Requiem for Communism

Abstract

In Requiem for Communism Charity Scribner examines politics of memory in postindustrial literature and art. Writers and artists from Europe's second world have responded to last socialist crisis with works that range from sober description to melancholic fixation. This book is first survey of this cultural field.Today, as cultures of Eastern and Western Europe merge into Infobahn of late capitalism, second world is being left behind. The European Union has pronounced obsolete structures that once defined and linked industrial cities from Manchester to Karl-Marx-Stadt--the decaying factories and working collectives, wasted ideals of state socialism and welfare state. Marxist exponents of global empire see this historical turn as an occasion to eulogize the lightness and joy of being communist. But for many writers and artists on left, fallout of last century's socialist crisis calls for an elegy. This regret has prompted a proliferation of literary texts and artworks, as well as a boom in museum exhibitions that race to curate wreckage of socialism and its industrial remnants. The best of these works do not take us back to factory. Rather they look for something to take out of it: intractable moments of solidarity among men and women that did not square with market or plan.Requiem for Communism explores a selection of signal works. They include John Berger?s narrative trilogy Into Their Labors; Documenta, German platform for contemporary art and ideas; Krzysztof Kieslowski's cinema of mourning and Andrzej Wajda's filmed chronicles of Solidarity movement; art of Joseph Beuys and Rachel Whiteread; novels of Christa Wolf; and Leslie Kaplan's antinostalgic memoir of women's material labor in France. Sorting among ruins of second world, critical minds of contemporary Europe aim to salvage both remains of socialist ideals and latent feminist potential that attended them.

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