Tag Archives: east bloc
2417 – Wege in die Nacht / Paths in the Night (1999 Germany)
timespace coordinates: Germany just after the 1989 reunification, in the transition years that have marked not just ex-Eastern Germany but the whole of Eastern Europe with a similar set of problems including deindustrialization, structural adjustment, shock therapy, mass layoffs, rising neo-nazi anti-immigrant sentiment, overnight privatizations, and defunding of the public sector (education, health, social welfare) and mass migration
Streaming here with English Subtitles.
directed by Andreas Kleinert
There are not many movies that can transmit the feeling of rage and disenchantment that followed right after what Boris Buden termed “the honeymoon years” when literally Western fashion magazines with photo shoots of East Berliners marrying West Berliners next to the former Berlin wall.
Usually, we are familiar with the US hardboiled noir detective – of the 40s and 50s who is usually a sarcastic middle-aged male, a former or present alcoholic, a private detective ‘gumshoe’ brutally confronting and confronted by a corrupted and corrupting system. In film noirs, characters are lost and found or completely abandoned by law or justice according to merciless logic. They are delivered to their ineluctable dark fate and fall for the femme fatale as they always, bloodily and viscerally try to escape the pull of money, seduction, or a decent living. The main characters seem to be attracted to the darkest corners and they always seem to be followed by their past, falling deeper and deeper into a Kafkian maze that is masterfully lit and whose stark shadows evolved out of the German Expressionist movies.
In Paths in the Night – we have something else, a former employer, maybe even a high-ranking party member or ex-bureaucrat of the DDR who is somehow completely unadapted and unadaptable to the new society, where the only jobs available are night watchmen, bodyguards, or becoming an entrepreneur (like his former, more lucky or more adaptable colleagues). He is also a collateral victim of what has been termed the feminization of the workplace in the 1990s- or simply because in the new economy service jobs and care jobs are more available than factory jobs. East Germany and the former East bloc went from full employment to joblessness overnight almost. Not only jobs were lost but also careers, departments, and aims. History had an aim and its aim was the abolition of capitalism, when this did not happen the world turned upside down.
In a way, he is already a dead man, a ghost haunting the places that were familiar and close to him, the empty ruined factories and shutdown plants that were abandoned, destroyed, or sold out (in the movie someone asks him if the acquisition by a Japanese company was successful). In an extraordinary exchange with his wife who has a good job in a cafeteria or restaurant, he takes her to the ruined factory and she becomes more and more frightened somehow realizing that they are visiting some netherworld – the ruined factory is some sort of realm of the dead.
There is no explanation in the movie for a lot of actions, but they are all quite clear. He starts having a double life – which his wife is completely ignorant of, even if she suspects something. He starts joining a vigilante group that tries to bring justice in the subway – by way of suborning and beating up hoodlums and neo-nazis. This is done in the most brutal almost ecstatic way – and in fact, there is a sense that in the new capitalist society, where protection of any sort is lacking one is pushed to becoming a vigilante – a sort of ex-socialist Batman in a consumer society. He wants goods for his wife that he cannot afford so he turns to petty crime. It is not clear but he could even be an ex-Stasi, although meeting some of his former colleagues does not align him with the born-again ex-Stasi entrepreneurial state. He carries a gun and feels somehow important but at the same time, he cannot even find peace in his Schrebergarten garden.
But while Batman is a rich kid who goes psychotic after he witnesses his parents getting killed, this ex-East German somehow witnesses something else, not only just on the personal level but also the unmaking of this whole world. That does not mean he is more justified to do what he does, it just makes him less of an advanced, highly-trained superhero and more of a shipwrecked character, who has seen his ideals and progressive visions being trampled on. I would even say he is a figure of socialist realism – and also one that still gathers press clippings with the wars and even has an Internationalist memory left. What happens when the future is forfeited?
He seeks to be this model and still dreams perhaps of embodying this image of the model citizen of a better (German) state from the two, but ends up destroying or even endangering those who care for him or look up to him. It is also one of those movies that shows the dark side of transition – and not just this nostalgic (Ostalgie) tragicomic idea of communism and post-socialist pop like in Good Bye, Lenin!
It is definitely a highly interesting and dark movie, and I do not aim to discuss all its aspects here, just give you a taste of it- so just watch it and draw your own conclusions!
