(Never) Forget Your Past?
Appropriating the Buzludzha Monument
Wim Schepers
rMA Cultural Analysis: Thesis Supervisor: dr. Boris Noordenbos Second Reader: dr. Esther Peeren
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: AN ENCOUNTER WITH THE BUZLUDZHA MONUMENT ……….. 3 CHAPTER 1: HISTORY ANEW – THE MECHANICS OF EASTERN EUROPEAN NOSTALGIA……….. 11 CHAPTER 2: HOW THE EAST WAS WON – WESTERN HEGEMONY IN EASTERN EUROPE………… 21 CHAPTER 3: BACK TO THE FUTURE – ANATOMIZING THE BUZLUDZHA MONUMENT………….. 28 CONCLUSION: A SINCERE FAREWELL……… 54 LIST OF WORKS CITED……….. 58
INTRODUCTION: AN ENCOUNTER WITH THE BUZLUDZHA MONUMENT
A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism.
- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Within the Stara Planina mountain range in central Bulgaria, atop the desolate Buzludzha peak, stands the now crumbling House Monument of the Bulgarian Communist Party. Inaugurated in 1981 by the nation’s communist government to commemorate the founding of the Bulgarian Social Democratic Party a hundred years earlier, the monument was abandoned and has fallen into disrepair since Bulgaria’s renunciation of communism and the establishment of a democratic government in 1990. Recently, a fierce debate on the proposed restoration of the monument has prompted the government to bequeath the edifice to the Bulgarian Socialist Party, successor of the former Communist Party. However, as of yet no attempts have been made to rehabilitate the structure (see fig. 1).
Fig. 1. Schepers, Wim. “The Buzludzha monument within the Stara Planina mountain range.” 2015. JPEG File.
Driving along the redeveloped E85, which cuts through the Bulgarian hinterland, a brand new signpost designating Buzludzha as a “place of interest” interrupts the valley’s monotonous barrenness (see fig. 2). Neatly it labels the distance still to traverse: 17 kilometers. Its familiar, stylized imagery and its recognizable brown color, a common denominator of such signs all over Europe, incorporates the Buzludzha monument within the area of safely delineated tourist attractions at which locals wile away their Sunday afternoons. However, the dilapidated statue to which the sign deftly points and which marks the onset of the mountain road winding up towards the Buzludzha site immediately mocks this presumption (see fig. 3). The memorial, depicting Hadzhi Dimitar, a warlord who played a decisive role in Bulgaria’s struggle for independence from the Ottoman occupants, is in a state of severe disrepair. Its tiles have been smashed, graffiti defiles its surface, its pedestal is overgrown with weeds. However, despite its deplorable state, the sculpture, flanked by a stone pillar, still emanates an aura of stern authority and unflinching power. Rising up ponderously in the arid Bulgarian landscape Hadzhi Dimitar gazes grimly across the valley, defying the Bulgarian nation’s adversaries. This decaying remnant of a once powerful regime is not quite a welcoming entrée to one of Bulgaria’s biggest ideological monuments.
Fig. 3. Schepers, Wim. “Memorial.” 2015.
JPEG File. Fig. 2. Schepers, Wim. “Buzludzha signpost.” 2015.
Unfortunately, the statue’s dispiriting appearance is only a premonition to the lamentable condition of the entire Buzludzha site. In order to reach the monument itself, visitors travel up a once well-kept mountain road lined with memorials commemorating the 1877-1878 Russo-Turkish war, spacious parking spots, which support an unimpeded view of the valley below, and quaint fountains replenishing the weary traveller with fresh mountain spring water. However, as the government no longer maintains the access route, Buzludzha’s infrastructure is nowadays in a state of severe deterioration. Venturing towards the monument is an enterprise requiring indispensable safety precautions. For, driving up the mountain road includes braving patches of snow, fallen trees, knee-deep potholes forcing the motorist to the opposite side of the driveway and dangerously narrow passageways at which the road has partly collapsed down the precipice below.
