Barker, Peter

English

Bohemia - Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Kultur der böhmischen Länder

Meškank, Timo: Instrumentalisierung einer Kultur. Zur Situation der Sorben 1948-1989.Domowina-Verlag, Bautzen 2014. 275 S., Abb., ISBN 978-3-7420-2300- 1.Timo Meškank is a Sorbian historian who teaches the Sorbian language and contem-porary history at the University of Leipzig. As a student at the Technical Universityof Dresden (1985-89) and the University of Leipzig (1990-96) he experienced the endof the German Democratic Republic and its somewhat painful transformation in thepost-unification period. From 1988 to 1990 he edited a student newspaper, Serbskistudent (Sorbian Student), which published a number of articles critical of the wayin which socialism had developed in the GDR, and as a result he and the newspapercame under close scrutiny from the secret police. He also completed a PhD thesis atthe Humboldt University in 2000 on Czech-Sorbian relations in the inter-warperiod, and spent a year at the Charles University in Prague in 1992-93, which ex-plains the comparative methodology of this book. He compares the role of Czecho-slovak writers and artists under Communism with that of their Sorbian counter-parts, politically and artistically, and presents a more positive view of the Czecho-slovaks.This book, which was originally published in Upper Sorbian in 2011 with the title,Kultura w słužbje totalitarneho režima (Culture in the service of a totalitarianregime), reflects his preoccupation with the discrepancy between the public imageprojected by the Communist government of the GDR of its policy of support forthe Sorbian minority in Upper and Lower Lusatia and his experience of the way inwhich the Sorbian institutions were used by the ruling party, the Socialist UnityParty (SED), from 1948 to 1989, as a conveyor belt (Transmissionsriemen) for theimplementation of their policies. The SED’s version of the Soviet nationalities poli-cy, the institutions which supported it, and the intellectuals and writers who agreedto work within its confines,  provide the major focus of this study. By 1951 the SEDhad taken over political control of the umbrella institution for Sorbian cultural asso-ciations, the Domowina (Homeland), which had been founded in 1912, but wasbanned by the Nazis in 1937. It therefore had to be refounded after 1945 in a periodof intense pressure from the Soviet occupation power and from the political institu-tions created in the Soviet Zone. Meškank is particularly concerned with the rolethat writers and artists played in these institutions from the late 1940s to the collapseof the Communist regime in the autumn of 1989. Underlying this concern is theview that many of those who played leading roles during the Communist periodwere compromised, but they still continued to play a substantial part in the institu-tions after reunification.The story of the development of the Domowina from an institution whichworked for the nationalist cause of the Sorbs to one which became subordinate tothe political demands of the SED has been analysed extensively by other authorssuch as Ludwig Elle, Edmund Pech and Peter Schurmann. What is new aboutMeškank’s book is the emphasis on the role of the cultural and intellectual elite inthis submission to political demands. His analysis of their role is not a positive one,particularly when compared with the part played by their Czechoslovak counter-Bohemia Band 55 (2015)224parts in the fight for ‘socialism with a human face’ in the 1960s. Meškank concen-trates on particular figures: For example Pawoł Nedo, the head of the Domowinauntil its ban in 1937, who then resumed this role after 1945, having joined the KPD,later SED. He portrays Nedo as a nationalist Sorb, who is, however, forced tochoose between his nationalist idealism and his commitment to the Communistcause. In 1950 he gave in to political pressure and ceded his post to the hardlineCommunist, Kurt Krjeńc,  moved into the academic world and eventually became aprofessor at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Meškank believes that Nedo wastypical of Sorbian intellectuals who did not realise that they could not win againstthe political power of the SED, but thought that they could achieve their nationalistaims by compromise. Others were convinced of the Communist cause and were pre-pared to use their writing or art in this cause. The prime example cited by Meškankis Měrćin Nowak-Njechorński, who openly expressed his belief in the primacy ofpolitics over art. He regarded the role of Jurij Brězan, the leading Sorbian novelist ofthe post-war period, as more ambiguous: He started as a convinced socialist andmember of the SED, but at certain points his criticism of the imposition of particu-lar political decisions, which affected the Sorbs negatively, for example the changesin 1964 to the bilingual school system, was expressed openly. His clashes with thefunctionaries in the Domowina caused him to move the centre of his engagement inGDR institutions to Berlin. He also became the first major Sorbian writer to pro-duce bilingual versions of his work. Despite his criticisms of SED policy, Brězancontinued as an SED member until 1989 and as a vice-president of the GDR Writers’Union.Meškank’s criticism is particularly strong of those writers and