Orphans of the East

Postwar Eastern European Cinema and the Revolutionary Subject

Constantin Parvulescu

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780253017659
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

An analysis of films produced in post-World War II Eastern Europe featuring the trope of the orphan, and the issues these characters addressed. Unlike the benevolent orphan found in Charlie Chaplin's The Kid or the sentimentalized figure of Little Orphan Annie, the orphan in postwar Eastern European cinema takes on a more politically fraught role, embodying the tensions of individuals struggling to recover from war and grappling with an unknown future under Soviet rule. By exploring films produced in postwar Hungary, the German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Poland, Constantin Parvulescu traces the way in which cinema envisioned and debated the condition of the post-World War II subject and the "new man" of Soviet-style communism. In these films, the orphan becomes a cinematic trope that interrogates socialist visions of ideological institutionalization and re-education and stands as a silent critic of the system's shortcomings or as a resilient spirit who has resisted capture by the political apparatus of the new state. "By using the trope of an orphan Constantin Parvulescu demonstrates how films made in countries such as Hungary, East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania reflected on the specific problems affecting Eastern Europe after 1945, such as the loss of population, economic backwardness, the legacy of the Holocaust, while engaging in wider debates, especially the superiority of socialism over capitalism. Economically and elegantly written, it demonstrates that cinema produced in the periphery can be central to our understanding of films as ideological tools. This is one of the best books on Eastern European cinema ever written." —Ewa Mazierska, University of Central Lancashire "Groundbreaking.... The author's comparative, transnational perspective in chapters devoted to close textual analyses of each narrative demonstrates the value of reading film as a primary source for understanding the relationships among state power, intergenerational trauma, and revolutionary subjectivity. Parvulescu's highly original portrayal of a landscape of parentless children evokes the trauma of war and the specificity of the socialist experiment in the former Eastern Bloc." —Catherine Portuges, University of Massachusetts-Amherst "Parvulescu has taken a highly innovative approach to socialist and post-socialist cinema in the region, and one that is vividly illustrated by a superb selection of films." — Studies in European Cinema

1Creatures of the Event

Subject Production in the Reconstruction Era

The unconscious is an orphan and produces within itself the identity of nature of man.

—Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

The Postwar Desert

At the end of World War II, most of Eastern and Central Europe was in ruins. Prague had been spared Allied bombing, but not Budapest; and Berlin and Warsaw were both mazes of rubble. War had been fought on their streets. Even Bucharest had been hit. The images of the collapsed Danube bridges of Budapest have become a staple element of the Hungarian collective memory. Photographs of postwar Warsaw and Berlin are even more disturbing. They present eerie urban landscapes, with entire neighborhoods consisting of hollow buildings. Everywhere uninhabitable houses, lacking roofs and windows, stories and staircases. The streets overflow with debris and are blocked by burned vehicles. Any of the still-standing facades might collapse. Landmark buildings and squares have become unrecognizable, and even the German Reichstag seems to stand only for the purpose of having a Soviet soldier place the flag of Eastern Europe’s new rulers on it.

The human landscape looks similar. Cities are deserted. The few men and women appearing in pictures of the rubble era seem to wander, puzzled and aimless, in the post-apocalyptic landscape. Most images are not representations of despair or horror. They don’t present the Warsaw Ghetto, which during its days of maximum occupancy had corpses lying on the streets. Resignation is the prevalent postwar mood. People’s presence in the bombed city seems to be as useless as that of the buildings that still stand. Ruined lives among ruined dwellings. The rags they wear and their slim bodies match the decor. Some rummage in the debris for scrap; others just pose for the camera, contemplating together with those who take the pictures the strangeness of the architectural remnants. In an uncanny way, their presentation and their body language reminds the viewer of today of other images of hopelessness. The precariat of the third world comes to mind, atop the garbage mounds of twenty-first-century metropolises—maybe even more hopeless-looking than the Europeans of 1945.

