relate to Russia’s eclectic religiousness. It is maybe not even a recent phenomenon, though it has become more prominent and visible to the Western eye because of its affinities with Western belief systems. Thus a survey in post-Soviet countries revealed that many Orthodox believers

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also owned talismans or believed in telepathy and reincarnation (Titarenko 2007, 43). Marsden is fascinated by collective hallucinations or projections where individual beliefs converge with archetypal and tribal “passions they produce in others” (Marsden 1999, 85). These passions included not only extreme forms of worship and strange legends, but also the passion with which visions. Thus in Ossetia he notes the sightings of strange reptile-shaped aircraft when the Civil War broke out in 1991. As in the Balkans, bloodshed was preceded by sacred visions. St. George was seen frequently as a mounted figure in North Ossetia giving warnings or asking for milk. Such apparitions are, as Marsden claims, of pre-Christian origin and merge with the cult of a native sacred hero called Uastardji. Shrines on the roadside as well as drinking toasts still testify to his presence. This palimpsest-like nature of cultural phenomena holds a special interest for Marsden who sees himself also as a kind of religious archaeologist tracking present-day culture back into the deep past. From St. George, the patron-saint of Georgia, the path leads back to Uastardji with his winged horse and thus possibly reflecting Scythian or Alan heritage. However, Uastardji’s presence is still felt very powerfully, even in the office of the republic’s president, whom Marsden eventually pays a visit. This man has three telephones on his desk—yellow, grey and red: When the grey one rang, it was his secretary; when the yellow one rang, it was his wife. The red one remained silent. For all I knew, that was the one reserved for Uastardji himself. (Marsden 1999, 213)

The anecdote indicates the importance of ancient mythical and religious forces in parts of the former Soviet Union, or, for that matter, in modern civilization in general. Though Marsden never makes it explicit, it seems to be part of his mission to point out the continuing relevance of mythical images to contemporary life. Why else write for a Western audience about obscure Russian beliefs? Another non-Christian group Marsden traces back into the deep past are the Yezidis. A starting point is his Western knowledge of esoteric systems that appeared in the early twentieth century and resurfaced in the “New Age” in the 1970s. Marsden heard about the Yezidis through books by Gurdjieff and Pushkin, who allude to a mysterious sect whose beliefs are incompatible with any others. Since a central being in their mythology is a fallen angel, Melek Taus; Yezidis have for centuries been condemned as devil worshippers. It is one of Marsden’s tasks to counteract these prejudices since the Yezidis have been persecuted in Turkey, Iraq, Syria and other places both for their religion and their Kurdish ethnicity. Marsden thus gives some scope for their history and mythology, their

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symbols and their life-style and is impressed by the spirit of this community. A community leader tells him how he healed someone after that person had dreamt that he had been hit in the face by the leader. He came with pains in the head to the leader, who then massaged his chin until he got better. The man gave him a sheep as a sign of gratitude: “That is the way it is with us” (Marsden 1999, 230). The Yezidis also represent the oldest religion he encounters on his journeys. Combining ancient features of Babylonian and Iranian beliefs, it goes back to pre-Christian times. Yezidism appears to be a kind of matrix for all the later religions. Light is the theme of Marsden’s book and he experiences all kinds of variations on this theme when visiting various groups and sects. But it is the Yezidis that show him that this is indeed his central theme joining all the other religions, sects and denomination. To meet the Yezidi is to return to the origin and to better understand contemporary problems resulting from diversity: Light—always light. Light of the sun, light in the beginning, light as essence, light common to all faiths of this region, to Zoroastrians and Manichaeans, to the three monotheisms of the Book; light common to all the dogmatic believers I’d been with in the north—the golden light that came from the Molokans’ statue of Maria the Spinster, the gilded light that sanctified the icons of the Old Believers, the shard of light in us all that had driven the Doukhobors on their centuries-long, iconoclastic odyssey. (Marsden 1999, 232)

To the extent that the Yezidis and the other groups have enlightened him about his own project—which turns out to be a search for light or rather Light in a spiritual sense—his interlocutors have endowed his journey with meaning. In other words, his journey has been turned inside out; it has moved from a geographical-historical venture into Russia’s provinces to a quest into his self and our selves. This internalisation seems to be a phenomenon affecting many postSoviet Western travellers. Paul Hollander has commented critically on those Western pilgrims such as Shaw, the Webbs or Feuchtwanger who worshipped at the shrine of Socialism. They went to the USSR in order to find their expectations realised, their dreams come true. They were presented with Potemkin facades and came back elated, bearing a message to the world. Their own criticism of corrupt and alienating Western society had been vindicated. After these early days, the 1920s and 1930s, travellers became more critical and their horizons certainly opened tremendously in the years of perestroika and glasnost. Now that the facades were being removed other realities became visible and confronted

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the Western traveller with ugly truths about human society and oneself while the self had been excluded from the earlier pilgrimages. Whenever Western travel writers encounter religious phenomena they may be shocked by strange déjà-vu or simply curious. But they are always enlightened whether through opposition or consent. The religious odysseys of Western travellers in Russia certainly bear witness to the decline of religiousness in the West. To be lost in Russia, however, may well be a specific form of re-orientation for some Western travellers.

Notes 1. Some 30,000 Doukhobors now live in Canada. 2. Interestingly enough, the Russian harlequin in Heart of Darkness hails from the Tambov area. “Tambov was famously fertile ground for prophets, chiliasts and latter-day Christs” (Marsden 1999, 53). 3. Icons were used for target practices in the army, as pavement in mines, as potato crates, as boards for chopping meat or as fuel for stoves (Kapu ci ski 1994, 174). 4. Cf. e.g. Brougher 1997. There are numerous episodes in Western travel books reporting about healers, shamans and esotericism in general. Cf., among others, Kharitidi 1996, Schenkel 2005.

References Borowik, Irena and Grzegorz Babi ski, eds. 1997. New Religious Phenomena in Central and Eastern Europe. Kraków: Nomos. Bremer, Thomas. 2007. Kreuz und Kreml: Kleine Geschichte der orthodoxen Kirche in Russland. Freiburg: Herder. Brougher, Valentina. 1997. The Occult in Russian Literature of the 1990s. The Russian Review 56: 110-124. Hollander, Paul. 1981. Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba. Oxford: OUP. Hope, Christopher. 1990. Moscow! Moscow! London: Minerva. Kapu ci ski, Ryszard. 1994. Imperium. Trans. Klara Glowczewska. London: Granta Books. Kharitidi, Olga. 1996. Entering the Circle. New York: Harper Collins. Marsden, Philip. 1999. The Spirit-Wrestlers and Other Survivors of the Russian Century. London: Flamingo. Nitzberg, Alexander. 2003. Preface to Sprechende Stimmen. Russische Dichter lessen, ed. Alexander Nitzberg, 3-8. Cologne: Dumont. Schenkel, Elmar. 2005. Das sibirische Pendel. Eggingen: Isele. Thubron, Colin. 1989. Among the Russians. Anstey: Thorpe.

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. 1999 In Siberia. New York: Harper Collins. Titarenko, Larissa. 2007. Religion as an Indicator of Post-Soviet Transformation. In Church and Religious Life in Post-Communist Societies. Ed. Edit Révay and Miklós Tomka, 33-49. Budapest: Pázmány Társadalomtudomány. Varga, Ivan. 1995. Modernity or Pseudo-Modernity? Secularization or Pseudo-Secularization? Reflections on East-Central Europe. In Religion and the Transformations of Capitalism. Ed. R. Roberts, 23147. New York: Routledge. Wolff, Larry. 1994. Inventing Eastern Europe. The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford UP.

ACROSS THE LINE: BRITISH POST-WALL POETRY CINZIA MOZZATO

Pre-wall Perspectives Although British poetry of the eighties was hardly interested in experiencing the world beyond the Iron Curtain, the question of “Eastern countries” continued to flash across literary debates. Relating to an increasingly non-aligned territory of literary confrontation with the Eastern bloc, poetry in particular registered a sensible shift from a general concern with the “Eastern other” to a more specific concern with Central-European Europe. The transition was, of course, not so abrupt. On the one hand, a sort of stylised “setting” still represented the paradigm of “Eastern” sociopolitical oppression, as it had done since the late sixties; on the other hand, contemporary Eastern Europe was variously conjured up through the experiences and the works of Eastern writers engaged in the overt struggle against the political manipulation of history, that school where “text books lie” (Auden 1974, 37). If the unabated success of older poets of the Soviet sphere, like the Russian Osip Mandelstam, sanctioned the Western concern with the great terror—and consequently a broad identification of the Eastern bloc with an inchoate Sovietised land—Central European poets, like the Polish Czeslaw Miosz, elicited less obviously ideological readings. Eastern writers had long been regarded, in Joseph Brodsky’s words, as “witnesses to man” (Miosz 1983, 26). By the mid-eighties, their poetry was airing in the West visions of Central-Eastern Europe that harked back to its past, its divisions and its shifting ethnic/national boundaries, thus disrupting deep-seated views imposed by official history and also, more subtly, deconstructing from within a misleading, transversal “communist identity.” Even more crucially, these poets were bringing into light the twofold nature of Central-Eastern Europe and the extreme fragility of its geo-political configuration. As it became apparent in the post-Wall period, Eastern European history revolved on a cluster of

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histories that looked both central and residual to the twentieth century Weltanschauung,1 and that were defined by a blend of past (the Jewish question, the Second World War, national/political conflicts) as much as present (ethnic and social displacement, uninterrupted oppression) narratives. British poets proved highly sensitive to poets who, like Miosz, used freedom to engage morally with history. In fact, it was the Central Eastern poets’ paradigmatic experience of “dissidence and testimony” (Miosz 1986, 5), which most prickled the political-historical vision endorsed, in the first place, by writers with non-English and working class radical affiliations.2 Writing in the late eighties, Seamus Heaney remarked the potentially universal afflatus inherent in translated Eastern poets, and focused on their ability to strike a balance between historical concern and moral reflection (Heaney 1988, 36-44; Jarniewicz 2002, 24). This, he felt, was a model for both Western and British writers. Staples of Heaney’s radical agenda were a kind of poetry disentangled from any “hampered and deprived” condition imposed by political constraint and the longawaited emergence of a first person plural, viewed as a subject and an agent of history itself (Heaney 1986, 11). It was a radically European agenda, and its sharp ethical edge forerun perceptions that the AngloHungarian poet George Szirtes would eventually articulate, referring to Brodsky and to his fellow poet James Fenton: They were also Europeans and I am, I think, above all, a European. All that is good and all that is evil reside for me in the heart of Europe. (Szirtes 2002, 53)

Heaney’s critical perspectives chimed rather crucially with a wider focus on the “tongueless” histories hidden by official records and information. Between the eighties and the nineties, this focus was actually shared by some oppositional writers of the Thatcher age. Poets like Ken Smith and Tony Harrison were particularly concerned with the relentless disruption of their post-war liberal-democratic background as much as with the disappearance of different groups (the working- and the new underclass, ethnic minorities) from the spectrum of social history and political talk. In the aftermath of Thatcherism and of the Cold War, they would thus try hard to play off their demystifying, conflict-centred notion of history against the political and moral assuredness of Western Europe and in particular, against Western detachment from what happened on the former Eastern side.

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It was in the exploration of the post-Wall world that Harrison and Smith, amongst others, envisioned a potential subversion of historical imagination, and of the narratives which the Cold War worldview and political culture had partially submerged. Despite its marginality to the geo-political maps covered by British verse, the emersion of Eastern European long-obscured “geographies” was therefore crucial to bridge the distance between the West and the “Wild East” and to overcome epistemic impasses which lay tucked in Western historical frameworks. While providing counter-narratives to the topical identification of the Eastern bloc with its post-communist identity, post-Wall (Kostova 2000, 84) poets re-charted the borders and cast a searching light on Germany, CentralEurope, and the Balkans, carefully reading through the layers of recent history in order to investigate a shared European past.3

Landscapes and Mindscapes of War: Tony Harrison With today’s hindsight, British poets’ concern with Central-Eastern Europe and its past rather than with the realities of Eastern postcommunism might seem rather qualifying. It nonetheless opened up challenging dialogues with the post-Wall European memory while sharpening an awareness of ongoing tensions in the nineties. In this respect, 1989 signalled therefore both a move forward to a cohesive though transient view of contemporary Europe, and a shift backwards into the stories that revolved around it. As Ken Smith put it in “The Wall,” “we [were] / each other’s ghosts” (Smith 2002, 168): the unknown (the East) and the submerged (recent history) were recognised as a kind of dumb doppelgaenger for the ideologically and morally buttressed West. As we shall see, the resurgence of a “Nazi-Fascist” ghost, which the focus on red terror had somehow exorcised, was a case in point, as it proved crucial to post-wall visions of Germany and Poland. But the historical sweep of British poetry extended further to cover delicate aspects of recent history. All through the post-1989 European geography of “oblivion,” the nexus actual/imaginary inherent in the Cold War divided memory refracted on poetic memory.4 Old enemies, unknown yet familiar as in Wilfred Owen’s “Strange Meeting,” started to surface, leading poetry to the core of Central European stratified history. The border areas were the first where the Cold War patterns of historical apprehension were tested and found wanting. A paradigmatic case was provided by North-Eastern Germany: the impact of its difficult re-integration to the West after four decades of Eastern “captivity” was per se indicative of all the anxieties which had been lurking beneath the Cold

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War deep freeze and of the historical renegotiations which attended the shift to a post-Wall Europe. From a British point of view, there lay the ambivalent episodes of the struggle against Nazism which the liberaldemocratic war against the Eastern bloc had echoed, and which both British and Eastern German cultural politics had aptly manoeuvred. Several poets, from Ciaran Carson to Ken Smith, chose therefore to revise the post-war and Cold War myth of the Allied moral victory by unearthing the 1945 Anglo-American raids on Northern Germany (Carson 1987, 9-13; Smith 2002, 186). Between the eighties and the nineties, this meant to engage rather bitterly with the dominant patterns of national memory. It was a challenge Tony Harrison, the poet of political antagonism, could not help taking up. Representations of Northern Germany and specifically the memory of war in Dresden have been pivotal to Harrison’s reflections since his 1991 piece “The Mother of the Muses,” a poem that fascinatingly tackles the fractions and short-circuits of individual and collective memory. Harrison sheds light on the very construction of history: his Dresden features in an old, pre-1989 newsreel, where the filmic compression of wartime destruction and post-war rebirth powerfully hints at the artificial and often destabilising way war and traumas are handled. Reconstruction is displayed as part of the causal logic of historiography that, in Walter Benjamin’s view, serves the cause of the winners (Benjamin 1973, 24555): in this case, both the Allied and, from 1961 onwards, the Eastern bloc. Hovering between the mnemonic and the imagined, Harrison’s viewpoint in the poem shifts in fact from a literal comprehension of “reconstruction” to an oblique exploration of its emotional and psychological effects on those who survive. Significantly, the perspectival shifts on the German town register the poet’s problematic view of history. The overlay of contemporary, wartime and GDR Dresden underlies a coded semantic cluster. Dresden grows out of the interplay between the pre-war ElbFlorenz—the Unschuldige Stadt, or “guiltless city,” recently invoked by the Dresden-born poet Durs Gruenbein5—and the resurrected (and “halved”) city, while the post-war ravaged town, a symbol of the Allied attacks, looms ghastly over both sceneries. Memory and oblivion are embedded into each other, but the latter carries no reassurance. Both seem to hinge on arbitrary narratives whose correlative objective is material and artistic rebirth, which Harrison explicitly undermines zooming in on the symbolic reconstruction of the Semper Opera: The Semper’s restoration Dresden’s lauded effort to restore One of the treasures of the now halved nation

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Exactly as it was before the war. Billions of marks and years of labour To reproduce the Semper and they play What they’d played before the bombs fell, Weber, Der Freischuetz for their reopening today. 6 (Harrison 1992, 43)

For Harrison, who grew up during the Cold War, Dresden was part of a territory which 1989 opened to historical negotiation and to a real, demystifying reconstruction. Its role keyed into moral anxieties that the East/West divide could no longer cover up; it thus provided a viable introduction to the wider challenges to historical definition posed by Central-Eastern Europe. In Harrison’s view, post-wall Dresden was “at the heart of Europe” and its memory had to be addressed, even when what was at stake was the larger European narrative of anti-Nazi struggle. By evoking the wartime attacks of the “Luftwaffe and the Lancaster,” the poet actually hinted at the Allied anti-German “moral bombing” as an integral part of European and British memory of WWII (Harrison 1992, 39).7 The post-war narratives which the official culture of the early nineties was trying to refurbish were consequently disrupted; but so were the narratives which had long converged in a parallel, anti-fascist and leftist myth to which Harrison felt surely closer. At the time of European reunification, Harrison was foregrounding his post-ideological resistance to history within a demanding political, psychological and moral frame and attempted to retrieve a haunting, shared “past that would not pass.”8 Harrison’s voice in 1991, as in the later film/poem “The Gaze of the Gorgon” (Harrison 1992, 57-75) was certainly the voice of “those born after:” the very representation of the town reflects such belatedness, as Harrison tilts the balance between the metaphoric value and the physical, historically-stratified reality of the cityscape. Though retaining its marked symbolic resonance, Dresden was nevertheless one of the first and closest towns in the former Eastern bloc to feature concretely in contemporary British poetry, alongside Carol Rumens’ St. Petersburg and George Szirtes’ Budapest.9 Harrison’s post-Wall vision was in any case not solely retrospective, nor was his East exclusively the object of memory. After 1990, Harrison’s bent for witnessing was actually sharpened by his experience of the Balkan conflict, which inspired him to send the Guardian a sequence of sonnets from the Sarajevo siege. The very ambiguities he detected in the politics of memory were, in this case, palpable in the political instrumentation of national(istic)/ethnic or religious “divisions,” both in the Balkans and in the rest of Europe. These poems body forth Harrison’s attempt to cast a critical light on the

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dominant representation of the conflict by undermining its purely “ethnic” bases. The moral implications ushered in “The Mother of the Muses” are thus displayed in “The Cycles of Donji Vakuf” (Harrison 2007, 338) where the speaker/reporter comments on the indistinction between winners and losers in the very aftermath of war: And tonight some small boy will be glad He’s got the present of a bike from soldier dad, Who braved the Serb artillery and fire To bring back a scuffed red bike with one flat tyre. (Harrison 2007, 338)

In “Donji Vakuf,” scenes of “everyday” life are sketched with (black) humour while casual details capture the triviality of all the traces left by history: earlier in the sequence, the trails of blood before the bakery remind readers of the sadly famous Markale market. Such trivial notes were admittedly all the poet could record, facts which the West could no longer regard as obscene (and therefore, off-stage) and distant. For Harrison, the Eastern European political divisions of the nineties were an urgent, oppressive European reality that harked back to the twentiethcentury narratives of conflict and that poetry had to face. The Gorgon was, as a matter of fact, still frighteningly gazing into those newly borderstrewn lands.

