Creating Post-Marxism Across the Iron Curtain:

Alternative Political Thought in Central Europe after 1968

 

Rationale

 

The course intends to explore the creation of a new, post-Marxist left-wing politics after 1968 by focusing on West Germany, East Germany, Austria, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The fate of West German student activism, the Prague Spring, and the March Days in Poland in the heady days of 1968 showed that, while the preceding decade of domestic calm could be broken, systemic change could not be achieved within the Marxist paradigm. No longer was the language of Marxism a living body of ideas that could create a viable platform for substantive social change in Europe. With the benefit of hindsight, it became clear over the ensuing years that a new conceptual foundation for alternative political thought had to be created. This foundation had to be able to nourish a critique of bourgeois society (for Austrian and West German intellectuals) and socialist society (for intellectuals in the East) in the new, post-Marxist era, and simultaneously it had to serve as a bridge to the wider society. The following decades proved that creating an alternative political language would not be easy. What began to emerge in the late 1970s was, however, less a coherent and comprehensive ideology of opposition in Central Europe than a set of themes and issues that found embodiment in a set of loose organizations. What they shared was a new political language, one that fundamentally accepted the premises of liberalism rather than Marxian socialism. The exploration of the themes and issues central to this conception of liberalism, and the organizations that embodied them, will constitute the subject matter of the bulk of the course, which is largely divided between an exploration of the organizations and the thought of their leading representatives on the one hand, and the themes that they shared across the Iron Curtain on the other.

After examining the roots and failure of 1968, and looking at the immediate responses to the disappointments of that year, we will take as our point of departure the Helsinki Accords of 1975. Drawing on the language of rights articulated in the Accords’ Final Act, the Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR) was founded in Poland in 1976 and Charter 77 came into being in Czechoslovakia in 1977, followed a year later by The Committee to Defend the Unjustly Persecuted (VONS). These movements – and Solidarity (which showed the necessity of intellectual/worker cohesion for success) in their wake – aimed not to replace the communist parties but to establish a sphere of autonomous action often referred to as “civil society.” At the same moment in postwar history, the Green movement coalesced in West Germany, both expressing a similar autonomous, anti-institutional and “anti-political” politics, and concerning itself not just with the problem of the environment but also with those of minority and women’s rights. By the early 1980s, they were joined by loosely organized intellectual dissenters in Austria (two, later allied as one, Green parties), the German Democratic Republic (within the Freidensdekaden (Peace Weeks) and the Kirchliche Forschungsheim Wittenberg) and Hungary (in the Foundation for the Support of the Poor (SZETA) and the Danube Circle). These movements and the ideas of their spokespeople will form the foundation of the course.

Thematically, there were many ideas that these organizations shared, but we will focus on only five of them. Given the concerns of the course as a whole, the importance of the rediscovery of Central Europe is self-evident. In essence, the whole course will argue that, in intellectual terms, there was a Central Europe at least between the late 1970s and late 1980s, regardless of whether it existed over the longue durée for cultural, economic, geographic or topographic reasons. A second theme will be the discussion of peace and disarmament. Although official and unofficial meditations on the division of Europe and the danger of nuclear conflagration were a recurring theme throughout the years of the Cold War, the NATO decision to station nuclear weapons in West Germany, taken in 1979, provided the spark for renewed discussion. Our third theme will be rights: human, minority and women’s rights in particular. As noted above, the Helsinki Accords can be seen as a crucial turning point in the process of creating an alternative political vision for Central European intellectuals East and West. The ratification of the “Third Basket” of agreements, concerning human rights, provided alternative thinkers with a new language, the language of rights. This language was a perhaps uniquely flexible one, one that did not necessarily imply a single political orientation or world-view, making it an inclusive language that could bring together (in the East) ex-communists and non-communist, and (in the West) leftists and moderates of all stripes whose unity had been fractured by the events of the early 1970s. Fourthly, the resurgence of issues of history, and especially those concerning the long shadow of the Second World War, will be an issue. Whether in the West German Historikerstreit, the Czechoslovak dissidents’ debate over the expulsion of the Germans, or the “Waldheim Affair,” the persistence of questions about moral culpability and the relationship between the war and contemporary politics had surprising potency. Finally, the environmental degradation of Central European air, forests and rivers also became a central topic with which regional dissident thinkers could both reach out to broader constituencies and point out the insufficiencies of their governments, especially as the extent of the devastation became more widely known.

