Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West (37 page)

But for all his reactionary devotion to the West and his final defection (where he pursued a career as a conservative/republican publicist and, interestingly, never wrote anything remotely as important as while living under communism), Tyrmand both observed and embodied something that was specific to Eastern European communism. In his writing he remains completely dependent, even mad about it. He constantly uses phrases and metaphors showing his lack of objectivism. He constantly uses the phrase ‘they’; ‘My attitude towards communism is my outcome of my life under communism’, he writes. Tyrmand often behaves as if he owned communism, completely unaware and uninterested what it might have meant for people outside of his milieu. Tyrmand, who was privileged under the socialist system, which gave free flats to the members of the writers union and supported them financially, couldn’t see the connection between the censorship and the privilege he was getting. The latter was transparent to him, and often he even speaks of it as just another form of repression.

5.10 To consume or not to consume. The new PRL generation (Innocent Sorcerers) by Wojciech Fangor, 1960.

Tyrmand was not the only intellectual in the communist state, who, while using all the privileges and being implicated in it, got a sudden myopia when criticizing its shortcomings. He took his derision of working women for a serious act of system critique, rather than simple misogyny. He often seems as if he’d like no
women to work, or only middle class fashionably dressed women to do so. While seeing the poverty of the working class in post war Warsaw, he was blind to their newfound literacy; nor does he consider that giving jobs to these ‘masculinized’ women working in the city was a rather positive alternative to being imprisoned at home. Intellectual critics of the system couldn’t take the lower classes into account, because that would ruin their line of reasoning, in which the system is portrayed only as the evil slaughterhouse of aspirations.

Yet Tyrmand remains interesting because he embodied certain aspirations just as naïve as those of his opponents. Dressed famously in colorful socks, listening to jazz, reading and writing Western-style literature, he became an idol of the nascent class of youth, born before the war, who only knew socialism, and who came of age around the Thaw. These people were the closest we had to the Americanized Western youth culture. There was the emergence of the student theatres like STS and Bim Bom, linking the traditions of surrealist avant-garde and poetry, a repressed memory of the war time illegal art and literature with the new spirit of jazz and new wave film - the spleen and the glamor of the beautiful actors in Wajda’s
Innocent Sorcerers
(1961). Their literature was Marek Hlasko and Tyrmand himself, their cinema was Wajda, Skolimowski and Polanski, their music was the highly original, Polonized jazz of Krzysztof Komeda, Tomasz Stanko and Zbigniew Namysłowski, published in the famous vinyl series
Polish Jazz.

However, like many other pro-Western bourgeois intellectuals before and after him, Tyrmand’s love of the West came from the fact that the West he knew was the cultivated and sophisticated world of Parisian museums. An author on the other side of political spectrum to Tyrmand, was the reporter Ryszard Kapuściński, who, elevated and educated by the communist system, becoming its flagship journalist, actually travelled to those less known territories subject to Western influence or domination. In his recent biography of Kapuściński, Artur Domosławski notes the incomprehension of
the journalist’s contemporaries, who can’t really believe in these stories about ruthless French or American murderers.

For the twenty-somethings at journalism school and Kultura, socialism is rather absurd, nothing but empty rituals and boredom. They dream of a comfortable life and the outside world: the West is where it’s at! Someone is going on a scholarship to the States, someone else is off on holiday to Western Europe. In the West these young people get a large dose of new impressions, experiences and ideas. Yet Kapuściński comes back from that outside world and speaks of the West as having enslaved the poor countries of the Third World, and of the curse of ‘American Imperialism’. For the young people, the stories of their colleague and master sound like sheer cant, while for Kapuściński ‘American imperialism’ is not a platitude but an accurate description, something he has touched, sniffed and seen.

Domoslawski quotes one asking him ‘You don’t like America, but why do you carp at the French, too?’ ‘You know the French from Paris – cultured, educated people’, responds Kapuściński, ‘but I know the ones from the colonies. They are barbarians! If you get in their way or frustrate their business interests, they’ll kill you’. As in the frequently quoted saying from the transition – ‘they were lying to us when they told us about communism, but they were telling the truth about capitalism’.

Were all the youth of Eastern Europe all eager westernizers? Polish-Jewish Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher saw the Russian youth movement otherwise, writing in the 1963 essay ‘The Soviet Union enters the second decade after Stalin’:

Western observers of the Soviet scene are often struck by what they describe as the gradual Americanization of the Soviet way of life. They notice a general preoccupation with material comfort, a weariness with ideology and a craving for entertainment, widespread profiteering and blackmarketing, cynicism and pessimism among the young, especially among the Soviet beatniks, who look sometimes like real cousins of their
Western counterparts. These observers conclude that Soviet society, or at least its upper strata, are undergoing a process of embourgeoisment…This view seems to me erroneous. The general preoccupation with material comfort is real enough; and so (after half a century of wars, revolutions, and Stalinist terror) is the longing for a relaxed, easy-going life. Yet, the so-called Americanization is rather superficial and transient (although it is connected to some extent with the Soviet ambition to catch up with the USA industrially).

