Revolutionary Nostalgia: Power Images and Dreams
The beginning
:nostalgia:
Thirty years ago I stepped foot on American soil for the first time as an emigre from Central Europe. That was in April. This month it has been ten years since I moved to California. In all those years I felt like I’ve been leading a double or triple life, not quite a fully American or European kind, not quite an East Coast or West Coast kind, and before that not quite a Northeast or a Southeast kind. Since the mid 1990s I have moved from the Czech Republic to the United States, from New York to North Carolina, and from North Carolina to California, with lots of of other moves between cities and places in between. Because of those moves the last thirty years have felt broadly, and the last ten more acutely, as a sort of non-existence in a non-place, a definition of that dreaded word ‘liminal’. Nowhere feels truly home. This ‘nowhere-ness’ exists as a mere possibility, because ‘everywhere-ness’ is also possible. It is predicated on a sense of displacement, a reenactment of the moment of being placed, rather than an arrival through one’s own agency.
Every story of immigration is different and I can only speak of my own in relation to everyone else’s, but what I think connects them is a rather peculiar feeling of being connected to one’s original place of departure or home. It is a strange feeling that develops over time for some, while for others it is there from the very beginning. In the mid 1990s when I was still a fresh arrival in the United States the fact that I was IN the US did not necessarily mean that I was at home. In fact it felt as though being here was just a temporary measure. Every summer for the first 3 years I went back to the Czech Republic for the summer to continue living out my existence as a full fledged young Czech adolescent, to be among my friends and peers. I may not have been attending Czech schools anymore, but this didn’t strike me as anything strange. My friends and I would hang as though nothing had fundamentally changed. The schools were still the same, so were the teachers, as well as the city streets and the townspeople. It seemed like this state of affairs would continue forever.
Looking back on the scant few photos I have of that era I detect an optimism that has completely drained away over the last three decades, as everyone I recognize got older and either already passed away or moved on with life. I realize that as we go through life we lose contact with the majority of the people we encounter, the very people that make up the background to our lives. They structure our reality in so far as the spaces we inhabit do, but when those people are gone none of the buildings and spaces can make up with their presence for the absence of the lives which we knew that occupied them at the same time as we ourselves did.
I contemplate a return to my homeland every time a bout of acute nostalgia grips me and every time I end up in an internal debate about how a return to one’s home is pretty much impossible. It may not be that the home has changed as much as the person that is returning did. The thirty years I’ve been away resulted in overwhelming personal changes as well as the changes of the place where I came from, if not physically, then at least psychically. Going back would feel more like another immigration at this point.
When I set out to start writing about revolutionary nostalgia, I didn’t have a clear picture of what the term was meant to signify. It felt more like a theoretical politically motivated treatise on the nature of social upheaval and change. It is still that, but the more I kept thinking about it, reading relevant books and taking notes, the more I felt inclined to insert myself into the picture as a kind of foil through which that theory could be justified. After all, for years I have been painting pictures of clouds and family photos in homage to the idea of nostalgia. Before those pictures I’ve obsessed over flags, nationalist and separatist tendencies, and a sense of cultural (non)belonging, a solid twelve years of artistic exploration. It felt like time to put it into writing.
:nineteen eighty nine:
When I arrived in the United States it was on the tail end of the 1989 Eastern European revolutions. Ours, the Velvet Revolution, was one in a series of revolutions that swept through East Germany, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and the Baltic States. These revolutions lifted the so-called Iron Curtain, caused the fall of the Berlin Wall, and precipitated the collapse and dissolution of the Soviet Union, an almost unthinkable feat in the months leading up to them. The Velvet Revolution was one of the last revolutions in the series, but also it became the one where events proceeded with the greatest haste. In countries like Poland and East Germany the revolutionary struggle took months if not years. In Prague the change occurred in ten days.
Today people still quibble over the name the revolution was given, suggesting that what occurred in November 1989 wasn’t velvet or a revolution. The revolution was named Velvet Revolution, because not one protester was killed (not entirely true, there was one reported death of a student, but this turned out to be a ruse played by the secret police to confuse protesters on the ground. You can read an article I wrote about that here). But this doesn’t mean that the revolution wasn’t violent. Students were hit, kicked, tear gassed and beaten with clubs. Cracked skulls, broken noses and bones abounded and dozens wound up in hospitals with lifelong disfigurements.