Dispatches: Borders in Ken Smith’s Poetry Significantly, the all-pervading presence of “walls” and the notion of dislocated, rather than dismantled, Eastern borders would permeate postWall poetry ever since 1989. The “present absence” of the Berlin Wall was particularly crucial to Ken Smith’s The Heart, The Border (1990), a collection which displaces the centre of British poetry more radically than any contemporary work. Here, Heaney’s oft-invoked plural “us” is the dominant subject, placed in a no man’s land where the East and the West no longer “spy” on each other in fear, though fear pervades the collection’s ground tone. For Smith, who had been travelling across Eastern Europe before 1989, the sense of uprootedness which followed the implosion of the Eastern bloc expanded into a generalised, European condition: “We grew up on the other side / of a long long war we all lost” (Smith 1990b, 62), says one of the speakers in the Heart, the Border. Anxiety about the possible Westernisation of Eastern Europe is palpable. In his prose reportage Berlin, Smith is sympathetic with the Eastern Germans’ attitude toward the West: “What

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they were afraid of was their own world, but they were taught to be afraid of ours . . . and they were right about that” (Smith 1990a, 305). Scepticism likewise permeates his poems: in his post-Wall world, a sense of anomy underscores the insubstantiality of any effort to frame history within defining narratives, or to frame “the East” within geographic or political boundaries. From Germany to Poland, to Slovakia, border areas were for Smith a privileged ground for exploration. In his poems/dispatches from the 1989 exodus for example, East Berlin becomes the trope of fragile unity; in “Passing Through” (Smith 1990b, 60, original emphasis) “we” get lost amongst travellers in a new country, arriving without change for the phone, between trains, just passing through. You should have called, distant friends say. Ich verstehe Banhof I reply. There we meet, drinking in another doomed city, down street named for dead soldiers, victories understood only in the vernacular, and we with our own debased currency another history glimpsed in the driving mirror, central Europe on fast forward: printouts, flags, bullets, disbelief of the faces of the tyrants, ends of system without escape clause. Walls fall and men.

The final zeugma is sufficient to underline Smith’s ability to compress historical catastrophe in a rather baffling way. In his view, topical elements of the Eastern European landscape (the border, the statues of “tyrants,” national flags flapping and being burnt) help the reporter resist any assured interpretation of what he is witnessing. Visual and verbal urgency (“I went to watch the Berlin Wall, and watch it fall down. It felt obligatory,” Smith commented before recording the Wall poems.10) invites further investigation despite, or because of, the poem’s epigrammatic close. A closer reading of Eastern Europe was possible after the 1989 facts, in poems where at the opposite pole of Smith’s Polaroid reportage lies an involved, first-hand observation of realities beyond the wall. Smith’s discovery of Central-Eastern “terra(e) incognita(e)” touched on a wide range of themes, achieving spell-binding but disquieting implications in “The Magic of Poland” sequence (Smith 1990b, 51-4). Smith’s choice of Poland was, of course, highly indicative. Like George Szirtes’s Hungary, Poland was a country where the dense cluster of narratives—revolving

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around the memory of Nazism, of the communist past that partly distorted it, and of the presence of the Jewish and Roma population—radically challenged the post-1989 historical reconfiguration. Smith’s sequence consequently holds back from direct reportage: towns like the rust-belted Nova Huta, built from scratch under communism (“the coast a long ribbon of string / green earth, woods. Then immigration, / not user-friendly”) or cities like Krakow (“Take a long tour of the monuments: / these are to all the many years the ravens ate / the long depredations of the wolf, the bear / the arrival of the Adam Smith institute”) constantly baffle the poet’s attempt to read into them. As elsewhere, the opaqueness of Eastern cityscapes grows as space gets crammed by monuments, street names, fleshed-out characters that intrude upon Smith’s objective. His apparently light-hearted tone is, however, demystified as the sequence progresses to its deadpan climax. Here, the poet’s objective registers a sense of genuine helplessness as it glides over Oswiecim. Smith’s barren language points to the very vacuum history secreted not so long ago: Farms and unfenced fields, Villages, chained cattle, Turkeys, road signs Reading Muzeum Oswiecim: Auschwitz-Birkenau. Flat grey earth. Pits, drains, factories. The machineries of death. ... An offshoot of the rail, Tracks ending in grass, chimneys, A tangle of old wire, A pond of white human ash. (Smith 1990b, 53)

Smith’s elliptical mode measures his distrust of any illusory, empathetic comprehension of other people’s experience. His “Eastern Europe” lies more than ever at the core of Western Europe’s unresolved tension with its past. Its borders, and the people living across it, are writing back to the former Western “other,” even though, as Smith wrote in the later “Malenki Robot,” “a wire . . . runs through the[ir] heart” (Smith 2002, 286) and through the poet’s mind, incapable to unravel it. On the one hand, Smith’s post-wall poems suggest that the experience of past dehumanisation defies story-telling: so in Auschwitz, the silent presence of objects in a museum

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is the story of WWII victims (“Four, the Photograph”). On the other hand, story-telling is necessary, and Smith would soon feel the urgent need to host a number of voices from a (now) closer East, talking about lives which after 1989 did not sound so unfamiliar anymore. As happens with Harrison, the post-wall scenarios led Smith to dismiss any moral compromise with European history. In these post-Wall poems, shifting the focus to Auschwitz was not uniquely a refusal to foreground the different, destructive outcome of communism, to which Smith’s mapping of Eastern Europe was not blind. It was, however, a way to counteract forty years of politics that instrumentalised the memory of genocide and to address one of the pivotal histories that bound the West and the East forever. By retrieving the transversal concentrationary imagination central to his generation, Smith crucially pointed to the juncture between Western and Eastern parallel drifts. This would become clear in his following collection, Shed, where the Polish and Slovak desolated, “unfenced fields” are reminders of Nazi and communist camps but also invoke—in absentia—a third element of the European “progressive” ratio. Here, the memory of past oppression—the machineries of death—seems actually conflated with an essential post-industrial, gloomy landscape, which hints at the parallel, calculated waste of human lives brought about by industrialisation. What Smith’s poems subtly suggest is the aberrant relation between these two kinds of modernisation, and it is telling that this relation would eventually strike northern poets concerned with social division in the West, Tony Harrison in primis.11 For Smith, post-Wall verse could address the calculated victims of the overall progressive project of modernity, as much as those who suffered the rise of new Eastern walls in the confused panorama of the nineties. He condensed these impressions in Eastern-set poems where different personae expose the wires of past persecution and political oppression, and those of contemporary material deprivation and division. The non-fictional speaker in “Malenki Robot” (Smith 2002, 286) is a Slovak survivor of Soviet labour camps in Szolyva (Ukraine) and an exploited labourer: Monday I build doors, Tuesday put on roofs. It was the priest told me to go, Three days, he said, a little light work, Malenki robot, two years building roofs, And that because I had a trade. I survived wearing the clothes of those who died, after a while I survived because I had survived, and then came home and here the border.

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Poems such as “Malenki Robot” spring from Smith’s commitment to the post-memorial poetry of witness, and at the same time register the complexity of post-1989 geo-political scenarios: the border between Slovakia and Ukraine was after all one of the several consequences of the abolition of the East/West divide, and could thus symbolise further divisions superseding the former Cold War fracture (Garton Ash 1998, 251-2). As both The Heart, The Border and Shed show, Smith’s awareness that history itself might turn into a border was part of his trenchant response to the revolutions of 1989. Tactfully but firmly, Harrison and Smith engaged with postAuschwitz, post-communist and post-wall Eastern memory because they were aware of a vaster, and present, brutal age that did not end in 1945 or 1961, and would not after 1989. Their original visions of Eastern Europe provided sharp insights into the post-Wall discourse, where, as has been claimed, the post-wall cultural representation of the East might still be regarded as an element of the Western self-identificatory process (Houswitschka and Hallberg 2005, 51-63). By grafting the former “Eastern Europe” onto their first-hand experience at such a crucial juncture in history, both Smith and Harrison suggested historical readings which evaded the lurking short-circuits of the Cold War worldview. Even more significantly, they radically defused the power of the West/East divide, by adopting a Central European sensitivity to historical processes. Their subtle, post-ideological re-assessment of a shared European past crucially led to a wider (and deeply Orwellian) worldview, where the lost tracks of Eastern history crossed those, less obviously lost, of the Western world. Their original experiences as witnesses enabled them to “bear witness to man” and to endorse ambivalent views on the progressive “etiological myth” of modernity (Bauman 2001, 241) by returning history to the defeated.

Notes 1. See Predrag Matvéjevic, Le monde ‘Ex’: Confessions, 23-51. 2. Adam Piette investigates the non-aligned stance endorsed by Irish intellectuals in his stimulating article about British poetry in the Cold War age. See Piette, “Cold War Poetry,” 638-42. 3. Christoph Houswitschka and Edith Hallberg discuss the use of the term “Post-Wall” in their “Introduction” to the collection of essays Literary Views on Post-Wall Europe, 51-63.

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4. See Aleida Assmann’s concept of oblivion (Vergessenheit) in her seminal study on post-war collective memory, Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedaechtnisses. 5. The Dresden-born poet Durs Grünbein tackled the memory of the Allied raid on the ElbFlorenz in Porzellan: Poem vom Untergang meiner Stadt. 6. Harrison’s The Gaze of the Gorgon includes poems which, like “The Mother of the Muses,” where written before the fall of the Berlin Wall. However, the collection raised debate because of its uncompromising indictment of Western militarism and because of Harrison’s non-orthodox re-reading of the Second World War. 7. Harrison anticipated, in fact, a still ongoing debate, that emerged from the repercussion of David Irving’s revisionist theses in Destruction of Dresden (1980) alongside the historian Frederik Taylor’s seminal survey in Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945 and the novelist W. G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction. 8. The phrase is borrowed from the revisionist historian Ernst Nolte, whose notorious article “Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will” was first published in 1986 in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. 9. In Carol Rumens’s collection The Greening of the Snow Beach, the poet’s depiction of pre-1989 Russia is, however, partly inspired by the Russian poets of the thirties, and by the literary afterimage of the Stalin years which they created. Post-1989 Eastern Europe (Hungary and Romania) is instead the focus of George Szirtes’s Bridge Passages. 10. Smith offers stimulating views on both his prose reportages and his poetry in his introduction to The Poetry Quartets 3. 11. In Harrison’s Prometheus, Post-communist towns like Nowa Huta (Poland) and Copa Mica (Romania) provide an Eastern counterpart to Western postindustrial landscapes (England and Western Yorkshire in particular). See Harrison, Collected Film Poetry, 285-375.

References Assmann, Aleida. 1999. Erinnerungsraume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedaechtnisses. Muenchen: Beck. Auden, W. H. 1974. Archeology. In Thank You, Fog, 37. New York: Random House. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2001. Sociology after the Holocaust. In The Bauman Reader, ed. Peter Beilharz, 230-258. London: Blackwell. Benjamin, Walter. 1973. Theses on the Philosophy of History. In Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, 255-66. London: Collins. Carson, Ciaran. 1987. Dresden. In The Irish for No. Oldcastle: The Gallery Press. Garton Ash, Timothy. 1999. History of the Present: Essays, Sketches and Dispatches from Europe in the Nineties. New York: Random House.

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Grünbein, Durs. 2005. Porzellan: Poem vom Untergang meiner Stadt. Frankfurt am Mein: Suhrkamp. Harrison, Tony. 1992. The Gaze of the Gorgon. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe. —. 2007. Collected Poems. London: Viking. —. 2007. Collected Film Poetry. London: Faber & Faber. Heaney, Seamus. 1988. The Government of the Tongue: the 1986 T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures and Other Critical Writings. London: Faber and Faber. Houswitschka, Cristoph and Edith Hallberg. 2005. Literary Views on PostWall Europe. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag. Irving, David. 1980. The Destruction of Dresden. London: Futura. Jarniewicz, Jerzy. 2002. Milosz reads Larkin. Poetry Review 92, 1: 24-6. Kostova, Ludmilla. 2000. Inventing Post-Wall Europe: Visions of the “Old Continent” in Contemporary British Fiction and Drama. Yearbook of European Studies 15: 83-102. Matvéjevic, Predrag. 2004. Le Monde ‘Ex’: Confessions. Paris: Fayard. Miosz, Czeslaw. 1986. O Naszej Europie: Our Europe. Kultura 4: 3-12. —. 1983. The Witness of Poetry. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press. Nolte, Ernst. 1993. The Past that Will not Pass. In Forever in the Shadow of Hitler? ed. Ernst Piper, 18-23. Atlantic Heights: Humanities Press. Piette, Adam. 2007. Cold War Poetry. In The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry, ed. Tim Kendall, 638-42. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rumens, Carol. 1989. The Greening of Snow Beach. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe. Sebald, W. G. 2003. On the Natural History of Destruction. New York: Random House. Smith, Ken. 1990. Berlin: Coming in from the Cold. London: Penguin. —. 1990. The Heart, the Border. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe. —. 1998. The Poetry Quartets 3. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe. —. 2002. Shed: Poems 1980-2001. Tarset: Bloodaxe. Szirtes, George. 1991. Bridge Passages. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —, interview by Lidia Vianu. 2002. Interview with George Szirtes, The European English Messenger XI:1 (2002), 51-58. Taylor, Frederik. 2004. Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945. New York, Harper Collins.

CAN THE EAST GERMAN SPEAK?— IDEOLOGIES OF MEMORY

WALK/DON’T WALK: HISTORY AND MEMORY IN POST-WENDE BERLIN STEVEN QUINN

It is March 2007 and we are standing in front of the former Nazi Air Ministry building on Leipzigstrasse, looking on to the north loggia that features the Max Lingner mural celebrating the 1949 founding of the German Democratic Republic. Currently the German Finance Ministry, this site is emblematic of many stages in recent German history, invoking memories of blitzkrieg and genocide, occupation and horror, protest and liberation. As a group of strangers gaze upon its façade, inside the building the present occupants quietly monitor the flows of global trade that now power the economies of Europe and the reunified Germany. “We” are a group of tourists who have spent the past three hours on a walking tour, participating in the construction of a popular history of Berlin. Beginning at Hackesche Markt, we have zigged and zagged across Mitte, collapsing nearly 800 years of Medieval, Baroque, Prussian, Nazi, and Soviet eras into one brisk spring afternoon. Not one of us is German and even the guide himself is Dutch. As we look upon the Lingner mural, where smiling workers hold red flags and banners proclaiming Sozialismus and schoolgirls in uniform applaud as their leaders pass through the painted crowd, our guide recites the details of the protests of 1953 and the increasing brutality of the Communist government. Those in the crowd around me titter nervously, their pity and compassion mixed with disbelief and ridicule. Unable to comprehend how people could live with such brutality and oppressiveness and still believe in the possibility of a better future, the conclusion is that these same people must have been possessed of some inordinate capacity for self-deception. The tour guide has already seeded such ridicule along the journey; as his narrative has wound its way across the city, a series of throwaway remarks has clearly framed his own perspective on these more recent events. Passing through the museum quarter, finally being reconstructed after the damage caused by the Second World War, the Soviets are criticised as peasants and buffoons with no

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appreciation of classical art or architecture. Crossing past the remnants of the Palast der Republik, the later East German governors are derided as philistines with a love of boarded concrete and fluorescent light, deluded believers in a false modernity. As we turn our backs on the Fernsehturm and head west down Unter den Linden, East Berlin is dismissed as “just ugly” and the former inhabitants of the GDR idealistic fools. The walking tour is a common feature of many tourist destinations around the world, a leisurely stroll for those who desire the authentic (or vice versa), it is part local history, part anecdote, part stand-up comedy routine. As an oral performance it recounts history but the voluminous tomes of historical fact are reduced down to the easily consumable and repeatable elements of dinner-party storytelling, signalling the emergence of a new category of popular history, where the oral triumphs over the written and the anecdotal supplants the documented. As a city brimming with secrets, Berlin appears the ideal landscape for such a performance; it remains a marked space, the scars of its past still visible beneath the frantic suturing of city planners and the language of transport networks and urban regeneration. In the present it stands in a precarious relation to its own secrets, as between the need for remembrance and a desire to forget, the landscape shifts uneasily. As Ladd has written, the cumulative effects of two world wars plus a cold war have made German historical memory excruciatingly sensitive, at least in Berlin. Either a Nietzschean paralysis has destroyed the national will to act, or a healthy scepticism has developed about the deeds of nations and human beings. (Ladd 1997, 39)

The reconstruction of the new Berlin continues to be characterised by fiercely contested debates about the memorialisation of the physical landscape and the place of twentieth century history in the twenty-first century city, leaving Berlin in a perpetual state of flux; proposed and existing memorials appear, disappear, and reappear as the transition from popular memory to official history is continually being renegotiated. The perceived deep horror of Berlin’s historical landscape is so pervasive that it is as if only the total transformation of the cityscape into faux-marble shopping plazas and ubiquitous neon signage can properly exorcise it. In EXBERLINER, a local English-language magazine, the phenomenon is described as “Adver-techture” in reference to the rapid commercial transformation of Alexanderplatz and other formerly neglected areas of East Berlin (“Citizens Adolf and Knut” 2007, 7).

