Communism's Public Sphere: Culture as Politics in Cold War Poland and East Germany

By Kyrill Kunakhovich

Communism's Public Sphere explores the political role of cultural spaces in the Eastern Bloc. Under communist regimes that banned free speech, political discussions shifted to spaces of art: theaters, galleries, concert halls, and youth clubs. Kyrill Kunakhovich shows how these venues turned into sites of dialogue and contestation. While officials used them to spread the communist message, artists and audiences often flouted state policy and championed alternative visions. Cultural spaces therefore came to function as a public sphere, or a rare outlet for discussing public affairs.

Focusing on Kraków in Poland and Leipzig in East Germany, Communism's Public Sphere sheds new light on state-society interactions in the Eastern Bloc. In place of the familiar trope of domination and resistance, it highlights unexpected symbioses like state-sponsored rock and roll, socialist consumerism, and sanctioned dissent.

By examining nearly five decades of communist rule, from the Red Army's arrival in Poland in 1944 to German reunification in 1990, Kunakhovich argues that cultural spaces played a pivotal mediating role. They helped reform and stabilize East European communism but also gave cover to the protest movements that ultimately brought it down.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Jan 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781501767050

Book preview

Communism’s Public Sphere

Culture as Politics in Cold War Poland and East Germany

Kyrill Kunakhovich

Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

To my parents

What a crowd shows up for a theatrical performance or the poetry readings of a well-known poet in order to hear a political allusion, explode into applause, and return home. There is nothing strange or wrong with this; if politics is forbidden it is sought everywhere.

—Adam Zagajewski, 1984

Contents

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

1. Takeover: Reconstruction as Revolution

2. Planning: Workers and Cultural Mass Work

3. Nationalism: Public Protest and the Birth of National Communism

4. Pluralism: Individual Choice and Public-Opinion Polling

5. Consumerism: Cultured Consumption and Its Limits

6. Reform: The Promise and Peril of Controlled Revolt

7. Dissent: Normalization and Its Discontents

8. Protest: Spaces of Opposition, Spaces of Dialogue

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

This book has been a long time in the making and I have accrued many debts along the way. The first is to Stephen Kotkin, who inspired the questions at the heart of this project. He encouraged me to think big, pushed me to find the devil in the details, and believed in my work even when I felt lost. Jan Gross and Anson Rabinbach were expert guides to Polish and German history. Their enthusiasm, patience, and wisdom have been invaluable over the years. When I was still an undergraduate, Laura Engelstein supervised my first attempt to write about culture as politics. It is largely thanks to her that I set out to become a historian.

At Princeton, I was immersed in an extraordinary community of scholars and friends. This project took shape through countless conversations with Pey-Yi Chu, Franziska Exeler, Mayhill Fowler, Michael Gordin, Irena Grudzińska-Gross, Jeff Hardy, Elidor Mëhilli, Anne O’Donnell, Serguei Oushakine, Ekaterina Pravilova, and other members of the Russian kruzhok. It also benefited from the advice and support of many graduate school colleagues, including Henry Cowles, Rohit De, Will Deringer, Catharine Evans, Evan Hepler-Smith, Zack Kagan-Guthrie, Jamie Kreiner, Ronny Regev, Padraic Scanlan, Margaret Schotte, Chris Shannon, and Annie Twitty. The Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Charlotte Elizabeth Procter Fellowship provided funding along the way.

Research in Kraków was made possible by a grant from the International Culture Center and its director, Jacek Purchla. Andrzej Chwalba generously invited me to participate in his doctoral seminar, and I am grateful to his students for their feedback. Special thanks go to the incomparable Szczepan Świątek, who insisted I prove myself before letting me into the archive—and then showed me everything it had to offer. My time in Leipzig was supported by the German Academic Exchange Service and Leipzig University’s Center for the History and Culture of East Central Europe. I am grateful to the Center’s Stefan Troebst and Frank Hadler, as well as Beata Hock, Lars Karl, Hannes Siegrist, and Václav Šmidrkal. Thomas Höpel kindly shared his deep knowledge of Leipzig’s cultural bureaucracy before, during, and after my stay in the city.

