Iron Curtain (76 page)

“Okay, here then.”

“No, not here. It’s not safe.”

They walk down the stairs into the deserted basement of the building.

“Okay, now you can tell me what you think of our leader.”

“Well,” says the other, looking around nervously, “actually I quite like him.”

As was the case in so many spheres of life, the communist monopoly on power meant that jokes about anything—the economy, the national soccer team, the weather—all qualified, at some level, as political jokes. This was what made them subversive, as the authorities understood perfectly well, and this is why they went out of their way to quash them. A letter from Budapest youth movement authorities to Hungarian summer camp counselors solemnly warned them to be prepared: campers might well indulge in “vulgar”
joke-telling sessions. In case such a thing should happen, the counselors should cheerfully participate in these occasions in order to divert the crowd toward more tasteful and
politically acceptable forms of humor.
²⁷

Not all youth leaders were so understanding. In reports sent to the Education Ministry about the general mood of students in Poland, “chants, jokes, rhymes, and graffiti” were judged a sign of “oppositional feelings,” perhaps even evidence of “contact with the underground.”
²⁸
For the wrong joke, told in the wrong place at the wrong time, one could even be arrested, not only in the 1950s but later on as well. This was the premise of Milan Kundera’s 1967 novel
The Joke
, the book that first gained the Czech writer an international audience: its protagonist writes a joke on a postcard to a girl, and is thrown out of the party and sent to work in the mines as a result.
²⁹
In 1961, members of an East German cabaret troupe really were arrested after a performance titled
Where the Dog’s Buried
, which included the following skit:

The cabaret also featured a bureaucrat who answered every question with a quotation from
Walter Ulbricht, “just to be absolutely on the safe side.” It was all rather clumsy, but the authorities were not amused. In the report filed afterward, a local party boss fumed, “the show consisted of provocative defamations of the press, workers, Party officials, and youth leaders.” The actors remained in jail for nine months, during which time several of them were isolated in solitary confinement. Much later, one of them discovered that hundreds of his jokes had been reported to the secret police.
³⁰

The incident illustrates the distinct absence of a communist sense of humor. It also underlines the delicate balance that had to be struck by satirists, cabaret artists, and others who wanted to perform legally. On the one hand, they had to be funny, or at least pointed and sharp, if they were to attract an audience. On the other hand, they had to avoid telling the jokes that people around them were actually telling or even alluding to the topics that others found so amusing. Official media faced the same dilemma. Hungarian state radio made an attempt at tackling this problem in 1950 with the launch of
a political cabaret. Their aim was clear: “Every good laugh is a blow to the enemy. The new program will radiate the optimistic joy and strength of our society.” The program lasted two months and was then abandoned.
³¹

Almost no one in the Eastern bloc wrestled with this problem in the Stalinist period so diligently as
Herbert Sandberg, the
Buchenwald survivor who became the editor of
Ulenspiegel
, briefly East Germany’s funny satirical magazine. Although the magazine’s offices were originally located in West Berlin and the magazine was first registered under an American license, Sandberg’s superb team of artists and writers all came from the intellectual left, and from the beginning they were close to the Kulturbund and the communist party. Sandberg himself was not at all ideological, however. He regarded laughter as “healing,” and believed he could play a role in reconstructing society if he and his colleagues focused their sharp pens on caricatures of Germany’s Nazi past and its present division.

At least to begin with,
Ulenspiegel
very much reflected Sandberg’s sensibility. The January 1, 1947, issue contained, among other things, a satirical article about Adenauer, a review of an underrated exhibit of children’s books (no one was talking about the exhibit in overserious Berlin because “it’s about fun and love and magic”), and a critical piece about Wilhelm Furtwängler, the conductor who had stayed in Germany during the war and kept silent about Nazi atrocities. There were cartoons criticizing the moribund denazification process (“Are there really no Nazi party members left?”) and much open discussion of the Third Reich. A few months later, Sandberg’s ambivalence about the deepening division of Germany and of Berlin was reflected in the May 2 cover, which showed a blind man standing between the four flags of Berlin’s four occupying powers. The headline—“An Uncertain Future”—did not clearly blame either the Americans or the USSR for the division.

This neutrality could not be maintained for long, and eventually Sandberg had to take sides. As East–West tensions grew, so did communist influence over the magazine’s content. Its satire shifted to focus more sharply on capitalism, on the United States, and on Germany’s helplessness in the face of Western “warmongering.” By December 1947, its Christmas issue cover featured a German child asking, blandly, “Mother, what is peace?” By the spring of 1948, the magazine had lost its American publishing license. In May, the first issue produced under its Soviet license showed several bridges: the ones marked “currency unity” and “economic unity” are still intact; the one marked “political unity” has been blown apart.
³²

Covers mocking Truman, de Gaulle, and Western promises of demilitarization followed, although Sandberg resisted becoming yet another propaganda tool. He took the “wrong” side in the formalism debate, insisting on expressing his admiration for “formalist” artists such as Pablo Picasso. This compromise did not last long. By 1950, the party Central Committee’s
cultural department could no longer tolerate anything other than total conformity. As one of its members argued, “We need support by our satirical press in the republic.” The magazine, another declared, was attempting to conform—“We believe that
Ulenspiegel
has constantly and intensively worked on improving itself”—but doubts remained.
³³
None of this mattered, because its readership had collapsed. No one wanted to buy a satirical magazine that wasn’t funny, and the authorities shut it down in August. Although it was later reincarnated under the similar name of
Eulenspiegel
, it was never quite the same.

