J. Hoberman's The Red Atlantis: Communist Culture in the Absence of Communism

...In J. Hoberman, the ruins of communist culture have found a passionate and erudite archeologist...

...The ironies of Jewish persecution in Eastern Europe were many and 118 n DISSENT / Spring 1999 morbid...

...That Prague belonged not to Franz Kafka, whose house had been transformed into a theme park, but to K-Mart, a frenzied emporium where plenty of Czechs were to be found...

...In a time when turning state's witness was touted as the greatest of civic virtues, the Rosenbergs went to their deaths without implicating a soul...

...In the cities, meanwhile, Yiddish culture was vigorously promoted, and the "non-Yiddish-speaking Jew [encouraged] to...

...The attacks on Kafka's writings well illustrated communism's troubles with skeptics, especially the rootless and cosmopolitan...

...Still, I was disappointed that Hoberman missed the two most peculiar ironies of his Slansky comparison...

...Films like The Resolution were also useful to regimes seeking to project a tolerant image in the West...

...The Red Atlantis is unusual for being neither an indictment of art under totalitarianism nor a New Left attempt to rescue Old Leftists from the "condescension of posterity...

...Indeed, in 1926 they began settling Jews in the "national homeland" of Birobizhan, an area the size of Switzerland on the border with China...

...Hoberman, however, cautions against taking Socialist Realism's hostility to modernism at face value...

...Considering the walls that once divided such men and women, it can be jarring to find them honored by the same author...

...In a striking formulation, Hoberman describes the look of Socialist Realism as "nostalgic for the future...

...An assimilated man with a strong attraction to Jewish theology, Kafka dared to question the promise of secular modernity, and to laugh at those who claimed to represent it...

...ALMOST SINCE its inception in the late twenties, Socialist Realism has attracted the ridicule of intellectuals in the West...

...Their suspicious comrades, however, refused to forget that they were Jews...

...They sacrificed everything—even their children...

...Hoberman spreads his sympathies to communists and dissidents alike, to American Popular Frontists and Czechoslovakian students, to Ben Shahn and Isaac Babel...

...revolutionize the not-thenexisting Yiddish theater...

...Like their contemporaries in the Harlem Renaissance, the Soviet Yiddishists were seeking at once to recover and to transcend the folkways of their people...

...David S. Sampliner...

...In Hoberman's words, Soviet Yiddish culture "turned the idiom of the shtetl against the shtetl...

...Indeed, the language of film criticism is as pervasive in Hoberman's treatment of recent history as the language of political criticism is absent, with sometimes troubling results...

...The place was packed with Americans who imagined they were recreating the Paris of the twenties when, in fact, they were creating the Prague of the nineties...

...Although the politics of the cold war figures prominently in its pages, the book is refreshingly devoid of cold war polemics...

...After screening the film twice, Estelyi was fired, while the film was banned for the remainder of the decade...

...an astonishing title, considering that all of Kafka's descendants had recently gone to their deaths in the camps...

...As an economic system, communism may have been helpless against capitalism, its historic adversary...

...Eastern Europeans used to joke that the only thing one could be certain about under communism was the future...

...Kundera, from his Parisian exile, seemed to be languishing, too...

...I would have thought that honor would go to capitalist advertising, but the point is well taken...

...he couches his praise in language opaque enough to negate its value as ad-copy...

...The trials "aestheticized politics," something Walter Benjamin believed only fascists were capable of...

...They kept the faith...

...At the same time, as Hoberman observes, these Eastern Europeans enjoyed a different relationship to the establishment than their anticommunist admirers in the United States, having "opted out of, rather than into, the local power structures...

...The same phrase could be extended to communist ideology itself...

...Had the Rosenbergs ever been asked their views on the Slansky trial, they might have condoned it as the Party's form of revolutionary justice...

...They found champions in left-liberal critics like Irving Howe, who compared their work to the political novels of André Malraux and Ignazio Silone...

...In 1921, the director Alexander Granovsky founded the world's first government-subsidized Yiddish theater, teaming up four years later with the brilliant actor Solomon Mikhoels, the painter Natan Altman, and Isaac Babel to produce the film Jewish Luck, adapted from Sholom Aleichem's stories about shtetl life...

