At least to begin with, Ulenspiegel very much reflected Sandberg’s sensibility. The January 1, 1947, issue contained, among other things, a satirical article about Adenauer, a review of an underrated exhibit of children’s books (no one was talking about the exhibit in overserious Berlin because “it’s about fun and love and magic”), and a critical piece about Wilhelm Furtwängler, the conductor who had stayed in Germany during the war and kept silent about Nazi atrocities. There were cartoons criticizing the moribund denazification process (“Are there really no Nazi party members left?”) and much open discussion of the Third Reich. A few months later, Sandberg’s ambivalence about the deepening division of Germany and of Berlin was reflected in the May 2 cover, which showed a blind man standing between the four flags of Berlin’s four occupying powers. The headline—“An Uncertain Future”—did not clearly blame either the Americans or the USSR for the division.
This neutrality could not be maintained for long, and eventually Sandberg had to take sides. As East–West tensions grew, so did communist influence over the magazine’s content. Its satire shifted to focus more sharply on capitalism, on the United States, and on Germany’s helplessness in the face of Western “warmongering.” By December 1947, its Christmas issue cover featured a German child asking, blandly, “Mother, what is peace?” By the spring of 1948, the magazine had lost its American publishing license. In May, the first issue produced under its Soviet license showed several bridges: the ones marked “currency unity” and “economic unity” are still intact; the one marked “political unity” has been blown apart.32
Covers mocking Truman, de Gaulle, and Western promises of demilitarization followed, although Sandberg resisted becoming yet another propaganda tool. He took the “wrong” side in the formalism debate, insisting on expressing his admiration for “formalist” artists such as Pablo Picasso. This compromise did not last long. By 1950, the party Central Committee’s cultural department could no longer tolerate anything other than total conformity. As one of its members argued, “We need support by our satirical press in the republic.” The magazine, another declared, was attempting to conform—“We believe that Ulenspiegel has constantly and intensively worked on improving itself”—but doubts remained.33 None of this mattered, because its readership had collapsed. No one wanted to buy a satirical magazine that wasn’t funny, and the authorities shut it down in August. Although it was later reincarnated under the similar name of Eulenspiegel, it was never quite the same.
Yet in private, behind closed doors and when they were on their own, even the authorities told political jokes. Günter Schabowski, an East German journalist and later a member of the last East German government, once told a British journalist, “At Neues Deutschland we told each other jokes in the canteen. We weren’t blind to the failings of the system, but we convinced ourselves that this was only because it was early days and the class enemy was perpetrating sabotage wherever he could. One day, we thought, all problems would be solved and there wouldn’t be any more jokes because there wouldn’t be anything left to joke about.”34 There were even jokes about that. For example this one, quite possibly imported from the USSR, and alluding to two of the Soviet Union’s most famous Gulag construction projects:
“Who built the White Sea Canal?”
“Those who told political jokes.”
“And who built the Volga–Don Canal?
“Those who listened.”
Humor could not always be controlled. Clothing could not always be controlled. As it turned out, religious emotions could not always be controlled either. Some of those in communist Europe organized themselves under the church’s umbrella in a careful manner, planning and measuring their involvement, calculating the personal price they might have to pay. Józef Puciłowski was part of a Union of Polish Youth section whose leaders made a decision to go, as a group, to a priest for private catechism instruction on a regular basis. The risk paid off: no one in the group ever told the authorities.35 As a young man, Hans-Jochen Tschiche decided to become a Lutheran clergyman. Although at the time, in the late 1940s, he was able to study in West Berlin, he deliberately went back to work in the East in order to pursue his vocation there. Part of the appeal of the clergy for him was its openness: one was allowed to read a wider range of literature, to discuss material not available to most people in the East, to make contact with Western priests and churches while at the same time avoiding conflict with the regime and being of some help to its victims.36
But others did not calculate, did not measure, and did not plan. Occasionally suppressed religious feelings simply burst into the open.
Perhaps the largest spontaneous outburst took place in 1949, in the Polish city of Lublin. It began in the summer, on July 3, when a local nun noticed a change on the face of a Virgin Mary icon in the city’s cathedral. The Madonna—a copy of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa, Poland’s most revered icon—appeared to be weeping. The nun called for a priest. He witnessed the miracle too, and both began to pray. Others followed suit. With astonishing speed—this was before telephones were common—the news of the miraculous weeping virgin spread across the city. By evening, the doors of the cathedral could not be closed because of the size of the crowds.
In the days that followed, the news spread farther and pilgrims from all over Poland began to make their way to the cathedral. Of course, there was no public announcement of the miracle, and the regime did what it could to discourage the faithful. The authorities blocked public transportation into the city and placed policemen along the roads to prevent people from getting there, but to no avail, as one eyewitness remembered:
It was in July 1949. Five of us went on foot since they had already stopped selling tickets for the train to Lublin. When we got to the cathedral we stayed there all night and in the morning there were already thousands of people, and at about seven o’clock they began standing in a queue waiting for the cathedral doors to open. After some time a policeman came and took away the priest but people still waited longer. And then they came again and took the keys to the cathedral and still people waited.