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In recent years, icons of the GDR have become the new tourist consumables for those wishing to fetishise the traces of the now deceased Communist state. Chief amongst these are Karl Peglau’s distinctive 1961 red and green traffic light symbols, the Ampelmännchen, which initially gained prominence as part of the Ostalgie phenomenon of the early 1990s. As Federal authorities attempted to unify the appearance of Eastern and Western space, street names and signposts became the most easily transformable indices of division. After a series of protests, the Ampelmännchen became the focal point for those groups unhappy with the rapid effacement of all visible signs of life from before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Yet, Ostalgie has since come to function as a marker for tourist groups with an ironic appreciation of the supposedly kitsch values and icons of East Germany. This appreciation is based upon a conception of these icons as being born of a time of naivety and blind faith in the future, one that is at odds with (what the West now knows to be) a time of bureaucratised repression, surveillance and brutality. For Pinfold this is a product of “the prevalent discourse which represented GDR citizens as having been too long confined to a form of childhood” (Pinfold 2007, 135). The fixation with the symbols of the GDR as tourist items that circulate, paradoxically, as part of a capitalist consumer economy, is due in part to their capacity to be detached from the physical. Where memorials imprint history upon the landscape and mark a sense of place, the commodity or the souvenir is mobile, able to circulate in global space and it is in this space that the uneasy translation of memory into history is occurring. In Jana Hensel’s After the Wall (2004), and Anna Funder’s Stasiland (2003), the stories told map out a different sense of place and space, detailing the lives of those from the East and their response to the new world of a unified Germany and its compulsory Western free market economics. Both texts have played a part in the construction of a Western memory of life before the fall of Communism and contributed to the ongoing production of an Ostalgie industry. Significantly, however, this process is marked as a reframing of the GDR past in ways determined by those values prized by the West. Thus while the Ampelmännchen are now free to appear in a variety of consumer guises, the Palast der Republik is being dismantled. As debates continue over the reconstruction of Berlin’s Prussian past and sections of the Wall are retained as part of the walking tour destination circuit, other less official or commercial sites slide into repossession or demolition. Many of the walking tours conclude with a visit to Checkpoint Charlie, where local actors and models appear in U.S. military uniforms to pose for photographs with tourists, and the shops and

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stalls that line Friedrichstrasse stock Soviet and GDR memorabilia. Yet, on the corner opposite Checkpoint Charlie, the corporate owners have demolished an unofficial memorial to those who died while trying to cross the Wall. Where once nearly 1100 commemorative dark wooden crosses stood silhouetted against a white background, now there is nothing more than a derelict block obscured by hoardings. Early in Stasiland, Funder recalls her childhood decision to learn German and how she was drawn to what she terms its “sticklebrick” words, the cascading multiple noun and verb compounds that produced words inconceivable in other languages. “Things could be brought into being that had no name in English—Weltanschaunng, Schadenfreude, sippenhaft, Sonderweg, Scheissfreundlichkeit, Vergangenheitsbewältigung” (Funder 2003, 4). As she travels on the train from Berlin to Leipzig to visit the Runde Ecke, she realises that her own mixed feelings for the GDR demand a similar sticklebrick word: the form she settles upon is “horror-romance.” The sense of romance derives from “the dream of a better world the German Communists wanted to build out of the ashes of their Nazi past” (Funder 2003, 4), the horror from what was produced instead. Such horror, as it is now widely known in the West, was a product of the repressive Stasi. A concern with the operations of the Stasi dominates Western perspectives on the former East Germany, and there is a continual interrogation of those producing novels, memoirs or films about the time as to how they represent the existence of the Stasi within their work. There is often a rigid compartmentalisation of texts into those that declare the brutality of the government and its security services and those that do not. Recent examples of this polarisation include the Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck film Das Leben der Anderen (2006), and Funder’s Stasiland (2003), which are seen in the West as representing some form of “appropriate” retelling of German history.1 Alternately, with Leander Haußman’s Sonnenallee (1999), Wolfgang Becker’s Goodbye Lenin (2003) and Hensel’s After the Wall (2004), for instance, the inevitable accusations of Ostalgie have been made due to the fact that these works do not explicitly feature the presence of the Stasi, nor do they address its operations in retrospect. Jauss has posited the phrase “horizon of expectation” to account for the capacity of readers to recognise texts and position them in relation to preexistent forms of knowledge, where the pleasure of the reader is determined in advance by their familiarity with the type of genre. He describes this “horizon” as the “system of expectations that arises for each

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work in the historical moment of its appearance, from a pre-understanding of the genre, from the forms and themes of already familiar works” (Jauss 1982, 22). In this respect it is possible to speak of a familiar GDR discourse that already addresses readers and creates certain expectations before any text is engaged with. For Jauss, however, more than simply a matter of genre convention, the “horizon” also marks limits around the discourse itself, in that it refers to the expectations generated in particular periods in history (Jauss 1982, 23-4). Not only, then, is there prior knowledge of a GDR discourse, but that knowledge is framed in terms of what can be known in the present. Thus, the prevalence of the Stasi in Western accounts of GDR life becomes the benchmark by which all other accounts are judged. The horror provoked by the Stasi renders any attempt to depict an alternate sense of the relationship between past and present an impossibility. In the case of those writers and directors from the former East, the concern is often more with exploring the terrain of memory, whether in attempting to capture a time past, a childhood dimly remembered, or the ordinary lives of those living within the GDR, as “a means of salvaging a sense of normality from western clichés about GDR existence” (Pinfold 2007, 135). Yet such a perspective is roundly dismissed in terms of the polarisation now being imposed from outside of Germany; the texts concerned are gathered together into the category of simply being Ostalgic works and criticised for their blithe ignorance of the truth of life in the GDR. In these cases, the place of Eastern memory is declared a prohibited space, a no-go area irreconcilable with the West’s knowledge of that same past. What remains clear within the surrounding discussions is a forceful non-German presence that has assumed the power to decide how truthful or repentant such memories are. Funder’s Stasiland and Hensel’s After the Wall are by virtue of this judicial logic portrayed as being on opposite sides of the ideological divide, however such a perspective is misleading. Certainly Funder’s text does explicitly take the operations of the Stasi as its subject, but it is far from being simply another litany of horror. Instead, Stasiland is concerned just as much with the present-day situation of those attempting to construct new lives in a post-GDR environment. Similarly, while Hensel’s After the Wall has been reprimanded by some writers for adopting an Ostalgic tone,2 she too is more interested in the present-day consequences of reconstruction and those being forced to negotiate it. In a parallel review of both works when they were published in the US, Garvin devoted the majority of his article to an anecdotal recounting of the “facts” of life under the GDR and the Stasi, before rounding off with: “Stasiland is a

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thoughtful collection of interviews with the Stasi’s victims and officers. Considerably less profound is the memoir by Hensel, a twentysomething member of East Germany’s last generation of teenagers. The movie version will surely be titled Triumph of the Whine” (Garvin 2006, 3). The unfortunate ease with which Garvin dismisses Hensel and the lazy historiography through which he reconstructs popular memory as official history is indicative of the simplistic polarisation of Western attitudes towards representations of East Germany. Those who do not reiterate the simple Western mantra of truth, democracy and free-market capitalism, continue to be positioned as somehow unrepentant Stasi-sympathisers or ungrateful Marxist ideologues. At stake here is the status of popular memory in the construction of more official narratives. Depictions of the former East as nothing more than “Stasiland” are far-reaching, furnishing many with little direct experience of the East with a compendium of facts by which they can determine the truth of the memories of others. The deployment of Ostalgie as a dismissive term to contain such memories prevents their serious consideration as anything other than childish delusion. Herb Caen has famously declared that “Nostalgia is memory with the pain removed” (in Davis 1979, 37), and it is this trope that continually ghosts critiques of the works of those from the former East, where the longed-for stability of a past age is registered as a disavowal of the Stasi. Yet, to position all works from the East as either confirming or denying the received wisdom of popular history diminishes the array of voices attempting to be heard. Nostalgia is a complex and far from uniform construction, and its relationship to popular memory not easily reducible to a value judgement of false or true forms. As Davis himself writes, “nostalgia, despite its private, sometimes intensely felt personal character, is a deeply social emotion as well” (Davis 1979, vii). In spite of such a perspective, Ostalgie has come to represent an all-encompassing frame that positions memory in a secondary relationship to history and marginalises the experiences of those involved. Funder recounts working for an overseas television service in Berlin in the mid-1990s and the difficulties she experienced in getting coverage for stories from the East. After receiving a letter from a Dresden-born German now living in Argentina, she raises the subject at a meeting: He asks whether we might do an item on what things are actually like now for the East German people instead, as he says, of “always broadcasting what is being done for the poor cousins.” “Puzzle women,” Uwe muttered.

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I took a deep breath. “And I agree with him—we’re always talking about the things that Germany is doing for people in the former GDR. It would be great to do an item from the eastern point of view. For instance, to find out what it’s like to wait for part of your file to be pieced together.” “You know we don’t broadcast domestically,” Scheller said, “so there’s no point us doing items on the Ossis for their gratification.” (Funder 2003, 12, original emphasis)

It is this dismissal of any and all stories from the East that prompts Funder’s investigations into what later becomes Stasiland. The lingering distinction between Ossis and Wessis continues to maintain a logic of division and belies claims towards unification. In much of Funder’s research it feels as if the Wall has not come down. There are mysterious and secretive assignations with operatives and their objects, both the surveilled and their surveillors perpetually looking over their shoulders as if unsure that the past is, in fact, past. “People here talk of the Mauer im Kopf or the Wall in the Head. I thought this was just a shorthand way of referring to how Germans define themselves still as easterners and westerners. But I see now a more literal meaning: the Wall and what it stood for do still exist” (Funder 2003, 233-34, original emphasis). Such an invisible presence marks the past as still most defiantly present, yet, in spite of this persistence, the touristic presentation of Berlin’s popular history allows travel in only one direction, while neglecting many others. Hensel’s Zonenkinder (2002) was motivated by what she saw as a similar sense of neglect on the part of those in West Germany. In its English-language translation, After the Wall, she writes of attending a Hertha Berlin match with a friend from Cologne: Jan confessed that the whole Ostscheiß, or “East bullshit,” as he put it, really got on his nerves. For him, the whole East-West divide was totally passé. It was boring. Like many West German guys, Jan was sick of discussing the GDR past. What did it have to do with his own life? As far as he could tell, nothing. (Hensel 2004, 39)

For Hensel, the relationship with the past that friends from the West enjoy is based on the sense of security and stability of having somewhere to return to; whether it be the towns where their parents live or the houses of old friends, their past still exists in a physical landscape. She describes her own generation as “the children of the first ‘immigrants’” (Hensel 2004, 71), expected to embrace a new language and a new culture: “Just like me, my friends have been forced to assimilate into a foreign culture that’s

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grown up on their native soil, a culture that constantly requires them to exchange the old for the new” (Hensel 2004, 42). In contrast to the familiar definition of nostalgia as a longing for a past time, Hensel’s text can just as easily be read as a lament for a lost place. On a return trip to her own family home in Leipzig, I soon arrived at my parents’ house. “Moritzhof,” said the computerized voice. My childhood tram stop had always been called “Watestrasse.” I loved the name as a girl precisely because I had no idea what it meant. Now they’d renamed it after a new shopping center. (Hensel 2004, 30)

The sense of displacement from her own past that Hensel experiences is described in her own declaration that “nothing remains of our childhood country” (Hensel 2004, 4), yet crucially throughout the German version, Zonenkinder, she refrains from describing it as East Germany or the GDR, instead making reference to “das Land” or “unser Land” without focussing on the political denomination. There are two issues here, one that concerns Hensel’s relationship to the land of the memories of her childhood and the other its presentation within an English-language text. There are many moments in After the Wall where the translation itself actively operates to both frame and deflect Hensel’s meaning. In some cases, the translation operates on a purely vernacular level in the transposition of German to American colloquial speech. Thus the first chapter features references to “fall” (autumn), “Mom,” “butt,” “numbskull,” playing “hooky,” “track meets,” “suckers” and even “cents.” Aside from the off-putting and intrusive nature of this understanding of “English-language,” what is most clearly ironic in this section is that Hensel herself is describing the disappearance of East German terms and their replacement by their Western counterparts in the early years of unification.3 More significant, however, is the highly visible concern with framing the narration for an audience assumed to be unfamiliar with East German history and culture. There is an overt practice of substituting Hensel’s “Land” forms for “GDR” or “East Germany,” and the translator’s insertion of “East bullshit” for Ostscheiß is even worked into a passage of reported speech in such a way as to make it seem that a German is providing the translation. In other instances, sardonic captions are added to images and photographs, either as describing unfamiliar objects or gently mocking GDR daily life, but all are equally portrayed as being Hensel’s own. Clearly the translator, Jefferson Chase, is highly conscious of the target audience for “his” text and many of the amendments can be read as bridging devices between one culture and another, even when this risks

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disguising the translator’s voice as Hensel’s. For Pinfold, the outcome is that “in translation, Hensel’s attempts to evoke an ordinary childhood seem constantly to be thwarted by her translator’s desire to explain the GDR context to his target audience” (Pinfold 2007, 143). Of more concern are the overt framing devices employed as part of the wider translation strategy. The text is book-ended with a “Timeline of the GDR and Jana Hensel’s Life” (which unfortunately creates the impression that Hensel views the two as somehow entwined) and an extended “Note from the Translator” (Chase’s meditation on the current state of German identity and politics). The effect of both of these sur-texts is that “the translation creates a much more obviously political tone which appears inconsistent with Hensel’s desire” (Pinfold 2007, 141). The book’s title is also changed from Zonenkinder to After the Wall and this is far from a simple matter of translation. While “Zonenkinder” can literally translate as “children of the zone,” its meaning refers to East Germany as the occupied Soviet zone, a term used by West Germans in their dismissal of East Germany as a valid country in its own right. Hensel’s defiant use of the term is an attempt to reclaim this disappearing landscape for her own generation.4 “After the Wall” alternately, marks the text in temporal terms, indicating the passing of time and a movement away from the past rather than a negotiation with lost space. It is arguable that such interventions on the part of translator may be in some way responsible for the reception of After the Wall as an Ostalgic text. Certainly, the English-language version has acquired more in its translation than Hensel herself may have intended. If Jauss’ horizon does indeed mark the visible limit of what can be known, then its function in this context is to position memories of life in East Germany within the conceptual frame of received popular wisdom. The frequent use of Ostalgie as a means of classifying such works marginalises their perspectives simply because they are not seen to conform to the set of expectations being generated in the West. In the aftermath of Funder’s story rejection by her editor, she receives another letter from her Dresden-born correspondent in Argentina: “a week ago he wrote back. He was angry, telling me that history is made of personal stories. He said that issues were being swept under the carpet in East Germany, and people along with them” (Funder 2003, 13-14). Any historical discourse is impoverished if it is only drawn from a narrow range of sources; if those traces are also based on a limited set of expectations then life in the GDR is reduced to the touristic spectacle of horror. The collapsing of popular memory into official history, as displayed in the walking tour or other similar forms of popular oral history, rigidly demarcates Berlin’s historical landscape into areas

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accepted or rejected by this new economy of memory and the translation of historical documents into the patter of the walking tour reduces experience to the dimensions of the LCD camera screen. The relationship of memory to history has never been an easy process of reduction over time, but is instead a series of often violent and destructive acts that randomly expunges lives and memories. As the figures of the Ampelmännchen are slipped into hand luggage and carried west across the border, and the shopping plazas continue their march east, further transforming the old into the new, it hardly seems an equitable exchange.

Notes 1. However, Funder has questioned the truth-value of von Donnersmarck’s film, claiming it “is a fantasy narrative that could not have taken place” (Funder 2007, 2), because it would have been unthinkable for any operative to work outside of the Stasi’s bureaucratic structure. 2. The East Bay Express writer, Richie Unterberger, for instance, described Hensel’s book as exhibiting “an almost perverse nostalgia” (http://www. eastbayexpress.com/artsculture/express_reviews/Content?oid=288033, accessed 17/04/2007). For criticisms of its German publication, see Pinfold (Pinfold 2007, 135). 3. Hensel writes, “As soon as the Wall fell, the language changed. The consumer depot was suddenly called a ‘supermarket,’ nickies became ‘T-shirts,’ and apprentices turned into ‘trainees’” (Hensel 2004, 12). 4. It also functions as Hensel’s riposte to Florian Illies’ Generation Golf (2001), an analysis of the West German generation born in the same period.

References Anonymous. 2007. Citizens Adolf and Knut. EXBERLINER, No. 49 (April), www.exberliner.com. Davis, Fred. 1979. Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. New York: Free Press. Funder, Anna. 2007. Tyranny of Terror. The Guardian, May 5. http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2072454,00.html (accessed 01/08/2007). . 2003. Stasiland: Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall. London: Granta. Garvin, Glenn. 2007. The Horror of the Stasi’s East Germany. Reason Online, http://www.reason.com/news/show/33060.html (accessed 10/04/2007).

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Jauss, Hans Robert. 1982. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Trans. Timoty Bahti. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hensel, Jana. 2002. Zonenkinder. Hamburg: Rowohlt. . 2004. After the Wall: Confessions from an East German Childhood and the Life that Came Next. Trans. Jefferson Chase, New York: Public Affairs. Illies, Florian. 2001. Generation Golf. Frankfurt: Fischer. Ladd, Brian. 1997. Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pinfold, Debbie. 2007. “Erinnerung Ideologisch Entschlacken” or Lost in Translation: Reflections on Jana Hensel’s Zonenkinder and its American Translation. German Life and Letters, Vol. 60, No. 1 (January): 133-148. Unterberger, Richie. 2004. Express Reviews. East Bay Express, October 27 http://www.eastbayexpress.com/artsculture/express_reviews/ Content?oid=288033 (accessed 17/04/2007).

