Iron Curtain (61 page)

In its way, the Kulturbund was an archetypical postwar Eastern European institution. Its central figure was not an accidental grifter but a “Moscow” communist,
Johannes Becher, who had spent twelve years living in exile in the Soviet Union. Its founding and formation were not spontaneous but planned in advance. As early as September 1944, Becher had attended Soviet meetings on Germany’s future, where he spoke of the need to win over educators and pastors as well as actors, directors, writers, and painters. Like the Free German Youth, the Kulturbund was intended to be a mass organization, and it immediately set up branches around the country.

Like many other institutions at the time, the Kulturbund also maintained two very separate sets of policies. Internally, its leadership was loyal to the Soviet occupation force and to the German communist party. Becher kept in constant touch with Dymschitz and other Soviet cultural officers about everything from the showing of Soviet films to the design of stamps.
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At internal meetings, the leadership also used recognizably communist language. In January 1946, the organization’s inner circle agreed that it was time
to launch “the struggle against reactionary influences and tendencies,” and reprimanded regional leaders who had become “too autonomous.” Everyone present understood that “too autonomous” meant “not pro-Soviet enough.”
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Externally, the Kulturbund presented itself as nonpartisan, apolitical, and certainly not communist. Hoping to attract the “bourgeois intelligentsia,” Becher placed the Kulturbund’s headquarters squarely in Dahlem, the elegant western Berlin suburb where many of them lived. At the opening meeting, he called for the creation of “a national front of all German intellectuals,” and in an early declaration he said the organization was “oriented neither to the East nor to the West.”
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For a time, the Kulturbund succeeded in maintaining this dual role. Thanks to its Soviet patrons, the Kulturbund could procure not just ration cards and coal deliveries—Becher and his colleagues got a regular supply in the winter of 1945—but commissions, theaters, and exhibition space. Very quickly, the Kulturbund also began allocating apartments, villas, seaside vacations, and government salaries. Those connected to the Kulturbund could have new editions of their previously banned books published in large numbers or see their plays produced before big audiences.
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The Kulturbund also helped organize the first major postwar exhibition of German art, the first time that the paintings Hitler had scorned as “degenerate” had appeared in a German gallery since 1933.

The Kulturbund did sponsor a lively cultural life, at least for a time, and in December 1945 a group closely linked to the Kulturbund began to publish a satirical magazine,
Ulenspiegel
, which was sharp, pointed, and actually funny. The era’s best artists, cartoonists, and writers all contributed. The editor,
Herbert Sandberg, was a Buchenwald survivor as well as a talented and amusing satirist and cartoonist. The magazine’s covers daringly mocked Germany’s strange, divided existence, and its writers seemed prepared to take on anything. They “bubbled with activity and believed that the golden age had begun,” said Sandberg later on.
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Seeing what appeared to be the beginnings of a true cultural flowering, émigrés began to write in.
Hanns Eisler, one of
Brecht’s musical collaborators, politely appealed to the Soviet administration in 1946: “I would be very pleased if I could be of use, even a destroyed Berlin is still Berlin for me. Above all, I am thinking of the chairmanship of a music department.”
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Brecht himself announced that he was returning to the country and would like to be met by car at the German border—as long as it was a
large
car. If
a suitable vehicle could not be found, he told the Kulturbund that he would prefer to make the journey to Berlin by train.
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The large car was procured, and in October 1949 he and
Helene Weigel were transported in high style, first to
Dresden—where photographers, radio reporters, and local dignitaries greeted him—and then to Berlin, where he was installed in what remained of the Hotel Adlon. Becher, Dymschitz, and dozens of others spoke at a reception for him the following day.
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Even artists and writers with a Nazi past were forgiven and offered new jobs if they were famous enough, much to the annoyance of some
German communists. At one meeting of the Kulturbund presidium, a member complained that the organization was constantly being asked to procure “a farm, or a villa by the sea” for cultural figures who had belonged to the Nazi party. Politically dubious artists were receiving privileges at the expense of the workers: “My hair sometimes stands on end when I see how we at the Kulturbund draw up lists of intellectuals who are to receive Christmas parcels from the Soviet military administration … I have a bad conscience toward the working-class comrades when I see how little is being done for them.”
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Weimar artists who had been on the political left—and there were many—were courted most fiercely of all.
György Faludy, the Hungarian poet, has described how these kinds of approaches could be deeply embarrassing: a communist functionary once tried to win him over with a “nauseating, clumsy and to me almost physically painful glorification of my greatness as a writer. Then he said that the party would rebuild for me a damaged villa … After the inflation—which would last only a few more weeks—they would give me, naturally in secret, a considerable monthly salary.”
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Max Lingner found this kind of approach appealing. The new department for “people’s education” (
Volksbildung
), set up under Soviet auspices but run by German bureaucrats, issued an invitation to him in 1946: “We urgently need you to return right away to Berlin.” He struck up a correspondence with
Walter Ulbricht, among other things sending him a manuscript about art education. He was unwell—he had survived the occupation of France and at the age of sixty had both heart and liver complaints—but nevertheless thought it was his duty, as a Marxist, to return and help build communism.