For certain more conspiratorially-minded analysts and sociologists the term revolution is also subject to interpretation, because some believe that what occurred was a handover of power orchestrated behind the scenes by various interested powers and planned many months, if not years, in advance.
And finally, the speed of the revolution is itself a misrepresentation. In reality what took only ten days to accomplish, had a prelude that began many months before in the small student protests that took place on the 20th anniversary of the self-immolation of Jan Palach, the ‘patron saint’ of the 1968 Prague Spring. Palach set himself on fire in protest of the political repressions that followed the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. More abstractly however, Palach’s protest was directed toward the passivity of the Czech people. He felt that the failure of the Spring was more attributable to the resignation of the spirit, rather than actual political repression. What was crushed in 1968 wasn’t a political movement, but the optimism in the possibility of change, even if that change meant that what replaced communism was a more sincere, more authentic, unadulterated form of communism. It was a vision of historical proportions dating back all the way to the failure of the Revolutions of 1848 and the Prague Uprising.
I was only eight, but I remember the atmosphere of those autumn days of 1989. It was pervasive and it felt like something big was happening. I watched cars with young people hanging out of the windows holding out flags as they drove through town. It looked like they were going to a football match. Only a little later when the state-run television started showing video after video of massive protests in Prague did it finally click. I still didn’t understand what was happening, but whatever this was, it was something very different. It felt like a light bulb turned on somewhere, not very bright at first, like the old school Edison bulbs from movies where it flickers for a little bit first with that clicking sound and then as the coils get hotter, the bulb gets brighter and brighter. It took that bulb a few years to get really hot and bright, but 1989 was the moment that someone pulled the switch.
Accounts of life before the revolution depend on who one asks, but in our family there was a general consensus that the point of living was that every new generation did slightly better than the one before. My great grandmother lived all the way to her 80s without ever having a private bathroom or a TV. Our family cottage in the mountains didn’t have plumbing until I was seven or eight years old. It had a dry toilet in a separate unheated room attached to the back of the structure. Water had to be pumped by hand and carried indoors in buckets. Stoves were old coal burners and took a couple of hours to heat up a room in the depths of winter when temperatures in the mountains would frequently dip to -20 Celsius. Even in the late 1980s and early 1990s we watched the two official state channels on old black and white tv sets, Czechoslovak-built Teslas from the 1970s.
Generally speaking, the new generations did better, but the bar was set pretty low. After her first divorce, my mother and I moved into our first apartment, a ten minute walk from my grandparents’ apartment where she and I were both raised, in the same little room at the end of a narrow hallway. The building was the first communist housing project built in the city back in the 1960s and the only way to buy one of the apartments was to get one assigned, which in those days meant that you could either put your name on a list and wait for years, or you had to know a guy or a guy who knew a guy.
Well, my grandfather apparently knew a guy, that’s how he got the apartment and later his job as a company driver. He drove a large mustard colored Volga wagon with a Taxi sign on the roof, but he wasn’t a normal cabbie at all. You couldn’t just catch a ride from him. Even if you snapped your fingers, whistled or raised your arm to hail his cab, he wouldn’t have stopped. That’s not the kind of Taxi he drove. He picked up highway workers, architects and engineers and drove them around from their homes to job sites around Czechoslovakia, wherever a road, a highway, or a bridge were being built. Sometimes he took me on his excursions and country ramblings and I got to experience the working man’s life for the first time as a five year old. The smell of fresh asphalt permeated everything. It was on the workers’ clothes, on the seats of the car, and in the office hallways. A jolt of nostalgia still hits me today whenever I smell the roads softened by the summer heat.
It was in late 1989 that I recall first seeing the posters of Vaclav Havel plastered around town. One of them appeared on the glass of the main entrance to our communist-era concrete apartment building. It was a stark contrast black and white photo of the dissident soon-to-be president with the words Havel Na Hrad (Havel for President) in thick bold all-caps lettering on the side.