 

Reading List

 

19 January. Introduction.

 

26 January. One Example of the Subject of this Course, While We Get Books.

Paul Berman. “From the Radicalism of the '60s to the Interventionism of the '90s. The Passion of Joschka Fischer.” The New Republic (27 August, 2001). Available online at: www.tnr.com/082701/berman082701_print.html.

 

2 February. Where Did 1968 Come From?

Arthur Marwick. The Sixties. Oxford: OUP, 1998. 3-25, 36-8.

Walter Laqueur. Europe in Our Time. NY: Penguin, 1992. 205-7, 231-78. You should skim from page 167, if your grasp of postwar, pre-1960s European developments is not so strong.

Donald Sassoon. One Hundred Years of Socialism. NY: New Press, 1996. Skim 241-355, paying particular attention to developments in the BRD and especially Austria.

Vladimir Tismaneanu. Reinventing Politics. New York: Free Press, 1992. 39-87.

Vladimir Tismaneanu. The Crisis of Marxist Ideology in Eastern Europe. London/NY: Routledge, 1988. 77-126.

Joseph Rothschild. Return to Diversity. Oxford/NY: OUP, 1993 is a good overview of Eastern European developments, if you need more information.

John Torpey. Intellectuals, Socialism and Dissent. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota, 1995. 13-59.

Klaus Larres and Panikos Panati, eds. The Federal Republic of Germany Since 1949. London/NY: Longman, 1996. 79-99.

 

9 February. 1968 East and West.

Carole Fink, Philipp Gassert and Detlef Junker, eds. 1968: The World Transformed. Cambridge: CUP, 1998. Introduction.

Arthur Marwick. “‘1968’ and the Cultural Revolution of the Long Sixties (c.1958-c.1974)” and Paulina Bren. “1968 East and West: Visions of Political Change and Student Protest from Across the Iron Curtain.” In: Gerd-Ranier Horn and Padraic Kenney, eds. Transnational Moments of Change: Europe 1945, 1968, 1989. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. and 81-94 and 119-35.

“The New Left as a World-Historical Movement.” Chapter 1 of George Katsiaficas. The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of the New Left. Boston: South end Press, 1987. 3-27.

Jeremi Suny. Power and Protest. Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP. Read only 164-6 and 211-2 for a thesis on the ties between domestic developments and détente.

For the German Speakers, a bonus: Etienne François. “Annährungsversuche an ein außergewöhnliches Jahr,” Immanuel Wallerstein. “1968 – Revolution im Weltsystem,” Wolfgang Engler. “Konträr und parallel: 19668 im Osten. Thesen.” In: Etienne François, et al., eds. 1968 – ein europäisches Jahr. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 1997. 11-33, 105-9.

Look over the relevant sections in Rothschild for background on Poland and Czechoslovakia.

Jerzy Eisler. “March 1968 in Poland.” In: Fink, et al., above. 237-51.

Claus Leggewie. “A Laboratory of Postindustrial Society: Reassessing the 1960s in Germany.” In Fink, et al., above. 277-94.

Stuart Hilwig. “The Revolt Against the Establishment: Students Versus the Press in West Germany and Italy.” In Fink, et al, above. Only pages on West Germany and conclusions, 321-35, 346-9.

“Domestic Policy in the Era of the New Left.” Chapter 5 of Dennis Bark and David Gress. Democracy and Its Discontents. A History of West Germany, volume 2. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1993. 113-36.

Skim through “The Action Program of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia,” and the Italian and French Communist Party responses in Robin Alison Remington, ed. Winter in Prague. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969. 88-136, 331-4.

“Liberalization.” Chapter 1 of Kieran Williams. The Prague Spring and Its Aftermath. Cambridge: CUP, 1997. 3-28.

“Reform, Revolution, or Counterrevolution?” Conclusion of H. Gordon Skilling. The Interrupted Revolution. Princeton: PUP, 1976. 824-52.

Ivan Sviták. “The Abysses of Reformed Communism.” In: The Unbearable Burden of History. Volume 2: Prague Spring Revisited. 155-75. (Photocopied in 1201.)

Adam Michnik. “The Prague Spring Ten Years Later.” In: Letters from Prison and Other Essays. Berkeley: UCP, 1985, 155-9. (Photocopied in 1201.)