And then a bishop came and told people to go home because the cathedral was not opening, so then people were really shocked and sang and prayed and that went on until afternoon when I went to the side entrance of the cathedral and at first I didn’t understand what was happening and then … I saw that they were breaking down the doors and I am helping and people are singing and praying and shouting “Don’t close our church.”
Eventually, he entered. He saw the face of the Virgin Mary light up. Tears of blood flowed down one of her cheeks. “I believe it was a true miracle,” he wrote.37
Communist officials were stymied. At first, they kept the story out of the newspapers in the hope that it would go away. But as more and more people came, and as the cathedral square filled up with pilgrims, they changed tactics. On July 10 they launched an “anti-miracle action”: an extra 500 policemen arrived from Warsaw and Łódź, and the newspapers were given the go-ahead to begin a negative propaganda campaign. The pilgrims were described not as “peasants” (a positive word in the communist lexicon) but rather as a “crowd” or “mob” of “country people,” naïve illiterates, even “speculators” or “traders” who could be spotted carrying vodka bottles in the evening. Government authorities solemnly examined the miraculous painting, declared it had been damaged during the war, and said that any apparent markings on the face must be due to humidity. Church leaders, including Cardinal Wyszyński himself, were pressed to declare the miracle false. Fearing that the pilgrims could face terrible repercussions, clergymen told the faithful to go home.
But the faithful kept coming, pitching their tents in front of the cathedral doors. The following Sunday, July 17, the inevitable confrontation took place. Local party leaders organized a demonstration in Litewski Square, in the city center. They denounced “reactionary clerics” through megaphones so powerful they could be heard inside all of the city’s churches. Ins
ide one of them, the Church of the Capuchins, the congregation began to sing a hymn: “We Want God!” As mass came to an end and people poured out onto the streets, arrests began. The churchgoers tried to escape from the town center, but policemen blocked the side streets and herded them into armored trucks—a scene, one historian remarks, not so different from the street arrests the Nazis had carried out in Lublin a few years earlier. Some remained under arrest for a few hours, some for up to three weeks.38
By August, the authorities had found a way to fit the event into their overarching narrative. How had it happened that news of the “miracle” had traveled so quickly, even to places hundreds of miles away from Lublin? Who spread this fantastic rumor through the whole country? Polish radio had the answer: the organizers of the “miracle” in Lublin turned out to be reactionary cliques of clerics, acting in concert with enemies of the Polish nation and the People’s Republic, along with Voice of America. This, the reporter ominously concluded, was hardly surprising: “Voice of America was very pleased that in Poland people abandoned positive work in the fields, and ordered them to gather in front of the cathedral in indescribable conditions … This was not a manifestation of faith. It was an organized demonstration of medieval fanaticism … for purposes which had nothing to do with religion.”39
Eventually, the fuss over the Lublin miracle died down. But it was not the only such event in Stalinist Europe. In the Hungarian village of Fallóskút, two years earlier, a young woman named Klára ran away from a violent husband, spent the night in the fields, and had a dream in which the Virgin Mary told her to look for a spring. She found the spring, and then had a second dream, in which the Virgin Mary told her to build a chapel. Despite her poverty, “belief would be enough” to pay for the chapel, according to the Virgin, and so it proved. Klára convinced others to help, and the chapel was erected beside the spring at the end of 1948. A priest came to inaugurate the building.
Even though the fearful episcopate refused to recognize the miracle, the Virgin nevertheless appeared to Klára several times again in 1949, after which she was sent to a psychiatric hospital and given electric shock treatment. She was released, but then sent back to the hospital once more in 1952 and diagnosed as schizophrenic. In the meantime, many others began to support the chapel, including Klára’s repentant husband. Later, in the 1970s, she made two trips to the Vatican in an attempt to secure papal recognition for the miracle. Eventually recognition was granted, though only after her death in 1985.40
Fallóskút never attracted the crowds that briefly deluged Lublin cathedral. But the chapel eventually came to play a special role in Hungarian Gypsy culture. These most passive of all regime opponents demonstrated their belief by quietly making their way to Klára’s source, and by quietly observing the miracles the holy water wrought. Several patients with eye trouble were cured by the water. A mute boy was said to have begun to speak. No one who came to pray at the chapel had to say a word about politics, communism, democracy, or opposition. But everyone who came to Fallóskút understood why they were there and why others were not.
Miracles, pilgrimages, and prayer were not the only form of passive opposition the church could offer. However curtailed, persecuted, and oppressed, religious institutions did continue to exist during High Stalinism. However pressured or threatened, not every priest was “patriotic” either, and not every Catholic intellectual was in search of a public career. Those church authorities who were willing to operate discreetly were even able to create unusual living and working arrangements for people who wanted nothing to do with communism at all. Precisely that sort of odd arrangement helped Halina Bortnowska survive High Stalinism with her conscience intact.