2398 – UAP Romanian Socialist symposia (ost: Kate Bush Running on the Hill)
This is one of my favorite detournement videos by Victor Plastic, an infamous digital media and dead media analog archivist from Romania who collects forgotten recordings, tapes, pop culture gems, games anything that escaped the Digital Dark Ages. I am really glad the video is still up and that I was able to find it after some lengthy search. Everyone is of course free to interpret the video however one likes, but below I will try to give some context.
CONTEXT
I was one of those kids who spent much of my childhood from the late 1970s through the 1980s and early 1990s (basically all summer vacations) not in Scout summer or Bible camps, but at artist Union symposia, sculpture parks, Seaside Artist collective homes or “Tabere” (literally camps) as part of the UAP network. Uniniunea Artistilor Plastici – the Artists Union spelled for short UAP like the English Unidentified Aerial Phenomena is now somehow despised or seen as an epitome of conservative ideas by the young generation, its name associated as a throwback to another era. It now stands accused of nepotism and crooney capitalism. But before we rush to that conclusion let us consider that it used to offer an important economic (and welfare) support and was a viable cultural infrastructure that spread throughout Socialist and post-socialist Romania (other Socialist countries had similar structures). After 1989 attempts at privatization and accruing costs (unpaid gas and electricity tabs) basically made the union close down its spaces, transform them into commercial spaces, sell or foreclose them, or even evict the artists who started to lose their aura of ‘living national treasures’.
ET IN ARCADIA EGO
This Union was quite powerful at the time and had a lot of bargaining power because it represented all painters, all sculptors, all decorative and monumental art (think about the Yugoslav and Bulgarian brutalist monuments and fabulous mosaic art) practitioners and under Socialism in Eastern Europe. Also all official art was done by UAP artists. So even if you were not allowed to be openly critical of the party and its leader and you were supposed to represent the values of communism and of progress, you had a lot of liberty (especially in Hungary) and supportive structures as backups, exhibition spaces, free ateliers (although some more central or bigger than others). You could also do a tour exhibiting around the country and you could travel from one city to another with all expenses being paid. It was really an ideal deal if you consider the austerity politics of the times and the later shock therapy years. Most importantly you also had a community to support you that would visit the exhibitions and also the willing state that was also regularly buying works from you on a yearly basis.
Of course, there were guiding lines and even preferred styles (pressure to conform to Socialist Realism went in and out of fashion over the years). From a purely experiential perspective as a young kid, it was amazing to hang out with the local cowherd shepherds and countryside kids and take turns caring for the animals, learning to dodge kicks from animals that you never encountered in a city environment. I was also the first generation and 2nd of city-born kids on both sides of the family. The same was true for the countryside kids – taking up sculpture and drawing and actually joining in with the sculpture. Food was also excellent in a time of penury, wine, and slivovitz (tzuica) were aplenty, and most of the artists were former peasants themselves (my father included – or at least he never lost the skills he learned as a kid – how to milk, etc) who made the jump from the land to the city/university.
ARTISTS OF THE PEOPLE
Most of these very masculine and quite sexist at times groups were also fishermen, occasional hunters or seasoned mushroom pickers and knew how to build their own furniture and design and build their own houses or make their own clothes. It was also the reality that this was a time when the artist was a special creature – an “artist of the people”, some sort of national treasure, treasured almost like handicraft artists still are in Japan nowadays. They were spoiled in the best of ways, had plenty of food and booze all the time, and feasting was done at almost middle-age levels with wildfowl, freshly hunted deer (that was mostly reserved for the party apparatchiks), and plenty of wild mushrooms from the forest and excellent bread from ovens. Also, local party bureaucrats, and benevolent mayors, were happy to act like art patrons. They loved talking and spoiling these bizarre and quite brazen artists with the best products of the land. Another thing to remember – having a beard or long hair was a big nono in that era, you could lose your job or get even caught by the police (or Milicia how it was then called) and forcefully shaved.