Nevertheless, coming into view of the Buzludzha monument itself is a more than ample reward for the trying expedition uphill. As the dense temperate forest makes way for the windswept highlands, characteristic of the Stara Planina mountain range, two colossal hands holding torches, which supposedly symbolize the lasting friendship between the USSR and the Bulgarian nation, mark the final stretch towards the monument. When the low-hanging clouds, which the strong winds sweep over the peak, begin to lift, Buzludzha emerges gradually from the fog. From this distance, the round, UFO-like shape of its central building supported by a rectangular tower broadening towards the top, seems almost delicate and graceful in comparison to the brutal features of the two torches which appear to be carved out of primeval rock. Buzludzha materializes from the fog as a testimony of the outrageous ambitions to which the communist regime aspired. “It’s grand, it’s just insane. It’s the future, you can see the future there,” one of the monument’s visitors asserts in an interview with The
Laboriously hiking up the stairway from the nearby parking lot offers an indication to the extent of the damage the site has sustained since its abandonment. Electric wires have been unearthed and are now exposed to the harsh weather conditions on the peak and much of the decorative tiles which once paved the steps have disappeared, leaving nothing but their imprint in the sub-soil. Upon ascending the final platform leading to the securely bolted entrance doors, Buzludzha reveals its true dimensions. Standing in front of the entryway, the vast convex shape of the central hall towering above me arches inward and attaches itself to a supporting structure, resembling a pedestal, on which the central hall rests. Despite the numerous cracks in the building’s concrete framework – indicative of sustained water damage – and the countless tag lines besmirching the façade, the monument still manages to convey a sense of its former glory. The matter-of-factness of Buzludzha’s architecture, which distinctly exhibits the individual concrete slabs serving as building blocks for the structure, emphasize its sturdiness and contrast it with the elegant curving shape and the seeming lightness with which the upper hall rests on its base. Buzludzha is grounded in the earth, but at the same time it reaches for the skies, as if this concrete monstrosity could lift-off any moment. In its entirety Buzludzha emanates a sense of forceful supremacy emphasized by the inscription of concrete letters attached to both sides of the façade calling the Bulgarian proletariat to arms. In addition to this roaring Communist propaganda, an anonymous visitor to the monument has adorned the space above the entrance with glaring red graffiti summoning all pilgrims to Buzludzha to “Never Forget Your Past.”
In its appearance Buzludzha relates to the New Brutalism. Both a label and an architectural program (Banham 21), New Brutalism originated in the nineteen fifties with Le Corbusier’s 1952 Cité radieuse in Marseille and lived through its heyday in the sixties and seventies. It is characterized, as Reyner Banham argues, by “precisely its brutality, its
legibility of plan; 2, clear exhibition of structure; and 3, valuation of materials for their inherent qualities ‘as found’” (23). In practice, Brutalist buildings are typically erected in bare concrete and stripped of all superfluous detail. These structures are deliberately massive in their appearance as they express the sheer functionality and raw materiality of their shape. Brutalism is architecture at its most honest, at its most uncompromising. Hence the derogatory term of “concrete monstrosities” which these structures got allocated after the vogue for Brutalist university buildings, shopping malls and governmental offices subsided. However, in the Soviet Union and its affiliated states, when the communist system started to disintegrate during the seventies, the architectural constraints of the Stalin- and Khrushchev era slackened and young architects gained freedom to experiment. While these new talents, quite unlike their Western colleagues, did not organize themselves in schools, they did borrow much of the West’s leading architectural styles, freely intermingling Brutalism with Neo-futurism and postmodernism, while at the same time harking back to older Western European styles, including the International style, and Soviet favorites such as Constructivism, this way creating still little-known architectural masterpieces like Buzludzha, the Yalta Sanatorium or the Tbilisi ministry of transportation. As Jonathan Glancey argues in a 2011 Guardian article, these buildings could thus “be read as the swansong of a superpower, created by people freed from centralization, looking to and borrowing from the west” (Glancey).
Communist Party members would enter the monumental structure through its wide iron gates leading into a marble-clad foyer, after which they would mount one of the two staircases, adorned with red velour, to the vast auditorium in the inner ring of the building. Taking their seats on low benches organized around a central floor, they would have been greeted by approximately 500 square meters of stylized mosaics running around the entire length of the auditorium and depicting communist dignitaries such as Marx, Engels and Lenin. Directing their gaze upward they would be struck by the awe-inspiring height and span
of the cupola, capped by a representation of the Soviet hammer and sickle hovering protectively over the audience and calling all workers of the world to unite. Leaving the auditorium party members passed into the outer ring of the structure, whose vast windows commanded astounding panoramas of the surrounding countryside. Gazing across the rolling Bulgarian hills dotted with quaint towns and contemplating, on the opposite wall, scenes from Soviet history meticulously rendered in multi-colored mosaics, would offer the regime’s enthusiasts the full communist experience.