Yet in private, behind closed doors and when they were on their own, even the authorities told political jokes. Günter Schabowski, an East German journalist and later a member of the last East German government, once told a British journalist, “At
Neues Deutschland
we told each other jokes in the canteen. We weren’t blind to the failings of the system, but we convinced ourselves that this was only because it was early days and the class enemy was perpetrating sabotage wherever he could. One day, we thought, all problems would be solved and there wouldn’t be any more jokes because there wouldn’t be anything left to joke about.”
³⁴
There were even jokes about that. For example this one, quite possibly imported from the USSR, and alluding to two of the Soviet Union’s most famous
Gulag construction projects:

Humor could not always be controlled. Clothing could not always be controlled. As it turned out, religious emotions could not always be controlled either. Some of those in communist Europe organized themselves under
the church’s umbrella in a careful manner, planning and measuring their involvement, calculating the personal price they might have to pay. Józef Puciłowski was part of a Union of Polish Youth section whose leaders made a decision to go, as a group, to a priest for private catechism instruction on a regular basis. The risk paid off: no one in the group ever told the authorities.
³⁵
As a young man,
Hans-Jochen Tschiche decided to become a Lutheran clergyman. Although at the time, in the late 1940s, he was able to study in West Berlin, he deliberately went back to work in the East in order to pursue his vocation there. Part of the appeal of the clergy for him was its openness: one was allowed to read a wider range of literature, to discuss material not available to most people in the East, to make contact with Western priests and churches while at the same time avoiding conflict with the regime and being of some help to its victims.
³⁶

But others did not calculate, did not measure, and did not plan. Occasionally suppressed religious feelings simply burst into the open.

Perhaps the largest spontaneous outburst took place in 1949, in the Polish city of Lublin. It began in the summer, on July 3, when a local nun noticed a change on the face of a Virgin Mary icon in the city’s cathedral. The Madonna—a copy of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa, Poland’s most revered icon—appeared to be weeping. The nun called for a priest. He witnessed the miracle too, and both began to pray. Others followed suit. With astonishing speed—this was before telephones were common—the news of the miraculous weeping virgin spread across the city. By evening, the doors of the cathedral could not be closed because of the size of the crowds.

In the days that followed, the news spread farther and pilgrims from all over Poland began to make their way to the cathedral. Of course, there was no public announcement of the miracle, and the regime did what it could to discourage the faithful. The authorities blocked public transportation into the city and placed policemen along the roads to prevent people from getting there, but to no avail, as one eyewitness remembered:

Eventually, he entered. He saw the face of the Virgin Mary light up. Tears of blood flowed down one of her cheeks. “I believe it was a true miracle,” he wrote.
³⁷

Communist officials were stymied. At first, they kept the story out of the newspapers in the hope that it would go away. But as more and more people came, and as the cathedral square filled up with pilgrims, they changed tactics. On July 10 they launched an “anti-miracle action”: an extra 500 policemen arrived from Warsaw and Łódź, and the newspapers were given the go-ahead to begin a negative propaganda campaign. The pilgrims were described not as “peasants” (a positive word in the communist lexicon) but rather as a “crowd” or “mob” of “country people,” naïve illiterates, even “speculators” or “traders” who could be spotted carrying vodka bottles in the evening. Government authorities solemnly examined the miraculous painting, declared it had been damaged during the war, and said that any apparent markings on the face must be due to humidity. Church leaders, including Cardinal Wyszyński himself, were pressed to declare the miracle false. Fearing that the pilgrims could face terrible repercussions, clergymen told the faithful to go home.

But the faithful kept coming, pitching their tents in front of the cathedral doors. The following Sunday, July 17, the inevitable confrontation took place. Local party leaders organized a demonstration in Litewski Square, in the city center. They denounced “reactionary clerics” through megaphones so powerful they could be heard inside all of the city’s churches. Inside one of them, the Church of the Capuchins, the congregation began to sing a hymn: “We Want God!” As mass came to an end and people poured out onto the streets, arrests began. The churchgoers tried to escape from the town center, but
policemen blocked the side streets and herded them into armored trucks—a scene, one historian remarks, not so different from the street arrests the Nazis had carried out in Lublin a few years earlier. Some remained under arrest for a few hours, some for up to three weeks.
³⁸

By August, the authorities had found a way to fit the event into their overarching narrative. How had it happened that news of the “miracle” had traveled so quickly, even to places hundreds of miles away from Lublin? Who spread this fantastic rumor through the whole country?
Polish radio had the answer: the organizers of the “miracle” in Lublin turned out to be reactionary cliques of clerics, acting in concert with enemies of the Polish nation and the People’s Republic, along with
Voice of America. This, the reporter ominously concluded, was hardly surprising: “Voice of America was very pleased that in Poland people abandoned positive work in the fields, and ordered them to gather in front of the cathedral in indescribable conditions … This was not a manifestation of faith. It was an organized demonstration of medieval fanaticism … for purposes which had nothing to do with religion.”
³⁹