I was fortunate to spend a year at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard, where I learned a great deal from Homi Bhabha, Steven Biel, Jonathan Bolton, and Claire Edington. At the College of William and Mary, Bruce Campbell, Frederick Corney, Emily Gioielli, Laurie Koloski, Alexander Prokhorov, and Elena Prokhorova provided feedback on my work and made me a far better teacher and scholar. For the past six years, I have been privileged to call the University of Virginia home. I am particularly grateful to my colleagues Manuela Achilles, Fahad Bishara, Claudrena Harold, Andrew Kahrl, Mary Kuhn, Erik Linstrum, James Loeffler, Jeffrey Rossman, Jennifer Sessions, and David Singerman. A grant from UVA’s College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences funded additional archival work in the summer of 2017.

I have presented research from this book in more venues than I care to admit. Thank you to Patryk Babiracki, Rüdiger Bergien, Jadwiga Biskupska, Andrea Bohlman, Chad Bryant, Nicole Burgoyne, Paul Bushkovitch, Holly Case, Kathryn Ciancia, Alon Confino, John Connelly, Carol Anne Costabile-Heming, Sarah Cramsey, Andrew Demshuk, April Eisman, Malgorzata Fidelis, Scott Harrison, Jeff Hayton, Francine Hirsch, Seth Howes, Mariana Ivanova, Lisa Jakelski, Krzysztof Jasiewicz, Polly Jones, Zachary Kelly, Padraic Kenney, Pavel Kolář, Anna Krylova, Katherine Lebow, Maike Lehmann, Alice Lovejoy, Norman Naimark, Małgorzata Mazurek, Natalie Misteravich-Carroll, Agnieszka Pasieka, David Petruccelli, Mackenzie Pierce, Andrew Port, Benjamin Robinson, Nicholas Rutter, Juliane Schicker, Leonard Schmieding, Edith Sheffer, Marci Shore, Pavel Skopal, Thomas Sliwowski, Keely Stauter-Halsted, Dariusz Stola, Berenika Szymanski-Düll, Kiril Tomoff, David Tompkins, Katie Trumpener, Eric Weitz, and Katharine White for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Special thanks are due to those who read all or part of this manuscript. I am profoundly grateful to Rachel Applebaum, Cristina Florea, William Hitchcock, Simon Huxtable, Piotr Kosicki, Allan Megill, and Molly Pucci, as well as two anonymous reviewers.

I have had three wonderful editors at Cornell University Press. Roger Haydon first took a chance on this project, Emily Andrew steered it through review and approval, and Bethany Wasik carried it to the finish line. Thank you also to Karen Laun, Bill Nelson, Mary Petrusewicz, Mia Renaud, and Sandy Sadow. The publication of this book was aided by a subvention from UVA’s College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. A version of chapter 1 appeared previously under the title Reconstruction as Revolution: Cultural Life in Post-WWII Kraków and Leipzig in East European Politics and Societies 30.3 (August 2016): 475–495.

Sarah Milov read every draft of every chapter and made every one of them better. Her kindness, generosity, curiosity, and insight have improved my work and my life in countless ways. I owe her more than I can say and am grateful every day for her love and companionship. Our children, Vivi and Lenny Kun-Milov, have been a welcome distraction from this book as well as an impetus to complete it.

When I was growing up I dreamed of being an academic because that was what passed for normal in my family. My father, Mikhail Kunakhovich, taught me to trust my gut and keep exploring. My stepfather, Krishan Kumar, continues to model what scholarship looks like. My mother, Katya Makarova, has been a source of support, encouragement, and inspiration my whole life. These are the people most responsible for this book, and it is dedicated to them.

Abbreviations

Introduction

On October 9, 1989, more than a hundred thousand people packed into Leipzig’s Karl Marx Square, between its stately opera house and the Gewandhaus concert hall. Two days earlier the German Democratic Republic (GDR) had celebrated its fortieth birthday, but the festivities were overshadowed by protests. In Leipzig demonstrators had called for more freedoms and rights, and the police responded by dousing them with water cannons. Anticipating an even bigger rally on October 9, city officials called in thousands of troops: soldiers with machine guns, riot police in body armor, Stasi detachments, combat militia.¹ As the square filled they began thumping their truncheons on their shields, foreboding deadly force. Then, suddenly, the voice of the Gewandhaus conductor Kurt Masur came over the loudspeakers. We urgently ask you for prudence, so that a peaceful dialogue can take place. The crowd seemed to exhale, breaking into spontaneous applause. It was an immense relief to all who heard it, an eyewitness recalled. We immediately formed a procession and started to move.² Police had set up barricades to block any such march but in the end allowed it to proceed; a few policemen even joined in. It was the miracle of Leipzig, Masur claimed.³

A crowd of people stand on a square at night, holding candles.