Unfortunately, twenty-five years of abandonment and neglect have taken their toll. As the monument’s roof construction has become unstable, the Bulgarian Socialist Party has securely bolted the entry doors. In order to access the building, adventurers have to climb through a narrow hole, cut out in the building’s thick concrete walls, which leads onto one of the central staircases. The landing offers a clear view of the foyer, eerily lit by the wintry sunshine pouring through the bolted gates. Debris fills the vast open space; remains of red velvet coating hang rotting from the ceiling. However, it is only upon climbing the heavily damaged flight of stairs and emerging into the auditorium proper that the full extent of the devastation becomes visible (see fig. 4). The scene is well nigh apocalyptic. The strong mountain winds tear at the corrugated ceiling which makes the auditorium resound with high-pitched grating; much of the iron roof covering has already collapsed, enabling snow and rain to enter the building freely and seep slowly into the concrete; the valuable floor tiles and marble wall covering have been removed and dragged off; mosaics have been defiled; graffiti stains the walls. Vandalism, theft and sheer neglect have reduced the Buzludzha monument to a mere shadow of its former authoritarian glory. However, in recent years the dilapidated monument has managed to attract international attention from – predominantly Western European and Northern American – tourists who seem to find a particular appeal in the building’s rapidly decaying splendor. This does not only become apparent by way of the
numerous graffiti tags on the monument’s surface, which bawl their messages in slang English, but also through the explorations of and reflections on Buzludzha which feature abundantly on Blogs, Youtube videos and the like.
Hence, in this thesis, I will examine the Buzludzha monument in its contemporary setting. More specifically, I wonder what it is that draws these Western tourists to a mangled structure perched upon an inaccessible ridge deep within the Bulgarian hinterland. Taking both personal accounts (blog entries, videos, etc.) and material traces on the structure itself (tag lines, graffiti, etc.) as my cue, I will analyze the different meanings these visitors attribute to Buzludzha and probe them by disentangling the underlying socio-historical structures to which they relate. In this regard I am especially interested in the potentiality of nostalgic longing within their interactions with the monument, which I will initially relate to the perception of contemporary Eastern European society as nostalgic for certain aspects of its communist past and subsequently ground within Western/Eastern European relations by means of Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism and Larry Wollf’s remapping of the concept to incorporate the West/East dynamic on the European continent. Consequently, my central question is twofold: If and how do Western tourists read a nostalgic potentiality in their interactions with the Buzludzha monument and how does this potentiality pertain to the political backdrop of the contemporary relations between Western- and Eastern Europe? Aiding me in untangling this construct are the concepts of the ruin and the specter. For, Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin’s understanding of the ruin as a liminal entity enables me to read the Buzludzha monument in terms of the Derridean specter. Not being incorporated within the official discourse, Buzludzha neither fully belongs to the past nor the present and thus enables its visitors to create meaning through its material structure, thus revealing the political implications underlying the nostalgic responses of Western visitors to the Buzludzha monument.
Fig. 4. Schepers, Wim. “Central auditorium of the Buzludzha monument.” 2015. JPEG File.
CHAPTER 1: HISTORY ANEW – THE MECHANICS OF EASTERN EUROPEAN NOSTALGIA
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting
- Milan Kundera
In order to understand Western nostalgic appropriation of the Buzludzha monument, I believe it is vital to first apprehend some of the peculiarities of the larger context of Eastern European communist history. I will definitely not sketch a full historical overview of the rise and fall of the communist regime in the region here; that project is beyond the scope of this thesis and has been accomplished eloquently by others.1 However, what I will outline in this chapter is a conceptual synopsis of how Eastern Europe’s recent history has been interpreted in academia, fiction and media alike as spawning a society profoundly permeated by nostalgic longing, a nostalgia that supposedly originated within the region’s communist past and its focus on creating the ultimate proletarian utopia. This way I hope to shed some initial light on the multi-layered societal structures that underlie the West’s fascination with the Buzludzha monument. Clearly, this is neither an objective nor a nuanced view on this geographically, linguistically, ethnically and culturally extremely diverse region, but it offers an overview of some of the current discourses on Eastern Europe which are relevant for this thesis as they are – albeit unwittingly in many instance – taken up by Western tourists interacting with Bulgaria’s Buzludzha monument
1 See Lovell (2009) for a concise introduction to the history of the Soviet Union. More extensive recent works on
the history of the USSR include Chubarov (2001) and Lewin (2005). For a historical overview of Bulgaria in particular see Chary (2011).