That is not to say that women did not play an important role and even this hierarchy of textile art ranking lower than the other art – overlapping hierarchies (particularly in regards to North South relations) did not exist so clearly in opinion. There were collaborations btw textile factories and large-scale textile art done by both genders (for example see the great piece “Theatre of the Heart” inside the National Theatre done by Florin CIUBOTARU si Serban GABREA btw 1969-1979). This was part of a series that included “War and Peace” and “Ode to the Country”. There were many women artists and even families of artists (art was a dynastic thing) and art historians and critics. Independent of gender, everyone basically painted or went “la peisaj” to paint landscapes. Many women participated in the neo-avant-garde and only later got the recognition they merited (thinking here of Lia Perjovschi or Geta Bratescu). To end this long digression, some of these camps still exist, and now they are mostly linked to what could be called land art or have turned towards more or less openly ecological concerns. Some of them are still touted to keep up the spirit of the times, mostly dependent on local artistic networks and long-term friendships. I always meant to join one of them near Bistrita, but never did.
NEO BARBARIANS
This video also compares two pop cultural expressions that were roughly contemporaneous. One was glamorous, quite urban, and entering the pop charts. While across the Iron Curtain in Romania, you had these strange bearded hordes of ‘alternative’ men. I am using the word ‘alternative’ under scare quotes because they were really odd in retrospect, not really workers, peasants, or intellectuals, nor counterculture members in the sense of artists boho chic from the West (think NY Greenwich Village). They enjoyed a kind of uneducated and anti-intellectual and cultivated look of ‘wildness’ (they all pretended they were uneducated even if they had a good cinema culture and were bibliophiles). They also preferred an image of the unsophisticated noble “barbarian”. They were some sort of Stone Age Socialist neo-barbarians using self-made tools (I remember those incredible wooden hammers), close to natural materials (stone, wood) in wild countryside surroundings (not really the wilderness of the Wild West) but some sort of Arcadia impossible utopia setting of the Renaissance or classical times. They now seem somehow neo-pagan in their pastoral landscape and interest in non-European art always ranked high (they also had the Meridiane publishing house who translated a lot of the most important art historical materials such as Panfosky, Arnheim, most of the French Annales longue duree school books). Every artist’s home had a library with those books. Religion was not really present apart from the usual orthodox icon-making business, and religion was frowned upon, but there was always some sort of mystical attitude. Some groups fused the abstract with the religious (Horia Bernea) or dabbled in Neo-Byzantinism (see Sorin Dumitrescu and Anastasia Publishing House).
PEASANT ARCHETYPES
And now for these memorial houses, countryside retreats, and artistic summer camps. They were indeed incredible places because they fostered a sort of mixed ideal existence in the middle of the forests sometimes with all the local kids and the rural community having active contact with the artists. Lazarea depicted here is a very interesting case since it is actually situated in the Hungarian enclave in Romania. The “rural” always had a difficult status in countries that were predominantly agrarian but were prioritizing industrialization, high modernism, and proletarian culture. The peasant was more a revolutionary subject in the Global South (see Vietnam, India, or especially Maoist China) than in the former Soviet Union or the East Bloc. It is important to understand that this idealized image of the farmer or Taranul Roman “Romanian peasant” was easily used by racist proto-fascist constructions of genetic and ethnic purity btw the wars. Eugenics and miscegenation discourse were so popular in Romania’s 1920s that pseudo-scientific anti-semitic marriage counseling books written by countryside doctors in Romania warned against peasants mixing with despised ‘others’ (who at that time meant mostly the Jewish or Rroma population associated with slavery or the corrupt city). There were echoes of inter-war Eugenics in the later pronatalist policies of Ceausescu-era Romania.