Figure 1.

A Leipzig Monday demonstration seen through the windows of the Gewandhaus, December 1989. The demonstration of October 9 took place on the same square, framed by the Gewandhaus and the Opera House (center). SLUB Dresden/Deutsche Fotothek, photograph by Harald Hauswald.

All revolutions have their heroes, and Masur makes an appealing candidate. At six-foot-three, with ramrod posture and an imperious bearing, he cut a figure larger than life. The morning after the rally, a group of residents arrived at the Gewandhaus with a wreath, anointing Masur the savior of Leipzig.⁴ But how did a conductor find himself in this position in the first place? How did he, of all people, come to address the crowd, and why did his words carry such weight? Masur later described himself as an involuntary politician forced into action by a sense of duty, yet that is not quite right.⁵ For eight years he had led a public conversation series, Meetings in the Gewandhaus, that tackled pressing issues in the GDR—from freedom of speech to police brutality. Through these meetings, Masur met many of the activists who organized the protests of October 1989 and gained their trust. He also built relationships with local officials, who at the critical moment gave him access to the city’s loudspeaker system. What looked like one extraordinary act was really the culmination of a years-long process. Masur played mediator on October 9 because he had done so his whole career, promoting dialogue between the people and the People’s State from his position at the helm of the Gewandhaus.

Masur was not alone in this effort. The statement he read out on Karl Marx Square had been cowritten with five men: a cabaret performer, a theologian, and three functionaries of the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED). They knew each other well from years of organizing cultural events, which always required official approval. Thanks to these professional ties, Masur was on good terms with local administrators, including the three party functionaries: secretaries for culture, education, and propaganda on the Leipzig District SED Committee. He called them up on midday on October 9 because he knew them to be reasonable men who would not want to risk bloodshed. The functionaries, too, had good relations with Masur and valued his perspective. One of them even told friends that conversations with Leipzig artists had changed his view of the [communist] system bit by bit.⁶ Although Berlin had issued orders to suppress protest by any means necessary, these functionaries’ friendships with Masur convinced them to break ranks.⁷ Meeting at the Gewandhaus that afternoon, the six-man group—three administrators, three civilians—hashed out the text that Masur read, taking pains to speak personally to both sides of ‘the barricade.’ ⁸ The so-called Leipzig Six practiced the dialogue they preached, a dialogue that had been honed in cultural institutions like the Gewandhaus. When tensions between state and society reached fever pitch, it was spaces of art that provided a middle ground.

This book explores the political role of cultural spaces in communist East Germany and Poland. In both states, it argues, such spaces were a public sphere in which many actors contested visions of the public good. For communist regimes, they served as vehicles to spread Marxist thought and shape their subjects’ attitudes and values. Officials supervised and funded thousands of cultural institutions—concert halls, theaters, galleries, youth clubs—because they were convinced that these could serve regime goals. Yet states’ attentiveness to spaces of art also transformed them into spaces of resistance. On stage, on paper, and onscreen, artists used their platform to critique government policy and offer alternatives. Drawing on Romantic tradition, many came to see themselves as speaking for the public on matters of public importance—much in the way that Masur did. Audiences, meanwhile, spoke for themselves by clapping, booing, or not showing up at all. Since communist officials treated art as a political matter, its reception became a political act: an opportunity to voice displeasure or articulate demands. Under regimes that banned free speech, spaces of art turned into outlets for political debate.

Yet cultural spaces were more than battlegrounds between state and society. As the example of the Leipzig Six suggests, they also played a mediating role, fostering dialogue and compromise. Officials always watched audience reactions closely, looking to see whether state policy was having the desired effect. In both East Germany and Poland, in fact, public-opinion polling first emerged in cultural institutions. Focusing on two cities, Leipzig and Kraków, I examine how administrators monitored and responded to cultural signals. Encountering the public in spaces of art forced state administrators to adjust the way they ruled and gradually transformed communist politics. However, such encounters changed the public too. Although it failed to meet its goals, communism’s cultural project left a deep imprint on local cultures and identities. Spaces of art were sites in which state and society influenced each other. They illuminate how both regimes and publics evolved under communist rule.

