Читать книгу Diversity in the East-Central European Borderlands - Группа авторов - Страница 8

In the 2000s, an interesting trend emerged in Wrocław, Lviv, Chernivtsi, and Chişinău. All of a sudden, small anthropomorphic statues and other decorative objects hinting at human presence popped up in the streets and squares. Wrocław is presently famous for its bronze dwarves, whose number since the installation of the first Daddy Dwarf in 2001 has exceeded 100. What on first impression looks like an extravagant branding gimmick, is actually a reference to the Orange Alternative, an anti-communist underground movement that claimed the dwarf as its symbol in the 1980s. On the other side of Poland’s eastern border, in Lviv, tourists take pictures of funny batiaryky. These bronze figurines popping up along tourist routes in the downtown area allude to the pre-war subculture of batiary, “lovable rogues” immortalized in the local folklore. In the landscape of the western Ukrainian city, batiary evoke the myth of Polish Lwów, exciting and perilous at one and the same time. In Chernivtsi, yet another western Ukrainian city with a complicated history, several objects that disrupt the conventional understanding of public monumental art can be seen in the downtown area. One of these is a bronze horse carriage alluding to the fin de siècle, metropolitan elegance, and European fashion. Another is the antique bicycle with a huge front wheel, as if casually left by its owner at a plaza with the evocative name “Turkish Well.” These two installations arouse the mixed feelings of amusement and melancholy which usually accompany abandoned status objects that no longer have utility in present-day life. In the capital of Moldova, one may see another interesting “urban hieroglyph.” An illuminated shield at the entrance to a hip restaurant is decorated with a portrait of a bearded middle-aged man. The inscription below reads “Karl Schmidt.” Evidently, owners of the venue decided to put their business on the map by referring to a legendary mayor of Chişinău that was then part of the Russian empire. From time to time one also comes across non-monumental visual references to the pre-war Jews. However, like the Jewish restaurant “Under the Golden Rose” in Lviv and figurines of “lucky Jews” on sale in Polish cities,5 they follow the same logic of pop-cultural presentation that elevates stereotypic features and uncomplicated narratives.

Despite obvious differences between these post-socialist cityscapes, a knowledgeable observer may detect their common ambience. Wrocław, Chernivtsi, Lviv, and Chişinău have traditionally been hubs of the historical borderland regions of Silesia, Bukovina, Galicia, and Bessarabia, proverbial for their motley populations and patchworks of languages and religions. In turn, this also implied that from being sites of seemingly harmonious co-existence and cultural exchange, they periodically became arenas for interethnic conflict and brutal violence. The contemporary urge to “re-populate” their urban nooks and crannies might be interpreted in more general terms as an effort aimed at the re-scaling, de-monumentalization, and individualization of the cityscapes that still bear traces of socialist/Soviet grand mythologies. At the same time, this is also a remarkable act of civic magic triggered by reactions to the EU and NATO enlargements, the settling of scores with “two totalitarianisms,” and fears linked to mass migration. This magical act highlights a perceived absence of human beings lost in the historical cataclysms and, consequently, emulates a presence of friendly, benevolent, and desirable “others.” One may continue this line of argument by evoking the apt metaphor of ghosts and spirits of memory suggested by Aleida Assmann (2011: 1–5).6 In places and times of existential and political insecurity people summon benevolent “spirits,” or positively colored presentations of bygone times, in an effort to withstand the scary “ghosts” of an unburied past. Under such circumstances, the cute figurines and images serve as public amulets conveying a comforting aura of innocence and wellbeing.

Meanwhile, symbolic “re-populations” of the urban space might also be propelled by a different logic. It seems that in cities profoundly shaped by legacies of expulsions, ethnic violence, and the Holocaust, there is a need to “camouflage the wounds of failed diversity” (Czaplicka, Ruble, and Crabtree 2003: 17) or, in Kenneth E. Foote’s terminology (2003), to “rectify” places of memory that for some people are still associated with disturbing experiences of injustice, loss, and crime. The latter treatment presupposes a partial and selective erasure of the traces of a disaster; in effect the place may become unarticulated and bereft of meaning, as “[n]o sense of honor or dishonor remains attached to the site; it is, so to speak, exonerated of involvement in the tragedy” (ibid.: 23). Resistance to rectification may come from different groups, including both representatives of the displaced urban communities, and local activists insisting on acknowledgement of the original sites of memory. Nevertheless, there is no guarantee that rectification will morph into the next phases, i.e. “consecration” and “sanctification” of memorable sites and establishment of healing commemorative practices (ibid.: 7–10).

Oftentimes, to describe the fragmentary and multilayered quality of the cityscapes that withstood historical cataclysms and massive human loss, one uses the metaphor of palimpsest. Like any trope, however, it has its conceptual limitations (Huyssen 2003: 7; Silverman 2013: 3–8). The image of a palimpsest visualizes the possibility of retrieving some undamaged authentic layers exposed through breaches of the recent overwritings and re-dressings. Yet such retrieval is hardly possible in places where the whole demographic structure and economic organization were obliterated while material structures remained practically intact. Under such circumstances, it makes sense to talk about voids—symbolic, epistemological, emotional—which are palpable and which the present-day residents of these cities try to patch up. Voids are not merely omissions that still presuppose the ability of the living population to “decode” and partially retrieve the urban text. They are rather “the multiple of nothing” (Bowden and Duffy 2012: 46), brought about by the paucity of information available for the urban explorer, by her emotional detachment from the collective past, and by the complexity of the loss that resists coherent representation. Perceived voids in the texture of the cityscapes produce disturbing voids of meaning which today’s residents are tempted to fill in by inscribing them into “a bigger whole of being, a deity, a state, a nation, or the impersonal authority of the law” (Wydra 2015: 25). Such appropriation unavoidably disassembles the articulated “places of memory” associated with the “others” and substitutes them with “memories of place” projected by the present-day urbanites (Truc 2012).

The shapes and content of the urban milieus discussed in this book derive from combinations of cultural continuities and political ruptures, “representations of space” conceived by the elites, “representational spaces” of inhabitants and users (Lefebvre 1991: 3–50), present-day heritage industries, and individual efforts to make sense of the contentious past. Gaping voids that interlock collective memories with built environments and their symbolic re-mediations, are profoundly political. They disrupt the imagined consistency of the urban landscape, they provoke efforts of interpretation and, subsequently, trigger competition and conflict among social actors coming up with their own, more or less articulated versions of the past (Dwyer and Alderman 2008: 171). Paradoxically, instead of filling the gaps, the practice of ornamenting the public spaces with fairy-tale entities, legendary figures, and melancholic artefacts oftentimes makes urban voids even more obvious.