National Post (National Edition)
Eastern Europe’s dance-hall REVOLUTIONARIES
During the Cold War, disaffected youth in communist countries couldn’t speak out — but they sure could dance
The Lionel Gelber Prize is a literary award for the world’s best non-fiction book in English on foreign affairs. It was founded in 1989 in the memory of Canadian diplomat Lionel Gelber. A prize of $15,000 is presented annually by The Lionel Gelber Foundation, in partnership with Foreign Policy magazine and the Munk School of Global Affairs. This week, the National Post is excerpting all five nominated books. The winner will be announced on March 25, and will deliver a public lecture at the Vivian and David Campbell Conference Facility at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto, on April 15.
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PA RT S of the entries were deemed sufficiently progressive. As the new “Dance Commission” of the Central Committee complained, much of the work submitted was based on unprogressive, uneducational themes such as sentimental love, nostalgia or pure escapism. One song about Hawaii, the committee declared, could just as well be set in Lübeck.
Most of the time, young East Germans responded to this sort of thing with howls of laughter. Some bands openly mocked letters they had received from party officials and read them aloud to audiences. Others simply flouted the rules. One shocked official wrote a report describing the “wild cascades of sound at high volume” and the “wild bodily dislocations” he’d observed at one concert. Inevitably, there were escapes as well. One band, dismissed by the authorities as a “propagandist for American unculture” caused a sensation by fleeing to the West and then immediately beaming its music back into East Berlin on RIAS.
In the end, the authorities never did find a solution to the “problems” of Western music and youth fashion, not in the 1950s and not later. If anything, both became even more alluring after the first, sensational recording of Rock Around the
reached the East in 1956, heralding the arrival of rock and roll. But by that time, the communist regimes had stopped fighting. The battle against Western pop culture was fought and lost in East Germany even before the Berlin Wall was built — and everywhere else, too.