A famous photograph of the rubble era shows a skinny Warsaw boy siting pensively on a pile of debris. Many similar images survive from then—children alone in front of an imploded building. Their young flesh, recently emerged into the world, contrasting with the crumbling scenery. While looking at the image of the boy, viewers might ask themselves what his story is. Where does he come from? Is he on his way somewhere? It seems like a warm day; he wears shorts, keeps a hand on one of his knees, and stares into the ground. What does he feel or think? Is there a connection between him and the collapsed building in the background? Does his family lie dead under the wreckage? Or is he just resting, hungry, tired, disappointed, or lost?

Perhaps he has no purpose. He is neither tired nor sad. He thinks of nothing, feels nothing; just stares into the ground with the sleepiness of the undernourished. Perhaps he just waits for something to happen, which was a widespread attitude of everyday men and women of 1945. War had brought into the realm of the everyday not only death, suffering, hunger, and exhaustion, but also disorientation, lack of perspective, and idleness. After taking in the staggering landscape of destruction which marks the conclusion of the war—a perceptive experience that reminds one of overwhelming exposure to the sublime—the postwar subjects, like the boy in the picture, lower their heads. Theorists of the sublime argue that the hugeness and the overpowering effect of the object of contemplation shatter the inner cohesion of the subject. The positive outcome of such an inner commotion is, Immanuel Kant argues, a rediscovery of oneself, as self, for and with oneself—and the viewer can speculate that the pensive pose of the Warsaw boy catches exactly this process of self-reconstitution. The negative aspects are two. One is the disintegration of the self in a post-traumatic scenario, which will generate social recklessness; the other is resignation and deep skepticism, the sources of existential powerlessness and passivity.

The same experience of 1945 bafflement, about how confusing the last months of war and the first months of peace were, is presented in Primo Levi’s novel The Truce (La tregua; published in the United States as The Reawakening), and in its brilliant 1977 screen adaptation by Francesco Rosi. Their protagonist is an Auschwitz survivor (assumed to be Levi himself). The book depicts his picaresque nine-month journey returning from Auschwitz to northern Italy through almost all the countries of Eastern Europe. To the gaze of an individual who thought he had seen everything in Auschwitz, similarly perplexing urban and human landscapes reveal themselves here: the devastated cities, the hungry homeless, the discharged soldiers, the Red Army checkpoints, the soup kitchens, the displaced persons’ camps, the columns of armored vehicles and army trucks acclaimed by the masses as they pass through the centers of provincial towns, collaborators arrested, Nazi symbols dismantled and replaced with pictures of the ideologues of the New Order (Marx, Lenin, Stalin); improvised shelters for the sick, traveling refugees, overcrowded hospitals, packed trains, the ever-present flea markets (where a gold watch might be exchanged for a few potatoes), scenes of generosity and horrifying villainy, but also the first gestures of returning to normality, to life as it was remembered from before the war: the reopening of a bakery, of a coffee shop or of a movie theater; men courting women, children playing on the streets, people looking for work and bonding in cooperative social relations.

The central theme of Levi’s book and the film is the return home. Every character in the film embarks on this journey, even when the chances are high that it will become a long odyssey or that home no longer exists. Returning home is the metaphor for the postwar predicament of the continent, the first step in the effort to rebuild its civilization. For Levi’s character, returning home means the (slightly illusory) desire of reconnecting with friends and family and starting his prewar life again. Returning home means putting an end to a state of existential hovering, to disorientation and purposelessness. Home is thus, perhaps even for the Warsaw child in the photo, not a place, not a family nest, not a house, a room in it, or some other form of shelter. Many of these might have been obliterated by the war. Home is a condition. It marks a closure, the end of a terrible journey, and, most importantly, it becomes a place from which one can start over (or imagine starting over), and reverse the course of history from destruction to reconstruction, from contemplating devastation to developing opportunities. Home means life lived for more than survival; it assumes a return of reason to the center of social life.

The Ultimate Poor

Written by Béla Balázs and directed by Géza Radványi, Somewhere in Europe (original Hungarian title, Valahol europábon), the film analyzed in this chapter, thematizes the postwar experiences described above, from disorientation and reckless survival acts to the rediscovery of home and commencement of the reconstruction process. It presents the same landscape of devastation, the chaos, the famine, the purposelessness, and the villainies of 1945 recorded in Levi’s book. But it articulates a more developed and more pregnant message of optimism than The Truce. It presents the conditions, the opportunities, and the beginning of the slow and difficult but essential rebirth of community in postwar Eastern Europe.

