From the western perspective, Russia and the Soviet Union represented "the other" for a good part of the 20th century. Eastern Europe, the subject of the book under review, is closer to the West both geographically and culturally, yet, because it was overshadowed by Russia, not much was known about it. Now that the Soviet Union is no more and Eastern Europe is readily accessible, with a number of Eastern European countries joining the European Union in 2004, how do we see this part of the world? Do we still perceive it as exotic? And how does Eastern Europe see the West? This part of the Soviet bloc had better access to Western ideas. Does that mean that Eastern Europe understands the West better? The contributors to Over the Wall/After the Fall explore these questions through a series of case studies covering everything from high to pop culture, from music to marketing.
Art held a special position in Soviet times. Art was revered and artists were relatively well paid. While enjoying a privileged position within the Soviet system, many artists were also seen as champions of anti-Communism and thus allies of the West, for they incorporated messages of protest in their work. With the fall of the Soviet Union, art and particularly experimental, anti-Soviet art, was expected to flower. It did not – a puzzle to both Western critics and the local intelligentsia. More striking, the public, formerly avid readers and museum and theater goers, lost interest. To help understand the art conundrum, Halina Filipowicz presents the case of Polish theater, admired in the West during Soviet times for being avant-garde and non-conformist, and now a source of disappointment. Filipowicz questions public dedication to the arts under Communism, pointing out that apparent financial success was created by block purchases of tickets through labor unions. In the current situation, attempts to appeal to the public by offering light entertainment and strikingly patriarchal stagings of western works may sit badly with western critics, but are successful. Paul Krainak's look at installation art in Bratislava, Slovakia points out that while the concept of installation art was taken from the West, local artists, during the Communist period, gave it their own twist. Many communicated their message by leaving the most important things unsaid. Local viewers, able to read what was omitted, found the art eloquent, but Westerners see it as minimalist and unsatisfying. Part of Andaluna Borcila's essay also looks at installation art. The 1995 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago called Beyond Belief was supposed to showcase the art of Eastern Europe as it truly was. Instead, to communicate to a western audience, artists showed that which was expected, rather than that which they produced at home. Like the Polish underground theater that drew the attention of Western intellectuals, East German samizdat writing had the allure of forbidden fruit. Although some of these supposedly anti-Soviet writers were actually paid by the government, as Liz Whitmore notes, other samizdat organizations laid the groundwork for "owning the means of production" in the new, capitalist, setting created by the reunification of Germany. Some counter-cultural movements have a long history and Mark Andryczyk goes back 100 years to trace the roots of Lviv Bohema, a loosely affiliated group of writers. He then examines the writing of today's Lviv Bohema and their constructs of the West.
The art produced by the Lviv Bohema and the East German samizdat writers draws our attention to the importance of language, explored directly in two articles. Bill Johnston looks at the meteoric rise in demand for English as a second language that occurred in post-1989 Poland. The motivations for learning English are various, from a desire to participate in the western commercial and intellectual world to the drive to reject Communism by focusing on a language seen as antithetical to Russian. Interestingly, although there is a great demand for teachers of English, this is not seen as a good career path. In all countries of Eastern Europe, but particularly those that were part of the Soviet Union, like Belarus, getting back to the native language is seen as integral to establishing nationhood. But what happens if the people one seeks to address are much more comfortable using Russian? And perhaps, as Elena Gapova points out, the drive toward reestablishing the native language is not so selfless after all, but a way for intellectuals to assert authority and thus gain politically and economically.
Popular culture is no less important than language or high culture in shaping world view, and Borcila looks at the role of television. She discusses the impact that televising the Romanian Revolution had on the Romanian citizenry. She also looks at how Romania is presented to the West. Western television seized on the image of Romanian orphans as emblematic of the country and its plight, prompting Western visitors, including ex-patriots, to seek out orphanages as an obligatory part of their Romanian travel experience. Somewhat related is Robert Kaplan's travelogue, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History, critiqued by Anca Rosu. Writing for a western audience, Kaplan seeks to enforce stereotypes rather than to see what is truly there and to enlighten his readers.
Television is a powerful force and so is advertising, whether on TV or elsewhere, and Vera Sokolova looks at the latter in the Czech Republic. The Soviet system was prudish, and open sexuality was associated with the West. With the fall of Communism, highly suggestive ads began to appear, many showing women being sexually violated. The danger of such advertising was hidden behind the mask of western liberalism, but, as Sokolova points out, might be linked to problems of trafficking in women and the difficult position of homosexuals. Carol Silverman looks at gender and mass media from a different perspective, examining Bulgarian women's choirs. These choirs, a creation of the Soviet system, were discovered by the West and taken to be representative of an archetypical Eastern European musicality. When marketed in the West, the choirs were also highly sexualized, which often meant that the women doing the singing were not shown on album covers so that their stocky, middle-aged bodies would not detract from the erotic image. And the women in the choirs were not only disembodied. They were denied appropriate financial compensation for their music, not just during Soviet times, but also by western companies. A more cheerful image is presented by Rainer Gries' article on the marketing of Club Cola, a Soviet era East German product that was threatened with extinction by the introduction of Coke and Pepsi. Club Cola not only revised its formula (though only slightly), it initiated an aggressive marketing campaign that utilized nostalgia for the glories and accomplishments of Soviet times to sell its product.
Perhaps nothing shapes our view of the world like the space that we live in, and two articles examine the lived environment. David Houston looks at the Frank Gehry building in Prague, an oddity by Gehry's own admission, and wonders what impact such a structure will have. Magdelena Zaborowska's look at the architectural history of Warsaw begins with a somber account of the destruction of the Jewish sector and the subsequent construction of "gifts" such as the Josef Stalin Palace of Culture and Science. In more recent buildings, such as the Umschlag Memorial and the Warsaw University Library, she finds greater optimism, even if the latter does draw financing from commercial enterprises on its property.
The articles are framed by a detailed introduction and a clever satirical afterword which tries to capture, in artistic form, some of the complexity presented in the body of the book. There is much more going on in this book than can be conveyed in a review, even a review as long as this one. A lively read and an important contribution, this book is an eye-opener.