Films Becker, Wolfgang. 2003. Goodbye Lenin. X-Filme Creative Pool/Westdeutscher Rundfunk/arte. Haußmann, Leander. 1999. Sonnenallee. Boje Buck Production. Henckel von Donnersmarck, Florian. 2006. Das Leben der Anderen. Bayerischer Rundfunk/Creado Film/Wiedemann and Berg Filmproduction/arte.

DISTURBANCE EAST. PUNKS IN EAST BERLIN. MEMORY, GENDER AND COLD WAR IN A POST-1989 TELEVISION DOCUMENTARY ANTJE BUDDE All three, curtain, cordon, and wall, may denote parts of a fortification. (Wilbur 1948, 75) . . . in den Auseinandersetzungen am Runden Tisch wurde eines sehr deutlich: durch die Frauenpolitik der vergangenen Jahre ist ein emanzipatorisches Bewußtsein bei den Frauen verschüttet worden. . . . bedarf einer vielschichtigen Aufklärungsarbeit, um die Unterdrückungsmechanismen gegenüber Frauen, die subtilen Formen ihrer Abwertung sichtbar zu machen.1 (Merkel 1990, 8)

The two quotations above mark two points of reference for my approach to the analysis of television and film documentaries, which talk in retrospect about cultural phenomena and their ideological and political indications specifically for youth culture in the former East Germany or the German Democratic Republic (October 7, 1949-October 02, 1990). One reference point is related to the context of the Cold War and its consequences for the East Germans. The other point links the discourses on the Cold War, chauvinism and patriarchy to the problem of gender representations and the question of gender inequality. As Ina Merkel states in the above quotation, the Round Table discussions after the fall of the Wall brought to light that this problem was systematically suppressed in the public discourse in East Germany. As a result women’s emancipatory consciousness was buried to a certain degree. We now have to uncover again the mechanisms of women’s oppression. Merkel talks about that, of course, within the context of an open, public debate in a disappearing socialist country. However, the majority of documentaries about East German culture that I know of are produced, directed and written by men and focus on male perspectives of history. Dominic Strinati explains in his An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture that we shall consider the feminist critique of both popular culture and the study of popular culture. . . . These include popular cultural representations

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This should be kept in mind when analysing documentaries with regard to East German popular culture, how and by whom they are produced and how women are presented to us. One of the very rare yet problematic documentaries, written and directed by East German women, is the television documentary Störung Ost. Punks in Ostberlin 1981-1983 (Schneider and Katzorke 1996). 2 Documentaries like Störung Ost could have become a means of empowerment when it comes to an East German input in the Western and male dominated discourse on the more recent past of German history. This could have included a discussion on socio-political alternative thinking and the articulation of the loss of utopian thought. It is for a reason—not only due to economic inequality—that the satisfaction factor in contemporary Germany among East Germans is lower than among West Germans. The loss of ideals and utopian potential on the one hand and the sobering realities of a materialist capitalist society on the other left their marks (Becker and Merkel 2000, 6-12; Mühlberg 2000, 15-25; Brie 2000, 147-160; Engler 2000, 161-164 and Früh et al. 1999, 38-44). Unfortunately, the feelings of grief and loss are often not taken seriously and mocked as Ostalgia related backwardness although, according to the psychoanalysts Margarete and Alexander Mitscherlich, a capability to grieve is necessary when responsibly dealing with traumatic events on a historical scale. Margarete and Alexander Mitscherlich, in their famous psycho-analytical book Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern. Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens (The Inability to Grieve. Of Collective Behaviour. 1967, 369), were rather discussing the Germans’ inability to deal with their personal responsibilities regarding fascism and Nazi Germany. However, this book became influential in the search for a new productive beginning for East German film-makers during the Wende, 1989-1991 (Pusch 2000, 45-51).

Remembering the East—Documentaries about Punks in East Germany The Punk movement in Berlin and Leipzig—both cities with recognisably more international permeability due to their status as capital and world fair venue—belongs to those youth subcultures that could not

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be absorbed into the national spectrum of socialist youth politics and party approved youth culture like, for example, Breakdance (Raschik 2007) and ultimately lead to drastic conflicts between the Punks, their parents, people in the streets, state authorities, state security and SED party authorities. A generational conflict between coming of age provocative and attention seeking youngsters with domestic and societal authorities turned, under the conditions of the Cold War, into a radicalised and violent conflict about both political and patriarchal power. The history of documentaries on youth and popular culture including aspects of Punk music started before the Wall fell. In 1988 the 116 min. documentary flüstern und SCHREIEN—Ein Rockreport (Whisper and Shout. A Rock Report) was produced by the East German DEFA (directed by Dieter Schumann, written by him and Jochen Wisotzki). This was probably the first of a number of male dominated music documentaries regarding East German rock, punk and heavy metal cultures but the only one that was actually filmed and produced in the GDR. A number of follow-up productions based on this film have been produced ever since. One of the most recent “cover versions” is Achtung! Wir kommen. Und wir kriegen Euch alle (Attention! We’re Coming. And We Will Get You All, Mueller 2008). The documentary Störung Ost. Punks in Ostberlin 1981-1983 was the first of its kind after the unification. The film was broadcasted on ZDF— the Second German Television—that officially started its broadcasting on April 1, 1963. The foundation of the ZDF was provoked by the Cold War media battle between the Eastern and Western part of Germany shortly after the Berlin Wall was built. The ZDF is part of the federal broadcasting network of the FRG (Federal Republic of Germany, also referred to as West Germany, founded May 23, 1949). With its special production stream Das Kleine Fernsehspiel (small forms of teleplays), the ZDF provides a platform for film projects that usually do not fall into mainstream categories. Störung Ost was broadcasted within this programming segment. The East German audience watches television more frequently than West Germans. Due to economic circumstances recreational behaviour of East Germans is more focused on domestic activities like television and radio consumption, gardening and going for walks rather than travelling the world or pursuing expensive spare time activities (Früh et al. 1999, 33-38). Furthermore, after years of state television, it seems the East Germans prefer private television programming and do not primarily watch federal television including the ZDF (Früh et al. 1999, 278-290).

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Störung Ost tells the Punk story from the insider’s perspective of two female activists. This approach set a standard for productions like OstPunk! Too much Future (93 min., 2006) (Rassloff 2007, Koehler 2003, Berg 2007, RBB) directed by Carsten Fiebeler and Michael “Pankow” Boehlke. Here, the male directors who were also East German activists of the Punk movement in Berlin and Leipzig interviewed four men and two women. They integrated this more contemporary material in a collage of private and archive documents, film and photos (Findaway.TV 2007). In this regard the film shares basic similarities in composition and dramaturgical approach with Störung Ost. However, OstPunk! Too much Future was co-produced by the RBB (regional television Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg). This 35 mm film was a cinema production first and launched nationally on August 23, 2007. Interestingly, the film critic Christian Schön accuses the film of being done in “Guido Knopp fashion.” The ways, how East Germans and East German cultures are presented in television shows after the unification is often as disappointingly stereotypical as it was before the Wall fell (Merkel 1997, 129-143), often ignorant towards the diversity of Eastern perspectives/practices and more often than not based on Western Cold War strategies of ideological indoctrination. The more radical examples for the latter are documentaries by Guido Knopp, are reminiscent of a reincarnation of head-on East-West propaganda shows of the Cold War period like Die Rote Optik (The Red Optic, presented by Thilo Koch) in the West and Der Schwarze Kanal (The Black Channel, presented by Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler) in the East. For example, Das Wunder von Berlin—Die Dokumentation (The Miracle of Berlin—The Documentary, ZDF 2008) by Florian Hartung and Jobst Knigge is one of those “The Making of”-documentaries which is linked to the television film Das Wunder von Berlin (The Miracle of Berlin, ZDF 2008). It was not produced for the ZDF Kleines Fernsehspiel like Störung Ost but for the ZDF series ZDF History, since 1984 under the direction of Guido Knopp, a West German history professor. Both, the fiction film, which reached a mass audience of 8 million viewers (news aktuell GmbH 2008) and the documentary, tell the extraordinary story of the East German Punk Tilo Koch. Curiously he has almost the same name as the cold media warrior mentioned above. Another Punk documentary which extends its scope a little further into other art forms hit the television public with Punkmusik und Spaßperformance. Alternative Kunst in der DDR (Punk Music and Fun Performance. Alternative Arts in the GDR, 45 min. RBB) made by Karoline Kleinert. This documentary, again, is very much based on biased evaluations that can be traced back to Western Cold War rhetoric. All of

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these documentaries in their interconnectedness form a discourse not only about the ways punks and their culture should be presented, but also how the history of East Germany could be told.

Cold War, Iron Curtain, Squeezed in Punks We were once told that the aeroplane had “abolished frontiers;” actually it is only since the aeroplane became a serious weapon that frontiers have become definitely impassable. The radio was once expected to promote international understanding and co-operation; it has turned out to be a means of insulating one nation from another. (Orwell 1945, original emphasis) Was soll ich mit einer Weltanschauung, wenn ich mir die Welt nicht anschauen darf? (Punk graffiti in Störung Ost)3

The GDR and its internal conflicts between official socialist and alternative subcultures must be seen in the context of the Cold War. Both culture and counter-culture were constantly defining themselves and negotiating their relationship within the constraints and challenges that the Cold War created for them. Many documentaries about East German youth sub-cultures—including hippie, hip hop and punk—share the longing to break down limitations, whether they consist of a rigid and patronizing well-planned out system of job security and clearly outlined social expectations—hence the complaint about “too much future” rather than the Sex Pistols’s outcry about “no future”—or the special conditions of the national border/Berlin Wall. For the internal conflicts in the GDR we have to consider two equally important and highly contradictive reference points. On the one hand there was the ongoing comparison and competition with the West, Western media and its material wealth (rather than the concept of democracy), which put a lot of pressure into the dynamics of social and political conflict within East Germany. On the other hand there was also the constant comparison between the ideal socialist society—however any given party would define that on the basis of their hopes for the utopian other—and its limited and often limiting realization as social, political and economical reality. I cannot think of any major conflict in GDR history that was not somehow linked to the dialectically integrated, often oppressive and explosive combination of these two parameters. In Störung Ost it becomes clear that the protagonists did see themselves to a certain degree not only as provoking troublemakers but also as people who insisted on an utopian ideal that a socialist country was meant to fulfil. I would argue that this is

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the reason why some of the Punks felt somehow lost after the Wall fell because the times of utopia seemed to be over. They now could buy all the accessories they missed so much behind the Wall like Punk music records, leather jackets, sneakers, hair cosmetics for daring hair designs. They could also travel in case there was enough money. Yet, something was missing and that had nothing to do with fashionable consumerist appearance or global tourism. In Störung Ost a reflection of the Cold War happens—even in retrospective—almost exclusively through the national and local lens, which unwittingly recreates the provincialism and narrow-mindedness that the film originally set out to attack. The national perspective to a great extend ignores the British and US American origins of the Punk movement, its socio-political conditions and its original utopian potential of social criticism. The story of the East German punks and its developmental conditions are a product of the internal, national consequences of the Cold War, although that war was played out on an international scale. The nation remains an essential category of analysis. Even in the globalising world the existence of nations, which create unique media cultures can not be ignored (Curran and Pak 2000, 342). Something that the documentary presents quite convincingly is the claustrophobic tension based on the Cold War conflict, which could balloon and blow up almost any kind of trivial and minor problem, including the transition of provoking, and self-discovering needs of adolescent people into state affairs of national security. It is interesting that in Störung Ost there is not much analytical concern for the complicated historical dialectics of the Cold War with regard to the German separation and its reasons, the East German attempt to build an alternative socialist state and the consequences of a suppressed dealing with Germany’s fascist past in both parts of the country. All the blame for being forcefully confined by the Wall/secured national border goes into one direction only: the socialist state and its executive powers. The filmmakers present themselves and their fellow punks as victims of communist oppression, which certainly helped to find funding for the project in the West German media. The underlying rhetoric is the prolonged Western rhetoric of the Cold War that reaches into the here and now. The term Cold War was a biased term of Anti-communism from the beginning. Usually the term refers to the timeframe from the mid-1940s to the early 1990s and describes the post WWII tensions between the capitalist super power USA and its opponent, the socialist/communist super power USSR including and involving their satellite states around the world. There is, however, also the approach which traces the conflict back

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to 1917 when the October Revolution in Russia led to the founding of the Soviet Union. With regard to East Germany both of these approaches are necessary. The first one would reflect the outcome of WWII on the part of Nazi Germany and the second would include the special history of East Germany and the utopian threat that socialism posed to developed capitalism. These two aspects are inseparable. In October 1945 George Orwell in his essay “You and the Atomic Bomb” apparently used the term for the first time when symbolically referring to hostile peace between equally powerful nuclear states (Schwarz 1997, 109-110). In March 1946 the London Observer employed the term “to describe Soviet policy toward Britain” (Schwarz 1997). The metaphor drew not much attention at the time until Bernard Baruch (1870-1965), an American banker and presidential adviser, “crystallized the situation in a compact, convenient form” (Schwarz 1997). The term was further popularised through the book The Cold War by the American journalist Walter Lippmann (1889-1974). The most obvious symbol of the Cold War was the Berlin Wall or the Anti-fascist protection wall as the official East German rhetoric would call it. Here the idea of the “Iron Curtain” comes into play. In a way, the iron curtain after the Second World War is the opposite of the cordon sanitaire after the First World War, the latter being “drawn by the Western Powers along Western Russia after World War I in the hope of keeping communistic ideas East of that line.” (Feuerlicht 1955, 189)

As Feuerlicht points out, the metaphorical use goes back to the eighteenth century when an iron curtain was installed in a theatre in Lyon in order to prevent fires from spreading. Among others it was Orson Wells who metaphorically used the term in 1904 as a metaphor for “enforced privacy” in his The Food of the Gods (Feuerlicht 1955, 187). In 1923 a German general applied “the theatrical term in the field of international politics” denoting “the tight news blockade which the Allies planned to impose on Germany during the First World War” (Feuerlicht 1955, 187). The first reference to the Soviet Union was made by a Russian writer in early 1930 blaming the Russian bourgeoisie for lowering (sic!) the Iron Curtain (Feuerlicht 1955, 187). In the meaning as we use the metaphor today it was first used by the Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels who predicted in his weekly sheet Das Reich two weeks after the end of the Yalta Conference (Feb. 4-11, 1945): The Soviets would occupy the whole of Eastern and South Eastern Europe including the larger part of the Reich. In front of this territory . . . an iron curtain would descend at once. (Feuerlicht 1955, 187)

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From here the term found its way into a telegram that Winston Churchill sent to the American president Truman on May 12, 1945 (Feuerlicht 1955, 188) almost a year before his famous “Iron Curtain” speech (Churchill 1946) thus linking Western anti-communism with Fascist anti-communism. Of course, for the East Berlin Punks the “Iron Curtain” was not just a symbol for a historical battlefield but lived reality. They felt, like many people, that they needed to get out of that claustrophobic space. But who could they turn to? Mass media, in particular television and radio, played a central role in the mutual battle of the Cold War parties. The East German youth became one of the favourite battlefields for both East and West German politics. In Störung Ost the impact of Western media, be it West German television, British newspapers and radio shows, which covered mini stories about the East German punks, or music records with Western punk music smuggled by grandmothers (never grandfathers) was made very clear while the impact of East German media culture was completely ignored. Right from the beginning the documentary symbolically identifies the Punk movement as an interference on a television screen. The title sequence of the film shows a television interference indicating a Bild-Störung (disturbed image), which then turns into the film’s title. The disturbance is only a disturbance with regard to the official GDR culture and its needs for holding up appearances of a clean and well organised youth culture. The point of reference is not the West German media, although the East German Punks were, on a much smaller scale, also disturbing for West German media as Peter Wensiersky, a West German journalist, points out in the film. The existing cultural diversity of East German culture was undermining Western Cold War driven stereotypes of East German culture as being of a monolithic communist totalitarian character. Western ignorance with regard to East German cultural diversity and uniqueness becomes particularly clear in the conversation between the “retired” Punk Speiche (nickname) with the British radio presenter John Peel. While Speiche, in stumbling self-learned English, expresses his admiration for Peel, Peel himself is completely unable to communicate with Speiche and also admits that he never had the slightest clue what in fact the messages and contents of the East German Punk songs were that he would play in his show. While this media presence was important for the Punks due to their isolation, it was a curious, rather entertaining and light-hearted thing to do for Peel. The two film-makers also critically confronted Peter Wensiersky with the incomplete picture that West German media would paint of East German Punk culture in their limited coverage before the unification. Wensierski answered that they should feel lucky that the West

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provided such images because then not only the images of marching youth at political events would survive the end of East Germany but also images of the “other youth culture.” Considering the fact, as becomes very clear from the documentary, that East German Punks did a pretty good job in documenting their activities themselves, sometimes backed up by the unobliging footage of the Stasi, Wensierski has a pretty limited understanding of the dialectics that make images survive. His reaction makes also clear that obviously not much was known about cultural diversity in Western media except for the Cold War imagery of obediently marching people. This kind of images link Socialism to Fascist iconography and this was and still is a strategy of visual Cold War media rhetoric. Part of the Punk movement, as presented in Störung Ost, was a radicalised discourse or rather blame-game with mutual accusations of fascism/Neo-Nazism or fascist behaviour between the Punks and state authorities. But the Punks did not stop there. They included the people in the streets in their accusations as basically being “daily life fascists.” This, however, is a very complex issue that cannot be further discussed in this essay.

