Certainly this was a poor, unwashed, provincial Polish version of the “jitterbug” style … It provoked a certain amount of disdain even among those who didn’t fight it, but it also inspired respect for its tenacity, for its battle against the arch-powerful officialdom, for the challenge it threw down to the grayness and total poverty all around.10
As in the West, the clothes were associated with music. Like their Western European counterparts, the bikiniarze, the jampecek, and the others started out as jazz fans, despite—or thanks to—the young communists who went around smashing up jazz records. Once it had been forbidden, jazz music became politicized. Even to listen to jazz on the radio became a political activity: to twiddle the dials of one’s father’s radio in an attempt to catch different stations through the static became a form of surrogate dissent. Radio Luxemburg was weirdly popular, as were the jazz programs on Voice of America later on. This would remain a dissident activity until the communist regimes collapsed forty years later.
In their clothes and in their music, the youth rebels of Poland or East Germany had a lot in common with American rockers and zoot suiters, as well as British teddy boys. But because of the nature of their regimes, their fashion choices had a much deeper political significance than they would have in the West. From the authorities’ point of view, these young hipsters were by definition implicated in black market trading. How else could they have obtained such unusual clothes? They were also by definition admirers of American-style consumerism. Like Western teenagers, they wanted possessions. In particular, they wanted possessions the communist system could not provide, and they went out of their way to get them. One former Hungarian jampecek remembered the lengths to which he went to get hold of the thick-soled shoes:
There were dealers in the southern district, three of them. I don’t know their names, Frici somebody-or-other, they brought the stuff in. I think from Yugoslavia or the South … It was a big thing that you could buy it on the side, in instalments. You had to have connections to get hold of it … People envied each other for where they’d bought stuff …11
The regime also suspected that admiration for Western fashions implied an admiration for Western politics. Very quickly, the press began to accuse the youth rebels not just of nonconformism but of propagating degenerate American culture, of plotting to undermine communist values, even of taking orders from the West. At times the youth rebels were called saboteurs or even spies. Perversely, this kind of propaganda had the effect of making these inchoate groups seem, and eventually become, more powerful and more important than they might have been otherwise. One Polish newspaper described American pop culture as “a cult of fame and luxury, the acceptance and glorification of the most primitive desires, the filling of a hunger for sensation.”12 Other official media equated the bikiniarze with “speculators, kulaks, hooligans, and reactionaries.”13 Jacek Kuroń reckoned that this sort of language actually drew young people to jazz, to “Western” dancing, and to more exotic forms of dress. He argued that the bikiniarze became a genuine countercultural movement only after the press began to rail against them: “They were told, ‘You are bikiniarze,’ and they responded, ‘We are bikiniarze.’ And that gave them the political program that they’d been missing.”14
Sándor Horváth, a Hungarian historian who has studied the jampecek movement in depth, argues along similar lines that the Hungarian youth subculture was created by newspaper propaganda and not vice versa. In addition, he speculates that the crusade against the jampecek was probably inspired by the Soviet drive against “hooliganism,” which took place at the same time. He even questions whether the jampecek really existed, in the beginning—or whether the communist authorities, needing something against which to define themselves, had in fact invented them, deriving their description from the “Westerns, gangster films, dime novels and comic books” that made their way across the Hungarian border. In order to promote the character of a “good” communist they needed “bad” capitalists, and the jampecek fit the bill.15
Once they had been defined as outlaws, these fashionable groups began to attract people who really were looking for a fight. In Poland, there were frequent, serious squabbles between bikiniarze and zetempowcy (a nickname derived from the Polish acronym of the Union of Polish Youth, ZMP), as well as between the bikiniarze and the police. In 1951, a group of young people from a Warsaw suburb went on trial for alleged armed robbery. Sztandar Młodych, the official youth newspaper, described them as “young bandits serving American imperialism,” and claimed they had been dressed in the characteristic narrow trousers and thick-soled shoes. One young communist activist wrote in to Sztandar Młodych to complain that he too had been convinced that “admirers of the American lifestyle are hostile to People’s Poland” after having been beaten up by a group of young “hooligans” dressed as bikiniarze. He had been wearing his red Union of Polish Youth tie. Krzysztof Pomian, at the time a Union of Polish Youth leader in Warsaw, was also once attacked in a park and beaten up by people he never saw. A schoolmate was arrested for the crime, but later was freed.16
The reverse was also true. Young communists, sometimes in tandem with the police, hunted bikiniarze in the streets: they would catch them, beat them up, cut their hair, and slash their ties. More than one “official” youth dance party was ruined when bikiniarze began to dance “in the style”—meaning the jitterbug—after which they were beaten up by their “offended” peers.17 Kuroń himself remembers being told by a local party secretary that since the “bikiniarze and the hooligans” hadn’t been persuaded by the press, the radio, and the comic caricatures of themselves in posters and books, it was time to get a group of young, healthy workers and go after them: “From that moment, whenever bikiniarze jumped onto the dance floor, the young communists hauled them off and beat them up.”18 Similar situations occurred in Hungary too.