East Germany and Poland experienced similar forms of communist rule. Thanks to the architecture of the Eastern Bloc, their cultural spaces came to play analogous roles, enabling a public discussion of public affairs. And yet the topics and the tone of that discussion differed in each country. The Polish and East German public spheres had their particular dynamics, informed by local history and politics. I trace these dynamics from the Red Army’s arrival in Poland in 1944 to the GDR’s dissolution in 1990, showing how they shaped the two countries’ trajectories. This helps explain why the Leipzig Six still called for the further development of socialism in October 1989, after Poles had already voted to leave socialism behind. But understanding national outcomes also requires looking beyond national borders. East German demonstrators on October 9 openly referenced the Polish model, and only days earlier a Kraków rally had proclaimed solidarity with Leipzig. Poles and East Germans watched, interacted with, and learned from one another. In excavating such cross-border entanglements, I suggest that the Eastern Bloc was a transnational public sphere.

The Cultural Public Sphere

The concept of the public sphere is closely associated with the work of Jürgen Habermas, whose book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere was published in West Germany in 1962. The first English translation, however, appeared only in 1989, and many reviews noted that it was propitiously timed.⁹ The book charted the rise of an intermediate space between state and society in which private individuals debated and advanced the common good. In eighteenth-century Europe, Habermas argued, the emergent bourgeoisie set up new venues of sociability: coffee houses, salons, debating societies. These venues lay outside of state control and offered the opportunity to critique it. Through open, rational discussion, all comers could in principle weigh in on current affairs and force states to start acting in the general interest. For Habermas, the public sphere was a forum in which private people, come together to form a public, readied themselves to compel public authority to legitimate itself before public opinion.¹⁰ It is hard to imagine a better example than what took place on Karl Marx Square in October 1989.

Today Habermas’s concept is used most often as an ideal type, denoting a form of democratic politics in which all citizens can participate in policymaking. Habermas called this the liberal model of the bourgeois public sphere, but then devoted the majority of his book to chronicling its structural transformation. As absolute monarchies gave way to constitutional democracies, the public sphere was institutionalized in the form of parliaments and became an organ of the state. It was soon overrun by lobbying, politicking, and propaganda, serving "the manipulation of the public as much as legitimation before it. Writing in the shadow of the Third Reich, amid the advertising blitz of the West German Economic Miracle, Habermas despaired at the prospects of free and critical debate. Yet he believed the public sphere continued to exist and remained influential at least as a freedom-guaranteeing corrective to the exercise of power and domination."¹¹ Even when citizens were systematically misled, manipulated, and excluded from government, they still had the capacity to bring it to account.

While Habermas defended the democratic potential of this power-penetrated public sphere, his critics noted that its liberal model was power-penetrated too. The eighteenth century’s political debates, they pointed out, were neither free nor open to all comers; in actuality, they were largely reserved for rich white men. Nor did public authority readily recognize public opinion but rather censored and ignored it.¹² In critiquing Habermas’s genealogy of the public sphere, scholars sought to free the concept from his context. If the public sphere never lived up to its ideal type, not even in eighteenth-century Europe, then it was not specific to a time and place. The concept could be used more broadly to describe any site of public engagement with politics, no matter how constrained or imperfect. In Geoff Eley’s words, the public sphere makes more sense as a structured setting where cultural and ideological contest or negotiation among a variety of publics takes place.¹³

This framing of the public sphere is not historically contingent, and scholars have applied it to settings all over the world. In fact, it appears frequently in studies of the Eastern Bloc, though almost always with some kind of modifier. Authors speak of a proto-public sphere, an ersatz public sphere, a censored public sphere, an obstructed public sphere, a politicized public sphere, a party-controlled public sphere.¹⁴ As Marc Silberman has written, such formulations reflect the need to acknowledge corrupted or regulated, yet productive forms of communication in Eastern Bloc societies.¹⁵ The public sphere was clearly different under communist regimes than under liberal democracies, since communists explicitly took aim at liberal institutions. They targeted parliaments, newspapers, churches, and civic organizations: precisely the channels through which a sovereign public could form and express public opinion. Yet that does not mean that a public sphere ceased to exist, or ceased to matter. Instead, as this book argues, it took other forms. As civil society atrophied, and as formal political structures fell under regime control, cultural institutions became some of the most productive forms of communication between state and society—however corrupted or regulated this communication was.

