The Many Shades of White The Berlin Wall is perhaps the consummate symbol of Cold War Europe, indeed

the Cold War world. Nearly the whole complexity of life in the Soviet Bloc is writ on its whitewashed easterly face. That it abrades with the West makes it all the more encompassing as a mirror of the experience, a great part of official and lay consciousness in the East having been devoted to its neighbor. Those miles and miles of white concrete tell the story of censorship and repression and these two seemingly simple concepts were developed into such mandarin systems of circulating inputs and outputs as to have a qualified life of its own beyond the censor-artist relationship, beyond the competing considerations of Diktat and free expression.

White as Uniformity Remembering the difference between bare and bleached concrete, the readiest impression is that white is an imposed uniformity. Stalinist Europe, in wall paint and much else, had very exact specifications. For example, the ideal partisan had to be all of the following: a man of action, a public individual (one without the bourgeois impedimenta of private existence), and a future-oriented idealist. In Ashes and Diamonds Szczuka, living vicariously in a worn past, fails to live up to all three and is crushed by the ineluctable march of the Dialectic. Crucial to his lifes denouement is the choice to visit the witness to his wifes end, herself a near-extinct relic. The room he enters is a cul-de-sac, a dungeon of past tenses, and in it he dies at the hands of a foil: Maciek, a forwardthinking man of action whose equivalent sin is to reject the new order. Sczcuka, despite being a true believer, dies for the crime of nursing human wounds; against the dictates of a grander force,

Dolom 2 he looks back and has to suffer, a pillar of salt. Maciek is also weighed and found wanting; a ruthless AK assassin, not much more than a serial killer, he is perhaps the most fully incarnated human being in the novel for the simple fact that he falls in love. But the new order has no room for counter-revolutionaries (even one so suddenly unsure and repentant). Maciek dies, a historical irrelevance. In the Wajda film adaptation his dead body falls onto a garbage heap. He is debris, one of historys necessary casualties, and his dead body is the post-facto pulp of one who refused the advance of time. Before they expire, both are given glimpses to a more resolved lifeSczcuka the comforting knowledge of a dignified death for his wife, Maciek the prospect of a new start with Krystyna. Apparently, whom history would destroy, she first makes profoundly happy. The novel of course is a pedagogic tool, and its main message is an old one: the wages of sin is death. The example then bears out the demand for uniformity not only in the climactic murders but in Andrzejewskis creepy dogmatism, which finds him appropriating as narrator History herselfa mistress that demands the death of characters for reasons as philistine as ideology. That novels (especially one as fully realized as this) have already internalized (and indeed began to advocate) party decrees this early in the imperiums history (1948) shows the quick capitulation of the artist class to the red flag. Knowing art influences life more than the other way around, the communists took to its gardens, pruning extant shapes to appropriate forms and cultivating desirable saplings. Understanding art as a space of pure influence, they set out to be its undisputed marrionettist. They weaned the shelves to an approved selectionAll art, of whatever period, which embodied discontent, alienation, indignation, pity, longing, loneliness, suffering, however subtle, was given permission to enter (Haraszti). And of arts present and future, a system of

Dolom 3 censorship and the more subtle control of employment were imposed on the artist class. They instituted an official method: Socialist Realism, which cut all art production into a pre-approved shapeoptimistic, populist, representational and partisan. The completion of this project, the successful ionization of art with particles of ideology entails the end of that glorious era of lart pour lart. As Haraszti points out the classical, medieval and renaissance epochs give ample precedent for the notion that art and power are not natural enemies. Despite the grandeur of the art of these periods, championing a return thereto is retrogression nonetheless. Whoever unthinkingly rejoices in this artistic backslide, would perhaps celebrate as well a return to the medieval understanding of blood or an Aristotelian conception of matter. But the communists knew of other methods besides the politicization of art; particularly, they undertook a project far grander in scope and whose success was accordingly far more majestic: the politicization of life itself. Remember Ludviks imperishable outburst: Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky! The backlash was very spontaneous. Those words mobilized the entire academic community around him toward censure, a process that unfolded mechanistically and largely without direction from on high. Friends and colleagues all unanimously turned against him. This total betrayal haunted Ludvik for the rest of his life, especially as it found an objective correlative in that beautifully choreographed tableau, the room of raised hands. The system has contrived to make ideology ascendant over human relationships; teachers, close friends, even Marketa who was probably in love with Ludvik joined in chorus to damn him to hard labor as a blacklist; more important than the disloyalty, she probably thought it was in his best interest. Powerful is a system that could boast of being able to bend to its requirements the pure impulses of youthful love.