Disturbance, Women, A Summary Noch im vergangenen Jahr schienen sich in diesem Lande alle darüber einig zu sein, dass die Frauenfrage bei uns gelöst sei. Es gab die weit verbreitete Auffassung, Frauen hätten bei uns alle Möglichkeiten und Chancen und insbesondere junge Frauen lägen in einer Art sozialer Hängematte. (Merkel 1990, 5)4

It is of particular interest for to me that Störung Ost is one of the rare occasions that women, East German women in particular, were able to raise their voice in the current discourse about recent German history from an insider’s perspective. Störung Ost (produced by ZDF) was written and directed by Mechthild Katzorke and Cornelia Schneider, both born in 1964 who were directly involved in the events that their film talks about (German Film Service). Therefore, it has a strong autobiographical flavour. At the same time it shows women in an active position. It is of additional interest that both writers/directors were not raised in the obligatory educational system, which was atheistic and concerned with both sexes. Boys and girls were sharing the same education. Instead, due to their fathers being pastors, they were educated in a Catholic girls Gymnasium (high school). That is highly unusual and places the filmmakers outside the regular East-German experience. It was exactly this outsider yet politically privileged position, which prevented Katzorke and

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Schneider from being punished the same hard way for their Punk involvements as their peers. Both film-makers were able to move to the West instead of doing time in a socialist prison or being drafted into the army. They studied experimental film at the University of the Arts in West Berlin instead. According to their film statements the film-makers had two reasons for becoming part of the male driven Punk scene. On the one hand they became interested in a “cute and cool looking” Punk boy who they discovered on a city train platform—S-Bahn stations being one of the favourite meeting places for Punks in East Berlin. There is, in fact, a strong heteronormativity underlying the entire film, although, at the same time we watch mostly homogenous male groups pursuing their Punk activities including wild male-only dances while the “regular” girls stand by, watch and take care of smaller siblings. Another reason for Mechthild Katzorke’s and Cornelia Schneider’s involvement was their opposition to the assumingly rather boring church events of the political opposition at the time. As a bad example serves the female singer Bettina Wegner singing peaceful songs. The film-makers wanted to break away from their parent’s practices of political/religious opposition and find their own ways of expression. Punk was the thing to do. To the uncomfortable surprise of the film-makers the Punks were later absorbed into the Church opposition culture while the socialist state missed out on that opportunity. The generational conflict particularly with their fathers and with (male) authority in a broader sense was generally a driving force also for the male Punks in the film. The documentary uncritically presents women as mostly being absent, passive or powerless. There was hardly a single positive female role model presented. The role models, so it seems, are male. Empowering experiences could only be made in a masculine and hence empowering/active environment. This was visually enforced by the juxtaposition of an almost exclusively all-male Punk activism with a mixed gendered activism of the “regular” and boring “socialist” youth. Apart from the film-makers narrators/interviewers there are three more female activists interviewed in the film. The overwhelming number of interviewees is male which reflects the fact that Punk culture was dominantly a male culture. One of the three female interviewees is rather marginalised. She talks about the connection between domestic male violence mainly against women and children and the violent encounters between Punks and state authorities or between mainly male Punks and other youth groups. Women are not excluded from violent acts particularly as accomplices of the political system like police

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women who took care of the female Punks when taken into short-term custody. Grandmothers are portrayed as friendly supporters/smugglers of music records from the West. Sisters in the Catholic Girls School act as teachers. Mothers are hardly mentioned and usually described as being powerless in domestic conflicts which are clearly dominated by patriarchal men/fathers. Interestingly, love relationships are not discussed. Sex is presented as a marginal issue and only mentioned by male interviewees. Why are female film-makers dealing with gender issues this way? I think, it was not so much the masculinity of the Punk movement that was so attractive but rather the experience that power—within the framework of their circumstances—was always male. The socialist state, police and Stasi as well as the Christian Church and even their families were all organised in authoritarian and patriarchal “too much future” kind of controlled ways. The Cold War, its rhetoric and practical implications was executed by male protagonists. If young men didn’t have many options for adolescent escapism, then girls had even less. The problem is that Mechthild Katzorke and Cornelia Schneider are not aware of the fact that their attempt to take part in empowering male activities and conflicts did also alienate them from their actual interest as women who want power participation. Their documentary is so profoundly indoctrinated by patriarchal and Cold War concepts it sometimes feels like a misogynist film done by women cold warriors. It is paradoxical how young women who engage in opposition and resistance to oppressive socio-political conditions at the same time become the very products of exactly that. This is only reinforced by the film-makers symbolic self-perception as North American First Nations chiefs when both of them repeatedly film themselves wearing colourful feather headgear like children who do masquerades. That is, in fact, a very East German thing to do. The socialist government embraced, of course, all peoples who where subject to Colonialism and imperialist exploitation. The utopian idealism of a good, exciting, free and colourful socialism/paradise that the Punks believed in as much as any political or cultural dissident in the East German context is symbolically demanded by the idealising appropriation of North American First Nations people—well, only the male ones, because women do not get to wear the exciting head gear and are as powerless as anywhere. Some of the Punks stick to their romantic projections. The last, symbolically charged scene of the documentary shows one of the retired male Punks who through the entire film is dressed up like a caricature of a North American Indian. By the end of the film he is sitting in a canoe in peaceful waters somewhere in Germany together with his dog. Both are howling in unison. He says that he is in search of a country different from Germany

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where he can breathe freely and hopes to find it in the Northern vastness, as he calls it vaguely. He clearly is not indicating Siberia.

Notes 1. . . . during the discussions at the Round Table it became very obvious: politics regarding women of recent years buried an emancipatory awareness among women. . . . a complex educational work is necessary in order to make visible the oppressive mechanism regarding women, the subtle forms of devaluation (Translation Budde). 2. Engl. “Disturbance East. Punks in East Berlin 1981-1983” (Translation Budde). Sometimes also translated as “Out of order.” 3. What’s the use of a (ideological) concept of the world (Weltanschauung) when I ain’t gonna be allowed to go and look at the world? (translation Budde). This is a word game playing with the German word schauen for “watch” or “look at.” 4. Just last year there still seemed to be a general consent regarding the women’s question as being resolved in our country. There was the popular understanding that our women do have any possible opportunities and chances and that particularly young women were basically resting in a social “hammock.”

References Becker, Franziska and Ina Merkel. 2000. Das Ende der Utopie? In Das Kollektiv bin ich. Utopie und Alltag in der DDR, ed. Franziska Becker and Ina Merkel, 6-12. Weimar, Wien: Böhlau Verlag. Berg, Henning. 2007. Der sozialistische Abschaum. Stern.de (August 25), http://www.stern.de/unterhaltung/film/:ost-Punk!-Der-Abschaum/ 596083.html (accessed October 29, 2008). Brie, Michael. 2000. In den Mauern: Utopia DDR. In Das Kollektiv bin ich. Utopie und Alltag in der DDR. Ed. Franziska Becker and Ina Merkel, 147-160. Weimar, Wien: Böhlau Verlag. Churchill, Winston. 1946. Sinews of Peace (Iron Curtain). Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, March 5, 1946. Online at http://www. winstonchurchill.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=429 with video embedded from Discovery Channel Education http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=jvax5VUvjWQ (accessed October 10, 2008). Curran, James and Myung-Jin Pak. 2000. Beyond Globalization Theory. In De-Westernizing Media Studies. Ed. James Curran and Myung-Jin Pak, 3-18. London: Routledge.

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Engler, Wolfgang. 2000. Mit Barer Münze zahlen. Gestalten des Utopischen in der DDR-Geschichte. In Das Kollektiv bin ich. Utopie und Alltag in der DDR. Ed. Franziska Becker and Ina Merkel, 161164. Weimar, Wien: Böhlau Verlag. Feuerlicht, Ignace. 1955. A New Look at the Iron Curtain. American Speech 30, no. 3 (October 1955): 186-189, http://www.jstor.org/ stable/453937 (accessed November 30, 2008). Findaway.TV. 2007. Ostpunk—Too much future / Kultcheck bei Findaway.tv. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGKIscmdM3Q (accessed November 20, 2008). Früh, Werner, Uwe Hasenbrink, Friedrich Krotz, Christoph Kuhlmann and Hans-Jörg Stiehler. 1999. Ostdeutschland im Fernsehen. München: KoPäd Verlag. German Films Service & Marketing GmbH. Stoerung Ost [Out of Order]. Biographies of Mechthild Katzorke and Cornelia Schneider. http://www.german-films.de/app/filmarchive/film_view.php? film_id=74 (accessed October 5, 2008). Koehler, Oliver. 2003. Gott sei Punk. Ein Blick zurück auf den Zorn. Fluter.de, http://www.fluter.de/de/subkultur/13/1531?tpl=162 (accessed November 25, 2008). Merkel, Ina. 1990. Wie alles anfing…. In UFV und Argument extra: Ohne Frauen ist kein Staat zu machen, 5-9. Berlin: Argument Verlag. Merkel, Ina. 1997. Mentalitätsunterschiede in Ost und West und die Rolle des Fernsehens und des Fernsehfilms. In Das Ende der Euphorie. Das deutsche Fernsehspiel nach der Einigung. Ed. Birgit Peulings and Rainer Maria Jacobs-Peulings, 129-143. Münster, Hamburg: Lit. Mitscherlich, Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich. 1967. Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern. Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens. München: Piper. Mueller, Delia. 2008. Achtung! Wir kommen. Und wir kriegen euch alle. http://www.achtung-wir-kommen.de/index_g.htm (accessed on Dec.01, 2008). Mühlberg, Dietrich. 2000. Alltag und Utopie. Gedanken bei einem Rückblick auf die ostdeutsche Geschichte. In Das Kollektiv bin ich. Utopie und Alltag in der DDR. Ed. Franziska Becker and Ina Merkel, 15-25. Weimar, Wien: Böhlau Verlag. news aktuell GmbH. 2008. Über acht Millionen sahen “Das Wunder von Berlin:” ZDF-Fernsehfilm war Zuschauermagnet. Presseportal: ZDF, January 18. http://www.presseportal.de/pm/7840/1125444/ (accessed October 07, 2008).

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Orwell, George. 1945. You and the Atomic Bomb. In Tribune (October 19), http://orwell.ru/library/articles/ABomb/english/e_abomb.html (accessed 25 November 2008). Pusch, Steffi. 2000. Exemplarisch DDR-Geschichte leben. Ostberliner Dokumentarfilme 1989/1990. Frankfurt/M: Peter Lang Verlag. Raschik, Nico. 2007. Interview by Alexander Kempf. “HERE WE COME”—Breakdance in der DDR. http://www.backspin.de/30.html? &cHash=3c05351c40&tx_ttnews%5BbackPid%5D=16&tx_ttnews%5 Btt_news%5D=398 (accessed October 10, 2008). See also: http://www.herewecome.de/index2.php?content=stab (accessed October 29, 2008). Rassloff, Michaela. 2007. Punk im Sozialismus: Neuer Dokumentarfilm porträtiert Punkdasein in der DDR. http://www.readersedition.de/2007/09/05/punk-im-sozialismus-neuer-dokumentarfilmportraetiert-punkdasein-in-der-ddr (accessed on November 25, 2008). RBB. Review of OstPunk! Too much Future. http://www.rbbonline.de/_/filmzeit/beitrag_jsp/key=6286842.html (accessed on Oct.29, 2008). Schön, Christian. Review of OstPunk! Too much future. http://www.filmstarts.de/kritiken/75523-ostPunk!-too-muchfuture.html (accessed on Oct.29, 2008). Schwarz, Frederic D. 1997. Time Machine. Naming the New War. In American Heritage Magazine 48, no. 2: 109-110, http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1997/2/1997_2 _95.shtml (accessed on November 20, 2008). Strinati, Dominic. 2004. An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture, 2004: 162, http://www.myilibrary.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/ Browse/open.asp?ID=5694&loc=161 (30 November 2008). White, Wilbur W. 1948. White's Political Dictionary, 75. Cleveland: World Publishing. Quoted in Feuerlicht 1955. ZDF. 2003. Review of Störung Ost: Ein Dokumentarvideo über die jüngere deutsch-deutsche Geschichte. http://daskleinefernsehspiel. zdf.de/ZDFde/inhalt/29/0,1872,2052925,00.html?dr=1 (accessed on October 29, 2008).

Films Fiebeler, Carsten and Michael Boehlke. 2006. OstPunk! Too much Future. Egoli Tossell Film AG, Koppmedia and RBB. Hartung, Florian and Jobst Knigge. 2008. Das Wunder von Berlin—Die Dokumentation. ZDF.

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Kleinert, Karoline. 2008. Punkmusik und Spaßperformance. Alternative Kunst in der DDR. RBB. Richter, Roland Suso. 2008. Das Wunder von Berlin. ZDF. Schneider, Cornelia and Mechthild Katzorke. 1996. Störung Ost. Punks in Ostberlin 1981-1983. ZDF. First broadcast 2 June 1996. Schumann, Dieter. 1988. flüstern und SCHREIEN–Ein Rockreport. DEFA.

EASTERN EUROPE AS THE OTHER

REDRESSING ABSENCE: MEDIATISED WITNESSING AND THE REPORTING OF THE BALKAN CONFLICT IN RECENT BRITISH THEATRE GEOFF WILLCOCKS

The plays considered within this chapter, although in various ways, all deal with the manner in which the Balkan conflict of the 1990s was perceived and portrayed by the Western, and particularly Western European, media. Specifically, these plays, namely Chris Thrope’s Static (1999), Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995) and Peter Cann’s Un-Earth (2004), all concern themselves with re-addressing the absences present in much of this journalism and examine how these absences lead to a reconstruction of the people of Balkans. However, before this some brief contextualisation is required. The realities of the Balkan conflict, as with the realities of any civil war, were complex. This complexity was partially articulated by General Lewis Mackenzie, the Canadian officer in command of UN forces in Bosnia in 1992, when he expressed his perception, albeit extremely crudely, of the difficulties inherent within UNPROFOR’s mission in Bosnia; “dealing with Bosnia is a bit like dealing with three serial killers— one has killed fifteen, one has killed ten, one has killed five. Do we help the one who has only killed five?” (Bennet 1998, 194 n28). Although crude, Mackenzie’s words do much to highlight a number of important issues in relation to the representation of the Balkan conflict by foreign journalists. First, Mackenzie’s comments reinforce the Western myth of the “‘Balkan temperament’ irrational, volatile and pugnacious, a construction so often used in the West to explain away the problems experienced by South Eastern Europe” (Bennet 1998, 194). Secondly, Mackenzie’s view demonstrates that dealing with or considering the Balkan conflict requires that ethical decisions need to be made. Whose side are we on? Who is “right”? Who is the aggressor and who the victim?

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Within the context of the Balkan conflict the answers to these questions are at some times easier to provide than at others. It is this situation that made the Balkan conflict difficult to report by journalists as modern news broadcasting demands “sound-bite” stories; quickly digestible and easily packaged into thirty-second time slots. Therefore, within a conflict that was ethically intricate, without clear and consistent aggressors and victims and whose historical context is too long and involved to be delivered and explained succinctly, the job of communicating this conflict to a non-Balkan audience becomes extremely problematic. Furthermore, television coverage of the Balkan conflict was often guilty of presenting a contradictory duality, in that it would show images of people who were clearly European, while simultaneously reporting them as “other” and in so doing denied the people of the Balkans their Europeanness. This denial of Europeanness, while potentially quiet unconscious, did make representing the Balkan conflict easier, particularly for European journalists, as by constructing the people of the Balkans as “other” the emotional connection between the viewer and the viewed is weakened if not broken altogether. The viewed are no longer seen as “us;” as Europeans, our neighbours, but rather they are constructed as “them,” distinct and separated from the viewer. In addition to this, it should not be forgotten that the Balkan conflict was, for the most part, not treated by the media as a foreign/European affairs story, but as a war story. While, this was eminently appropriate given the nature of the event, it did mean that the event was covered largely by war correspondents, who unlike foreign correspondents experience as part of their remit a unique set of ethical and moral dilemmas. As John E. McGrath notes: The reporter embodies the dilemma of agency—the ethics of witnessing rather than acting, of not acting in order to witness. This centrality of the reporter allows us to organise our relationship to the imagery of death via the figure of this agent, the individual who makes a choice. (McGrath 2004, 106)

This dilemma of agency and the moral and ethical decisions that construct it, particularly the ethics of witnessing—for both reporter and audience, in tandem with a desire to consider the emotional absence discussed above occupies a central position in many British plays that have been produced concerning the Balkan conflict of the 1990s. The first work considered within this chapter, Chris Thorpe’s 1999 play Static, brings both of these elements together and explores them holistically, considering as it does the

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media’s portrayal of the trauma of the Balkan conflict in relation to how both the viewed and the viewer are constructed. Static is composed of two inter-cutting, but only fleetingly intersecting, monologues delivered by a male and female character, both of whom are nameless throughout the piece. In his monologue, the male character relates his day and his general irritation and frustration with those that occupy the world around him, from the be-suited drunk that he finds slumped against the lobby door of his flat, to the old woman in the supermarket queue who uses her last cheque only to have it invalidated by the technology of consumerism. While the Male character’s monologue concerns the mundane everyday irritations of Western living, the Female character’s monologue reports the massacre of her village somewhere in South Eastern Europe, of her escape and ultimately of her finding the body of her lover, perhaps her husband, who has been shot through the head. While at the site of her lover’s death, a television crew arrive and film her grief, a scene that is transmitted back to Britain, where it is seen by the Male character, who for the briefest of moments, as the Female character looks into the camera, believes that a connection has been made between them and that her trauma has been communicated directly to him. In situating Static simultaneously in two different geographical locations, Thorpe manages to generate a tension between the recognisably British world of the Male character and the “other,” foreign setting of the Female character. Through their contrasting testimonies, Thorpe is deliberately attempting to build as much distance as possible between the two characters. The audience’s sympathy is developed with regard to the Female character in equal measure to the distaste they are encouraged to feel for the Male character. This carefully constructed distance, which is emotional as well as geographical, is then seen to collapse in on itself when the connection, albeit brief, is made between the two of them. To this end, Thorpe develops the distance in order to enhance the impact of its contraction. Initially, as he views the pictures broadcast from the site of massacre the Male character engages with them in the same cynical manner that he has employed throughout the play; viewing the woman on the television in the same way that he viewed the drunk or the old woman in the supermarket—as people who, when they cross the trajectory of his life, should only be seen as obstacles or viewed with contempt; at the very least they should be kept at an emotionally safe distance: Like everyone else I think corpses are fascinating . . . . And so many of the interesting ways to die happen abroad. I mean we may have our killers, but we just don’t slaughter as effectively as the Africans or the Slavs, do we?