Jean-Paul Sartre. “The Socialism That Came In from the Cold.” Foreword to Antonín Liehm. The Politics of Culture. New York: Grove Press, 1973. Only pages 33-7 (you can read the rest if you want.)

 

 

16 February. The Left in the Wilderness.

Walter Laqueur. A Continent Astray: Europe 1970-1978 (Oxford/NY: Oxford UP, 1979). Skim for general European developments and especially Germany and Austria.

Paul Hollander. Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998). Chapters 5-7.

Rodolf Tökés, ed. Opposition in Eastern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1979). Look at parts up to 1975/7 in chapters 2-5.

 

23 February. Helsinki and Its Consequences.

Daniel C. Thomas. The Helsinki Effect (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992).

 

2 March. Charter 77 and Dissent in Czechoslovakia.

Sections on Czechoslovakia in Barbara Falk. The Dilemmas of Dissidence in East-Central Europe (Budapest: CEU Press, 2003)

Václav Havel. “The Power of the Powerless.” In John Keane, ed. The Power of the Powerless (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1986). (Photocopied in 1201)

 

9 March. KOR and Dissent in Poland.

Sections on Poland in Falk.

Adam Michnik. Letters from Prison (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). 3-63, 76-99, 135-98.

Piotr Wierzbicki. “A Treatise on Ticks.” In: Abraham Brumberg, ed. Poland: Genesis of a Revolution (NY: Vintage, 1983). 199-211. (Photocopy in 1201)

Adam Michnik. “Anti-authoritarian Revolt. A Conversation with Daniel Cohn-Bendit.” Chapter 3 of his Letters From Freedom. Berkeley: UC Press, 1998. 29-67.

 

16 March. Spring Break.

 

23 March. Dissent in Hungary.

Sections on Hungary in Falk.

Gyorgy Konrád. Antipolitics (San Diego: HBJ, 1984). 1-24, 31-8, 50-65, 75-82, 91-8, 104-76, 195-243.

 

30 March. The German Greens.

Programme of the German Green Party (London : Heretic Books, 1983). Skim, but closely in parts.

Margit Mayer and John Ely. The German Greens (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1998). Trans. By Michael Schatzschneider. 29-48.

Eva Kolinsky, ed. The Greens in West Germany (Oxford: Berg 1989). Skim 89-158.

Rudolf Bahro. From Red to Green (London: Verso, 1984). 211-38. (Also recommended, skimming his The Alternative in Eastern Europe, and, if you do this, you might be interested in pages 59-93 of From Red to Green, which deal with this book and its consequences.)

Petra Kelly. Nonviolence Speaks to Power (Honolulu: Center for Global Nonviolence Planning Project, Spark M. Matsunaga Institute for Peace of the University of Hawaii, 1992). 15-28, 53-78.

Petra Kelly. Thinking Green! (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1994). 3-88.

 

6 April. Issues I: Peace and Disarmament.

First paper due by 4 April.

 

13 April: Issues II: Rights (especially Human, Women, Minority and National).

Second Paper due by 11 April.

 

20 April: Issues III: The Environment.

Third paper due by 18 April.

           

27 April: Issues IV: The Revenge of History

Fourth paper due by 25 April.

 

4 May: Special Reading Week Meeting on the Central Europe Debate.

Bradley Abrams. “Historicizing the Ahistorical.”

Milan Kundera. “A Kidnapped West, or Culture Bows Out.” Granta 11 (1984) 95-118.

George Schöpflin. “Central Europe: Definitions Old and New,” Czeslaw Milosz. “Central European Attitudes,” George Schöpflin and Nancy Wood. “Milan Kundera’s Lament,” Milan Simecka. “Another Civilization? An Other Civilization?” Mihály Vajda. “Who Excluded Russia From Europe? (A Reply to Simecka)” Milan Simecka. “Which Way Back to Europe? (A Reply to Mihály Vajda)” and Timothy Garton Ash. “Does Central Europe Exist?” In: George Schöpflin and Nancy Wood, eds. In Search of Central Europe. Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1989. 7-29, 116-24, 138-42, 157-62, 168-82, 191-215.

Jacques Rupnik. “Central Europe or Mitteleuropa.” In: Eastern Europe…Central Europe…Europe. Daedalus. Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 119 (Winter 1990). 249-78.

Iver B. Neumann. “Russia as Central Europe’s Constituting Other.” East European Politics and Societies 7 (Spring 1993) 349-69.

 

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