A. MARXIST TELEOLOGY: THE END-STAGE OF HISTORY AND THE COMMUNIST UTOPIA
“What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable” (51). A stock phrase of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, this programmatic statement is emblematic of the Soviet Union’s teleological worldview. The Manifesto’s premise is well known: according to Marx and Engels the crass capitalism dominating nineteenth century society was predestined to collapse within the foreseeable future. For, the bourgeois ruling classes base their legitimacy upon the accumulation of capital by means of wage labor, which itself is grounded within the competition between contract workers (51). In other words, the sole footing of the bourgeoisie’s dominance consists of sustaining a proletarian class whose individual members compete amongst each other for the better wages, this way maximizing industrial output and hence augmenting the capital accumulated by their bourgeois overseers. However, advances in industrial technology, which are supported by the ruling class as they enlarge output even more, threaten the validity of competition-based wage labor, rendering the necessity of possessing particular artisan skills obsolete and bringing industrial labor down to one uniform level. The proletariat is thus deprived of its meager means of existence and, as competition amongst its individual members ceases, unites itself into associations sparking revolution. In other words, the bourgeoisie “is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society” (51). Consequently, within the Marxist point of view society necessarily moves towards a proletarian-based communist utopia.
As this grand proletarian rebellion had not yet taken place more than half a century after the publication of The Manifesto, Vladimir Lenin and his Bolshevik party believed, contrary to Marx’s assumption, that the proletarian classes were unable to emancipate themselves. They thus decided to singlehandedly spark the revolution and overthrow the Russian tsarist regime, this way establishing a fledgling socialist state which would ultimately transform into a vast communist bloc ranging from Czechoslovakia to Kazakhstan, from Bulgaria to the northern Siberian reaches. Taking communist teleology into account, the Soviet Union and its affiliate states of the Warsaw Pact, directed themselves decidedly towards the future. For, in Marxist-Leninist teleology, there simply was no “beyond communism.” Within the newly established socialist state the endpoint of history was inherent as it advanced towards the penultimate communist utopia. All the Soviet populace had to do was awaken its dormant potentialities. Consequently, as Stephen Lovell argues in his introduction to the USSR’s history: “The leaders of the Bolshevik state […] subordinated the present to the future. Soviet people were told insistently that they would work hard and live badly for a long and indefinite period of time – all this in the interests of building an abstract noun” (15). In other words, the aim of the Bolshevik state was thus not to relieve present societal ills, but to direct its population towards an ideal future in which all these ills would have been resolved. Communism in particular, and the concept of ideology in general, is thus a gradual, but sure assimilation of the entire societal structure under the banner of one single idea. As Mikhail Epstein observes in his Cries from the New Wilderness on philosophy and spiritualism in post-Soviet Russia: “An ideology is a stratagem by which one of the parts captures the Whole. This is why every ideology is a cross between the partisan and the totalitarian: it begins with a party and ends with totalitarianism, and in this metamorphosis lies its whole aim and essence” (9).
B. THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF HISTORY: THE IMPLOSION OF THE COMMUNIST SYSTEM
Within this ideological framework an end to the communist state was simply not conceivable. In considering itself the end-point of history, the system envisaged itself to last forever. Hence, when the USSR did implode, and the satellite states of the Eastern Bloc experienced a national awakening, its millions of inhabitants were suddenly left without bearings. In this respect, Alexei Yurchack quotes musician Andrei Makarevich in his treatise on the end of the Soviet Union: “It had never even occurred to me that in the Soviet Union anything could ever change. Let alone that it could disappear. No one expected it. Neither children, nor adults. There was a complete impression that everything was forever” (1). Or consider Viktor Pelevin’s meditation on the end of communism in his novel Babylon which describes the advent of robber capitalism in Russia during the nineties: “It turned out that eternity only existed for as long as Tatarsky sincerely believed in it, and was actually nowhere to be found beyond the bounds of this belief. In order for him to believe sincerely in eternity, others had to share in this belief, because a belief that no one else shares is called schizophrenia” (4). While the western world reveled in “the end of history,” famously postulated by Francis Fukuyama at the fall of the Berlin Wall, history began anew for the former Soviet Bloc as it surpassed its backwardness and was taken in by the “spread of liberty and equality to all parts of the world” (Fukuyama 66). It is not communism that constitutes the final stage of history’s teleological development, but capitalist liberal democracy. For, “the ideal of liberal democracy could not be improved on” (Fukuyama xi).
