The Inhabited Ruins of Central Europe

The Inhabited Ruins of Central Europe

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The Inhabited Ruins of Central Europe Re-imagining Space, History, and Memory Edited by Dariusz Gafijczuk University College London and Derek Sayer Lancaster University

Editorial matter, selection, prologue, introduction and chapters 7 & 8 Dariusz Gafijczuk and Derek Sayer 2013 Remaining chapters Respective authors 2013 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-30585-5 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6 10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries ISBN 978-1-349-45494-5 ISBN 978-1-137-30586-2 (ebook) DOI 10.1057/9781137305862 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors vii viii ix Prologue: The Day the Wall Came Down (American Surreal) 1 Derek Sayer Introduction: Delicate Empiricism 9 Dariusz Gafijczuk 1 Ruins and Representations of 1989: Exception, Normality, Revolution 16 Tim Beasley-Murray 2 The Ruins of a Myth or a Myth in Ruins? Freedom and Cohabitation in Central Europe 40 Paul Blokker 3 Democracy in Ruins: The Case of the Hungarian Parliament 55 Endre Dányi 4 Itinerant Memory Places: The Baader-Meinhof-Wagen 79 Kimberly Mair 5 Edith Doesn t Live Here Anymore: A Story of Farnsworth House 102 Yoke-Sum Wong 6 Fake Fragments, Fake Ruins, and Genuine Paper Ruination 134 Jindřich Toman 7 How We Remember and What We Forget: Art History and the Czech Avant-garde 148 Derek Sayer 8 Anxious Geographies Inhabited Traditions 178 Dariusz Gafijczuk v

vi Contents 9 Terezín as Reverse Potemkin Ruin, in Five Movements and an Epilogue 194 Michael Beckerman 10 Desert Europa and the Sea of Ruins: The Post-Apocalyptic Imagination in Egon Bondy s Afghanistan 205 Jonathan Bolton 11 History s Loose Ends: Imagining the Velvet Revolution 227 Peter Zusi Index 247

List of Figures 1.1 Grzegorz Klaman Tectonics 35 1.2 Grzegorz Klaman Tectonics 36 3.1 A cultural heritage site or an inhabited ruin? 56 3.2 Continuity since 1000 the Holy Crown and the regalia in the Parliament s Cupola Hall 59 3.3 Continuity since the 1848 revolution the Parliamentary Collection of the Library of the National Assembly 66 3.4 Continuity since the 1848 revolution the Parliamentary Collection of the Library of the National Assembly 67 3.5 Continuity since 1956 and 1989 commemorative banner above the main entrance of the Hungarian Parliament, next to Imre Nagy s balcony 73 4.1 Photograph of Wall fragment 94 5.1 Farnsworth 1 102 5.2 Farnsworth 2 105 5.3 Tugendhat 1 109 5.4 Farnsworth 3 111 5.5 Farnsworth 4 113 5.6 Farnsworth 5 114 5.7 Tugendhat 2 117 5.8 Farnsworth 6 128 vii

Acknowledgments We are grateful for the generous support of the British Academy and the Royal Society who sponsored the Newton International Fellowship, without which the conference that led to this publication would not have been possible. In addition, we would like to thank all the participants who came that May to Lancaster University, some of whom are not represented in this volume. viii