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This one, I notice, as the camera pans down the woman’s eyeline to the body and swiftly pulls back again, is a young corpse. Killed in his prime when some other nameless combatant in a nameless dirty little war blew his brains out of the front of his head . . . . I try to be horrified, just to show willing. If only for the sake of the woman. But it comes down to this. He’s just special effects, and she’s just set dressing, she’s just a bit more context. That’s all. (Thorpe 1999, 9)

The character’s final comment is interesting as it draws directly on the contemporary confusion surrounding the mediatised image. Through this brief sentence Thorpe is able to bring Jean Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality to bear upon the process of mediatised witnessing (see Baudrillard 1988, 166-184). The Male character invests the scene that he is watching with a fictionalised, filmic quality. Potentially, he employs this as a device to emotionally alienate himself from that which he is witnessing, but it may also point to the fact that as a consumer of such images at the end of the twentieth century the Male character is probably far more likely to have seen many more thousands of dead and mutilated bodies within the context of the fictionalised settings of films than on the television news. His response at this point is to not merely construct the viewed Female character as “other,” but to fictionalise her reality in order to make sense of the event he is witnessing. However, despite his attempt to immure himself from the horror he is witnessing, he is ultimately confronted by the woman’s stare when she turns to face the camera. At that moment, although the Male character later attempts to deny it, the female character stops being “other” and becomes another human being, less that two hours flying time away, who is in deep pain and distress. A connection is made, an emotional connection that transcends distance, language, culture and nationality. The Male character’s role as a witness is, at this point, problematised. While the Male character would actively deny his role as a witness, the very fact that he feels compelled to deny it denotes an acceptance that the act of witnessing has taken place. Moreover, it is perhaps important to consider that implicit within the act of witnessing, in this instance feeling the pain of others, is the acknowledgment that someone may need help. Here the consequence of witnessing is one of implication within the event. An implication that brings with it a responsibility for the other person, for the Male character has been involuntarily interpellated as the “listener” to the Female character’s testimony. Therefore, the consequences of his involuntary interpellation is the ethical choice of action or inaction. Unfortunately, the Male character is unable to help, even if he wanted to.

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He is only an individual, who through the mediatisation of another’s situation has been able to experience their distress, but because of the inherent alienation created by this mediatisation between testifier and the listener, the Male character has been denied the ability to offer assistance. Therefore, Thorpe’s play attempts to draw lines of connection between the media construction of the Balkan peoples as “other” and Europe’s collective culpability in not acting decisively in the Balkans to avoid the atrocities that came so horrifically to characterise the conflict. Most certainly Thorpe intends this play to prick the conscience of its audience and to remind them of the humanity of those, who both distressed and distraught appeared nightly on our television screens during the Balkan conflict. Interestingly, the playwright Sarah Kane claims that the partial genesis of her 1995 play Blasted, was seeing on the television news a women at the site of the Srebrenica massacre pleading into the camera for United Nations assistance. As Aston notes, “Blasted captured a feeling of the Bosnian war” (Aston 2003, 81) and in a number of interviews given by Kane, she repeatedly returns to the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, especially the Bosnian conflict, as a means of establishing the play’s political engagement within contemporary Eastern European events. In this regard, Kane was quite clear that Blasted was a play about contemporary British society and its relationship to the atrocities being committed in Bosnia. Blasted has, in the shape of Ian, a reporter as one of its central characters. Ian’s attitude to his function as one who bears witness to and mediates the “truth,” is one of detachment and possibly even disdain. Ian’s work is intensely parochial, only concerned with those events happening locally. When in the second half of the play the Soldier (who in an earlier draft of the play speaks with a strong Balkan accent) insists that Ian should be aware of the atrocities of war, because “that’s your job . . . . Proving it happened. I’m here, got no choice. But you. You should be telling people.” Ian replies that it is not a story that anyone is interested in (Kane 2001, 47)1. Insisting that he is a home journalist, just covering Yorkshire, Ian expands upon his perceived role: I do other stuff. Shootings and rapes and kids getting fiddled by queer priests and schoolteachers. Not soldiers screwing each other for a patch of land. It has to be . . . personal. (Kane 2001, 48)

Ian’s assertion that this is not a story that anyone wants to hear is morally disturbing as it suggests an explicit denial of reality, a denial in which he is actively complicit. Ian’s claim that his reporting has to be “personal” is of course ironic. Ian can only see the faceless military aspect of the war

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and his failure to look beyond this, even if he had the desire to, means that he is incapable of seeing and thereby communicating the intensely personal and human aspects of the conflict. Thus Ian is responsible for the construction and perpetuation of the “other.” The fact that Ian turns a metaphorical “blind-eye” is then made literal when the Soldier sucks out his eyes and eats them. Peter Buse suggests that Ian’s refusal to bear truthful and meaningful witness as a journalist is punished by the loss of his eyes (Buse 2001, 84) and similarly, Kane points out that for a journalist to lose their eyes is akin to castration (see Saunders 2002, 54). However, if Ian’s situation is seen as part of the extended social and political metaphor that Kane creates in the second half of the play, the loss of his eyes suggests a broader statement concerning the process of witnessing in general and journalistically appointed witnessing in particular. It is, therefore, possible to suggest that Ian’s loss of sight has been brought about by his failure to witness, the inference being that if a society, or indeed a nation, fails to actively witness the traumas that surround it, then it loses its ability to see altogether. Viewed thus, Kane’s play becomes interestingly significant within the context of representing the Balkans. Although, clearly presented in the abstract, Kane’s play points towards the ethical dangers and ramifications of not truthfully representing or “seeing” the peoples of the Balkans during the conflict of the 1990s and thereby the reality of the situation that they were in. The moral implications of this are clear in relation to Bosnia and the Balkans in general. The very fact that one of the instigating events in the creation of this play was the United Nation’s inability to act decisively at Srebrenica, underscores the broader ethical parameters of the work. Ultimately, it would appear that those journalists who dismissed Blasted so completely when it was first performed failed to see that the moral dynamic of the play centres upon a desire to resist complacency and acknowledge the importance of mutual responsibility through a recognition of a shared, common humanity. As Edward Bond suggests in his defence of Blasted: It does not show us the images we will live with if we do not remake our moral vision. We already live those images—in the world where the two hands of the clock are birth and death, the world that is always there but becomes our dehumanised reality only when we do not try to make our daily world more just . . . . The humanity of Blasted moved me. I worry for those too busy or so lost that they cannot see its humanity. (Bond 1995, 22)

The final play in this chapter is Peter Cann’s 2004 play Un-Earth, a community theatre performance performed by The Resurrectionists uses

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the testimony of a number of Bosnian refugees, now living in Birmingham, as the source material for the play and through these real testimonies ensures, not only the plays humanity but also its truthful representation of the peoples of the Balkans during and after the conflict. As with Thorpe’s Static and Kane’s Blasted, the influence of the role of the journalist is also felt within Un-Earth. In the programme notes the company place the starting point of the work as a creaking wheel on President Tudjman of Croatia’s funeral carriage. From this single sound, the company began to consider creating a play about the revolutions of Eastern Europe by utilising the sound archives of the radio journalist Nick Thorpe. Within Un-Earth, the character of the journalist is Adrian Glenn, who is presented as a calm, rational, non-interventionist and objective observer. In this way, the audience trust Glenn, presented as he is as the voice of objective reporting. However, this position is not without its complexity, as the influential war correspondent James Cameron notes: “objectivity” in some circumstances is both meaningless and impossible . . . how [can] a reporter attempting to define a situation involving some sort of ethical conflict do it with sufficient demonstrable neutrality to fulfil some arbitrary concept of “objectivity.” (McLaughlin 2002, 162)

Or as Martin Bell explained after his experience as a reporter during the Balkan conflict: I was in the tradition of objective journalism and dispassionate journalism . . . . I believed in it once. I don’t believe in it anymore. (Bell 1998, 102-3)

Glenn’s role within Un-Earth is apparently ethically and morally uncomplicated, maintaining throughout his neutral impartiality. Glenn does not express a view of those he meets, he does not seek to take “sides,” nor does he portray the Balkans, its conflict or its people within the framework of any particular personal or moral perspective. Rather, he objectively observes and reports. But despite this apparent contradiction Glenn’s function dramatically is to allow an emotional and personal connection to be made between the Balkan peoples portrayed within the play and its audience, as it is Glenn’s role to help facilitate them in the telling of their stories. His presence in the play is not to represent the media’s cynical reconstruction of the Balkan people as “other,” but rather to redress this construction by giving the Balkan characters in this play a reason to speak. Thereby, the comment, analysis and emotional expression within Un-Earth is considered and expressed almost exclusively through

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the Balkan characters within the work2, and not rationalised through the perspective of the Western media. Thus, as the Western reporter in a foreign land, Glenn himself becomes the “other.” He is the stranger and the outsider. However, while all but the very last section of the play is set in Bosnia, the plays has a much wider remit in terms of portrayal and representation. While the fact that the play is constructed from interviews conducted with Bosnian refugees now resident in Birmingham and that the play was performed in Edgbaston in Birmingham locates the work within a specific community, the constituency for this work can be seen to be very broad. Staged at a time of resurgent unrest concerning asylum-seekers and refugees, Un-Earth can be viewed as a work that deals with perhaps the ultimate community disintegration and in doing so re-presents the story of this disintegration as a means of fostering a greater sense of commonality. In this way, Un-Earth operates as a performance that at root explores the nature of “neighbourliness” in its widest context. First the work seeks to explain the presence of these new neighbours within the Birmingham community; secondly it explores the devastating consequences of civil war with regard to the disintegration of the relationships that exists between those that have formerly been neighbours; and finally, it places those persons displaced by the Balkan conflict into an international context so that they can be viewed as Britain’s international neighbours, thus, at least partially, dispelling their construction as “other.” Collectively the themes of these plays and the characters within them demonstrate repeatedly the importance of the media and reporters in shaping and defining our understanding of the complexities of reporting the Balkan conflict. Moreover, the role of these characters is not simply to examine these complexities, but also, within a much wider context, to engage us, as an audience, in a consideration of our own ethical responses and responsibilities as witnesses to the material that these journalists present us with. While this is of course true of any conflict and not just the Balkan conflict of the 1990s, what is specific to this conflict and which has been explored within the plays considered here is the reconstruction of the peoples of a section of Europe, not as Europeans, but as those which fall outside the boundaries and borders of Europe, if not geographically and historically, then politically and culturally. Perhaps the most disturbing fact which these plays, whether implicitly or explicitly, highlight is that this reconstruction has occurred not so that the event can be considered in its most illuminating light, but so that the event and the people caught up in it can be more easily and more palatably consumed in the living rooms of Western Europe.

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Notes 1. Blasted was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, London, January 1995, directed by James Macdonald. 2. Un-Earth also considers how the Balkan conflict affected British soldiers stationed in Bosnia as part of UNPROFOR.

References Aston, Elaine. 2003. Feminist Views on the English Stage: Women Playwrights, 1990-2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 1988. Simulacra and Simulations. In Selected Writings. Ed. Mark Poster, 166-184. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bell, Martin. 1998. The Truth is our Currency. Harvard International Journal Press/Politics, Vol. 3.1: 102-3. Bennett, Christopher. 1998. Yugoslavia’s Bloody Collapse: Causes, Course and Consequences. London: C. Hurst and Co. Bond, Edward. 1995. A Blast at our Smug Theatre. Guardian, January 28. Buse, Peter. 2001. Drama and Theory: Critical Approaches to Modern British Drama. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Cann, Peter. Un-Earth. [2004]. Unpublished manuscript. First performed by The Resurrectionists at the Midlands Art Centre, Birmingham, July 2004, directed by Stephen Johnstone. Kane, Sarah. 2001. Complete Plays. London: Methuen. Langridge, Natasha and Heidi Stephenson. 1997. Rage and Reason: Women Playwrights on Playwrighting. London: Methuen. McGrath, John E. 2004. Loving Big Brother: Performance, Privacy and Surveillance Space. London: Routledge. McLaughlin, Greg. 2002. The War Correspondent. London: Pluto Press. Saunders, Graham. 2002. Love Me or Kill Me: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Thorpe, Chris. [1999]. Static. Unpublished manuscript. First performed at Leeds Metropolitan University Studio Theatre, Leeds, April 1999, directed by Paul Warwick.

AN-OTHER EAST: RE-VISIONS OF ORIENTALISM AND MASCULINITY IN ARTHUR PHILLIPS’S PRAGUE JOSEP M. ARMENGOL-CARRERA

Orientalism overrode the Orient . . . Orientalism assumed an unchanging Orient, absolutely different (the reasons change from epoch to epoch) from the West. And Orientalism, in its post-eighteenth-century form, could never revise itself. (Edward W. Said 1979, Orientalism, 96)

In Orientalism, an already classical study on the relations of East and West, the late Palestinian-American thinker Edward W. Said provokingly argued that the Orient is a Western invention. Of course, this does not mean that the Orient does not exist as a geographical location, but rather that the West invented the East as a place of mysticism and exoticism and, even more important, as its contrasting image. Actually, the East has long helped to define the West by becoming one of its deepest and most recurring images of the “Other.” It is crucial to note, therefore, that the relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of hegemony, power, and domination. Moreover, the relations of East and West, because of their inequality, have traditionally been characterised by inaccuracy and distortion. Knowledge of the Orient, because generated out of strength, promotes a distorted image of the Oriental and his world. Rather than represent himself, the Oriental is represented by Western dominating structures, which project their own fears and phobias onto the Orient. Orientalism thus became “a kind of Western projection onto and will to govern over the Orient” (Said 1979, 95). Moreover, it is one of Edward W. Said’s central theses that Orientalism is a gendered discourse. More specifically, he argues that, as a result of Orientalist practices of stereotyping, the West has tended to feminise the East. By inventing the separateness of the Orient, its eccentricity, its backwardness, its malleability, the West has stereotyped the East as sensual, willing, passive, penetrable, weak—in other words, as feminine. In Said’s own words, “the relation between the . . . East and the West is really defined as sexual”

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(Said 1979, 309). In line with these ideas, this chapter analyses Arthur Phillips’s 2002 novel Prague (New York Times Notable Book selection, and Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, Los Angeles Times, both 2003) as a contemporary literary re-vision of Orientalism. While Edward W. Said originally defined Orientalism as the cultural, political, and economic control of three successive empires—British, French, American—over the Middle East, I argue that the concepts and relations of “East” and “West” have been radically redefined since the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the downfall of Communism, suggesting that the introduction of Western/American capitalism and culture into Eastern Europe may also have become influenced by Orientalist discourses and views. Using as an example Arthur Phillips’s book, which follows the lives of young American ex-patriots in the Budapest of the early 1990s, I contend that Orientalism does indeed shape much of the novel’s structure and content, depicting the East as a new frontier for Westerners/Americans and its inhabitants as feminised objects of abuse. Furthermore, it is my contention that such Orientalist views, which seem to exoticise modern Budapest as an-Other East, are clearly and specifically gendered. The essay thus explores the gendering of the Orientalist fantasies in Arthur Phillips’s Prague, focusing on the connections between Orientalism and masculinity/masculinism in the novel. While much of this chapter is concerned with studying, and denouncing, Orientalism and masculinism, as well as their interaction, in Phillips’s work, it concludes by analysing the writer’s re-vision of both concepts, which might be considered, as we shall see, as highly subversive and innovative. Ultimately, then, this essay will centre on both the construction and the deconstruction of the (gendered) Orientalist imagery in Arthur Phillips’s fiction. Drawing on its author’s participation in the expatriate culture of Budapest, Hungary, from 1990 to 1992, Arthur Phillips’s first novel depicts the lives of a group of twenty-something American expatriates living in Budapest in 1990, the days following the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. While really wishing to be in Prague (hence the novel’s title), where they think the “real” life is going on, Phillips’s characters find themselves hanging out in the cafés of Budapest for different reasons.1 Prague’s protagonist is, arguably, John Price, a reporter for the English-language newspaper Budapest Today. While he is committed to virginity, defining sexuality as a distraction, he feels irremediably attracted to Emily Oliver, a Nebraskan employed at the city’s U.S. Embassy. While John has travelled to Budapest following his older brother, whom he adores and respects as a father-figure, Scott Price, English teacher and fitness fanatic, feels nothing but contempt for John. The relationship between the two brothers becomes

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increasingly distant after John commits “fratultery” by sleeping with Scott’s fiancée. Meanwhile, Mark Payton, a gay Canadian postdoctoral student researching the history of nostalgia, ends up suffering a nervous breakdown due to the philosophical and existential questions raised by his stay in Budapest, while Charles Gabor, a young Hungarian-American with an aggressive business-oriented mentality, plans to buy out Budapest’s prestigious but financially troubled family-owned Horvath Press. The Hungarian perspective, on the other hand, is represented by Nadja, an elderly pianist, “a Hungarian version of the kind of character Marlene Dietrich made famous” (Kamine 2002, 44), who captivates the Americans with tales of Austro-Hungarian spies and daring escapes spanning one totalitarian regime after another, and Imre Horváth, owner of the Horvath Press, who sees Charles as a generous and enthusiastic protector of his company. Besides depicting the relationships among the five American expatriates, Phillips’s novel is centrally concerned, therefore, with exploring the relationships between the American characters and their Hungarian counterparts, which are clearly influenced, as we shall see, by the set of (gendered) fantasies of the West about the East known as Orientalism. In order to illustrate the influence of Orientalism on Prague, as well as its gendered components, the remainder of this chapter will focus on the (intercultural) relations between, on the one hand, John Price and Nadja, and, on the other hand, Charles Gabor and Imre Horvath. John’s relationship with Nadja is marked by Orientalism from the start. As soon as he meets her at the jazz club where she is playing, John introduces her as “an exotic species” (Phillips 2003, 95). Looking for the “real” Eastern experience, John is easily seduced by her stories of spies, blackmail, forbidden loves between political enemies, and Europe’s decadent past. As Edward Said has argued, Orientalism has defined the East as a place of mysticism and exoticism, “of memories, suggestive ruins, forgotten secrets, hidden correspondences, and an almost virtuosic style of being” (Said 1979, 170). An Orientalist himself, John thus feels immediately attracted to Nadja, who keeps telling him about her daring escapes from different totalitarian regimes in Hungary. I have been forced, from time to time again, to join the sorority of refugees . . . I, with various members of various families, left my country in 1919, returned in 1923, left again in . . . 1944, returned in 1946, left again . . . in 1956 and returned only last year, (Phillips 2003, 98)

she informs John.