Bortnowska, the daughter of a teacher who taught her to “take life seriously,” was thirteen when the war ended. She and her mother had escaped from Warsaw during the uprising, and made their way to Toruń. In the spring of 1945 Bortnowska returned to school. Classes had resumed spontaneously. There was no order from above: teachers simply began teaching again, and the children simply wanted to learn. The teachers were the same ones as before the war, and they taught in the same way, using the same textbooks. Not everything was absolutely normal. In May, Bortnowska remembered, or perhaps June, a rumor spread that Russian soldiers were coming to deport Polish children. The teachers sent everyone home from school. But it was a false rumor, and things continued, at least for a time.
Bortnowska’s Scouting troop resumed spontaneously too. Led by several young woman who had been part of the Szare Szeregi, the Home Army Scouts, the troop set out to make itself useful. They organized aid for refugees then arriving from the east, assisted orphans and children who had been displaced. They behaved as they wanted, and answered to no higher authorities, despite some of the threatening signs around them.
In 1948, things changed. The school director was replaced, and many of the teachers left as well. The Scout movement in Warsaw was taken over by the Union of Polish Youth leaders, pressure came from above to conform, and the young women instructors decided to disband their troop. “Scouts can’t exist in a dishonest organization,” they told Bortnowska and her friends. In their case, no one thought of forming a secret or conspiratorial troop: “We understood that there was no point.” Bortnowska looked for other outlets. She managed to join Sodalicja Mariańska, a Catholic student group, on the day before it was disbanded. She was too late to work with Caritas as well.
Frustrated, but still determined to stick to her family’s principles and her own Catholic ideals, Bortnowska sought other small outlets for rebellion. A turning point came when she and a friend were asked to sign the Stockholm Appeal, one of the many peace petitions that had gone around the school. They signed—and then thought better of it. They went to the school director and asked for their names to be removed. Those who had managed not to sign in the first place went unnoticed. But Bortnowska and her friend, then in their final year of secondary school, “caused a fuss, and attracted attention to ourselves … the whole town was talking about it.” With that kind of black mark on their records, the possibility of higher education suddenly evaporated for both of them.
She could have gone to work at a factory, and she thought about doing so. But because Bortnowska had friends within religious institutions, there was one more option. She entered the Catholic Institute in Wrocław, and began to study to become a katechetka, a teacher of religion in elementary schools. The Catholic Institute, despite its imposing name, was in fact a temporary, unofficial institution, recognized by nobody except the church. Soon after its founding in the city of Wrocław, the institute’s buildings were confiscated and it moved to shabby rural premises near the town of Olsztyn.
At the institute, the students studied and taught at the same time. They survived off money from local parishes, free meals from grateful parents, and food donations from churchgoers. They cooked for themselves and cleaned for themselves. They stayed out of the way. “We didn’t exist, from the point of view of the authorities,” Bortnowska recalled. There was still enough administrative chaos, especially in the former German territories, for them to remain under the radar.
Bortnowska remained at the Catholic Institute until 1956, when things began to loosen up and she was able to apply to a real university and get a real degree. But for six years, she survived in communist Poland and did not collaborate. During that time she taught the rudiments of religion to schoolchildren, and had enough to eat and somewhere to sleep. She did not pose a threat to the regime, and the regime probably took no interest in her. She played no public role and took no political positions. She had no children and no family, and thus did not have to worry about ensuring their future. Her mother was able to look after herself.
Asked, more than half a century later, whether she’d been afraid during that time, she shrugged. Yes and no, she said. “It’s impossible to be afraid all the time. A person gets used to it, you stop paying attention.” And so, hidden in the countryside, she did.41
For those who could not or would not collaborate, for those unable to find shelter within the church or take comfort in humor, there was one, final, dramatic option: escape.
In this, the East Germans had it easiest. Poles who left Poland or Hungarians who left Hungary left not just their homes and families but their language and culture. For them, to leave the country was to become forever a refugee. After 1949, passport regimes across Eastern Europe were strengthened and borders reinforced, which made even this heartbreaking choice more risky and difficult, since anyone caught crossing the border risked arrest and imprisonment. According to Interior Ministry statistics, only 9,360 Poles crossed the Polish border for any reason in 1951, of whom only 1,980 were traveling to capitalist countries.42
For Germans the same choice could be very difficult, especially for those who owned property or had family in the East. But it was not quite so dramatic. West Germany was still Germany, after all, and the national language was still German. The logistics were easier too. Unlike the Poles, who had to find a way across East Germany, Czechoslovakia, or the Baltic Sea to the West, Germans who wanted to leave East Germany in the 1950s had only, in theory, to cross the border into the West.
This apparently simple task did become more complicated as time went on. In the early days, the obstacles were often on the western side of the border. Because the flow of refugees was almost entirely from East to West from the very beginning, the U.S. Army in Bavaria and the British Army in northern Germany initially tried to slow it down. Fearing it would be overwhelmed by large numbers of refugees, the U.S. Army actually began defending the borders of its occupation zone in March 1945, controlling who could and could not enter. Though these efforts weren’t particularly successful—refugees still crossed through forests or found their away around border posts with the help of smugglers and bribable Soviet soldiers—they did help set a precedent. In due course all of the Allied armies in Germany set up border posts and roadblocks, monitored routes leading in and out of their respective zones, and required those crossing “internal” German borders to carry passes and visas.43
Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956 Page 58