Somewhere in Europe was among the first postwar Hungarian film productions. Shot during 1947 and premiering on January 1, 1948, the film articulates a vision of the political future of the continent.¹ It is, however, not a world seen by individual consciousness, but by one of a collectivity, and it is not one of grownups, but of children, who have been turned into orphans by the war. They are the cinematic avatars of the Warsaw boy in the photograph, their story an interpretation of the boy’s whereabouts, a reading of his hopes, fears, and desires. The opening of the film on New Year’s Day of 1948 was meant to herald—politically, cinematically—a new beginning, a moment of rebirth in the continent’s history. Europeans were called on to envision themselves as orphans—to radically break away from the past, liberate themselves from discursive forms of control, experiment with new forms of social organization, create collective property, and relearn political life. The opening date also suggested that the main social functions assumed by reconstruction films of the late 1940s were to provide an interpretation of the war, to establish reliable criteria for defining guilt (antifascism), to depict the tough reality of the postwar situation, and to articulate a narrative of a return to political life.²

Somewhere in Europe draws on the premise that a bodily connection exists between its protagonists and the devastation produced by the war. The voiceover in the opening scene announces that the film is dedicated to the war’s orphans: “We dedicate this film to the nameless child, to all those children who met the same fate on the highroads of historical times.” The boys and girls whose story it is set to tell are shown as emerging from the rubble. They are its children and successors. They have inherited the debris from the previous generations. It is theirs to have and change. The film fashions them as the agents of Europe’s reconstruction. They have the generational legitimacy, the moral entitlement, the vital energy, and the nihilistic freedom from outdated legal and ethical constraints to become the new leading force of the continent and create a more just political and economic order. Somewhere in Europe shows how from a famished, antisocial, and apolitical condition—their poverty—these children of the debris organize into a democratic community, building literally “from scratch” a New Order.

War orphans were a common figure of the postwar landscape. Historical statistics show that tens of thousands of them roamed through each European country (Judt 2005, 21). They were also visible in rubble and reconstruction films, and in newsreels and documentaries of the time. But in spite of their omnipresence, no film prior to Somewhere in Europe granted them a central cinematic and political role. Other reconstruction films confer this role on other postwar figures, such as the concentration camp survivor (The Murderers Are among Us [Die Mörder sind unter uns], Wolfgang Staudte, Germany, 1945); the war veteran (Somewhere in Berlin [Irgendwo in Berlin], Gerhardt Lamprecht, Germany, 1946); or the resistance fighter (Rome, Open City [Roma città aperta] and Paisan [Paisa], Roberto Rossellini, Italy, 1945 and 1946, respectively). In other words, they focus on adults, on characters with a past, socially more integrated and thus politically less unpredictable or revolutionary than a gang of orphans.

In Somewhere in Europe, orphans bear a revolutionary impetus that is similar to the one envisioned by theoreticians of the Left in the aftermath of World War I. They have the advantage of coming from nowhere. They have nothing, not even biographical baggage or family bonds. They are not inscribed in any way by civilization. They are the ultimate poor. The film shows how, one by one, they build a gang that roams a desertified land identified as “somewhere in Europe.” Their revolutionary potential rests not only in the fact that they lack basic necessities, property, parents, care, and education, but especially in their immunity to mechanisms of discursive coercion, such as laws, hegemonic morality, religion, and education—laws that have lost their legitimacy because they were of the Old Order. Orphans are barbarians, total outsiders of the polis, who don’t recognize the discourses that protected, reinforced, and naturalized privilege and unjust economic relations in the past. They bear the revolutionary potential of having nothing:

For what does poverty of experience do for the barbarian? It forces him to start from scratch; to make a new start; to make a little go a long way; to begin with a little and build up further. (Walter Benjamin as quoted in Hardt and Negri 2009, xi)