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While John invites her to drinks, Nadja invents romantic stories for him. For instance, she tells him that, during one of their escapes, she and her husband made a list of all the books and records they had to leave behind so that they could rebuild the collection when away from Hungary. In Nadja’s own words: We spent one long night making a catalog of our literature and music. Of our life and pleasures. We took turns with the pen. One of us recited; one of us wrote. You must think of this beautiful scene, John Price, for it was very beautiful. There are tanks rolling up the streets of your home . . . There are explosions echoing down the streets . . . . And behind a blackened window, by candlelight, my husband and I scribble and whisper. (Phillips 2003, 99-100)

Of course, she is making up this story. As Nadja herself warns him, “I am really an incurable liar, John Price . . . you must never believe a word I say” (Phillips 2003, 99). While acknowledging the fantasy of the story, then, Nadja provides a beautiful fairy tale for John’s amusement. John pays for the drinks, and she makes up stories in return, insisting on their central component of fantasy and beauty. “You must think of this beautiful scene, John Price, for it was very beautiful” (Phillips, 1003, 99). Blinded by his own Orientalism, however, John is convinced of the veracity of her stories, which he wants to believe. While Nadja simply provides John with the fantasy that he desires, he thus keeps (con)fusing truth with lies, reality with fiction. However, John will finally have to confront reality, realising that his Orientalist fantasies belong to “an imaginative, unrealizable (except aesthetically) dimension” (Said 1979, 170). Imagining Nadja’s apartment, he falls prey to all kinds of Orientalist tropes, associating her place with exoticism, mysticism, romanticism, secrecy, and mystery. As John himself explains: Nadja’s apartment would be a treasury of her amazing life so beautifully, so fully lived: that . . . scribbled catalog of books and records—creased, yellowed, but there in the pulp; photographs of all her people and places; letters in remarkable handwriting, from eras when the mail came thrice daily; drawings of her, which she would handle with care but not worship, considering they had been sketched by hands of greatness, hands for whose other, more finished works museums fought one another like enraged children. On a shelf, mysterious souvenirs: a bullet casing; an ancient and curling identity card issued by some long since disbanded organization to some young man long since grey or gone; a rolled and tied citation from a government vanished from the earth. (Phillips 2003, 328-9)

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At the novel’s end, however, when Nadja dies and John Price finally visits her actual apartment, he is surprised to find none of these fantasised objects. As he sadly complains, “There’s nothing here. Nothing,” he muttered, amazed to unearth no evidence in the dwarfish chest of drawers, nothing beyond the few clothes and forint coins, the comb and brush. “This isn’t her life,” he said sadly. (Phillips 2003, 338)

Of course, this is Nadja’s life. Nadja’s stories of war and escapes suggest nothing but hardship, suffering, and deprivation. As she tells John, we have a most unfortunate habit of jollying up to rather the wrong side of world wars, haven’t we? And then being invaded by our Russian friends to pay for our sins. (Phillips 2003, 98)

However, John is simply interested in the purely exotic and mysterious parts of Nadja’s stories, idealising and romanticising them. At the novel’s end, however, Arthur Phillips finally makes Price confront Nadja’s harsh reality, thus undermining his young protagonist’s self-delusions. “The Hungarians,” as Adam Goodheart has put it, “are . . . time-battered specimens, nicotine-stained survivors of wars and uprisings. Among . . . such people, the young Americans seem weightless, almost immaterial” (Goodheart 2002, 7). In Prague, then, Phillips not only depicts the exoticisation of the “East,” represented as the (female) “Other” (Nadja), by Western masculinity (John Price) but also revisits these traditional Orientalist fantasies by contrasting American ingenuity with European realism. As Mendelsohn suggests, “the contrast—with its echoes of James and Wharton and Turgenev—between Eastern worldliness and Western naiveté is one that Phillips knowingly evokes” (Mendelson 2002, 75). Equally influenced by (gendered) notions of Orientalism is the relation between the Hungarian-American businessman Charles Gabor and the Hungarian publisher Imre Horvath. The encounter between the two men, which “provides ‘Prague’ with its most energizing subplot” (Maslin 2002, E8), is marked by a cultural clash which becomes apparent from the start. A grandchild of 1956, one of those Americans whose parents had left Hungary after the failed anti-Communist uprising of that year, Charles Gabor is described as a venture capitalist whose office in Budapest was “larger and more luxurious and with a better view than the U.S. ambassador’s” (Phillips 2003, 45). Moreover, Gabor has a totally derogatory and Orientalist view of the East, defining the Hungarians as “stupid” and “dumb,” a people “so busy playing dumb under the Russians,

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they wake up one day and they can’t help it, they’re not playing, they’re just dumb” (Phillips 2003, 119-120). While Gabor is represented as the very embodiment of contemporary Western/American capitalism, Imre Horvath is the recipient of Hungary’s history, representing European tradition, cultural refinement, and morality. The owner of a two hundredyear-old publishing house symbolically named “A Horvath Kiado”—“The Memory of Our People,” Imre, survivor of both fascism and communism, is a living symbol of Hungary’s cultural history. If Gabor represents the present, Imre stands for the past. The cultural and historical clash between the two becomes, therefore, almost inevitable. As Krisztina Toldy, Imre’s assistant, predicts: I am believing you will find Mr. Horvath an extraordinary businessman in your own Western style, except that in the fundamentally, he is a man of moralness and perhaps that is something you have seldomly seen in the West, or perhaps even never, since you are all unfamiliar with how living under the Communists did make some men strong. But perhaps this is impossible for your understanding what I mean. (Phillips 2003, 175)

Confirming Krisztina’s predictions, Gabor is totally unconcerned about morality or about Horvath’s relevance to Hungary’s past. Actually, using his fluency in his parents’ native tongue, he gains the confidence of the Hungarian editor and plots the takeover of his historical publishing house. While Imre acknowledges that his press is undergoing financial difficulties and needs Gabor’s money, he also insists that the press needs not only money but also, and especially, “men and women of culture who understand the importance of what we represent. We need Hungarians of character, ready to reclaim their heritage” (Phillips 2003, 175). Convincing Imre that he totally agrees with his views, and that he is a young Hungarian who can bring home the new thinking and what he has learned abroad, Gabor offers to ask his American firm for money for the Horvath Press’s expansion, renovation, and repatriation after Communism. However, when Imre suffers a stroke that leaves him paralysed and comatose, Gabor is quick to betray his compatriot’s memory by selling the historical national press to an American multinational. As Phillips writes, The Horvath Press was not only for sale but the fates had already proceeded to the details of what it would be called when it was swallowed, still breathing, into the snaky belly of the Multinational Median Corporation, where it would quickly be broken down into its irreducible components. (Phillips 2003, 181)

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Clearly, then, the relationship between the American businessman Charles Gabor and the Hungarian Imre Horvath may also be described according to the traditional gendered imagery of Orientalism. The son and grandson of anti-Communists, Gabor represents the epitome of American masculinity, imperialism, and capitalism. He is the successor of the “Cold Warrior” of the West, in pursuit of capitalism’s latest frontier, who was, in turn, the successor of the cowboy. Actually, it is not difficult to see, as Suzanne Clark does in Cold Warriors: Manliness on Trial in the Rhetoric of the West (2000), a connection between the Cold Warrior of the West and the cowboy stories of the American frontier. Looking at the intersections between the discourses of gender, anti-communism, and national identity during the Cold War, Clark contends that, in reality, the Cold Warrior discourse was founded on the mythology of the old West as the origin of the hero-warrior.2 The definition of American-ness in the Cold War rested on the nostalgia for the old discourses of the West to claim that there was and always had been only one real American identity. The Cold War relegitimated conquest by drawing on the American legacy of conquest, often borrowing older images of the cowboy and the soldier. It is Clark’s contention, therefore, that the United States transferred frontier narratives and their internal colonialism into the postwar to exercise international colonialism in the name of “democracy” and anticommunism. As Clark herself elaborates: The West and Theodore Roosevelt’s arena of strenuous manliness were rearticulated in the Cold War arena and underwrote the new international politics of East and West . . . . The phrase “Cold Warriors” entered the language because those old fables supported the new order. The West became a euphemism that conjoined frontier myth to national behavior in a global context. The category of the West continues ambiguously to refer to the American West and to the international West . . . . The arena of the Cold Warrior was a new historical era, but it made heavy use of the discourses that came before. (Clark 2000, 5-6)

In line with these ideas, then, I would like to argue that the (re-) construction of cowboy masculinity during the Cold War was a preface to the contemporary Western/American model of hegemonic masculinity that Arthur Phillips depicts in Prague. I suggest that the competitive and aggressive model of American businessman that Phillips portrays as dominating contemporary Hungary is nothing but the latest version of the cowboy myth forged in Cold War America. Taking up Suzanne Clark’s claim that the Cold War “lives on in the imaginary where it was so firmly installed through nuclear trauma and phobia” (Clark 2000, 14), I want to

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emphasise the analogy and continuity between the contemporary narratives of capitalism and the Cold War. Not only do the battle and the “Cold” Warrior contribute to the cultural narratives of capitalism (to commercials, to sports, to bodybuilding, etc.) but the narratives themselves promote competition, aggressiveness, and warfare. In Clark’s own words, “the global economy at the end of the twentieth century wages virtual warfare” (Clark 2000, 14). Following Clark, then, I read the shaping of masculinity during the Cold War as a preface to the contemporary American model of hegemonic masculinity (competitive, aggressive, individualistic, rootless, materialistic) portrayed in Phillips’s novel. If one coincides with her that contemporary warfare is not (just) military but (also) “economic, racial, and ecological” (Clark 2000, 16), then it is not difficult to identify as a new “Cold Warrior” the aggressive businessman that Phillips portrays as manager of an important American firm in Budapest during the first years after Communism. Like his most immediate ancestors, the cowboy and the Cold Warrior, Gabor embodies an aggressive model of Western/American masculinity based on the conquest and domination of new frontiers. For Gabor, Budapest/Hungary/the “Wild East” is nothing but a means of reaffirming his superior Western masculinity. As Phillips writes, Charles was the first person whose elevation to minor celebrity John had ever witnessed (or helped effect). The young powerhouse who made his name in the Wild East was going home to a plum job with some New York CV firm or investment bank or hedge fund or something, some financial nonsense the details of which John could not trouble himself to bring into focus. Charles was hailed as the only hero-survivor of his old firm’s fast and self-inflicted decline . . . . And now he was returning to his world, via Zurich, like a Crusader (a white crucifix on a tail fin gules) back from a conquered Holy Land, coming to reassure his people that their Gospel is true and powerful, the Red devils convert with ease. (Phillips 2003, 358)

Of course, the self-affirmation of Western masculinity always depends, as Said’s reflections on Orientalism have taught us, on the subjugation and feminisation of Eastern cultures and peoples. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that Charles Gabor’s inflated sense of masculinity and success depends on Imre Horvath’s erasure through feminisation. Actually, the feminisation of the East, particularly Eastern Europe, by the West, in particular the United States, may be traced back to the Cold War, which established multiple connections between political and sexual perversion, often representing Communists as “sexual perverts” (i.e. homosexuals) and effete (Courdileone 2005, 67-86).

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The homosexualisation of Communism, usually associated with Russia and Eastern Europe, served two main purposes. On the one hand, it diminished Communism as a perverse and feminising force. On the other, it enabled Cold War liberalism to emerge as the only possible alternative to Communism in post-war American society. As Robert J. Corber argues in his book on homosexuality in Cold War America, “the politicization of homosexuality was crucial to the consolidation of the Cold War consensus” (Corber 1997, 3). Given these historical facts, it is little wonder, then, that Charles Gabor, a “Cold Warrior” of the West, asserts his masculinity by diminishing and feminising Imre Horvath, survivor of Communism and a living symbol of Eastern European history and culture. Actually, Gabor can only carry out the semi-legal financial operation that makes him rich after Imre suffers a stroke that leaves him comatose and paralysed. Gabor’s assertive masculinity thus contrasts with Imre, who is depicted as weak, passive, needy, vulnerable, and penetrable—in short, feminised. As Phillips writes, smocked Imre lay on top of the covers; a smoothly folded blanket draped across his feet and lower legs. Fluids travelled at different speeds along a network of predictable tubes . . . John stared at Imre’s slow-breathing belly on the convex mattress under the blinking screens and tangled tubes. (Phillips 2003, 317-318)

While Charles Gabor embodies and displays an aggressively heroic model of American masculinity, Imre is thus reduced and feminised (“You’re very impressive when you’re not, you know, like this,” John tells Imre) and, subsequently, abused by Western masculinity and capitalism. In Prague, then, the assertion of Western masculinity remains inseparable from the feminisation and subjugation of the East, which is represented as corrupt, lazy, and childish or “whiny.” As Charles Gabor himself finally confesses to John: I hates it here, I hates this filthy li’l town, I hates the Hungarians, chum, and all their shitty little half-baked corruptions and laziness and this attitude they teach their kids from birth that the world owes them salvation, because history has beat up on them so bad and they are always betrayed and all the rest of it. The whininess of these people just kills me. (Phillips 2003, 360)

While much of Arthur Phillips’s Prague thus seems to depict Charles Gabor as the archetypal Orientalist, the one who asserts his superior Western masculinity by feminising and conquering the inferior East, the book is far more subversive and innovative than it may seem. As Daniel

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Mendelsohn notes, Gabor “believes himself to be free of the past; Prague makes it clear that such freedom comes at a high moral and cultural price” (Mendelsohn 2002, 75). At the novel’s end, while Gabor is at the airport, ready to leave Hungary and return to the United States, Krisztina Toldy, Imre Horvath’s faithful secretary, decides to avenge Imre’s memory by shooting the traitor dead. “She fires twice into his neck, then, sobbing, turns the gun upon herself” (Phillips 2003, 363). Before shooting him down, however, Krisztina calls Gabor’s family name, thus invoking the Hungarian-American businessman’s ancestral history. And Krisztina Toldy—a glowing, pulsing, sexless archangel of retribution—screams his name, just his family name, as if she invokes with it all his ancestors, his nation, his Danube tribe: Gábor! (Phillips 2003, 362)

While Gabor had always insisted that “you can’t possibly take feelings seriously” (Phillips 2003, 359), this invocation, however, provokes an emotional response on his part, and “at last a pure and unironic emotion flashes on the face of Charles Gábor” (Phillips 2003, 362). After trifling with two centuries’ worth of cultural history, then, the American businessman finally realises, even if only one second before dying, the relevance of one’s own ancestry, cultural history, and, above all, ethics and morality over purely economic interests. As Imre had advised him, “Your Hungarian history. Think on this first, Károly, and on balance sheets second” (Phillips 2003, 182). Admittedly, Charles Gabor’s death, perhaps too classic an example of poetic justice, followed by Krisztina’s suicide, might be interpreted as the death of the intercultural dialogue between East and West, two irreducibly different and antagonistic entities. However, my reading of the novel is against such potentially essentialist views. What the novel emphasises is not the essential(ist) differences between two identities, Eastern European and American, but rather the cultural, political, and economic inequalities which distort the relations of East and West, dividing rather than uniting the two cultures. In other words, rather than posit the “essence” of the East as opposed to the West, Phillips’s novel shows how Orientalism as a culturally and politically constructed discourse about the East continues to flourish today, having been successfully adapted to the new imperialistic and capitalist agendas (Said 1979, 322). As Mendelsohn has argued, Prague is really an old-fashioned novel of ideas—one of those books in which the plot feels like allegory and each character stands for some grand concept.

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Charles Gabor, of course, functions nicely as a poster boy for the soullessness of American capitalism. (Mendelsohn 2002, 75)

While promoting democracy, post-communism, as we have seen, is, in effect, attracting as well a new army of “Cold Warriors” to the “Wild East,” which has recently been established as Western/American capitalism’s latest frontier. While the new encounter between East and West may obviously prove enriching to both, it becomes absolutely essential, therefore, to prevent such encounter from being determined by traditional (gendered) notions of Orientalism, which, as has been argued, has systematically promoted Western masculinity by feminising and diminishing the East. After all, bridging together East and West, as the late Edward Said always insisted, should imply “crossing, rather than maintaining, barriers” (Said 1979, 336).

Notes 1. Prague, then, becomes a symbol of the characters’ naiveté, who think that the Czech city is much more interesting than Budapest, where they cannot see much happening. However, “the great sadness,” as Mendelsohn (2002, 75) notes, is that history and real life “is staring in the face the whole time they are in Budapest, they just don’t know how to recognize it.” 2. David Savran holds a similar view, suggesting that, in many respects, the cowboy most clearly exemplifies the hegemonic masculinity of the 1940s and 1950s. As a key player in an imperialist adventure, the cowboy, like Nixon or Khrushchev, exploited land and labour through the codes of “lawlessness,” justified genocide through the discourse of “manifest destiny,” and legitimated wild misogyny through the imagery of “male autonomy.” In Savran’s own words, “What the Dakotas were for the cowboys, Taiwan and Hungary were for Nixon and Khrushchev” (Savran 1992, 18-19).

