Documentos

R EQUIEM FOR COMMUNISM
CHARITY SCRIBNER

REQUIEM FOR COMMUNISM

REQUIEM FOR COMMUNISM

CHARITY SCRIBNER

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2003 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storageand retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book was set in Hoefler, Knockout, Uni, and Volta by Graphic Composition, Inc., Athens, Georgia,
and was printed and bound in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Scribner, Charity.
Requiem for communism / Charity Scribner.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 0-262-19488-0 (hc. : alk. paper)
1. Communism and art—Europe. 2. Socialism and art—Europe. 3. Post-communism—Europe.
4. Europe—Intellectual life. 5. Arts, European—20th century. 6. Arts—Political aspects—Europe.
7. Nostalgia in art. I. Title.
HX521.S38 2004
700 .458—dc21
2003051200

to Raphaël Thomas Delaney Smith (1967–1993)

C ONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: TheSecond World

viii

2

1.

The Collective

23

2.

Solidarity

45

3.

Nostalgia

63

4.

Mourning

89

5.

Melancholia

111

6.

Disavowal

135

Afterword

156

Notes

166

Works Cited

206

Illustration Sources

226

Index

228

A CKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book came together in three apartments in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg
between 1993 and2002, but its impulses extend to other cities and earlier
dates. In 1983, somewhere in the 7th arrondissement in Paris, I saw a monument to the Polish Solidarity trade union. Studying in Cracow in 1986, I once
struck upon a combat zone of tear gas and thrown stones that had opened up
between pro-democracy protesters and the police. On 10 November 1989 I
shared a sleeping compartment of arailway car with a wasted cultural attaché
from East Germany. He kept me awake the whole night with his stories of
doubt and regret. Later, over the course of my graduate work, certain occasions prompted memories of these encounters. I fell into conversations about
socialism and its aftermath in a number of places—the Red Fish studio collective in Brighton, a bar near the Sorbonne, and a curatorialo≈ce in the former
Stalinstadt. These flashpoints continue to illuminate my reading of European
literature and art.
This study is the product of multiple collaborations with scholars and
editors. The staΩ and faculties of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the faculties of both Comparative

x

Literature and Art History at ColumbiaUniversity established the intellectual
context that fostered this project. I am grateful to Isabelle de Courtivron,
Elizabeth Garrels, Edward Baron Turk, William Uricchio, and Dean Philip
Khoury at MIT, as well as Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Anna Frajlich-Zajac,
˛
Ursula Heise, Rosalind Krauss, and JeΩ Olick at Columbia. Special acknowledgment goes to Andreas Huyssen, the professor who directed thisproject’s
development into a doctoral thesis at Columbia and has continued to advise
me in my first years in the academy. The Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut im
Wissenschaftszentrum Nordrhein-Westfalen enabled refinement of this manuscript with a postdoctoral fellowship from 2000 to 2002. I’m obliged to
ˇˇ
Slavoj Zizek and other members of our Studiengruppe “Antinomien der postmodernen Vernunft”for their cooperation. I’d also like to thank Jörn Rüsen
and Doris Almenara for promoting our research.
A number of individuals and institutions helped to build the framework
for this study. I’m pleased to mention the British Film Institute, the Documenta Archiv, the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum, the
Dokumentationszentrum Alltagskultur der DDR in Eisenhüttenstadt, the...