PRODUCTIVIST RATHER THAN CONSTRUCTIVIST
The socialist state project was also interesting not as much as a constructivist but a productivist social project that would eventually usher in new anti-capitalist relationships, transformative for both society, sexuality, and humanity as a whole (as Bogdan Popa explores in his recent book De-centering Queer Theory: Communist sexuality in the flow during and after the Cold War). It is not a mystery any longer that across the Iron Curtain in the former West “Cultural Cold War” was raging, and the CIA was also sponsoring and actively supporting modern art against Socialism Realism. After the Cold War had ended, we have to reckon with the fact that only abstract and avant-garde was ‘recovered’ and integrated by the art market forces. It was much more convenient for financial speculation to sift the art collections in search of forgotten members of the avant-garde than it was to appreciate the value of Realism Socialism. The work of artists that straddled the divide btw avant-garde and Socialism Realism is a particularly interesting case study, as demonstrated by the project of Miklos Szilard “Mattis Teutsch: Avantgarde and Constructive Realism” (exhibited in both Budapest and Bucharest). e
2230 – TraumaZone aka What It Felt Like to Live Through The Collapse of Communism and Democracy by Adam Curtis 2023 (Russia 1985-1999)
Russia 1985–1999: TraumaZone (subtitled in promotional media as What It Felt Like to Live Through The Collapse of Communism and Democracy) is a seven-part BBC documentary television series created by Adam Curtis. It was released on BBC iPlayer on 13 October 2022. Using stock footage shot by the BBC, the series chronicles the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rise of capitalist Russia and its oligarchs, and the effects of this on Russian people of all levels of society, leading to the rise to power of Vladimir Putin. (wiki)
I have written elsewhere about Adam Curtis and while I definitely do not dig his “God” perspective, his overbearing voice, his simplifications, and his political position, I think it is an important documentary in the light of what has happened in the East after 1989. This is not to mean that it justifies in any way the destruction and the crimes committed in Ukraine by Russian troops at the present time or the neo-imperialism at stake. But it is important to realize that the West needs some Eastplaining since it cannot fully comprehend what it means that a world has collapsed. A world good and bad, a world certainly repressive and certainly lacking Western consumer goods, but with an aftermath that can not as easily be forgotten. What happened in the wake of this imminent collapse, as we have seen (like in other places such as South America) was full-on privatization that came undemocratically, imposed from above and more or less at the point of a gun. The rise of the mafia state, under extreme free market rule was a bounty for kleptocratic leadership. These are far from isolated phenomena that happened at the margins of the capitalist core. The best example is probably the so-called Wirecard Skandal – a German e-commerce firm whose massive level of fraud and market manipulation is a clear example of what went on during the last 30 years of financialization.
So yes think not just about East, Africa or the Global South but the entire world financial infrastructure, auditing firms, regulatory bodies and politicians. Apart from neoliberal schism and morphing we have today what some have called “market civilizations” that encapsulate a transnational neoliberal movement from the Global South and Eastern Europe. The entire deregulatory push and austerity politics in Russia was undertaken under the guidance of global institutions and their specialists and is part of the increasing financialization of the world economy.
The collapse of the URSS has coincided with the collapse of supply chains, the destruction of the medical safety nets, of reduced and ailing educational and social welfare systems, and the immiseration of a great majority while the demand was now for the building markets and transforming overnight everyone into a hustling entrepreneur and rapid siphoning of funds abroad into bank account safety or feeding into financial markets speculation. One has to see this in parallel with Clinton’s administration opening up the floodgates of speculation and financial deregulation that even today affects us all.
More importantly, the entire West has been privy to this and especially American foreign policy. This documentary has to be seen and read with a book by historian and economist Isabelle Weber – who went on to describe how China escaped Russia’s fate (shock therapy) narrowly and during several times of its homegrown attempts at privatization and liberalization. I think one has to think about how during the planned economy something like this never happened. While I think that Adam Curtis is a bad guide to both the Soviet cybernetic history (and maybe even its Western examples), and one should take with a grain of salt all his comments on GOSPLAN and everything that has to do with the Perestroika years, I think his selection on the way the economist and prime minister Yegor Gaidar became the most hated man in Russia are quite telling. At the same time, because of his anti-statist bias, Adam Curtis dully ignored the way economic cybernetics has played out in Siberian institutes (which merits a documentary).
I think that Jeffrey Sach’s career and change of mind after being called in as economic advisor to the Russian state during Eltsin is also telling. Russia and Moscow was welcome into the fold of global capitalism, and it important it has profited as much as financial centers such as London have profited from it. Russian companies were very welcome till recently and they had mixed ownerships, behind tied with foreign Western interests. Oligarchs were sponsoring private schools in the UK, and till the recent sudden superficial boycott, they were quite welcome in The City (especially London the money laundering capital of the world where a majority of the offshore firms are registered).