Scholars of communist regimes have long agreed that cultural institutions played political roles. In some studies, spaces of art feature as sites of communist indoctrination, echoing the Polish writer Czesław Miłosz, whose book The Captive Mind (1953) laid out a model of totalitarian control. The greater the number of people who ‘participate in culture’—i.e., pass through the schools, read books and magazines, attend theaters and exhibitions—the further the doctrine reaches and the smaller grows the threat to the rule of the [communist] philosophers, Miłosz insisted.¹⁶ Other accounts, meanwhile, frame cultural spaces as bastions of resistance, defending East Europeans from the totalitarian onslaught. All of the region’s anticommunist revolts, wrote the Czechoslovak author Milan Kundera in 1984, were prepared, shaped, realized by novels, poetry, theater, cinema, historiography, literary reviews, popular comedy and cabaret, philosophical discussions—that is, by culture.¹⁷ Both views are true, and therefore incomplete. Cultural spaces belonged neither to states nor to societies; instead, they mediated between the two. They channeled both dissent and propaganda, both government visions and popular voices. Eschewing the dichotomy of opposition and support, spaces of art promoted contestation and negotiation.

Politics through Culture

In Cold War Kraków and Leipzig, cultural spaces came in many forms. They included theaters, concert halls, art galleries, and museums, but also youth clubs, discotheques, cabarets, and factory break rooms. Some were as grand as Kraków’s Słowacki Theater, a neo-Baroque wedding cake that sat over a thousand viewers, others as humble as a converted broom closet with a few books and journals. With few exceptions, these spaces were state-owned, state-funded, and state-run, like the majority of public spaces in the Eastern Bloc. What tied them together, though, is that they were all classified as cultural facilities (placówki kulturalne or Kultureinrichtungen), subject to their country’s ministry of culture. Even in mid-sized cities like Kraków and Leipzig, hundreds of physical spaces fell under this rubric. Taken together, they constituted what I call the state cultural matrix: the totality of a state’s infrastructure for spreading, steering, and administering culture.

In communist regimes, culture was an established sector of government, alongside heavy industry or education. Both state and party organs at each level, from village councils up to the Central Committee, had departments for culture, art and culture, or cultural affairs.¹⁸ So, too, did mass organizations such as trade unions, student unions, and women’s groups. By the 1960s more than one hundred functionaries in Kraków and Leipzig worked in the culture sector full-time. Most had only a cursory familiarity with the arts, since it was common to move between culture departments and other fields. On the other hand, top-level officials often had firsthand experience with cultural administration. The cultural matrix thus received a great deal of political attention, along with significant funding. State budgets always included a line item for art and culture, while schools, factories, and even the army had to set resources aside for cultural expenses. The speed with which the state cultural matrix disintegrated after 1989 reveals just how much money and effort it took to run.

But for all that investment, what was the cultural matrix meant to achieve? This question has received surprisingly little attention. In studies of the Eastern Bloc, cultural policy typically figures as a restraint: a means of bringing artists to heel, or at least censoring their creativity.¹⁹ Seen through the eyes of those who chafed against it, cultural policy looks senseless, arbitrary, and malicious. It also varies wildly from genre to genre, or between high, mass, and popular culture. Crackdowns on literature or painting coincided with letups in rock music or film, making it difficult to speak of a concerted policy—or to compare policy between countries. Few scholars consider cultural policy from administrators’ point of view, and when they do they focus on one aspect of the state’s cultural project. There have been excellent studies of censorship in the Bloc, of the mass media, of factory-based cultural enlightenment.²⁰ But while such works illuminate how policy was made, they risk missing the forest for the trees. In chronicling the politics of culture in particular fields, they overlook a bigger project: politics through culture.

In Cold War Poland and East Germany, cultural policy was always social policy.²¹ For all the time they spent tending to artists, administrators in Kraków and Leipzig focused on audiences. They scheduled buses to take workers to the opera and put on concerts for construction brigades. They made sure that retirees joined painting circles, that school groups visited the theater, that university students went dancing in youth clubs. The cultural matrix needed to be vast in order to reach as many people as possible; our goal is to involve all residents in cultural life, without exception, one Leipzig official insisted.²² Directing culture’s production was only a means to an end. The state’s ultimate aim was to direct culture’s consumption—and in the process to shape its consumers. Communist regimes used many tools to mold their subjects, but cultural institutions played a special role. While the mass media could reach millions of people, it was no substitute for a live, captive audience assembled in a concert hall or theater. In addressing these cultural publics, officials sought to reach and influence the public at large.