Notes on Contributors Tim Beasley-Murray is Senior Lecturer in European Thought and Culture at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. He is the author of Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjamin: Experience and Form (2007). The essay in this volume is related to a larger project on the relationship between silence and speech. Michael Beckerman is a scholar, lecturer, and educator. He has published several books, including Janáček as Theorist (1993), New Worlds of Dvořák (2003), Janáček and His World (2003), and Martinů s Mysterious Accident (2007) and has written articles on such topics as Beethoven, Schubert, Vaughan Williams, Gypsy music, Mozart, Gilbert and Sullivan, Salamone Rossi, film scores, and Slavic history. He is presently working on issues ranging from musical form ( The Strange Landscape of Middles, Oxford University Press; The Castle in the Middle of Janáček s Sinfonietta ) to exile ( The Dark Blue Exile of Jaroslav Ježek, Music and Politics online; Ježek, Zeisl, Améry and The Exile in the Middle, Music and Displacement ) and is completing a book and documentary about the last composition written in the Terezín concentration camp by Gideon Klein. A frequent contributor to The New York Times, he has appeared many times on PBS s Live from Lincoln Center and is regularly featured on radio programs and lectures throughout North America, Europe, and Asia. He was awarded the Janáček Medal from the Czech Ministry of Culture, is a laureate of the Czech Music Council and has twice received the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for his work on Dvořák. He has been Vice-President of the American Musicological Society and was a co-founder of the OREL Foundation. He is currently Carroll and Milton Professor of Music, collegiate professor, and chair of the Department of Music at New York University. He was recently named Distinguished Professor of History at Lancaster University. Paul Blokker is principle investigator in the research unit Constitutional Politics in Post-Westphalian Europe (CoPolis) in the department of Sociology, University of Trento, Italy. His current research is on constitutionalisms, multiple democracies, dissent, and democratic participation. He is a member of the International Editorial Board of the European Journal of Social Theory. Recent publications ix

x Notes on Contributors include: New Democracies in Crisis? A Comparative Constitutional Study of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Romania (forthcoming); guest editor with Robert Brier, special issue on Democracy after 1989: Re-examining the History, Impact, and Legacy of Dissidence, East European Politics and Societies, 2009; Multiple Democracies in Europe: Political Culture in New Member States. Jonathan Bolton is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, where he teaches Czech and Central European literature and history. He is the author of Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77; The Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture under Communism (2012). He also edited and translated In the Puppet Gardens: Selected Poems, 1963 2005 (2007) by the Czech poet Ivan Wernisch, and has published articles on Czech modernism, contemporary Czech writers, and literary theory. Endre Dányi is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Department of Sociology at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. He completed his PhD at the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University in 2012. Inspired by science and technology studies and historical sociology, his doctoral research was a material-semiotic analysis of liberal democracy through the Hungarian parliament building. His main research interests include the places and material practices of democratic politics and the ways in which such places and practices define what it is to be political in a liberal democracy. Dariusz Gafijczuk is currently teaching and researching at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. His work has been published in such leading journals as History & Theory, Common Knowledge, and Theory, Culture & Society, spanning interests in the fields of history, social theory, and historiography. These are explored in his new book Identity, Aesthetics and Sound in the Fin de Siècle: Redesigning Perception (2013). Kimberly Mair is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Lethbridge, Canada. Her research is concerned with the aesthetics of communication, inter-sensoriality, and memory. Derek Sayer is Professor of Cultural History at Lancaster University and Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta, where he held a Canada Research Chair in Social Theory and Cultural Studies. His books include The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (with Philip

Notes on Contributors xi Corrigan, 1985); Capitalism and Modernity (1990); The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History (1998); and Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History (2013). His writings have been translated into Spanish, French, Polish, Turkish, and Japanese. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a founding editor of the Journal of Historical Sociology. Jindřich Toman was educated in Czechoslovakia, Germany, and the United State. He follows an academic path defined by the languages and cultures of Central Europe. His recent research has been situated at the interfaces of cultural history and visual culture, with topics including modernist book design and the history of photomontage ( Czech Cubism and the Book, 2004 ; Photo/Montage in Print, 2009). He has also co-curated several exhibitions, including Jindřich Heisler: Surrealism Under Pressure (with Matthew Witkovsky; Art Institute of Chicago, 2012). Yoke-Sum Wong is Lecturer in History at Lancaster University, UK. She has written on aesthetics and architecture in Singapore and Japan, and has had a long interest in domestic everyday architecture as the space where modernism and kitsch collide. Her work previously appeared in such journals as Common Knowledge and Environment and Planning A. She also edits the Journal of Historical Sociology. Peter Zusi teaches at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. He has published numerous articles on Czech and German literature and culture, as well as on modernism more generally. He is currently writing a book on Kafka and Czech modernism, and his most recent publication is Vanishing Points: Walter Benjamin and Karel Teige on the Liquidations of Aura, Modern Language Review 108 (2) (2013), 368 95.