The laurels are being heaped on faster than they can be put up on the promotion website – even a whole year after the film's premiere: film awards in Spain, Denmark, the César in France, triumphs at the conferral of the European Film Prize. Wolfgang Becker's »Good Bye, Lenin!« seems to have struck a collective European nerve. At the same time, the film's website is trying to win points by offering a lexicon of »East German words« for the benefit of the »Wessis«, many of which terms are well-known by now thanks to the many shows about East Germany now playing on German TV. But, more and more, people are questioning whether these kinds of curiosities are really all that's left of the terminology of this system of state that is fit for the consumption of the cinema-going and television-watching public. For although, according to this website, the »collective« refers to »a kind of association of workers unknown in the West, who all spend their entire bonus on booze«, the concept of «solidarity» does not come up at all in this list.

It is exactly these two terms on which Charity Scribner focuses in her book »Requiem for Communism«. The literary scholar, who studied in Poland and elsewhere during the eighties, helped to coordinate the first two platforms for documenta 11, and who is today assistant professor for European Cultural Studies at MIT in Cambridge, wrote her book between 1993 and 2002, partially while living »in three different apartments in Prenzlauer Berg [Berlin]«. The book is not only an obituary for the principles of collectivity and solidarity in cultural production, but at the same time a plea for the recovery of these concepts for the contemporary cultural scene. But herein lies the crux of the book's structure: as an historical retrospective on »transcontinental formations« in the literature and visual culture of the last three decades in Great Britain, France, Germany and Poland – whereby popular culture is largely ignored – Scribner's approach stops short before tackling an analysis of current cultural production. This goes above all for the productions of the nineties, which often took up the principles in question as themes and subjected them to a thorough examination. The fact that Scribner does not differentiate sufficiently between works created before 1989 and those that emerged afterward is another structural problem of her book.

At the same time – and this is the tremendously productive aspect of her analysis – the »Requiem for Communism«1 is not only a kind of last rite for socialist cultural production in Eastern Europe, but, in connection with this, can also be viewed in relationship to the end of that form of Western European welfare state that predominated until the late eighties. The basis assumption on which the approach taken in the book is based, that »the socialist project also belonged to the West«, not only goes against the grain of the commonly accepted interpretation of contemporary history, but also for example against the premises put forth in Boris Groy's project »The Post-Communist Condition«, according to which »the cultural divide that arose between East and West during the era of the Cold War has not yet been overcome« 2 and that »this gap still leads today to countless misunderstandings on both sides«. Scribner presumes just the opposite: that it is precisely in a divided cultural tradition based on collectivity in the socialist sense that the mutual experience of Eastern and Western Europe can be found. In current post-industrial and post-socialist experience, however, the concrete locations of collective work and our sense of solidarity have been lost.

In six chapters (»The Collective«, »Solidarity«, »Nostalgia«, »Mourning«, »Melancholia«, »Disavowal«) Scribner traces »aesthetic answers« to the crisis of socialism in the fine arts, film, literature, theater and exhibition situations. The »politics of remembering« that she is undertaking here is intended to analyze how, after the end of communism AND the welfare state, the principle of solidarity can still be harnessed to realize the emancipatory potential of collective cultural work. Based on concepts such as Maurice Halbwachs’ »collective memory«, Sigmund Freud's »work of mourning« and Walter Benjamin's »left-wing melancholy« and under the premise that the communist future once envisioned has already receded into the past, Scribner deliberately tries to illustrate this »contingency« rather than documenting the current state of the socialist history of Europe. Instructive examples for her include the »Offene Depot« in Eisenhüttenstadt, the »Kita-Museum der DDR« in Oranienburg, the films of Andrzej Wajda (»The Iron Man«, »The Man of Marble«) and Mark Herman (»Brassed Off«), novels by Christa Wolf (»Cassandra«, »The Divided Sky«), Rachel Whiteread's »House« or Sophie Calle's »The Detachment«.

As tools Scribner draws on the texts of Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt (here in particular »History and Obstinacy« and »Public Sphere and Experience«) – and very consciously not on »Empire«: as long as it is not yet possible to discern what communism has left behind in the collective European memory, the »irrepressible lightness and happiness of being communist«, of which Michael Hardt and Toni Negri write cannot correspond with reality. Thus, one of the merits of the book is that Scribner for the first time makes the body of writing produced by Negt and Kluge, which has only partially been translated to date, available to the English-speaking readership as a foil for the historical interpretation of collective productivity. The perspective that she consequently takes is that only a collective cultural practice, or one aimed at collectivity, can be the key with which the emancipatory power of productivity can once again be activated in collective memory.

Despite the citation of theoretical texts to interpret artistic works and the extremely thorough research that went into the book, a few urgent questions still remain open. For example, the connections with and influences of (above all) the American left wing, which were so important to the emergence of left-wing European cultural production, are completely left out. At the latest by this point the central blind spot of the book becomes its greatest shortcoming: although Scribner explains at the beginning that her analysis will be limited to cultural production in the four countries she names during the past thirty years – wouldn't it have been more effective, especially with regard to East Germany and the People's Republic of Poland, to delve at more depth into the traditions of collective cultural production in the Soviet Union and their impact on cultural production in Eastern Europe?

Charity Scribner: Requiem for Communism. Cambridge, Mass., USA (The MIT Press) 2003

 

Translated by Jenny Taylor-Gaida

 

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