...After a twenty-minute trial, Babel was executed in 1940 on false charges of being a Trotskyist spy...

...In such hearts, the dream of socialism with a human face still flickered, though it turned out to be a delusion...

...Lenin gave a speech declaring that Russia's workers were not true proletarians in the Marxist sense, but "malingerers that have gone to the factories...

...Communism and the dissidence it spawned were deeply intertwined...

...As Hoberman recognizes, the line between official and dissident culture in Eastern Europe was often blurred...

...An article in the French communist weekly, Action, asked, "Should Kafka Be Burned...

...Even more mysterious was the line between accepted and "counter-revolutionary" criticism, especially since it hinged on Moscow's ever shifting mood...

...It was this nostalgia for a perpetually receding future that made Bolshevism seem absurd to some observers from the early days of the Russian Revolution...

...The perfected Stalinist trial was actually staged after World War II in Czechoslovakia—despite 116 n DISSENT / Spring 1999 an extensive rewrite even while the show was in preproduction," he writes of Rudolf Slansky's trial...

...I was nostalgic, rather, for the literature of extreme situations (Sartre's phrase) produced by the intellectuals who were unlucky enough to live under communism...

...But unlike other defenders of the Rosenbergs, Hoberman doesn't exculpate them of involvement in espionage...

...Hoberman evokes these vertiginous ambiguities in a wry chapter on the "realist socialism" of Hungarian filmmakers who were subsidized, and often suppressed, by the Kaddrist state...

...A week after the end of World War II, an anti-Kafka campaign was launched throughout the communist press...

...The natives were building a better, happier future for themselves, but to my eyes it could not have seemed more familiar...

...Hoberman writes perceptively of Kafka's Eastern European heirs, who were brought to BOO KS the attention of the English-speaking world in the early eighties by Penguin's "Writers from the Other Europe" series, edited by Philip Roth, who was himself heavily indebted to the Prague master...

...In the early years of the Russian RevoDISSENT / Spring 1999 n 117 BOOKS lution, Bolshevism's opposition to antiSemitism recommended it to many Jews, some of whom revered Lenin as a latter-day Napoleon...

...But while the camera was running, the leader's peasant supporters rose up to defend him, and the Party was forced to reverse its decision, making the documentary, The Resolution, a scathing record of the Party's corrupt machinations and its defeat...

...his post-communist novels, like those of his dissident peers, had laid bare his dependence on the muse of Stalinism for inspiration...

...Just as advertising has inundated capitalist citizens with reflections of their ideal, consuming selves, so communist painting, film, and literature surrounded communist citizens with images of their ideal, sacrificing selves...

...NO GROUP experienced the dream and delusion of communism more intensely, or more tragically, than the Jews...

...In 1972, Gyula Estelyi, a Party secretary, extended to Gyula Gazdag and Judit Ember of the BBS an extraordinary invitation to film the Party's forthcoming purge of an agricultural cooperative leader...

...I was especially fond of the cynical, pungently ironic Eastern Europeans...

...A child of New York's film underground of the early seventies, Hoberman has remained a hardboiled outsider among film critics, many of whom have allowed themselves to become obsequious publicists for the industry...

...Just a few years after the defeat of Hitler, amid a grotesque campaign against the restitution of Jewish property stolen by the Nazis, the officially "anti-fascist" German Democratic Republic began to stamp "Jew" on the identity cards of its Jewish citizens...

...The movement was, he argues, BOOKS "the guilty secret, the evil twin, the secret sharer of the very enterprise it proposed to liquidate...

...But I suspect he's making a larger point, which is that the show trials were all the more terrifying for being staged, for being elaborately choreographed forms of character assassination as well as, often enough, preludes to actual assassination...

...Hoberman suggests that the Party's encouragement was consistent with a policy of "socialist 'repressive desublimation,' extending artistic liberty the better to intensify political domination...

...The reference to Slansky is telling: Hoberman obviously sees the Rosenbergs as victims of a show trial tinged with antiSemitism...

...And, as Hoberman might be inclined to put it, Jews assumed some of the starring roles in the history of communism: as heroes and martyrs, as traitors and victims...