References Clark, Suzanne. 2000. Cold Warriors: Manliness on Trial in the Rhetoric of the West. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Souther Illinois University Press. Corber, Robert J. 1997. Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Cuordileone, K. A. 2005. Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War. New York and London: Routledge. Dean, Robert D. 2001. Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

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Goodheart, Adam. 2007. Tourist Trap. New York Times Book Review, July 21: 7. Kamine, Mark. 2002. The Climate Abroad. The New Leader May/June: 42-45. Maslin, Janet. 2002. Americans Overseas, Lost and Generally Oblivious. New York Times, June 17. Mendelsohn, Daniel. 2002. Ironists Abroad. The New Yorker, July 8. Phillips, Arthur. Prague. New York: Random House, 2003. Said, Edward W. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage. Savran, David. 1992. Communists, Cowboys, and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Josep M. Armengol obtained his Ph.D. in English from the University of Barcelona, Spain, with a dissertation entitled Gendering Men: Theorizing Masculinities in American Culture and Literature (2006). He has published extensively on masculinity studies, especially literary representations of masculinity, in academic journals such as Men and Masculinities and Journal of Men’s Studies, among others. His latest books include Re/Presenting Men: Cultural and Literary Constructions of Masculinity in the U.S. (2008) and The Fiction of Man: Re-Visions of Masculinity in Richard Ford’s Fiction (In press). He is the editor of two volumes: Debating Masculinity (2009) and Masculinitats per al segle XXI (2007). Currently, he is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities at the State University of New York (SUNY), directed by Michael Kimmel, where he is working on a new book on racialised images of masculinity in American fiction. Antje Budde is a cross appointed Assistant Professor at the University College Drama Program and the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. She obtained her MA (1993) and PhD (2001) at Humboldt-University in Berlin/Germany. Between 19901991 and 1994-1995 she was a research fellow at the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing/China. Her special fields of research are: experimental theatre in China, intercultural theatre, experimental theatre in Germany/Europe, comparative media and performance studies and the history of East German Television (with special focus on gender, culture and politics). Corina Anghel Crisu is a Lecturer at the Faculty of Foreign Languages, University of Bucharest. She has participated in numerous international conferences, training workshops and joint projects, and she has authored more than 40 articles in the field of American Studies and Comparative Literature. She is the author of Rewriting: Polytropic Identies in the Postmodern African American Novel (2006). Her past awards include a Soros-Chevening Fellowship at Oxford University and a Fulbright Fellowship at Oregon State University. She is a member of IASA (The International Association of American Studies), ESSE (The

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European Society for the Study of English), and BAAS (British Association for American Studies). She is also a poet and has contributed to literary journals and anthologies worldwide; her poems have been collected in a bilingual volume, Triptych (Bucharest: Paralela 45, 2004). Cinzia Mozzato was educated at the University of Venice, where she read English and French. She moved to Belgium to teach Italian and learn Dutch and eventually took her PhD in Anglo-Germanic Philology and Literatures in Padua, writing a thesis on the representations of Central and Eastern Europe in contemporary British poetry. An essay on the poetry of Philip Larkin and Thomas Hardy has been included in Carte d’occasione (Padua: Unipress, 2007) and an essay on contemporary Black British poetry has been published in the first volume of L’Europa dei giovani (Padua: CLEUP, 2007). An essay on contemporary fiction in Uganda will be published in the forthcoming proceedings of the 2008 EACLALS Conference. She is currently working on translations of the Irish novelist Edward McWhinney and the Scottish-Pakistani writer Suhayl Saadi. Steven Quinn teaches Theatre and Performance Studies at East 15 and the University of East London. He has worked as a writer, actor and director and has a Doctorate in Cultural History. He has published articles on youth culture, popular music, performance theory, media studies and popular memory. His continuing research explores the intersection between performance studies and cultural politics. Elmar Schenkel taught at the universities of Tübingen, Freiburg, Konstanz and at Amherst/Massachusetts and was DAAD visiting professor at Russian universities (Kasan, Nishni Novgorod, Ekaterinburg, Moscow, Voronezh). Since 1993 he has been Chair of English Literature at the University of Leipzig. His research areas include science/religion/literature, children’s literature and travel writing. He has published books on British poetry, the Romantic essay, J.C. Powys and Tolkien as well as biographies of H.G. Wells and Joseph Conrad. Recent books include essays on eccentric and visionary scientists (Die elektrische Himmelsleiter), a Russian travel book (Das sibirische Pendel), a book on bicycles and literature (Cyclomanie) and a novel (Leise Drehung). He is a regular contributor to the Russian children’s magazines Schrumdi and Schrumdirum. John Sears is the author of Reading George Szirtes (2008). He has published essays on Szirtes and other contemporary writers, and has

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delivered papers on Szirtes’ work at universities across Europe. He lectures in English at Manchester Metropolitan University, and is currently working on a book on Stephen King and gothic theory, to be published by University of Wales Press. Kathleen Starck is Junior Professor for Cultural Studies at Osnabrueck University. Previously, she held a post-doctoral position in British literature at Bremen University and has taught British and American literature and cultural studies at Leipzig University. Her research interests include films of the Cold War, contemporary drama, popular culture, postcolonial and transcultural studies, as well as gender studies and masculinity studies. She is the author of 'I Believe in the Power of Theatre.' British Women's Drama of the 1980s and 1990s. (2005), has co-edited the collection of essays Transkulturelle Begegnungen [Transcultural Encounters]. (2007), and is working on a book on political masculinities in films of the Cold War. In December 2008 she hosted the international conference “Cultural Representations of the Cold War” at Osnabrueck University. Maria-Ana Tupan holds a professorship in British literary studies and literary theory at the University of Bucharest. She spent the academic year 1994-95 at Penn State University as a Senior Fulbright Scholar, and has participated, as a speaker, in international academic reunions in Athens, Manchester, Madrid, and Dresden. Her research interests range from cultural studies, comparative literature, and the history of literature in English to applied literary theory. She has received several awards from the Romanian Writers’ Union and from literary magazines. Her book publications include Scenarii i limbaje poetice (1989), Marin Sorescu i deconstructivismul (1995), Scriitori români în paradigme universale (1998), A Discourse Analyst's Charles Dickens, (1999), Discursul modernist (2000), Discursul postmodern (2002), Sensul sincronismului (2004), British Literature. An Overview (2005), The New Literary History (2006), Genre and Postmodernism (2008). Geoff Willcocks is a Principal Lecturer in Theatre and Joint Head of Department for Performing Art at Coventry University, UK. His teaching interests include post-war British theatre history and contemporary performance practice. His doctoral thesis (University of Reading) focused upon British theatrical responses to the conflicts and traumas experienced by Europe following the end of the Cold War Europe. His recent work has focused on the relationship between the Balkan Conflict of the 1990s and the work of British playwrights and performance practitioners.

INDEX

aesthetic 14, 16-17, 114 aesthetics 17, 37 agency 13, 17, 103 alterity 29, 33 America 5, 24-25, 32-34, 43-44, 117, 119 American 7-8, 24-27, 29-34, 43, 64, 81, 90-92, 95, 111-113, 115-121 amoral 39-40, 46-47 anti-communism 2, 90, 92, 117 anti-communist 39, 115, 117 anti-fascist 65, 91 Armenia 53 Armenian 29, 52 army 28, 59, 94, 121 Balkan conflict 65, 102-104, 108110 Balkans, the 8, 57, 63, 65, 102-103, 106-108 Baudrillard, Jean 33-34, 105 belief 3, 6, 15, 50, 55-58 Benjamin, Walter 64 Berlin 9, 21, 66-67, 74-77, 79-80, 82, 85-86, 88, 92, 94, 96 Berlin Wall 3, 16, 37, 45, 66-67, 71, 76, 87, 89, 91 bloc 3, 5-6, 8, 27, 44, 61, 63-66, 77 border 1-3, 24-26, 28, 42, 63, 66-70, 83, 89-90, 109 Bosnia 24, 27, 28, 29, 32, 33, 102, 106, 107, 109, 110 Bosnian 8, 24, 26, 28-29, 32, 106, 108-109 boundaries 5, 28, 61, 67, 109 Britain 28, 91, 104, 109 British 7-9, 61-66, 70, 90, 92, 102104, 106, 110, 112 British Columbia 54

Budapest 12, 14, 17, 37-39, 43-44, 65, 112-113, 115, 118, 121 Bulgaria 8, 42 Bulgarian 45 capitalism 2, 7, 17, 22, 79, 91, 112, 116-119, 121 Christian 32, 52, 55, 56, 57, 58, 95 church 50-55, 94-95 Churchill, Winston 92 cinema 88 clichés 13, 32, 78 Cold War 2-3, 5-6, 9, 36, 40, 42-43, 50, 62-65, 70, 75, 85, 87-93, 95, 112, 117-119 colonialism 95, 117 communism 7, 12, 17, 22, 68-69, 76, 112, 116, 118-119 communist 5, 16, 24, 28, 29, 31, 43, 52, 54, 56, 61, 68, 69, 74, 76, 77, 90, 91, 92, 116, 118 conflict 2, 31, 39, 62, 66, 87, 89-90, 94-95, 103, 106-109 counter-culture 89 Croatia 108 cultural difference 33, 36 diversity 92 history 116, 120 hybridity 24 identity 8, 43 narrative 42, 118 phenomena 57, 85 politics 64 representation 2, 4, 70, 85 space 26 void 8, 43 Czech 121 Czech Republic 3

128 democracy 3, 5-6, 21, 25, 79, 89, 117, 121 democratic 7, 17, 21, 62, 64 dilemma ethical 46, 103 moral 8, 103 of agency 103 dislocation 8, 18, 26, 42 displacement 8, 24-26, 28, 30-33, 62, 81 documentary 8, 85-88, 90, 92-95 Dresden 8, 64-65, 71, 79, 82 East European 36 former 2, 3, 65, 77, 79, 85 perilous 36 totalitarian 40 Easterner 34, 80 Eastern Europe 3-9, 21-22, 24-25, 45, 53, 61, 65-68, 70-71, 91, 102, 104, 108, 118-119 Eastern European 6-8, 22, 29-31, 34, 61, 66-67, 106, 119-120 East German 1-3, 8, 64, 75, 79, 81, 85-93, 95 East Germany 8, 63, 76-77, 79, 8182, 85-86, 89, 91, 93 economic changes 4 circumstances 87 control 112 framework 6 hardship 6 inequality 86, 120 interests 120 practices 3 reality 89 systems 4 warfare 118 economy 3-5, 13, 76, 83, 118 emigrant 25, 30-31, 33-34 emigration 28 emotion 79, 120 emotional 64, 103-105, 108, 120 encounter 7, 8, 27, 29-30, 34, 36-37, 44, 54, 56, 58-59, 94, 115, 121

Index Englishness 42 ethical 17, 36, 38, 41, 45-47, 62, 102-103, 105, 107-109 ethics 39, 46, 103, 120 Europeanness 103 existential 24, 28, 31, 47, 113 expatriate 112-113 fascism 86, 93, 116 fascist 63, 90, 92-93 feminist 85 fiction 8, 9, 41, 45, 88, 112, 114 fictional 6, 8, 26, 28, 36, 69 fictionalise 33, 105 film 8, 64-65, 71, 77, 83, 85-88, 90, 92-95, 104-105 Foucault, Michel 31 fragmentation 8, 24 freedom 3, 6, 17-19, 21-22, 29, 38, 45, 62, 120 frontier 6, 8, 24-25, 34, 41, 89, 112, 117-118, 121 GDR 1, 8, 64, 75-78, 80-82, 87-89, 92 gender 85, 94-95, 111-113, 115, 117, 121 German 1-2, 18, 40, 53, 64-65, 7475, 77-83, 86-87, 90-91, 93, 96 German Democratic Republic 74, 85 Germany 63-64, 67, 74, 76, 78, 80, 86-87, 90-91, 95 Gorbachev, Mikhail 14, 31 hegemonic masculinity 117-118, 121 hegemony 7, 111 Hungarian 7, 12, 14-15, 20, 38, 43, 62, 113, 115-117, 119-120 Hungary 7, 13-15, 19, 22, 67, 71, 112-118, 120-121 identity 2, 5, 7-8, 25-26, 29, 32-33, 36, 40, 43, 61, 63, 82, 114, 117 ideological 4, 17, 19, 22, 38, 50, 55, 61, 63, 65, 70, 78, 85, 88, 96 ideology 2, 45, 50 immigrant 3, 25-28, 30, 80 immigration 68

Index instability 4, 24, 26 intercultural 36, 113, 120 international 1, 2, 14, 22, 43, 86, 89, 90, 91, 109, 117 iron curtain 1-2, 41, 44, 50, 61, 89, 91-92 language 13-16, 20, 24, 33-34, 42, 51, 68, 75, 77, 80-83, 105, 112, 117 male culture 94 masculinity 95, 111-112, 115, 117119, 121 media 87-90, 92-93, 102-104, 106, 108-109 memory 7-8, 16, 26-27, 29, 43-44, 53, 63-65, 68-71, 74-76, 78-79, 82-83, 85, 116, 120 migrant 25 migration 24 military 2, 5, 76, 106, 118 moral 1, 4, 8-9, 13, 37, 40-41, 45, 47, 62-66, 69, 103, 106-108, 120 morality 1, 47, 116, 120 moralness 116 moslem 52 multiculturalism 36 myth 15, 21, 38, 50, 64-65, 70, 102, 117 mythic 12 mythical 57 mythology 42, 57, 117 nation 5, 12, 21, 42-43, 64, 75, 8990, 95, 107, 120 national 24-25, 30, 32, 42-43, 46, 51-52, 61-62, 64-65, 67, 75, 87-90, 116-117 nationalism 4, 52 nationalist 52 nationality 105 Nazi 21, 63-64, 68-69, 74, 77, 86, 91, 93 nostalgia 4, 26, 30, 33, 79, 81, 83, 113, 117 nostalgic 25 opposition 40, 59, 62, 94-95 oppression 13, 61-62, 69, 85, 90

129 oppressive 66, 89, 95-96 oppressiveness 74 Orient 111 Orientalism 111-115, 117-118, 120121 Orwell, George 89, 91 Orwellian 70 Ostalgie 76-77, 79, 82 Other, the 3, 7-8, 29-30, 32, 44, 61, 68, 93, 103-109, 111-112, 115 othering 8, 33 otherness 44 perception 6, 19, 22, 50, 62, 95, 102 perestroika 45, 50-51, 54, 58 philosophical 24, 30, 45, 47, 113 philosophy 38-39, 41, 46 Poland 3, 53, 63, 67, 71 police 40, 94-95 Polish 51, 61, 69 political culture 63 popular culture 2, 85-87 post-1989 9, 17-18, 63, 68, 70-71, 85 postcolonial 7-8 post-communism 4, 121 post-communist 3-6, 9, 15, 63, 7071 post-socialism 4 post-socialist 4, 6-7, 9 post-wall 9, 61, 63-65, 67-70 power 2-3, 7, 31, 37, 40-41, 46, 50, 70, 74, 78, 87, 90-91, 95, 111 Prague 8, 111-113, 115, 117, 119121 propaganda 2, 42, 88, 91 punk 8, 85-90, 92-96 putsch 24, 31 reconstruction 64-65, 75-76, 78, 102, 108-109 regime 4, 5, 16, 31, 36, 43, 55, 113 religion 4, 39, 50, 52-54, 56-58 religious 8, 50-52, 54-57, 59, 65, 94 reunification 1, 65 revolution 3, 5, 38, 50, 52, 55, 70, 91, 108 revolutionary 15, 19, 53

130 Romania 55, 71 Romanian 25, 34 Russia 43, 50-51, 53-54, 56, 58-59, 71, 91, 119 Russian 40, 42-43, 50-53, 55-57, 59, 61, 71, 91, 115 Said, Edward W. 111-114, 118, 120-121 Second World War 8, 55, 62, 74, 91 secret police 8, 39 Slovak 69 Slovakia 67, 70 socialism 3, 6, 58, 91, 93, 95 socialist 85, 87, 89-90, 94-95 soldier 43, 51, 66-67, 106-107, 110, 117 Soviet 5-6, 29, 31, 50-51, 55-56, 58, 61, 69, 74, 77, 82, 91 Soviet Union 2, 3, 8, 57, 91, 112 space, 16, 19-20, 24-26, 29, 32, 43, 45, 68, 75-76, 78, 82, 92 Stalin, Josef 51, 53, 55, 71 stalinist 53, 56 Stasi 8, 77-79, 83, 93, 95 subculture 86, 89 theatre 8, 91, 102, 107, 110 totalitarian 36, 38, 40, 50, 56, 92, 113

Index transformation 4-5, 7, 13, 18, 20-21, 51, 75 transition 3-7, 13, 15-16, 18, 22, 29, 43, 53, 61, 75, 90 translation 8, 12, 14-18, 20, 25, 33, 37, 76, 80-83, 96 transnational identities 8, 24 trauma 64, 104, 107, 117 Truman, Harry S. 92 traumatic 42, 86 Ukraine 24-25, 28-32, 69-70 uncertainty 5, 8, 31, 56 unification 80-81, 87-88, 92 United States 2, 8, 33, 117-118, 120 U.S.A. 24, 26, 28-29 violence 55, 94 violent 42, 83, 87, 94 Westerner 7, 40, 45, 80, 112 Western Europe 8, 62, 68, 109 Western European 5 West German 1, 8, 80, 82-83, 87-88, 90, 92 West Germany 80, 87 witness 8, 51-53, 59, 61, 65, 67, 70, 102-103, 105-107, 109, 118 world war 75, 91, 115 worldview 46, 63, 70 youth culture 85, 87, 92-93 Yugoslavia 8, 24, 26-27, 34, 106