Kunakhovich applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Communism's Public Sphere: Culture as Politics in Cold War Poland and East Germany, and reported the following:
From page 99:Learn more about Communism's Public Sphere at the Cornell University Press website.…Under these constraints, a national communism was at least better than its previous version, and most Poles welcomed Gomułka’s reforms. New challenges and disappointments would come soon enough. But in the fall of 1956 embracing National Communism was a winning strategy for Polish leaders, supported by the party and the public alike.This is a real success case for the Page 99 test! My book compares the workings of the public sphere in two Eastern Bloc countries, Poland and East Germany. Naturally, most pages focus on one country or the other, but here the two are side by side, as they are in the book as a whole. One of my central arguments is that the Bloc was deeply intertwined. For all their differences, Poland and East Germany evolved in tandem, partly because they watched each other closely.
This strategy was far more problematic for the SED, even though East German officials were some of the first to use it. After June 17, 1953, the GDR’s leadership adopted an early version of National Communism, vowing to become more responsive to the public’s needs—including the need for greater contact with West Germany. But draping the SED in German colors was a dangerous game. Amid national uprisings in Hungary and Poland, even loyal party members pushed its policies to their logical endpoint, calling for German reunification and the erasure of the GDR. In Poland, championing the nation bolstered the PZPR’s authority because it brought the party closer to the people. In East Germany, however, it only exposed the gulf between them. So long as East Germans saw themselves as Germans first, reforms like Gomułka’s—decentralization, democratization, de-Sovietization—would inevitably fuel the drive for German unity and therefore undermine the GDR. The tactics that had stabilized communism in Poland were unavailable to the SED, unless it could instill a very different kind of national identity.
Shortly after June 17, 1953, the playwright Bertolt Brecht mocked the SED’s response in an unpublished poem titled “The Solution.” Officials insisted that “the people / had forfeited the confidence of the government,” he wrote. “Would it not be easier / in that case for the government / to dissolve the people / and elect another?” The question was meant to be absurd, inverting as it did the standard relationship between people and government. But in effect, electing a new people is precisely what the SED did. Protest in 1953 and criticism in 1956 made clear that most East Germans waited for reunification instead of committing themselves to the GDR. To get through to such people and win their support, the SED had to rewire their sense of belonging. It had to uproot their lives, expose them to the party’s teachings, force them to get engaged in civic life, and distance them from West Germany. The government thus set out to elect its people through a Socialist Cultural Revolution that forced even the most reticent to participate. It sought to make East Germans out of Germans—and in the process to make the SED a truly national party.
Page 99 falls at the end of a chapter on nationalism, which shows that between 1953 and 1956 both states faced the same challenge: how to adjust communist rule to public opinion? Each country’s leaders set out to create a National Communism that would be more reflective of the people’s will. But they had to do it in strikingly different ways, as page 99 explains. Because of Germany’s division, East German leaders could not champion national traditions the way that Polish leaders could. Instead, they had to build a new East German nation in their image.
Page 99 captures some of the big-picture arguments of Communism’s Public Sphere. What it misses, though, are my sources and methods. The book’s starting point is that political discussions in the Eastern Bloc unfolded in cultural spaces – theaters, galleries, cinemas, youth clubs. Since communist regimes suppressed free speech, such spaces were rare outlets for dissenting voices. Taking advantage of their platform, artists presented visions that challenged the party line. Audiences, too, spoke for themselves by booing, clapping, or refusing to show up. Instead of a transmission belt for state officials, cultural institutions functioned as a public sphere: a space where many actors could weigh in on public affairs. I show how this worked in two cities, Kraków and Leipzig, between the Red Army’s invasion of Poland in 1944 and German reunification in 1990. Looking beyond page 99, a reader will find rock and roll, a workers’ opera, underground art shows, smuggled recordings, and a great deal more.
--Marshal Zeringue
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