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

Kunakhovich presents a richly detailed chronicle of the relations between political and cultural actors in the East German city of Leipzig and the Polish city of Krakow during the Cold War. He shows how artists and artistic spaces contributed to the evolution of communist regimes in Eastern Europe. After World War II, Stalinist regimes forcefully shaped art and imposed it on the masses in the hope of building socialism. Stalin’s death in 1953 eased the dependence of Eastern European leaders on Moscow and heralded a shift in those countries toward “national communism,” with governments seeking to engage the people and cater to local needs and desires. Communist leaders granted more freedom to artists, expecting to turn them into political allies. But those hopes were dashed. As the only civil actors allowed to address the public, artists endured close state scrutiny, but they never stopped pushing boundaries. The repression that followed the quashing of the Prague Spring in 1968 in Czechoslovakia gave rise to broad resistance in Eastern Europe, with artists and cultural places at the forefront. The push for artistic and political freedoms was more radical in Poland than in East Germany, but this process was also transnational: the two societies’ interactions led to the simultaneous collapse of both communist regimes in 1989.