COMMUNISM’S PUBLIC SPHERE COMMUNISM’S PUBLIC SPHERE CULTURE AS POLITICS IN COLD WAR POLAND AND EAST GERMANY Kyrill Kunakhovich CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London Copyright © 2022 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 2022 by Cornell University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kunakhovich, Kyrill, author. Title: Communism’s public sphere : culture as politics in Cold War Poland and East Germany / Kyrill Kunakhovich. Description: Ithaca [New York] : Cornell University Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022006088 (print) | LCCN 2022006089 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501767043 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501767067 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501767050 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Communism and culture—Poland— Kraków—History—20th century. | Communism and culture—Germany—Leipzig—History—20th century. | Politics and culture—Poland—Kraków— History—20th century. | Politics and culture— Germany—Leipzig—History—20th century. | Poland—Cultural policy. | Germany (East)— Cultural policy. Classification: LCC HX523 .K7997 2022 (print) | LCC HX523 (ebook) | DDC 306.3/450943862—dc23/ eng/20220817 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022006088 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/ 2022006089 Cover image: Piwnica pod Baranami, a basement club in Kraków, 1960s. Courtesy of the KARTA Center Foundation, photograph by Bogdan Łopieński. To my parents What a crowd shows up for a theatrical performance or the poetry readings of a well- known poet in order to hear a political allusion, explode into applause, and return home. There is nothing strange or wrong with this; if politics is forbidden it is sought everywhere. —Adam Zagajewski, 1984 Contents Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations xiii Introduction 1 1. Takeover: Reconstruction as Revolution 19 2. Planning: Workers and Cultural Mass Work 40 3. Nationalism: Public Protest and the Birth of National Communism 72 4. Pluralism: Individual Choice and Public-Opinion Polling 102 5. Consumerism: Cultured Consumption and Its Limits 129 6. Reform: The Promise and Peril of Controlled Revolt 157 7. Dissent: Normalization and Its Discontents 186 8. Protest: Spaces of Opposition, Spaces of Dialogue 215 Epilogue 249 Notes 265 Bibliography 307 Index 327 Acknowledgments This book has been a long time in the mak- ing and I have accrued many debts along the way. The first is to Stephen Kotkin, who inspired the questions at the heart of this project. He en- couraged me to think big, pushed me to find the devil in the details, and believed in my work even when I felt lost. Jan Gross and Anson Rabinbach were expert guides to Polish and German history. Their en- thusiasm, patience, and wisdom have been invaluable over the years. When I was still an undergraduate, Laura Engelstein supervised my first attempt to write about culture as politics. It is largely thanks to her that I set out to become a historian. At Princeton, I was immersed in an extraordinary community of scholars and friends. This project took shape through countless con- versations with Pey-Yi Chu, Franziska Exeler, Mayhill Fowler, Michael Gordin, Irena Grudzińska-Gross, Jeff Hardy, Elidor Mëhilli, Anne O’Donnell, Serguei Oushakine, Ekaterina Pravilova, and other mem- bers of the Russian kruzhok. It also benefited from the advice and sup- port of many graduate school colleagues, including Henry Cowles, Rohit De, Will Deringer, Catharine Evans, Evan Hepler-Smith, Zack Kagan-Guthrie, Jamie Kreiner, Ronny Regev, Padraic Scanlan, Margaret Schotte, Chris Shannon, and Annie Twitty. The Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Charlotte Elizabeth Procter Fellowship provided funding along the way. Research in Kraków was made possible by a grant from the Interna- tional Culture Center and its director, Jacek Purchla. Andrzej Chwalba generously invited me to participate in his doctoral seminar, and I am grateful to his students for their feedback. Special thanks go to the in- comparable Szczepan Świątek, who insisted I prove myself before letting me into the archive—and then showed me everything it had to offer. My ix x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS time in Leipzig was supported by the German Academic Exchange Ser- vice and Leipzig University’s Center for the History and Culture of East Central Europe. I am grateful to the Center’s Stefan Troebst and Frank Hadler, as well as Beata Hock, Lars Karl, Hannes Siegrist, and Václav Šmidrkal. Thomas Höpel kindly shared his deep knowledge of Leipzig’s cultural bureaucracy before, during, and after my stay in the city. I was fortunate to spend a year at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard, where I learned a great deal from Homi Bhabha, Steven Biel, Jonathan Bolton, and Claire Edington. At the College of William and Mary, Bruce Campbell, Frederick Corney, Emily Gioielli, Laurie Koloski, Alexander Prokhorov, and Elena Prokhorova provided feedback on my work and made me a far better teacher and scholar. For the past six years, I have been privileged to call the University of Virginia home. I am particularly grateful to my colleagues Manuela Achilles, Fahad Bishara, Claudrena Harold, Andrew Kahrl, Mary Kuhn, Erik Linstrum, James Loeffler, Jeffrey Rossman, Jennifer Sessions, and David Singerman. A grant from UVA’s College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences funded additional archival work in the summer of 2017. I have presented research from this book in more venues than I care to admit. Thank you to Patryk Babiracki, Rüdiger Bergien, Jadwiga Biskupska, Andrea Bohlman, Chad Bryant, Nicole Burgoyne, Paul Bushkovitch, Holly Case, Kathryn Ciancia, Alon Confino, John Con- nelly, Carol Anne Costabile-Heming, Sarah Cramsey, Andrew Demshuk, April Eisman, Malgorzata Fidelis, Scott Harrison, Jeff Hayton, Francine Hirsch, Seth Howes, Mariana Ivanova, Lisa Jakelski, Krzysztof Jasiewicz, Polly Jones, Zachary Kelly, Padraic Kenney, Pavel Kolář, Anna Krylova, Katherine Lebow, Maike Lehmann, Alice Lovejoy, Norman Naimark, Małgorzata Mazurek, Natalie Misteravich-Carroll, Agnieszka Pasieka, David Petruccelli, Mackenzie Pierce, Andrew Port, Benjamin Robinson, Nicholas Rutter, Juliane Schicker, Leonard Schmieding, Edith Sheffer, Marci Shore, Pavel Skopal, Thomas Sliwowski, Keely Stauter-Halsted, Dariusz Stola, Berenika Szymanski-Düll, Kiril Tomoff, David Tomp- kins, Katie Trumpener, Eric Weitz, and Katharine White for their help- ful comments and suggestions. Special thanks are due to those who read all or part of this manu- script. I am profoundly grateful to Rachel Applebaum, Cristina Florea, William Hitchcock, Simon Huxtable, Piotr Kosicki, Allan Megill, and Molly Pucci, as well as two anonymous reviewers.