2123 – SFitze 05 (substack)
If you’re interested in more SFitze issues please subscribe, support or share with others. This is a newsletter about mundane, banal and absurdist SF happenings all around, recognized or not. As SF melts into thin air – it infuses the forces of production, commercial culture, pop iconography, and comics as well as the mundane-as-fuck growing category. Think about the unbearable lightness of billionaires in space and presidential candidate Mélenchon projected as hologram in several cities during the recent French elections (thx Ion D. for this one) but also about Muslim teens and China’s nascent green hydrogen sector. SFitze is about how to trace SF spillovers independent of scale. Two things I’ve come to appreciate: never be dismissive and also never accept SF labels or outright denials thereof (“this is SF or this has zero to do with SF”). As the email version is shorter than the original one please scroll down the original substack post.
1991 – Arhiva de Sunet s02 Timișoara eps 1 & 2
For our non-Romanian speaking viewers (which seem to be the large majority of our daily visitors), here is some tremendous research into the byways and routes of socialist and east bloc subcultures. There’s lots of legends and while it’s not mythbusting, they’re pulling the veil on a lot of things. The Arhiva de Sunet and Centrul Dialectic are making interviews and trying to orient non insiders through the Romanian cultural space – recovering and recording an oral history from the 1960s on, via the stories of its stil living protagonists. Anecdotes lay out the ‘thick’ tissue of daily life and embed it in lived examples. Hiw was it to make & consume music back then?
Even if very hard to recover or to convey the feelings of listening something the very first time – they allow imagination to do its work. You can hear the soundtrack of youth subcultures to back it up in between, even if the words may be unreachable to you, you can still check the Playlist.
This season of podcasts relates the history of music, rock music in particular (with its various offshoots and under currents) from the city of Timisoara in the region of Banat, an important urban cultural center, and yet with a marginal-central (in the words of the writer interviewed) geopolitical position, as more of a place of exile during the Ottoman & Austro Hungarian empires. Socialism in Eastern Europe was not a wasteland of passion and it was not all grim gulags. The regime tried to nurture pop phenomena in the hope they would revive its own stasis. There was repression yet there were also bizarre hybrids and traffic going on. The central power was sometimes overstretched when it had to deal with 500km away centers like Timisoara. It is a funny quirky joy ride through the way various people, bands & taste communities have received influences from abroad, interpreted them and how music and material culture from discs to tapes to venues helped circulate precious information under restricted controls of the Ceausescu era. It is a story of how political it was everything or how much control there actually was and how one wondered about other versions of home grown socialism (from Hungary lets say or ex-Yugoslavia) while listening to these bands. What I like most is the way – the escape to a western fr world is portrayed, as protagonists recall a certain disenchantment with the capitalist music production and a sobering effect emigration had on them. An overall remarkable work.
Cu ce a rămas Timișoara? Cum era Timișoara în muzică în anii ‘80? Cât timp a avut Timișoara dominație otomană? De ce era, pentru turci și austrieci, o catastrofă să fii trimis la Timișoara? Ce înseamnă să fii la periferie? Cât timp a fost Timișoara capitala Imperiului? De ce apare în Timișoara desantul rockist de la sfârșitul anilor ‘60? Care era avantajul pe care îl avea Timișoara? Cum intra muzica din Occident în România? Există un sound timișorean al rockului? Ce film i-a tușat iremediabil pe Nicu Covaci și Ilie Stepan în anii ‘60? Ce trupă maghiară îl face pe Ilie Stepan să înțeleagă că Republica Populară Ungară construia un alt fel de socialism? Sunt subculturile subversive de rock specifice în Est? De ce îi apreciau hipioții și pe Lenin, și pe Lennon? Ce putea fi folosit de la punkiști și rockeri pentru resuscitarea socialismului? Răspunsurile le aflați numai din Arhiva de Sunet: Timișoara, episodul 1.
La ce terasă se întâlneau tinerii timișoreni în anii ‘60 și 70’? Ce operă rock a fost cenzurată în Timișoara? În ce s-au deghizat membrii formației Progresiv TM? Ce se întâmpla în România când apărea la Londra „Jesus Christ Superstar”? Care a fost reacția consumatorilor de muzică la lipsa de posibilități? Ce apare într-un magazin de casete din Timișoara în anii ‘80? Cum se vedea de la București teatralitatea din muzica timișoreană? Răspunsurile le aflați numai din Arhiva de Sunet: Timișoara, episodul 2.
TimeSpace Warps 