Described by film historians as a “shattering indictment of the world’s [belligerent] antihumanism” (Liehm and Liehm 1977, 147) and as depicting the predicament of a “whole generation of youth betrayed by the war” (Cunningham 2004, 68), Somewhere in Europe shows how its orphans progress from vagrancy to political consciousness. Initially they make use of their poverty to call into question all rules of civilization. They steal, pillage, and even kill for survival as they wander through a world in ruins, where “they have never encountered anything but contempt for the right to live and disrespect for human dignity.” Even after they settle in a bombed-out fortress and, inspired by a Socratic figure, engage in changing their way of living, “society rejects them and does everything in its power to hamper their struggle for the future” (Liehm and Liehm 1977, 147). But once bound to a place, the children refuse to return to their barbarian or nomadic life, and decide to defend what they have gained, the common they have created.

This is the moment when they gain a home—the one Primo Levi’s characters were looking for. The film exemplifies how this home is mostly condition—not a place one returns to, but a starting point, the foundation for building a common. Once the home is established, the reconstruction process can begin, materially, psychologically, socially, politically—the particle “re-” in “reconstruction” referring not to the re-surrection of a predicament from the past, but to transformation, to the overcoming of the state of postwar perplexity and chaos. It marks a re-turn to being human. And this is the humanism articulated in Somewhere in Europe. To be human is tantamount to building the common.

Figure 1.1. War orphans, barbarians, agents of reconstruction (Somewhere in Europe).

The orphans decide to give up their nomadic predicament and remain in the fortress. They organize their lives in it, rebuild it, and fight against the reactionary militia attacking them at the cost of some of their lives. Their sacrifice, however, is not in vain, since they obtain, in the words of another commentator, a “certificate from the new [antifascist] government that the [fortress] will be developed as a home for orphans—the first sign of the rebuilding that will usher in a new future” (Cunningham 2004, 68). In other words, they acquire recognition, sovereignty. The common they have built is recognized as theirs together with the principles that underpin it: collective property and direct democracy. Moreover, it is hoped that this new form of organization developed in this “somewhere” of Europe will spread out all over the continent.³

Introducing the Orphans

Somewhere in Europe is organized in three parts, which address the past, the present, and the future of its orphan protagonists. The past, the shortest section of the film, is narrated in Soviet montage style and aims to describe, on the one hand, the way in which the war has produced orphans and, on the other, the orphans’ intimate relationship to it, to the unthinkable devastation (and death) it caused, which I will refer in the following as “the Event.” A series of cinematic vignettes illustrate the horrors of war through dramatic lighting and camera angles. Soldiers’ boots march resolutely to the sound of army drums. A plane bombs a village. Terrified partisans await execution near a mass grave. The wheels of a freight train roll eastward on a journey from which there is no return. An air raid sets an amusement park on fire. Inside the haunted house, among the skeletons and monsters, a wax statue of Hitler catches fire, its slow melting, against the background of eerie music, suggesting the end of fascist Europe.

These vignettes also introduce the protagonists of the film, the orphans, and the violence that links them intimately to the Event. A child steps into the bombed house and sees the corpses of his parents, killed in a recent air raid. A Jewish boy escapes through the narrow window of a Reichsbahn train heading to a death camp as the rest of his family continues their trip to the gas chamber. A schoolgirl helplessly watches the execution of her partisan father. A six-year-old kid takes refuge inside the burning haunted house and stares in terror at its monsters and the melting Hitler. Two adolescents emerge from the rubble of a youth detention center, shell-shocked, but passionate to be alive and free.

The first part of Somewhere in Europe condemns the horrors of the war, but simultaneously views the disaster with a gaze reminiscent of religious awe. Alienating framing and dynamic editing gesture not only toward unfathomable destruction, but also to a bewildering and perhaps auspicious interrupti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: The Socialist Experience and Beyond
• 1 Creatures of the Event: Subject Production in the Reconstruction Era
• 2 Producing Revolutionary Consciousness in the Times of Radical Socialism
• 3 The Testifying Orphan: Rethinking Modernity’s Optimism
• 4 Children of the Revolution: The Rebirth of the Subject in Revisionist Discourse
• 5 The Family of Victims: Stalinism Revisited in the 1980s
• Epilogue: The Abandoned Offspring of Late Socialism
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index