Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

by Anne Applebaum

  As the Polish communists had learned during their first referendum, more propaganda was not necessarily more convincing. And more chanting young people, more banners, more parades, and more coordinated gymnastic displays were not necessarily more reassuring, to the Germans or to anyone else.

  Chapter 14

  SOCIALIST REALISM

  Literature must become party literature … Down with non-partisan literature!

  —Vladimir Lenin, 19051

  A typical Warsaw joke described the result of a competition for a memorial sculpture to Pushkin … The prize-winning monument was a gigantic, seated figure of Stalin holding a tiny book, on the cover of which were printed in minuscule letters just two words: Pushkin—Poems.

  —Andrzej Panufnik, 19492

  IN ONE CORNER, a bureaucrat in a suit, briefcase under his arm, strides forward with confidence; from the opposite corner, a young family—father, mother, and baby—smile and wave a flag, on their way to a parade. In between, engineers huddle over their designs. Workers lay down railroad ties. From their tractor, peasant farmers hail a blond peasant girl with a sheaf of wheat in her arms. Young people dressed in the blue uniform of the Free German Youth and the blue ties of the German Young Pioneers march and clap their hands in the air, to the accompaniment of accordions and a guitar.

  Factories, apartment blocks, and a stadium rise up in the background behind the figures. And at the very center, a young worker grasps the hand of a white-haired party boss. A man in a flat cap and high leather boots—the familiar uniform of the policeman—smiles enthusiastically at them both, as if giving his blessing. The colors are bright, the surface is shiny. All of the figures have symmetrical, idealized faces and a somewhat weightless quality, as if they belonged in a children’s cartoon.

  But they are not in a cartoon. All of these figures feature in an eighteen-meter mural, grandiosely titled Aufbau der Republik (Construction of the Republic). The mural was designed by Max Lingner, a German communist painter, executed on Meissen porcelain tiles—hence the shiny surface—and then mounted on the side of what had been Göring’s Air Ministry in Berlin, one of the few monuments of Nazi architecture to survive the war. Soviet forces had used the building briefly, but from 1949 until 1991 it was known as the House of Ministries of the German Democratic Republic, and it contained the GDR’s most important government offices.3

  Aufbau is of course a work composed in the spirit of Socrealismus, socialist realism, at its most zealous moment. If parades, festivals, work competitions, and summer camps were meant to occupy the daily life and the leisure time of Homo sovieticus, the images of socialist realism were meant to occupy his imagination and his dreams. Painting, sculpture, music, literature, design, architecture, theater, and film in Eastern Europe would all eventually be shaped by the theories of socialist realism, one way or another. So would the lives of painters, sculptors, writers, actors, directors, musicians, architects, and designers—as well as the experiences of ordinary people who came to live in socialist realist buildings, read socialist realist fiction, and watch socialist realist films.

  Aufbau is a typical work of High Stalinist socialist realism. But it was not a typical work for its painter. Lingner had been born in Germany but emigrated to France after Hitler came to power in 1933. While in Paris, he was influenced by the bright colors and abstract designs of his French postimpressionist colleagues, and he began painting in that vein. He also achieved a certain renown for his sharp, dark, satirical illustrations in the French communist press. Although this graphic work was highly politicized, it was not mawkish or bland, and it never looked like a children’s cartoon. Aufbau was, for him, a new departure. For that reason the story of Lingner’s mural—how it came to be painted, why it looks the way it does—is also the story of how socialist realism came to dominate, for a brief period, the fine arts everywhere in Eastern Europe.

  Lingner was not the only East German painter whose prewar work had been dissonant, eclectic, satirical, or abstract. Before 1933, German painters such as Emil Nolde, Max Beckmann, Franz Marc, and George Grosz had been among the most energetic and innovative in Europe. German art schools and movements—expressionism, the Bauhaus—had influenced artists and architects around the world, from Edvard Munch and Vassilii Kandinskii to Marcel Breuer and Philip Johnson. Many of these artists and movements had links to the political left, and after the war several of the most famous names in German culture—Otto Dix, for example, and in 1948 Bertolt Brecht—returned deliberately to East Berlin, hoping to build a socialist Germany.

  An unusually talented group of Soviet cultural bureaucrats awaited them. To the immense surprise of those Germans who had been horrified by their first, often brutal contacts with Soviet troops, a handful of their new occupiers spoke fluent German, read German literature, and admired German culture. One or two even knew more about German art than most natives. Two of the most important—Alexander Dymschitz, head of the cultural division of the Soviet Military Administration, and Grigorii Weispapier, the first editor of Tägliche Rundschau, the Red Army’s newspaper in Berlin—had once been classmates at the Art History Institute in Leningrad. Others had training in philosophy. Several were Jewish. They arrived with a mandate to make the eastern half of the city more culturally dynamic than the West, to oversee the “bourgeois revolution” in culture, and to prepare the way for the communist cultural revolution that would follow. In contrast to most of their countrymen, who treated the natives with disdain and brutality, they cultivated contacts with German artists and literati, attended performances, and visited exhibitions.

  In the very early days the East German cultural scene was just as chaotic as everything else. In the immediate wake of war, a series of random people “reoccupied” the Reichskulturkammer, the Chamber of Culture, where files on all of the artists, performers, and writers in Germany were still extant. The first to arrive was Elizabeth Dilthey, a former Nazi. She produced bogus Russian credentials, declared herself in charge of the new Kulturkammer, moved into the building, and immediately gathered around her cultural luminaries such as Martin Gericke, a hairdresser and theatrical makeup artist. When the American army arrived in July, Gericke, now describing himself as a “philosopher,” became their informant. Next, Klemens Herzberg—who had only marginally better credentials—ousted Dilthey and had himself proclaimed Plenipotentiary of the City Commandant of Berlin for Cultural Affairs, a title he kept for ten days, during which time he threw some excellent parties. Finally the Soviet administration replaced him with an elderly and politically neutral actor, Paul Wegener.4

  For a short time, the Kulturkammer was a critical institution for artists and intellectuals in Berlin, who used the building as a club, dining room, and meeting place. More importantly, it was also the center for the distribution of ration cards, a central concern for every Berliner. Even in the first weeks following the war’s end the Red Army granted those with artistic credentials the coveted “first” ration, a larger piece of bread, and more meat and vegetables. Asked why, Dymschitz declared that “it is possible that there is a Gorki among you. Should his immortal books remain unwritten, only because he goes hungry?”5 So powerful did this tool of cultural influence become, however, that the Soviet authorities decided to wield it with more force. The Kulturkammer had been a spontaneous creation, after all, and within a few months they had taken away its more important function—the distribution of privileges—and given it to an institution of their own creation, the Cultural Union, or Kulturbund.

  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 Ge
rman 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.6 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.”7

  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.”8

  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.9 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.10

  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.”11 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.12 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.13

  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.”14

  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.”15

  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.”16 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.17

  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.”18 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.19

  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 artis
ts 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.20 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.”21