Dolom 4 White as Silence Now, take the white to mean silence; silence as inaction, silence as the sound of stasis. All of the texts read in class were replete with characters that more or less allowed the system to wash over them. The starkest example is The Garden Party, which is populated by unfeeling, unthinking, unselfed dramatis personae, through which the party speaks unhindered. They strike the reader (perhaps the experience of theatre-goer is different) as disembodied voice boxes, walking larynges. The restless chatter in the play masks the silence of the individuals. These are disemboweled husks; they have no ego with which to mediate the words of the party from reception to reproduction. They just echo the slogans and allow that heartless thoughtless machine, language, to suborn their souls. But also, silence was later conceived as radical expression; when filth is expected of your mouth, soundlessness entails a certain purity of gesture that is revolutionary. When communisms internal distensions forced it to rely on a culture of underhandedness (that is to say corruption, bribes, favoritisms) refusing the new norms was to undertake a subtle act of protest. Think of Birkut, who clung to the systems de jures after its keepers abandoned it for a less demanding set of de factos. Long after the system and its subjects gave up on the promise of socialism, Birkut was still hard at work unshackling the downtrodden proletariat. He bravely (perhaps naively) adheres to a face value understanding of communism, one that puts a premium on the old lefts egalitarian roots. His tireless devotion to these ideals is demonstrated when his long-time comrade, Witek, is apprehended by officials. Where everyone has accepted these desaparecidos to be part of the daily grind, just one of many routine inconveniences to be longsufferingly endured, Birkuts insuperable sense of justice gives him a clarity of thought and will. Remember the scene when he consults with the party official about Witeks case; among other

Dolom 5 condescensions, the official says: Dont be childish, theres a political war going on in Poland. The bombast of that second clause could have easily drowned out somebodys constancy of purpose, but it is exactly Birkuts childishness that allows him to ignore it. He refuses to work under the systems terms and proceeds to act in a singularly subversive manner, for a goal no larger than to free his friend from unfair imprisonment. Think of Christa T., the unrelenting individualist, whose main modus operandi was to carve out a space wherein she could explore the nature of her true self, and be honest to the changing hypothesis. Where the system, ironically speaking through a wised up set of gradeschoolers, mocks her for making too big a deal of the torture of a frog, she refuses the readymade safety of that disingenuous cynicism. Rather than allow her wounds to heal, she allows herself to experience the full range of emotion. She could easily prop up walls to intermediate between her and the full force of trauma, but she instead stays steadfast to her commitment to a complete humanity. So every new death forces her to relive all the others (the black tomcat smashes against the stable wall, the magpies eggs splinter against the rock, and again the snow is brushed away from the small rigid face). Truth is the refusal to allow whatsoever is volcanically alive in you to fester in a post-human closure. There is a power and beauty in this understanding.

White vs. Full Color; East and West An idea that presents itself repeatedly in the texts is the understanding that the two societies, East and West, are simply different means to the same end. The results of these two systems seem to converge repeatedly. The clutter of the Western side suggests the possibility of common conclusions independently arrived at, by both the unregulated marketplace and socialisms centralized planning apparatus. Though individual graffito may stand as small units

Dolom 6 of meaning, these discordant pieces cancel each other out in the aggregate. On the whole, that saturnalia of colors carries about as much meaning as the white on its opposite. Think of the many other convergences that arise from the diametrically opposed dogmas of the two systems. The eponymous Case Worker can be said to display the fatalism (client vanishes behind his case, the official behind his function) Durkheim thought inherent in the industrial work arrangement. Perhaps these are miniature previsions of a larger convergence, one that Havel, in his essay Power and the Powerless, declared eminently possible given a perceived common rot in both systems. Also, the hands that worked to paint either side of the wall are products of their respective situations. The white was painted on diligently by workers under state employ while the western face was attended largely by amateurs. This arrangement works as a metaphor for the way in which each society treated art. The free access fostered by capitalism engenders a radical meritocracy that, just as much as it drives innovation and dispels the vice of complacency, forces the artist to live in fear of want. He may starve, and live limited to the pittance of a day job. Contrast this to the socialist system, as described by Milosz:
He who may once have done his thinking and writing in his free moments away from a paying job in a bank or post office, has now found his rightful place on earth. He has been restored to society, whereas the businessmen, aristocrats, and tradespeople who once considered him a harmless blunderer have now been dispossessed. They are indeed delighted to find work as cloakroom attendants and to hold the coat of a former employee of whom they said, in pre-war days, "It seems he writes.

There is a certain justice here that cannot be easily dismissed; art is given its due obeisance, its majesty finally propitiated to. Even the authority of Harasztis cynicism implodes when mocking this arrangement. The satire falls flat in lines such as What do they know about freedom, those who have no houses, never mind national artists retreats! its dismissiveness is so facile.