Lingner finally came back to Germany in March 1949. Like Brecht he was greeted as a hero, which pleased him enormously.
Neues Deutschland
called him a “great painter, known by all the world, but not by the Germans.”
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He received several large exhibitions and a commission to decorate
Unter den Linden, Berlin’s central boulevard, for the May Day parade. He was placed on the jury for the second national fine arts exhibition. In 1950, he helped found the new German Academy of the Arts.
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But 1949 was not 1945, and the
East Berlin that seemed to welcome Lingner so warmly was undergoing a dramatic transformation. The creeping
influence of the Cold War was part of the change. In 1947, the Western Allies kicked the Kulturbund out of West Berlin, on the grounds that it was a communist front operation—which, of course, it was—and forced it to move its offices to the Soviet sector of the city. In May 1948,
Ulenspiegel
followed the Kulturbund from West to East. Though Sandberg stayed on, his co-editor quit, as did a number of others.

Growing Soviet paranoia about the unreliability of the Eastern European allies was behind the change too. In March 1949, when the European department of the Soviet Foreign Ministry drew up a list of suggestions for “the strengthening of Soviet influence on the cultural life of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other countries of Eastern Europe,” they knew they faced a problem: “A part of the Polish and Czechoslovak intelligentsia is still under the thumb of the most reactionary leaders of the bourgeoisie, who are linked by a thousand threads to reactionary imperialist circles in the West.”
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They made a similar analysis of Hungary,
Bulgaria,
Romania, and
Albania, and concluded, once again, that more ideological education was needed: the translation and distribution of Soviet films and books, the construction of Soviet cultural centers and Soviet-style schools, and more cultural exchanges.
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The Soviet cultural officers on the ground wanted not just to bring in Soviet art, however, but to transform Eastern European culture into something fundamentally different. Dymschitz proclaimed this policy in an article, “
On the Formalist Direction in German Art,” published in the
Tägliche Rundschau
in November 1948. “Form without content means nothing,” he declared, before launching a sustained attack on abstract and modern art of all kinds. He mocked the “formalist artists” who “like to pretend they are revolutionaries … they act as if they were agents of renewal” and specifically attacked Pablo Picasso, a communist and a heroic figure for many German painters. He did not quite use the word “degenerate”—
entartet
—as Hitler had done, but he did call formalist art “decadent”—
dekadent
—which is very close. German intellectuals and artists responded in subsequent days. Some approved and some were angry. Sandberg launched a vigorous defense
of Picasso. Most, however, were simply surprised: left-wing artists had not expected the “progressive” Soviet Union to favor “conservative” art.