...They might even have gone to their deaths as anti-Stalinist saints...

...Stalinist saints...

...The Yiddish renaissance—and later Yiddish itself—came to an end, however, as official philo-Semitism gave way to spasms of semiofficial anti-Semitism, disguised first as antiTrotskyism, then as anticosmopolitanism, and finally as anti-Zionism...

...The Soviet artist Ilya Kabokov once explained the difference: "[O]ur advertisements, summons, explanations, instructions—and everyone knows this—do not correspond to anything, ever, anywhere in reality...

...His own tastes run to campy genre pictures and avant-garde experimentalism— the styles, it so happens, that defined communist cinema...

...Communists and dissidents (often former communists themselves) spoke to each other in elusive, and often untranslatable, diaDISSENT / Spring 1999 n 115 BOOKS lectics...

...We're not talking traitors—we're talking DISSENT / Spring 1999 n 119 BOOKS Stalinist saints...

...A collection of essays (most of them previously published) on communist art, film, and literature, The Red Atlantis is an elegy for the "Communist utopia which, in fact, never existed...

...Hoberman is drawn to the history of communism not because he finds it romantic, but because he finds it fascinatingly surreal and warped, rather like the films he most admires...

...He doesn't relish being a cultural power-broker...

...One had to be a bit of a Communist to appreciate the anti-Communist literature .. . produced in cold war Eastern Europe," writes J. Hoberman in The Red Atlantis...

...In the books of Milan Kundera, Janos Kis, and others, communism appeared as a limping archaism, for all that it claimed to be a heroic future...

...The suppression of Kafka was a perverse measure of how much the communist authorities cared about literature, and of how much they respected the literary abilities of smart Jews...

...The heart of The Red Atlantis is Hoberman's tender exploration of the Jews' long romance with communism— and of communism's lesser-known, and shorter-lived, infatuation with the Jews...

...Not, mind you, for the grim world of secret police files, work camps, and show trials...

...Greenberg disliked Socialist Realism because he considered it kitsch: a grotesque, reactionary form of pandering to the masses that stood opposed to the exalted goals of modern art...

...For those true believers, a permanent chasm existed between the socialist freedom of which they dreamed and their responsibilities to the bureaucracies they staffed— between freedom and authority, between power and the dream...

...According to Hoberman, "Communism itself was an aesthetic project—perhaps the aesthetic project of the century...

...Not surprisingly, it was a Jew, a Germanspeaking resident of Prague, who became Eastern Europe's most controversial writer...

...But it is also possible that Estelyi was among those communist functionaries who, guided by hopes no less sincere than those of their capitalist adversaries, believed they could repair the system through cautious reform and selfcriticism...

...The Rosenbergs," he writes, "were framed for an activity that all available circumstantial and psychological evidence suggests that they or rather, Julius, supported as ever by Ethel, committed...

...Yet from Hoberman's distinctly post-cold war perspective, they do have something in common: they are all beautiful losers, internal exiles in their native lands...

...Best known as a film critic for the Village Voice, Hoberman has also distinguished himself as an authority on Eastern European cinema...

...There were similar efforts in Poland, where Krzysztof Kieslowski, best known in the West for his chic spiritual dramas, got his start as a documentarist...

...Shlyapnikov, the leader of the soon-to-be-banned Workers Opposition, replied, "Permit me to congratulate you on being the vanguard of a non-existing class...

...Unlike Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn, writers like Milan Kundera, Danilo Kg, Ivan Klima and Tadeusz Konwicki had been men of the left...

...The most notorious example of communist aesthetics is, of course, Socialist Realism, with its unforgettable yet strangely impersonal images of heroic workers and peasants—Russian, Chinese, Polish, African, Cuban...

...In the late sixties and seventies, the experimental collective Bela Balasz Studio (BBS), named after the seminal Hungarian film theorist, produced documentaries that courageously exposed the contradictions of "goulash" communism, while remaining within the bounds of "responsible" criticism...

...If anyone in the States was in a position to appreciate Kafka and his heirs, it was, paradoxically, the American communists allied with the Eastern European censors, particularly those Jewish communists who were devoured by the combined forces of political and religious intolerance during the Red Scare...