intellectuals whoagreed to act as informers for the secret police. He sees their motives as varied: aris-ing from conviction, opportunism, or a desire for financial and material gain. Somewho informed on their colleagues and friends in early stages of their careers, laterbecame themselves objects of suspicion and surveillance when they espoused causes,of which the SED did not approve, such as expressing environmental concerns andcriticising the impact of open cast mining in Lusatia on the ethnic substance of theSorbs.Meškank’s conclusion is that the GDR period was a heavy one for the Sorbianminority with adverse effects, which is interesting in that the previous period fromHitler’s accession to power in 1933 to the end of the Second World War was one inwhich the Sorbs were subject to overt oppression. A number of the writers and intel-lectuals, who were later prominent in the GDR, worked underground against theNazis, particularly in Poland. Their experience of Fascism often provided the basisof their commitment to Communism. Meškank’s objection to the GDR’s policy andpractice was that it professed to provide positive support for Sorbian culture, whilstmaintaining the primacy of their political and economic goals. It is true that par-ticular policies, such as the development of open cast mining for lignite, did leaddirectly to the destruction of a large number of Sorbian communities and the reset-tlement of the Sorbian population in predominantly German local towns. Any Sor-bian intellectual or writer who refused to compromise with the political system wasliable to find it difficult to develop and find expression for their work, and at worstRezensionen 225was subject to repressive measures, including imprisonment, although some writers,such as Kito Lorenc, did manage to maintain their political and artistic integrity. Theonly environment where freedom of expression as a general rule was possible waswithin the churches, although the secret police did manage to recruit a number ofinformers in both the Catholic and Protestant churches. Meškank links the nationalities policy to the negative demographic statistics in theGDR period: The number of mother-tongue speakers declined substantially and theoverall area of Sorbian settlement shrank. The GDR government refused to allowthe last comprehensive demographic survey from the mid-1950s to be published, soit is difficult to establish exactly the extent of the decline. Meškank is certainlycorrect in his overall negative assessment of GDR policy towards the Sorbs. What isdifficult to establish is how far a more democratic society would have been able toproduce a more positive outcome, given the difficulties that minority cultures haveexperienced in a variety of political and social contexts since 1945 in their relationswith majority cultures. Meškank provides a negative analysis of the role that Sorbianwriters and intellectuals played in that decline. They were given greater opportuni-ties to publish their work and to be active in Sorbian institutions, but the compro-mises they had to make in the process were, in Meškank’s view, too high. He is alsohighly critical of the Domowina’s submission to political control by the SED,although he does admit that it did give greater priority to cultural and linguisticactivities in the latter part of the GDR, which led to a rise in its membership.London Peter Barker Haas, Susan D.: Communities of Journalists and Journalism Practice at Radio FreeEurope during the Cold War (1950-1995).Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations, Paper 869 (2013), URL http://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/869This University of Pennsylvania dissertation (262 pages) is available free of chargeby download. The reviewer, who spent more than 25 years in senior positions withthe American external radio stations in Munich, would like to compliment theauthor for her thorough grasp and interpretation of the complicated structure andfunctioning of the multinational broadcasting organization, which was one of thevery few genuinely successful Western external radio broadcasters during the ColdWar. In many respects the dissertation is also a useful supplement to the monographspublished by former RFE directors A. Ross Johnson (2010) and the late James F.Brown (2013), as well as to the history of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty by ArchPuddington (2000).1Ms. Haas, a former journalist who currently teaches at the University of Pennsyl-vania, spent several years interviewing approximately one hundred former employ-Bohemia Band 55 (2015)2261 Johnson, A. Ross: Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. The CIA Years and Beyond.Stanford 2010. – Brown, J. F.: Radio Free Europe: An Insider’s View. 2013. Washing-ton/D.C., 2013. – Puddington, Arch: Broadcasting Freedom: the Cold War Triumph ofRadio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Lexington, Kentucky 2000.

Meškank, Timo: Instrumentalisierung einer Kultur. Zur Situation der Sorben 1948–1989

https://www.bohemia-online.de/index.php/bohemia/article/download/7927/12194

Meškank, Timo: Instrumentalisierung einer Kultur. Zur Situation der Sorben 1948–1989

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Bohemia - Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Kultur der böhmischen Länder