Eastern Bloc states were not alone in this effort. Cultural policy always implies the management of populations through suggested behavior, write Toby Miller and George Yúdice. It is devoted to forming a collective public subjectivity, one that reflects the interests of the polity.²³ A state’s cultural policy, in other words, is an expression of its political mission and values. While the UK pursued a culture for democracy through the BBC, Fascist Italy used leisure-time activities to cultivate a culture of consent.²⁴ Communist cultural policy thus tells us a great deal about the evolution of the communist project. The changing architecture of the cultural matrix revealed officials’ changing visions of the future, the public, and the state. In Poland as in East Germany, it always encapsulated regime priorities—so much so, in fact, that when the cultural matrix started to collapse, communism’s downfall was not far behind.

The Artists’ Tribune

To staff and operate the cultural matrix, Eastern Bloc states relied on artists. Over four decades of communist rule Leipzig’s art academies churned out nearly 15,000 graduates: writers, painters, actors, dancers, musicians.²⁵ Those who joined artists’ unions received various perks, from special housing to travel opportunities. Above all, they received a platform—to speak, perform, or exhibit in public. The state’s investment in the cultural matrix brought millions of people into contact with the arts, giving artists unprecedented visibility and influence. Maybe we can’t say all the things that you can say here, conceded the East German writer Christa Wolf on a visit to the United States, but, on the other hand, people listen to us much more.²⁶ Such visibility was particularly striking under regimes that restricted it: besides state officials, few others had the opportunity to address a crowd. In their effort to reach a mass public through culture, communist regimes empowered artists to do the same. Thanks to the cultural matrix, East European artists became public figures.

That was why administrators watched the cultural matrix so closely, using both sticks and carrots to keep artists in line. Censor’s offices, culture departments, artists’ unions, and cultural journals all supplied a steady stream of guidelines for creative production. These controls aimed to make artists into mouthpieces for the state, ensuring that the cultural matrix functioned as a smooth transmission belt. But since art had to be politically correct, artistic expression became a political matter. For administrators, artists, and audiences alike, any departure from aesthetic norms acquired the force of a political statement. Observers parsed cultural events for signs of hidden protest or signals of a changing party line. The state’s determination to spread politics through culture meant that the two grew intertwined, turning cultural figures into political actors—whether they liked it or not.

For many East European artists, this role was nothing new. When a Western journalist asked Masur, two months after October 9, why an artist would concern himself with politics, the conductor advised him to start with Beethoven.²⁷ In the German lands, the notion of Kultur gave art and artists a special responsibility for defining the national essence.²⁸ In partitioned Poland, where the word intelligentsia originated, cultural figures saw themselves as guardians of the nation, sustaining its identity and guiding its development.²⁹ Both Polish and East German artists reprised these roles under communist rule. Like Masur, many believed that they were speaking for the public and giving voice to its opinions and demands. Others envisioned themselves as the party’s moral arm, advising communist regimes and urging corrections.³⁰ As Wolf acknowledged, artists could never say all the things they wanted, but they constantly engaged with, responded to, and commented on public affairs. Within the Bloc’s closed political system, they were among the most prominent critics of communist rule.

Scholars have long gravitated toward critical artists, seeing them as islands of freedom in a sea of control. Many distinguish between the state’s official culture and an unofficial one, also called dissident, alternative, underground, or independent. Some studies even speak of a second public sphere, comprised of counterofficial voices and separate from the first, state-centric public sphere.³¹ Such categories reflect a search for both the limits of dictatorship and spheres of autonomy outside them.³² The trouble is that the line between the official and the unofficial keeps disappearing from view. State institutions were full of alternative practices, as administrators constantly complained. Nor was independent culture wholly independent of the state, since counterofficial voices still made use of government spaces and resources.³³ There could be a great deal of distance between mainstream and dissident artists, but they did not inhabit separate realms. Until the very last years of communist rule, they operated within one cultural matrix.

