Requiem for Communism (review)

In this ambitious project, Charity Scribner examines a variety of aesthetic artifacts from Germany, Britain, France, and Poland that deal with the loss of that collective utopian vision associated with the erstwhile "second world." Less historically focused than Susan Buck-Morss's comparable study, Dreamworld and Catastrophe, Scribner's book advances by means of theoretical positions and may be understood productively as a kind of manifesto, the substance of which is articulated in her excellent introduction.

Scribner's objects range from the "Open Depot" in Eisenhüttenstadt (a permanent exhibit displaying artifacts from East German daily life) and the French artist Sophie Calle's installation The Detachment (conceived as a guidebook to the vanishing German Democratic Republic) to a comparison of disturbed object relations in the German writer and director Judith Kuckart's play Melancholia I and the West German artist Joseph Beuys's installation Economic Values. She considers the British writer John Berger's Into Their Labors trilogy and the French poet Leslie Kaplan's long poem "Factory Excess," and she reads a range of the East German writer Christa Wolf 's works through considerations of the fetish and the "totalitarian gaze."

Implicit in the book is an aesthetic theory of loss. As a way to understand the attrition of socialist culture and its memorial significance, Scribner reads Maurice Halbwachs's The Collective Memory in terms of the importance for memory of the transformation of materiality. Her interpretations are otherwise based largely on Freud's concepts of mourning, melancholy, and disavowal, and on the concept of nostalgia. These keywords double as evaluative categories but are applied rather incoherently. Berger, for example, is condemned as nostalgic for interring socialism's ideals in preindustrial history, while Kaplan's poem, despite also being deemed nostalgic, is praised. Scribner does not parse the distinction or explain why evaluation is necessary, but as in her contrasting assessments of Kuckart and Beuys, the ambivalence appears to originate in an unelaborated dual-system feminism that undermines the concepts' effectiveness as critical tools.

This dualism is most evident in Scribner's reading of the Polish director Andrzej Wajda's 1977 film Man of Marble (which features a strong female protagonist and which she likes) and its 1981 sequel, Man of Iron (which shows the same protagonist upstaged by her husband and family and which Scribner dislikes). Here Scribner not only eschews the elegant interpolation of theory and artwork that makes her chapter on the "Open Depot" and Sophie Calle, for instance, so delightfully instructive. She also ignores contemporary shifts in Polish culture, including the exhaustion of an orthodox Marxist ideology of gender roles and the tactical valorization of traditional family values that, metastasized through the 1978 accession of a Pole to the papacy, may be understood with hindsight as an effect of the Solidarity movement itself. A little history might have generated a more sophisticated reading of the films. Likewise, the entire book would have benefited from an explicit formulation of Scribner's feminism and an application of it not limited to evaluation.

I had hoped this book would do more to bridge the disciplinary divide between Slavic Lang. & Lit. and its Western counterparts, but its strengths remain in Scribner's appraisals of recent German and English art—such as her strong reading of Rachel Whitehead's 1993 sculpture/installation House. Although it does not deliver on the promise of its introduction, the project as such is refreshingly original and hopefully will inspire like-minded work.