A Freedom for Sharks

Nenad Popović

The situation in which the artists, intellectuals, teachers, authors and philosophers of Eastern and Central Europe have found themselves over the past twenty years is truly paradoxical, but not at all humorous.

While living beneath the grey boot of monotony for almost fifty years, they tried to persist in forward thinking: as avant-gardists, as insubordinate authors, thinkers and teachers at secondary schools and universities. Their attempts to achieve modernity involved hardship: the commitment to change led to blacklisting and often severe punishment. Milovan Djilas and the poet Vlado Gotovac spent long years in prison; many, including the best, were expelled from their biotopes: from Walter Biermann to Hertha Müller, from Ferenz Fejtö to Josif Brodsky.
And then came freedom! Unbelievable scenes at the Hungarian-Austrian border as political leaders cut the barbed wire, the open flight of despots such as Ceausescu, and, most unbelievable of all: thousands of people climbing over the Berlin Wall like happy children.
But the freedom soon turned out to be a freedom for sharks. Nobody asked Hertha Müller to come back to Romania, nobody asked Roman Polanski to continue his work at home. They received their Oscars and their Nobel Prizes as citizens of the USA and Germany – for art and thinking that was often experimental, but above all was intended for their homelands and had been engendered by those homelands.
After 1989, people of another type had a go at big experiments: artists of thievery on a grand scale, virtuosi of unscrupulousness, cynics of power: from the very refined to the folkish, from warmongers to police and control specialists, who meanwhile have become so artful that they pour plutonium into one’s aperitif.
Eastern Europe has not made anything of itself since 1989. Our tasteless elites make us look ridiculous before the entire world, with their jets, their jeeps and their super-yachts the size of medium-sized war ships, with their billions – yes, truly: billions! – in bank accounts in Vienna, Zurich and London, while, if a young cellist from Belgrade, St. Petersburg or Bucharest wants a small scholarship, she can apply to KulturKontakt Austria, or to Pro Helvetia, or the Bosch or Soros Foundations. At any rate – not at home.
The situation is not only outrageous, it is grotesque and disheartening. The freedom of the sharks has deprived Eastern and Central Europe of its oxygen. Our avant-gardists are now seen only in retrospectives or as speakers on festive occasions. Today, the kind of aesthetic dynamite embodied by New Slovenian Art or the subtle subversion of an Ilja Kabakov are things we can only dream about. All of us, not just those of us «down there».