...In his final chapter, Hoberman audaciously retells the story of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as a nightmare out of Kafka, in a chapter swarming with allusions to The Trial and "The Metamorphosis...

...Deny that, and you deny their martyrdom any meaning...

...He begins, "Someone must have denounced Julius Rosenberg," and later finds Rosenberg "transformed in his prison bed into a gigantic, red-haired insect named Rudolf Slansky...

...until the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939, the party's antifascism earned it moral prestige in Jewish communities throughout the world...

...nor even for the heady slogans of third world liberation...

...Writing in 1939 when Socialist Realism was at its height, Clement Greenberg, soon to emerge as the high priest of postwar modernism, dismissed it as "another of the inexpensive ways in which totalitarian regimes seek to ingratiate themselves with their subjects...

...That meaning, Hoberman suggests, lies in their refusal to name names, and in the purity with which they pursued their cause...

...But had they lived in Eastern Europe, this "progressive petit-bourgeois Jewish couple" might well have shared Slansky's fate, suspected and condemned of a different kind of double loyalty...

...It seems incredible today that the Party— a "totalitarian" organization, no less—would have sponsored such a film...

...Socialist Realism," writes Hoberman, "consummated the vanguard project to transcend the museum and fuse art with life...

...I sensed this loss most acutely five years ago in a bookstore in Prague...

...That Franz Kafka had been dead for over twenty years made him no less of a menace to Eastern Europe's new rulers...

...In 1950, Howard Fast placed Kafka "very near the top of what I have, in the past, rather indelicately called 'the cultural dung heap of reaction.' " Shortly after the Prague Spring, one Czech hardliner suggested that "if we are to discuss the influence of Zionism on the events . . . in 1968 . . . then we must make a detailed analysis of `Kafkaism' and of the `alienation' connected with it...

...What perished with the fall of the Berlin Wall was not only a coercive social order but a weirdly consensual culture...

...I'm not sure what that means, but Hoberman has offered the most compelling defense I have read of the couple's heroism...

...By likening Slansky's destruction to the making of a film, Hoberman comes close to making light of it, to banalizing its horror...

...Eight years later, Mikhoels became the first of scores of Jewish writers murdered on Stalin's orders, at the dawn of a wider campaign against Jewish "cosmopolitanism" that haunted Eastern Europe through the fifties...

...Drawing on Boris Groys's remarkable study The Total Art of Stalinism, Hoberman claims that the true horror of Socialist Realism is not that it crushed the Russian constructivist avant-garde, but that it realized the avant-garde's own vision, albeit in the service of Stalinism...

...ADAM SHATZ is a New York writer...

...Socialist Realism was, he says, "a modernism come to power, a modernism mighty enough to project a new mass consciousness beyond truth or falsehood...

...The Soviets courted the Jews through the 1920s, as part of their policy of self-determination for national minorities...

...In The Prophet Unarmed, the second volume of his magisterial biography of Leon Trotsky, Isaac Deutscher reports an exchange that took place at a congress of Soviets in December, 1921...

...But throughout the postwar years, it was the world's leading manufacturer of intellectual dissidents...

...No one was more eager than Jewish communists to shed themselves of ethnic particularisms for the sake of creating a new, socialist man...

...Hoberman exaggerates, but not by much...

...When the Eastern bloc disintegrated, I felt deprived as a reader, having no more stories of impending decline to look forward to...

...THE RED ATLANTIS: COMMUNIST CULTURE IN THE ABSENCE OF COMMUNISM by j. Hoberman Temple University Press, 1999 304 pp $34.95 SHORTLY AFTER the fall of communism, I found myself longing for the bad old days...

...For these indiscretions the long-deceased writer was, as Hoberman nicely puts it, "magically resurrected as a dissident" by the Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe, which were mainly in power by virtue of the Soviet army, and which quivered at any threat to their legitimacy...

...Cleverly vandalizing the language of the state, Shlyapnikov's retort richly anticipates the idiom of dissident literature...

...It was Socialist Realism that bridged the gap between elite culture and the masses...