Requiem for Communism

In Requiem for Communism Charity Scribner examines the politics of memory inpostindustrial literature and art. Writers and artists from Europe's second world have responded tothe last socialist crisis with works that range from sober description to melancholic fixation. Thisbook is the first survey of this cultural field.Today, as the cultures of Eastern and Western Europemerge into the Infobahn of late capitalism, the second world is being left behind. The EuropeanUnion has pronounced obsolete the structures that once defined and linked industrial cities fromManchester to Karl-Marx-Stadt--the decaying factories and working collectives, the wasted ideals ofstate socialism and the welfare state. Marxist exponents of global empire see this historical turnas an occasion to eulogize "the lightness and joy of being communist." But for many writers andartists on the left, the fallout of the last century's socialist crisis calls for an elegy. Thisregret has prompted a proliferation of literary texts and artworks, as well as a boom in museumexhibitions that race to curate the wreckage of socialism and its industrial remnants. The best ofthese works do not take us back to the factory. Rather they look for something to take out of it:the intractable moments of solidarity among men and women that did not square with the market or theplan.Requiem for Communism explores a selection of signal works. They include John Berger?snarrative trilogy Into Their Labors; Documenta, the German platform for contemporary art and ideas;Krzysztof Kieslowski's cinema of mourning and Andrzej Wajda's filmed chronicles of the Solidaritymovement; the art of Joseph Beuys and Rachel Whiteread; the novels of Christa Wolf; and LeslieKaplan's antinostalgic memoir of women's material labor in France. Sorting among the ruins of thesecond world, the critical minds of contemporary Europe aim to salvage both the remains of socialistideals and the latent feminist potential that attended them.