Rejecting the two-culture model as too black and white, other scholars prefer the notion of a gray zone, popularized by H. Gordon Skilling. In 1980s Czechoslovakia, he argued, many artists and publications existed on the borders of legality and illegality, blurring the line between the two.³⁴ This concept became widespread after 1989 as a way of overcoming Cold War binaries, yet it remains thoroughly trapped in them. For all the grayness in between, the poles of black and white endure; official and unofficial cultures remain juxtaposed, setting up a zero-sum game. Greater engagement with the state implies a greater distance from the underground, or even a betrayal of it. While one can move between the two, the poles are fixed, unchangeable, and timeless. Some ideal type of communism forms one end of the axis, and any deviation from it, even by communist leaders themselves, can only be construed as a concession—a step away from communist ideals. Dissidents, meanwhile, are trapped in constant opposition, merely reacting to the state instead of charting their own course. Like all the actors in the gray zone, they are condemned to live in two dimensions and defined solely by their attitude to communist rule.

This book adopts a different approach. Eastern Bloc artists were neither split into two camps nor stuck on a continuum between them. Instead, they voiced a wide range of opinions in the cultural public sphere, shaping the boundaries of state-sponsored culture in the process. Within the state’s cultural matrix, artists presented visions for society that went beyond simple support or criticism of the state. Instead of black and white, or shades of gray, the cultural public sphere was a kaleidoscope of color. This public sphere was never free from government interference, and officials blackballed, fired, expelled, or even arrested artists for crossing the line. Where the line lay, though, was not set in stone. In raising issues that had been taboo, artists could force administrators to discuss them; time after time, pressure from below expanded the parameters of accepted art. Conversely, artists sometimes used state policy in ways that forced regimes to backtrack or change course. You never knew where you stood, one Leipzig rocker recalled; cultural policy was a perpetual imponderable.³⁵ The reason for this, I suggest, is that cultural policy was not simply imposed from above but rather negotiated in the public sphere. Despite the real power asymmetry between them, both artists and administrators played a part in shaping—and constantly reshaping—the notions of official and unofficial art.

Public Opinion

Artists and administrators were not the only actors in the cultural matrix. State efforts to involve all residents in cultural life brought more East Europeans into more kinds of cultural institutions more often than ever before. These audiences were not passive recipients of government messaging, just as artists were not mere channels for it. They, too, made use of the cultural matrix to criticize state policy and voice their desires. In the 1970s, Kraków theatergoers booed at the mention of the Russian Empire and cheered at lines that referenced Polish independence. When the regime declared martial law in 1981, artists connected with the ruling party were sometimes slow-clapped off the stage. More often, audiences voted with their feet, by failing to attend state-backed events or leaving halfway through. So long as proper cultural consumption was prescribed, any departure from it was an act of protest. Even when audiences could not speak, they still found ways to make themselves heard.

While silence was expected in a theater, other cultural spaces encouraged boisterous interaction. In Kraków’s student clubs a steady din pervaded the air, one visitor remembered. There was cheap wine and passionate debate.³⁶ Different clubs attracted different kinds of people. In 1980s Leipzig, punks gathered at the Jörgen Schmidtchen House of Culture, goths at Arena youth club, skinheads at the Haus Auensee disco.³⁷ Under regimes that banned unsanctioned gatherings, cultural spaces offered an opportunity to congregate in public. There were few other venues where likeminded people could meet, talk, and develop a sense of community. Although the cultural matrix existed to serve regime goals, its users also made it their own. As the following chapters will show, cultural spaces played key roles in fostering the civic activism behind the miracle of Leipzig.

By assembling in cultural venues, individuals constituted a public: a crowd witnessing itself in physical space, as Michael Warner defines it.³⁸ The thrill of being part of such a crowd, of feeling an extraordinary rush of solidarity, remains a cherished memory for many to this day. Some tingle of emotion crisscrossed both the audience and the actors, the actor Leszek Piskorz reminisced of Kraków’s Old Theater in the 1970s. It sounds incredible today, but that’s how it was!³⁹ In sharing a communal experience, audience members could feel like they spoke with one voice. When Leipzig administrators abruptly banned a Hollywood blockbuster, frustrated ticketholders responded in collective terms. If you won’t show the film, then we won’t go to the elections! someone yelled. If you won’t show the film, then bring in the harvest yourselves!⁴⁰ In this case, as in many others, members of a cultural public claimed to speak for the public at large. To use Warner’s language, local grievances were transposed upward … to a general horizon of public opinion and its critical opposition to state power.⁴¹ The act of gathering in public enabled individuals to conceive of themselves as the public and empowered them to address the state.