In East Germany, the problem of youthful rebellion was made more acute by the undeniable influence of American radio, which was available not just on crackly, distant Radio Luxemburg but right next door on RIAS (Radio in the American Sector), which was broadcast directly from West Berlin. West German sheet music was also available for dance bands, and to the great consternation of the regime it was very popular. At a German composers’ conference in 1951, an East German musicologist denounced this “American entertainment kitsch” as a “channel through which the poison of Americanism penetrates and threatens to anaesthetize the minds of workers.” The threat from jazz, swing, and big band music was “just as dangerous as a military attack with poison gases,” since it reflected “the degenerate ideology of American monopoly capital with its lack of culture … its empty sensationalism and above all its fury for war and destruction … We should speak plainly here of a fifth column of Americanism. It would be wrong to misjudge the dangerous role of American hit music in the preparation for war.”19
In the wake of this conference, the East German state took active measures to fight against this new scourge. Around the country, regional governments began to force dance bands and musicians to obtain licenses. Some banned jazz outright. Though the enforcement was irregular, there were arrests. The writer Erich Loest remembered one jazz musician who, when told to change his music selection, pointed out that he was playing the music of the oppressed Negro minority. He was arrested anyway and went to prison for two years.20
The regime also sought alternatives, though tentatively. Nobody was quite sure what progressive dance music was supposed to sound like, after all, or where it was supposed to be played. At the German Academy of Art, a learned commission of musicologists came together to discuss the “role of dance music in our society.” They agreed that “dance music must be purposeful music,” which meant it should be only for dancing. But those present could not agree on whether dance music should be played on the radio—“merely listening to dance music is impossible, the listener will forget what its purpose was supposed to be”—and they feared young people would ask for “boogie-woogie�
�� instead of “real” dance music anyway.21
In May 1952, the Culture Ministry tried to solve this problem with a competition and prizes to be given to composers of “new German dance music.” The competition failed, as none of the entries were deemed sufficiently attractive by a committee that was probably looking for a modern version of Strauss’s Vienna waltzes. As the new “Dance Commission” of the Central Committee complained, much of the work submitted was based on unprogressive, uneducational themes such as sentimental love, nostalgia, or pure escapism. One song about Hawaii, the committee declared, could just as well be set in Lübeck.
Much of the time, young East Germans responded to this sort of thing with howls of laughter. Some bands openly mocked letters they had received from party officials and read them aloud to audiences. Others simply flouted the rules. One shocked official wrote a report describing the “wild cascades of sound at high volume” and the “wild bodily dislocations” he’d heard and seen at one concert. Inevitably, there were escapes as well. One band, a particularly notable “propagandist for American unculture,” caused a sensation by fleeing to the West and then immediately beaming its music back into East Berlin on RIAS.
In truth, the problem of Western music and Western youth fashion never went away. If anything, both became even more alluring after the first, sensational recording of “Rock Around the Clock” reached the East in 1956, heralding the arrival of rock and roll. But by that time, the communist regimes had stopped fighting pop music. Jazz would become legal after the death of Stalin, at least in some places. Rules on leisure clothing would relax, and eventually Eastern Europe would have its own rock bands too. As one historian notes, the battle against Western pop music was “fought and lost” in East Germany even before the Berlin Wall was built—and it had been “fought and lost” everywhere else too.22
For adults who had to hold down jobs and maintain families in the era of High Stalinism, flamboyant clothing was never a practical form of protest, though a few professions did allow it. Marta Stebnicka, an actress who spent much of her career in Kraków, put a great deal of effort into designing interesting hats for herself in the 1950s.23 Leopold Tyrmand, the Polish jazz critic with the narrow ties and the colored socks, was an adult style icon too.
But adults who couldn’t or wouldn’t dress up could still play pranks. They could also tell jokes. So ubiquitous and so varied were the jokes told in communist regimes that numerous academic tomes have since been written about them, though the use of jokes as a form of passive resistance in a repressive political system was nothing new. Plato wrote of the “malice of amusement” and Hobbes observed that jokes often serve to make the joke teller feel superior to the objects of his humor. George Orwell observed (as quoted above) that “a thing is funny when it upsets the established order. Every joke is a tiny revolution.” In the communist regimes of Eastern Europe, where there were so few opportunities either to express malice toward authority or to feel superior, and where the desire to upset the established order was both strong and forbidden, jokes flourished.24
Jokes also served a wide variety of purposes. The Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovskii probably expressed their main function most precisely when he pointed out that “the simplification of the joke exposes the absurdity of all propaganda tricks … In the jokes you can find the thing that has left no trace in the printed sources: the people’s opinion of events.”25 Certainly jokes allowed the joke teller to refer aloud to otherwise unmentionable truths, such as the fact that the Soviet Union bought Polish coal and other Polish products far below the international market price:
Negotiations are going on between Mao and Stalin. The Chinese leader asks the Soviet leader for help: “We need a billion dollars, fifty million tons of coal, and a lot of rice.” Stalin turns to his advisers: “Dollars, okay. Coal, okay. But where will Bierut get the rice?”26
Also the fact that the Polish army, in the 1950s, was led by a Soviet general with a Polish surname:
Why did Rokossovskii become a marshal of the Polish army?
