Framing Faust: Twentieth-Century Cultural Struggles

6. Oneiric Fausts: Repression and Liberation in the Cold War Era

oneiric fausts 6 Oneiric Fausts: Repression and Liberation in the Cold War Era T he feminization of Faust passes through the oneiric in order to open up language in new configurations and to explore the possibilities of reimagining a different reality. In the avant-garde, dreams play a role in surrealist versions of Faust and in the turn from rationality that characterizes artists as diverse as Brakhage, Jarry, and Ghelderode. In another link between Faust and the oneiric, reality takes on the character of a bad dream on both sides of the Cold War divide—in American film noir and in Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita. In the United States, the dark vision of the Faustian gets displaced, albeit briefly, by the liberating strains of the Beat writer Jack Kerouac, who recasts the Faustian motif in a more celebratory and optimistic mode. The return of nightmarish visions in films and other expressions of popular culture in the s and s might be seen to reflect a renewed disillusionment and cultural anxiety in the United States, while the psychological ravages of the post–Cold War era on the other side of the divide are rendered in filmmaker Jan Svankmajer’s surreal Lekce Faust (Faust). American Film Noir At the conclusion of World War II, the Truman administration decided that it would have to build up a European bloc to counter the potential economic power and ideological appeal of the Soviet Union. The idea of a communist military threat was created, as Senator Vandenberg advised Truman, to “scare hell out of the country.” Thus, the stage was set for European reconstruction in exchange for trade policies advantageous to American capitalists. As Richard Freeland notes, the Truman administration was convinced that “the mobilization of broad public support for its foreign policies depended on a dramatization of the communist threat to the United States.”1 oneiric fausts The official policy of anticommunism led to specific governmental initiatives aimed at creating a Western bloc and an Eastern bloc, which became the two sides in an ideological and economic Cold War. In Europe, money funneled through the CIA was used to create anticommunist labor organizations, thus weakening European popular support for the Soviet Union and strengthening trade relations with the United States.2 At home, anticommunist rhetoric served to limit labor victories, since labor leaders could be accused of being communists. In , the attorney general published his list of subversive organizations. Federal employees were required to take a loyalty oath beginning in March . Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vice president, Henry Wallace, was dropped from Roosevelt’s third reelection ticket in on the grounds that he was pro-Soviet; in , his Progressive Party was labeled communist when he ran for president as a third-party candidate. In the same year, the administration perpetrated a hoax on the American people (the “War Scare”), claiming the Soviet Union was planning an invasion of Western Europe.3 On February , , Senator Joseph McCarthy accused the State Department of harboring communists. As early as , Hollywood itself was drawn into the anticommunist campaign when nineteen writers were summoned before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC). Ten of them were charged with being members of the Communist Party and were eventually jailed in for refusing to cooperate in naming fellow writers (Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler, both of whom were called before the committee, left the country shortly afterward). By the end of the second round of hearings in , between and writers, directors, and actors had become effectively blacklisted and could no longer find employment.4 Many of the blacklisted artists would not work again in the film industry until the s, and many of them never returned. Of necessity, the hearings served to discourage union organizing in the entertainment industry itself. A description given in by John Howard Lawson, one of the original “Hollywood Ten,” conveys the nightmarish quality of Hollywood’s atmosphere in those times: As the lists of the “politically unreliable” persons multiply, motion picture workers have no way of knowing whether or not they are included among the suspects. Actors who are not called for jobs, writers who are no longer sought out for assignments, can only speculate on the possibility that sometime, somewhere, they have signed a petition 158 oneiric fausts or attended a meeting or engaged in an indiscreet conversation. The testimony of informers can rest on gossip...