That image defined the post-communist atmosphere felt by many people in the early 1990s Czechoslovakia, an unpretentious, slightly Mona Lisa-esque smile and eyes that emanated empathy, a hard thing to find in the depths of the cold communist Normalization. In 1989 seeing a reserved yet smiling face on a ‘propaganda’ poster was a stark contrast to the official portraits of communist authorities and the desolate vacant stares on their faces.
This ‘official’ image of Havel haunts my generation the way that the specters of Marx haunt the failed 1848 revolutions, because it in some way represents both the hope of a regained freedom from four decades of repression and the failure of the virtuous cycle, symbolized by the abandonment of the socialist experiment in favor of a pro-individualist, winner-take-all politics. Those same eyes that emanated compassion, now, thirty five years later, also seem to emanate sadness and a kind of distant self-satisfaction, a portent of post-revolutionary haze that was about to envelop the nation during its gradual descent into the grayzone of the neoliberal capitalist project.
The more I learn about Havel, the more I come to realize that the events of 1989 were in some way this one man’s fevered dreams come alive. He was their reluctant architect and director. As a political magician he was invoking the rites of the underground samizdat grimoires like Vokno and Novy Svet that gave shape and life to the once sleeping giant, the reawakened Prague Golem of capital. Following the failure and disappointment of the 1968 Prague Spring, Havel spent two decades in isolation as a banned author of provincial theater plays, obscure political essays and petitions, shaping the political consciousness of the underground intelligentsia. His philosophical disposition and political struggle, for which he was jailed in the 1970s and 1980s, played out in two distinct areas.
The first instance played out within his own unconscious mind while he was drinking, smoking cigarettes and writing in his secluded country house on the outskirts of Trutnov, where he held a job loading barrels of beer on trucks at the Krakonos brewery. There he wrote some of his most enduring essays and plays, organized a dissident movement within the rock’n’roll underground and hosted many artists and political outcasts that would eventually form his revolutionary cabinet and elevate him to the presidency.
The second was rooted in the network of Prague apartments that hosted underground philosophy lectures by banned professors and authors, in which Havel’s apartment played a pivotal role. Havel was heir to a vast family fortune, much of which (though not all) was expropriated by the communist state in the 1950s and was later given back to him through the process of restitution after the Iron Curtain lifted. Through his family Havel maintained a connection to the West even during times of the harshest state isolationism. Through a particular genius and sheer will, Havel regained fame and notoriety in the 1960s Czech cultural milieu, which quickly spread abroad and proved to be a crucial link between the West and the burgeoning dissident movement. His plays and essays were heavily distributed in samizdat form within the clandestine apartment networks. His fame guaranteed sustained attention in the West where his plays and essays sold quite well.
With his newly found fame Havel was able to live a spartan, but comfortable life off the proceeds from the sales of his articles and essays, which also gave rise to many conspiracy theories about a hidden family wealth, because Havel drove a Mercedes Benz to his job at the brewery and wore highly sought after jeans, back then a symbol of dissent, that were available for purchase only in specialty government-run stores called Tuzex.
By the end of the 1980s almost everyone within Czechoslovakia either read or heard about Charter 77, which Havel co-wrote and became its first signatory and de facto spokesperson. It can be said that everyone within the dissident movement read his essay ‘Power of the Powerless’.
I’ve come across several samizdat documents (usually hand-copied or typed, self-published and secretly distributed literature banned by the state) stashed away in our house as a young boy. I don’t remember the contents, but I do remember there were lots of jokes, some of which could be construed as anti-communist or at the very least with a western flair (english words, culture, etc), which in those days meant the same thing. My best guess was that they were my mother’s, as some of the jokes seemed like they were written by a young adult. I was fascinated by them and hand copied some of them, unconsciously reproducing the goals of the samizdat, before I put the originals away exactly as I found them. The possession of banned and illegal material like pro-western literature carried a hefty sentence at the height of political Normalization in the 1970s and even into the 1980s. If they’re still around, I’d love to get my hands on those documents again. Something tells me they’ve been lost to history.
But … maybe not.
To be continued ….
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