Because it’s cheaper to dress one Russian in a Polish uniform than to dress the whole Polish army in Russian uniforms.
Or the fact that even artists had to be forced to conform under communism:
What is the difference between painters of the naturalist, impressionist, and the socialist realist schools?
The naturalists paint as they see, the impressionists as they feel, the socialist realists as they are told.
Or the fact that supporters of the deeply unpopular regime were too embarrassed to admit it:
Two friends are walking down the street. One asks the other, “What do you think of Rákosi?” “I can’t tell you here,” he replies. “Follow me.”
They disappear down a side street.
“Now tell me what you think of Rákosi,” says the friend.
“No, not here,” says the other, leading him into the hallway of an apartment block.
“Okay, here then.”
“No, not here. It’s not safe.”
They walk down the stairs into the deserted basement of the building.
“Okay, now you can tell me what you think of our leader.”
“Well,” says the other, looking around nervously, “actually I quite like him.”
As was the case in so many spheres of life, the communist monopoly on power meant that jokes about anything—the economy, the national soccer team, the weather—all qualified, at some level, as political jokes. This was what made them subversive, as the authorities understood perfectly well, and this is why they went out of their way to quash them. A letter from Budapest youth movement authorities to Hungarian summer camp counselors solemnly warned them to be prepared: campers might well indulge in “vulgar” joke-telling sessions. In case such a thing should happen, the counselors should cheerfully participate in these occasions in order to divert the crowd toward more tasteful and politically acceptable forms of humor.27
Not all youth leaders were so understanding. In reports sent to the Education Ministry about the general mood of students in Poland, “chants, jokes, rhymes, and graffiti” were judged a sign of “oppositional feelings,” perhaps even evidence of “contact with the underground.”28 For the wrong joke, told in the wrong place at the wrong time, one could even be arrested, not only in the 1950s but later on as well. This was the premise of Milan Kundera’s 1967 novel The Joke, the book that first gained the Czech writer an international audience: its protagonist writes a joke on a postcard to a girl, and is thrown out of the party and sent to work in the mines as a result.29 In 1961, members of an East German cabaret troupe really were arrested after a performance titled Where the Dog’s Buried, which included the following skit:
Two of the actors start dismantling a wall, brick by brick. “What are you doing?” asks a third. “We’re tearing down the walls of the brick factory!” they reply. “Why are you doing that? There’s a shortage of bricks!” the other responds. Exactly, say the two labourers, continuing with their work. “That’s why we’re dismantling the walls!”
The cabaret also featured a bureaucrat who answered every question with a quotation from Walter Ulbricht, “just to be absolutely on the safe side.” It was all rather clumsy, but the authorities were not amused. In the report filed afterward, a local party boss fumed, “the show consisted of provocative defamations of the press, workers, Party officials, and youth leaders.” The actors remained in jail for nine months, during which time several of them were isolated in solitary confinement. Much later, one of them discovered that hundreds of his jokes had been reported to the secret police.30
The incident illustrates the distinct absence of a communist sense of humor. It also underlines the delicate balance that had to be struck by satirists, cabaret artists, and others who wanted to perform legally. On the one hand, they had to be funny, or at least pointed and sharp, if they were to attract an audience. On the other hand, they had to avoid telling the jokes that people around them were act
ually telling or even alluding to the topics that others found so amusing. Official media faced the same dilemma. Hungarian state radio made an attempt at tackling this problem in 1950 with the launch of a political cabaret. Their aim was clear: “Every good laugh is a blow to the enemy. The new program will radiate the optimistic joy and strength of our society.” The program lasted two months and was then abandoned.31
Almost no one in the Eastern bloc wrestled with this problem in the Stalinist period so diligently as Herbert Sandberg, the Buchenwald survivor who became the editor of Ulenspiegel, briefly East Germany’s funny satirical magazine. Although the magazine’s offices were originally located in West Berlin and the magazine was first registered under an American license, Sandberg’s superb team of artists and writers all came from the intellectual left, and from the beginning they were close to the Kulturbund and the communist party. Sandberg himself was not at all ideological, however. He regarded laughter as “healing,” and believed he could play a role in reconstructing society if he and his colleagues focused their sharp pens on caricatures of Germany’s Nazi past and its present division.
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