The name of the game for these two weeks has been DISSENT. Having covered Art & Nation, and Art & Ideology, we now moved to Art & Dissent, within the confines of a totalitarian communist state. This is perhaps the lessons that have appeared most similar to some of my lessons in German history and culture, because East Germany was also trapped under the obscurity of The Iron Curtain. This fact puts Germany into a very interesting place culturally and historically today, because it’s strong identity as part of Western Civilization culturally. BUT… that is a discussion for another day.

The thing that has surprised me most of all since coming to Poland and learning briefly about their fall to communism, is the radically different approach to submitting to communism. In the Czech Republic (Czechoslovakia at the time – that is an important distinction), the approach was submissive in appearance, and leaving the dissidence to the intellectuals and the artists. There is an overwhelming amount of material about artists who were banned by the government – some who grew depressed over that fact, some who took pride it in, and some who were determined to conform to the law, in order to keep being creative. We also learned that common in both Czechoslovakia and Poland, there was a difference between the communism of the 1950s and the communism of the ‘70s and ‘80s. But it was reversed (I say that loosely, rather, they were perceived differently) to each other. The communism of the 50s in Poland was positive, and life was cheerier, whereas Czechoslovakia was under communism’s iron clad grip and fear. The ‘60s were a period of growing progressiveness in Czechoslovakia until Stalin invaded Prague, and August 1968, he crushed the growing agitation. Then life became dreary, and bleak, and grey… but not quite as oppressive.

Grey is an important theme, which draws me back to our classes. In history, the discussion focused on the grey zone – the area in which people neither dissented nor forwarded The Party’s message (meaning, the communist party). They merely survived, and then reaped the reward in the fall of communism in ’89, by being the best well off in the new political momentum.

Our theater history session was with historian Ripka and our theater lecturer Dr. Barbara Day. We got to learn a lot about her personal involvement with the underground universities taking place in Czechoslovakia in the 70s and 80s, in which professors from the Western world would come on a traveler’s visa and teach a few lectures over the course of a weekend. Being able to talk to someone directly involved was unreal.

In literature we talked about the cultural reality of the present day, as affected by the communistic era. One piece that I really liked was The Tragedy of Central Europe by essayist Kundera, a famous Czech writer. In this discussion, we talked a lot about world literature (having read another piece titled Die Weltliterature) and whether or not it can exist. We were very divided, even when discussing examples such as Shakespeare, the Canterbury Tales and so on and so forth. But this other reading considered the reality and struggle of Central Europe being recognized. Poland, and certainly the Czech Republic (again, formerly Czechoslovakia) has felt a cultural tug towards the west, but a heavy and oftentimes oppressive tug politically towards the East. As a result, it at times has felt like an area that has fallen into disregard and abandonment, and not taken seriously enough as a region or set of countries. And besides, how does Central Europe even become defined? By political borders? How, when bigger countries on either side of Poland keep changing its borders for itself?

And that’s the basic idea to what we have learned about these past two weeks. This week we are in Krakow, Poland; Cíerny Balóg, Slovakia; and Žilina, Slovakia. Next weekend, I will be in Munich, Germany. Then it’ll be back into the classroom, the last two weeks before final exams. Yelp.

Until Next Time,

Joe