Dolom 7 Contemplate the imbalance between a mute inglorious Milton and a system that would have clothed and fed him like a king among men. And past this initial enticement (man after all shall not live by bread alone), there is the opportunity to be an engineer of human souls. Milosz isolates the inducement to conformity: a guaranteed audience. There are other factors, but to tempt the artist (someone whose hands daily ache with the reach for true greatness) with power in the real and the now, with entry into the circle of acknowledged legislators is to speak to the desires of his heart. Politics provides the necessary chemical agent that art needs to digest the world (Haraszti). The desire to become the soul of the community finds its perfect home in the systems warm embrace. Of course, we know the overwhelming answer to the ultimatum (all these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me): yes. The intelligentsia had nothing to lose but its independence; in return, it gained half a world, and possesses it on condition that it protects the unity of this world and interprets its own power as service. For the small price of working with a monochrome palette, the artist of the east took his rightful place in the center of a proselytizing cult while the artist of the west continued to wallow in his own bitter independence,

Post-Control, Self-Oppression At a certain point, internalization is inevitable. The white not only ceases to be unbearable, it begins to be necessary; or even worse, desirable. The objects that populate our daily existence slowly integrate themselves into our daily lives, to the point where we can no longer support ourselves without their once dispensable company. Enter the narrators of The Joke, each subjected to an external constant that slowly accreted onto itself a psychic

Dolom 8 superstructure. These supreme fantasists all find their supporting illusions shattered in the end of the novel, identity after identity destabilized and rearranged to cope with the critical loss of foundation. Take the example of Ludvik who arranged his life around an internal theatre of revenge. The object of this odium, Pavel, is the man Ludvik blames for that room of raised hands. As chance would have it, he finds himself in professional proximity to Pavels wife. He charms her and proceeds to visit upon her micro-managed scenes of domination and plunder (Everything that had happened to myself and Helena was part of a precise and deliberate plan). However the conversation after this grotesque ritual reveals Helena to be an unwanted wife; his climactic theft of Pavel Zemaneks secret chamber turned out to be more like the acceptance of a proffered gift. More importantly, Helena lets slip that she recognizes Pavel in him. The ordering principle of his life: his was an identity defined through an opposition that has apparently been dissolved by time. The unspooling culminates in a face-to-face encounter with Zemanek that not only confirms Helenas impression but also demonstrates his anger to be both flaccid and irrelevant. Trying desperately to hold together his imploding cosmos, he cries:
What would I tell him? How would I respond? How would I explain to him that I couldnt make peace with him? How would I explain that if I did I would immediately lose my inner balance? How would I explain that one of the arms of my internal scales would suddenly shoot upward? How would I explain that my hatred of him counterbalanced the weight of evil that had fallen on my youth? How would I explain that he embodied all the evils in my life? How would I explain that I needed to hate him?

Dependence is also key to censorships evolution past its ham-handed infancy, past the initial set of corrective reinforcements, positive and negative. Half the story consists of early onset artist dependence on content control. Entire languages, beasts of euphemism, allusion and code, were invented to undercut the censor. Reveling in the brilliance of these systems, the artist devised increasingly ornate and majestic inventions that allowed for an ever wider range of

Dolom 9 roundabout expression. The initial concession to work under the systems terms was the first defeat; it granted the censor his rules. However, soon the artists fabulations provided them with a resistance that helped them define themselves. Without the limits of that monochrome palette, the artist found his thoughts and feelings evaporating like steam into an open expanse. At that point, expression becomes impossible without the censors prescriptions. However, even more corrosive to art was the dependence developed by the audience. Accustomed to an artist class always positioning themselves around the decrees of censorship, they learned to read political commentary into everything. Enter the era of total politicization in all spheres of expression, which is to say the inability of expression to escape the systems intrusion. Among other things, this diffused silences potential as a radical gesture; society, in keeping with training, cannot help but interpret soundlessness as some sort of comment on the regime, therefore tainting the purity of the gesture. This is a censorship much greater than any censor could impose. At this point, the system would have not lost anything had it published and distributed even the most anti-utilitarian art; the most virtuoso meditations on form would have been rendered limp by a socialist audience blind to the pleasure of the text but fully receptive to the possible political connotations of formalism. The socialist censor has completed the triptych; in the center his toolsthe blacklists, broadcast delays, expurgations, revisions, speech codes and on either side the colluding masses of poet and reader; the censor is ready to unveil his masterwork: he has rendered impotent all of art.

The wall collapsed in 1989, ending over four decades of Cold War Eastern European Culture. In many ways, this era of human historythe east-west binary, socialist censorship, honesty as radical comment, politicized art, etc.exists as a closed system. It blossomed into a

Dolom 10 radically idiosyncratic universe while it lasted, and evaporated suddenly. To understand it is an exercise in historical inquiry. The 89 reconfiguration has disabused the world of the minor facts that anchored these texts to a relatable reality; already these novels seem a waste of time. However, one should be careful giving concessions to this mindset. The requirement for literature to be applicable is a poisonous one, akin to the Soviet demand for social utility in its masterpieces. In any case it betrays an infantile appreciation of art. Get past the superficial question of relevance and engage literatures marrowits insight into the creative mind, the way it imparts that sob in the spine. From the dust of their respective dead realities, these works of art remain compelling because their currency is still the human soul and their realizations monumental stories in and of themselves.