Communist administrators were acutely aware of this dynamic. All cultural events could become outlets for political expression, and therefore all had to be closely watched. City officials attended at least one performance of each play, film, concert, opera, and variety show in Kraków and Leipzig. They filed detailed reports on audience behavior and also collected information about it from artists, informants, and the secret police. Such reports made their way up the chain of command, sometimes reaching the Politburo itself—the highest party organ in each Eastern Bloc country. They carried so much weight because officials treated them as more than isolated cases. Like protestors, communist leaders, too, transposed specific incidents of clapping or booing up to the general horizon of public opinion, perceiving them as symptoms of social unrest. What happened in cultural spaces had an outsized impact on how officials understood the people they ruled. Especially at times of crisis, the opinions of particular cultural publics were taken as shorthand for public opinion.

Capturing public opinion was a persistent problem for communist regimes. Although their power is not rooted in consent, even dictatorships ignore the public’s attitudes and wishes at their peril. Yet they lack many of the tools that democratic leaders use to study what these wishes are—most notably elections. In the absence of meaningful electoral returns, Eastern Bloc states were forced to turn to more impressionistic sources, from private petitions to secret police reports.⁴² Audience reactions offered one more data point, and communist officials tracked them diligently. Focusing on two polling agencies, the Center for Public Opinion Research in Poland and the Central Institute for Youth Research in East Germany, I explore how interviews with local music fans or cinemagoers were quantified into public opinion. I also show how administrators used this information in making, implementing, and revising policy, including well beyond the cultural realm.

The cultural matrix came to be a feedback loop for Eastern Bloc regimes. By keeping tabs on artists and audiences, officials could learn whether their policies were working as planned. Cultural spaces also functioned as an early warning system, alerting administrators to rising frustration or emerging demands.⁴³ All of the Bloc’s major uprisings had roots in the cultural sphere; political ferment simmered in spaces of art before spilling out onto the streets. By the same token, political crackdowns were often responses to cultural cues. Alarmed at growing insubordination among artists, GDR leaders rolled back decentralizing reforms in 1965, before these could blossom into something akin to the Prague Spring. The cultural matrix was a window on society, which is why officials tolerated so much openness within it. It not only gave voice to artists and audiences but also informed communist governance, becoming a conduit between rulers and ruled.

Transnational Socialism

Even when they announced reforms, communist regimes insisted that their general line remained steady.⁴⁴ Anticommunist dissidents agreed: for Czechoslovak activist Václav Havel, the Bloc’s ruling parties were stable and static, unchanging and incapable of change.⁴⁵ To this day, the standard story of East European communism traces its rise and fall while glossing over its evolution.⁴⁶ Administrators on the ground, however, had a very different impression. They spoke—often with bitterness—of having to transform both how they worked and how they understood their job. Such transformations went beyond varying levels of repression, or the familiar cycle of liberal and conservative phases that dominates studies of cultural policy.⁴⁷ What changed was not simply the quantity but the quality of communist rule. And for officials in Kraków and Leipzig, what changed the most was how they saw the public.

The structure of this book reflects officials’ changing visions of society, each corresponding to a new philosophy of rule. Under the first—what both regimes retroactively termed Stalinism— officials set out to remake the public, seeing East European men and women as plastic matter to be shaped. The cultural matrix had a civilizing mission: to mobilize people, reform their hearts and minds, and fill them with enthusiasm for the building of socialism. The second vision, National Communism, involved taking the public and its wishes into account. Administrators accepted that different people had different tastes and catered to these tastes while seeking to guide them. A diversified cultural matrix was meant to promote popular engagement, drawing reluctant East Europeans into government structures. Under the third vision, however—what the Bloc’s leaders called Actually Existing Socialism—the public was conceived as a potential threat. Officials sought to buy its loyalty with consumer goods while stifling all dissent and expanding surveillance. They used the cultural matrix to stave off unrest, both by providing mindless entertainment and by isolating critical voices.

East European publics were behind these changing visions. By subverting, co-opting, or simply failing to conform to communist designs, Poles and East Germans forced administrators to reform the communist