‘The little profiteer’ – continues Deutscher – ‘the beatnik, the
stilyaga
, and the enthusiastic admirer of the latest Western pop song and dance, who so quickly catch the eye of the Western visitor – all of these are marginal characters.’ To Deutscher, the appearance of the westernized youth,
stilyagi
or
bikiniarze
, didn’t change the natural course of the society’s structure. The 1950s were the era when the workers could re-embrace the equality from the times preceding Stalinism, regardless of the other social classes inertia. Thaw generation poets like Yevtushenko, reaching for the ‘values of the 20s’, were hugely popular and it was them, for Deutscher, who were really the avant-garde and the rebels of that era, not the
stilyagi.
The ‘resurgent egalitarianism’ was the word of the day. It was very different to Tyrmand’s simple equivalence between consumerism and subversion. Both Polish Jews, divided by a generation, Tyrmand and Deutscher could not have had more different ideas about young people under socialism and their desires.

5.11 War fashion. A photoshoot in the ruins of Warsaw in Ty i Ja, 1960s.

As capitalism grew and reached its heights via textile production in nineteenth-century England, textiles and capitalism, textiles and production seem to be a perfect way of discussing the meanders of both production and social reality under communism. Its most obvious consequence, fashion, is erratic, passing, unstable and speculative – precisely what socialist production didn’t want to be. In this way fashion behaves like a modernist, avant-garde movement, which has to erase everything solid, in a permanent revolution of dress. Yet Soviet man was supposed to be focused on something not only stable, but something eternal, something monumental.

As Dick Hebdige puts it his
Cartography of Taste
, in the UK ‘although during the Cold War the prospect of Soviet territorial ambitions could provoke similar indignation and dread, American cultural imperialism demanded a more immediate interpretative response…America was seen by many as an immediate embodiment
of the future taken from Huxley’s
Brave New World
, Fyvel’s Subtopia, Spengler’s megalopolis, or Hoggart’s Kosy Holiday Kamp. Since 1930 the US served as an image of industrial barbarism…A country without a past and therefore no real culture, ruled by competition’. Yet it had its extremely appealing popular culture and fashion. Fashion was an obsession and real factor during the Cold War, enforcing the easy qualifications that everything exciting comes from the West. So if fashion, as a thing that relies on a changeability that is erratic, uncontrollable, unstable, is like a metaphor for capitalism itself, what then of fashion under a planned economy, that couldn’t and wouldn’t be subjugated to the terror of supply and demand?

Fashion was in the post-45 Poland a matter of negotiating between what was available, what was smuggled and what could be self-produced. Women had to become at once fashion designers, illegal fair-hunters and queuing masters, trying to guide themselves to what was fashionable. Creativity, DIY and also a desire for Western goods was mediated by
Przekroj
and
Ty i Ja
, with their “moral mission” of showing post-war society a way through the perils of censorship. Fashion definitely existed in real socialism, but it wasn’t really ‘fashion’ in the capitalist sense, fast-moving and fast changing. DIY, practiced by everybody in Soviet Bloc, was closer to anti-fashion, made against the industrial dialectics of supply and demand. Because of the unavailability of goods or the poor quality of the local production, DIY magazines and TV programmes flourished across the Bloc, counselling its citizens in areas as different as fashion and science, furniture and electric inventions, at the same time trying to trivialize the shortages and cover for the poor quality of goods by promoting the popular wisdom and the terrific skills lying dormant in every Mr and Mrs Smith.

According to Marshal Tito, socialism was an ‘essentially consumerist society’, and Yugoslavia, as a part of the non-aligned movement, definitely belonged to the most liberalized in this
matter in the whole of Eastern Europe. Yet it differed in this to the official version in the Bloc, where magazines promoted goods that were completely unachievable for any settled citizen, and unless smuggled, could only exist as the dark objects of consumerist desires.

Yet there were counter-strategies against the grayness, which from today’s perspective can be seen as an attempt at extending the high-minded pre-war status of upper classes rather than the mere imitation of America. But the goods craved by the youth were not only cultural, they wanted good alcohol, cigarettes, pants and silk stockings (the crucial commodity through which Maria Braun makes her spectacular post-war career, in Fassbinder’s
The Marriage of Maria Braun
). In socialism, one is not supposed to desire something as low as mere things and in any film from the early 50s material goods barely existed. One was supposed to withdraw the craving of things and work hard for the sake of the future and an always-postponed prosperity. This strangely enough corresponded with the pre-war ideology of the nobleman cultural intelligentsia of Poland. There, you were not supposed to be materialistic or admit you want things, which you were giving up in the name of higher, immaterial ideals. Ironically enough then, in this sense the new, post-war socialist ideal was adopted from the former upper classes.

How else could it have ended up apart from an even greater craving for the goods one was deprived of? In the Bloc, the mystery surrounding Western goods added to their metaphysical mystique, much in the Benjaminian sense of the “aura”, yet augmented by the fact that even with money you still wouldn’t be able to have them! Unless you had some amazing contacts within the Politburo, knew someone or were yourself involved with the smuggling of foreign goods to the black market (the essence of Warsaw described by Tyrmand), all you had was the fantasy. In later years, our freedom to buy was extended via the special foreign currency chain Pewex, where many sighed-about Western goods were available, including blue American jeans, but only with Western hard currency. It seems that we’re still seen via this prism of fantasy-power by our Western counterparts. Some films from the time took this easy dichotomy and pushed it to the point of absurdity and destruction.