A few of them knew that similar debates had already taken place in the Soviet Union of the 1920s and 1930s, when experimental poets and constructivist architects had been banned in favor of artists more to the regime’s liking. All of them knew that a version of this “formalism debate” had been conducted in Weimar Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, when the theatrical world had been divided between traditionalists, who favored classical productions in the manner of Lessing and Goethe, and radicals such as Brecht, who argued for the avant-garde.
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Painters had also at that time split roughly into those who thought that there was still a social or political role for the fine arts and those who believed in “art for art’s sake.”

But the new formalism debate—which soon took the form of numerous turgid essays, interminable committee discussions, and unreadable books—had an aspect that the earlier debate had lacked: because the definition of “formalism” was political as well as aesthetic, it was extremely slippery. In truth, no one could ever be certain what politically correct, socialist realist art was supposed to look like. It was easy enough to condemn artists who valued beauty over politics, or who worked in pure abstraction, atonal music, and experimental verse. It was also possible to dictate topics and subjects. One artistic competition in Poland in 1950 suggested painters produce works illustrating subjects such as “the technology and organization of cattle slaughter,” “the rationalization and mechanization of the industrialized pig farms,” or “bull and swine breeds in Limanowa, Nowy Targ, and Miechów.”
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Other judgments were more difficult, even for the most committed socialist realist critic. Did a portrait of a worker have to be precisely realistic, or could the artist’s brushwork show? If the lyrics of a song were “progressive,” did it matter whether the tune was difficult to sing? Could a nonrhyming poem still express positive socialist attitudes, or did communist poetry need to follow a certain form? In practice, these questions were decided not by critics or artists but by cultural bureaucrats whose judgments were often made for political or personal reasons. One Polish art historian has argued that what mattered was the attitude of the artist: if he agreed to abandon all pretense of individualism, if he strove to create the right mood on his canvas—however the right mood was defined at that particular moment—then he was a successful socialist realist.
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A pliant, regime-friendly artist might therefore be allowed to get away with the odd
splash of unnatural color, a green face or a purple sky, and a cooperative poet would be allowed some difficult figures of speech. But those who were under suspicion for whatever reason might well have their work banned for precisely the same things.
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In practice, cultural bureaucrats used their constantly evolving definition of what was “good” socialist realism in order to keep artists and intellectuals under control. After it was premiered for a select group in 1951, for example, the opera
Lucullus
—music by Paul
Dessau, libretto by
Brecht—was sent back for an overhaul. Some of the critics had found that the music contained “all the elements of formalism, distinguishing itself by the predominance of destructive, caustic dissonances and mechanical percussive noise.” The party was probably more bothered by the opera’s antiwar message—the Korean conflict had just begun—as much as by the aggressively nontraditional music (nine kinds of percussion instruments, no violins). Brecht wrote to Wilhelm Pieck, promised to add three arias that were “positive in content,” and eventually
Lucullus
opened again in October, though only for one night. The changes had been very minor: the main point of the delay, presumably, was to make sure Brecht and Dessau understood that the party, not its artists, had the final say.
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Other artists fell victim to changes in socialist fashion. In 1948, Horst Strempel painted a mural titled
Clear the Rubble! Rebuild!
in the new Friedrichstraße underground station. Abstract and metaphorical, the mural was highly praised—at first—as a “colorful symphony of reconstruction.” But after
Dymschitz’s article, Strempel publicly registered his objections to the Soviet attack on “formalism.” The party’s critics retaliated and denounced the mural for its “slave-like lack of clarity.” Eventually the
Tägliche Rundschau
called it a “senseless product.” In February 1951, just as Lingner was working on his own design for the
Aufbau
mural, Strempel’s mural was painted over and lost forever.
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The artistic establishment also exercised control because it could. In
Germany, just as everywhere else in Eastern Europe, the artists’ union—the Association of Fine Arts—had ceased to be a self-organizing organization in the 1940s. By 1950 it had become a centralized bureaucracy, with a single registry of membership. In order to buy paints and brushes, artists had to have a tax number issued by the association and a membership card confirming the tax number. Anyone who wanted to paint, in other words, had to conform at least enough to remain a member of the association.
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Choosing not to join could mean choosing not to work as an artist at all.