[spectre] Songs and samizdat made the Wall fall: Europe Against the Current September 1989 revisited

[Tjebbe van Tijen]

I think this  looking back at the years 1985-1989 from the  
perspective an initiative of the end of the eighties "Europe Against  
The Current" is relevant for this list and its non-territorial notion  
of 'Deep Europe'.

In this posting I just give four opening paragraphs of what is an  
illustrated and deeply documented text on my blog..

The Limping Messenger (my guess is that there is sufficient positive  
balance here between the "haunting spectre of Europe" and possible  
"self promotion") so the full text is here:

http://limpingmessenger.wordpress.com/2009/11/09/songs-and-samizdat- 
made-the-wall-fall-europe-against-the-current-september-1989-revisited/


tjebbe

========

Songs and samizdat made the Wall fall: Europe Against the Current  
September 1989 revisited

November 9, 2009 by Tjebbe van Tijen
In mainstream news papers and television the decade-commemoration- 
machinery for The Fall Of  The Berlin Wall in November 1989 is  
running at full speed now. So this is the right moment to recall the  
‘against the current’  history of those days – just before from 1985  
till summer 1989 – when mainstream media and commentators had no clue  
yet, of the sudden change in the political configuration of Europe,  
that would have its now official apotheose at last in November 1989.  
It was citizen dissidence that made not only the Berlin Wall fall,  
but also leveled the walls of nine state communist buildings (though,  
failing to dig out the deeper authoritarian fundaments). Thirty years  
of  heavy Cold War propaganda bombardment of party-regime edifices in  
the eastern parts of Europe did not accomplish, what in the end could  
only be done by the inhabitants, the citizens,  themselves. Some did  
it by writing and self publishing, others by distributing and  
reading, playing, dancing and singing, thus exposing the internal  
contradictions of systems reigning in the name and interest of all  
people, while excluding most of them from participation. The counter- 
culture movements in Eastern Europe have been instrumental in  
hastening the erosion process of state-socialism, this to such an  
extent that the walls of  these bureaucratic paradises crumbled at  
the sound of these ‘horns of Jericho’. It was in Hungary and  
Czechoslovakia that the first fissures appeared, and soon it were the  
East Germans, hopping trains, buses and their Trabants to hurriedly  
climb the fences of embassies in Prague, or to simply do a country  
hike and walk out across the Hungarian Austrian border where – for a  
short while – barbed wire was cut and watch towers were unmanned. DDR  
citizens not tearing down walls but “voting with their feet.”

[]
Earlier in 1989 the iron curtain – however rusty – was still in  
place, the great divide between Western and Eastern Europe. Block- 
thinking was predominant: First World (capitalist), Second World  
(socialist) and Third World (poor and revolting). A long curving line  
from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean split Europe, separated it  
physical in two opposing political systems. Europe was a plural word  
at that time. The geographical Europe as could be found in atlases  
and maps reaching till the Urals, and two socio-political Europes:  
Western Europe and Eastern Europe. Culturally speaking, that what was  
East of that fenced line was considered by the Westsiders NOT even  
part of their idea of Europe (something like the actual perception of  
Turkey as something that should not be part of the EEC). In the end  
all this bickering over meaning of pseudo geographic entities has  
long be understood by the United Nations personnel  as can be read in  
a report of the UN commission on toponymic issues that had to make an  
assessment for “A Subdivision of Europe into Larger Regions by  
Cultural Criteria” and concluded: ”every assessment of spatial  
identities is essentially a social and cultural construct.” The  
report – using shady diplomatic language – comes up with the  
conclusion that the notion of “East Europe” based on the Russian  
Empire from the 16th to the 20th century and the Soviet period from  
1917 to 1992 and its sphere of influence is over now and the  
traditional idea of “Central Europe” can once more be established. I  
can not find the promised maps of this commission and when one does  
only a quick check anybody can see that more than one mapping of the  
idea of Central Europe exists.

[]
It is hard to imagine now, but it needs to be recalled how deeply  
entrenched the divide was then, on all levels. There had been popular  
risings in Eastern Europe, starting in East-Berlin in 1953 and ending  
in Gdansk in 1980, with the Hungarian Revolt in 1956 and Czech Spring  
of 1968 as moments where the iron curtain was torn aside a bit, but  
soon after repaired by Soviet and Warsaw Pact occupying forces with  
their tanks. There was no end in view of  the ‘entente’ between the  
power blocks that kept each other in a forced embrace of mutual  
deterrence, based on their nuclear weapon arsenals. This military  
vision also translated into the cultural realm with the  monolithic  
view of the Eastern European block as one total oppressive political  
unit with a only a few courageous dissidents, martyrs for the cause  
of  a Western type of  ”freedom”, for the rest just masses of  
indoctrinated communist obeyers.

[]
Those who looked beyond this Cold War imago knew that the rule and  
control in each of the countries – messed together in the notion of  
‘Eastern Europe’ – had its own particularities, its own time line of   
periods of openness and repression. Those who were knowledgeable  had  
observed that – in each country in a different way and at different  
moments  - in certain official recognized cultural areas some forms  
of  less restricted activities and expressions were possible, like  
jazz festivals, cinema and theatre experiments, international  
scientific meetings, certain publishing activities, and cultural  
centers managed by youth associations or students. Those from “the  
West” who went through the curtain and made the effort to go beyond  
the controlled itineraries could also discover  a whole network that  
could rightly be labeled  a ‘cultural underground’, or as it was  
called  in Czech society of that time, not ‘underground’ or ‘counter  
culture’ like in “the West”, but ‘paralelní kultura’ (parallel  
culture), also sometimes named ‘zweiten Kultur’ (second culture) like  
in the DDR.