What thus ensued after the fall of communism in the USSR and its satellite states was the sudden onset of “(neo)liberalism, late capitalism, globalization, marketization, Europeanization, technocratic governmentality” (Boyer 17). Originating in Western Europe
and the United States, in which they took decades if not centuries to develop, these ideas were hastily imported within a post-socialist Eastern Europe attempting fiercely to catch up with its western counterpart. Stunned by these abrupt transformations evoking a total rupture with everything the former communist regime represented, Eastern Europeans, in an effort to balance themselves against the volatile forces of the present, began reaching backward (Boyer 18). Consequently, as Dominic Boyer argues, “[o]nly in memory, then, could Eastern Europeans retrieve the senses of security and autonomy otherwise denied them as new market and governmental forms of sociality innocently filled the social and historical “vacuum” created by the collapse of totalitarian states” (18).
C. THE LOSS OF BEARINGS: NOSTALGIA AND TRANSCENDENTAL HOMELESSNESS
This reaching backward is commonly designated as nostalgia. In its basic form nostalgia can be defined, as Fred Davis does in his sociological examination of the concept, as “a positively toned evocation of a lived past in the context of some negative feeling toward present or impending circumstances” (19). The sudden onset of capitalism in the former USSR and its Eastern European satellite states entailed a radical change of lifestyle producing instability and insecurity as the traditional system collapsed and the ex-Soviet populace had to learn overnight to navigate within the new capitalist environment which was so much at odds with their communist pasts. Consequently, it should come as no surprise that individuals, worrying about their present and future prospects, began considering the past, in which they supposedly had a secure means of existence, in a more benign light than the present and future in which safeguarding this means of existence has become, at least for the time being, uncertain.
Fully considering Fred Davies’ definition of nostalgia implies, however, that former Eastern Bloc citizens would invariably prefer a reconstitution of the communist regime to the
current liberal democratic framework. This is not necessarily the case. The workings of nostalgia prove to be far more complex than the simple wish to recreate a past situation. Dominic Boyer affirms this idea: “post-Socialist nostalgia is most often interpreted not literally as a desire to return to state socialism per se. Instead, it is understood as a desire to recapture what life was at that time, whether innocent, euphoric, secure, intelligible” (18). Hence, a more precise definition of the concept is desirable. Let me, in this regard, consider Svetlana Boym’s conception of nostalgia:
Modern nostalgia is a mourning for the impossibility of mythical return, for the loss of an enchanted world with clear borders and values; it could be a secular expression of a spiritual longing, a nostalgia for an absolute, a home that is both physical and spiritual, the edenic unity of time and space before entry into history. (8)
This understanding of nostalgia regards the notion not necessarily as a concrete longing for a particular place or time. Instead, Boym considers nostalgia as an abstract yearning for a spiritual being-at-home grounded in a physical situation. For the individual within ex-Soviet society this conception of nostalgia does thus not automatically entail a pining for a concrete, lived period of time under the communist system, but rather the feeling of being-at-home within the system, of being at least reasonably secure, of being provided with income, shelter and love, of having ingrained a steadfast system of values and beliefs. Despite its deficiencies, the Bolshevik regime did manage to provide its citizens with such amenities. For most of its history, it succeeded in offering the majority of its population at least reasonably adequate shelter, satisfactory food rations and basic job security. But, above all, Eastern European communism instilled in its populace a belief in an everlasting utopia, which, if every individual did its utmost, would be reached in the near future.
The situation to which the general ex-Eastern Bloc population awoke in 1991 can best be described by means of the concept of “transcendental homelessness,” coined by Georg Lukács in his 1920 seminal work Theory of the Novel. Transcendental homelessness is the quintessential modern – and I consider modern here in the sense of capitalist, liberal and democratic society – experience. According to John Neubauer, attempting to come to terms with this intricate philosophical notion, the concept involved “banishment from a transcendental home, as well as from ancient Greece, where, so Lukács claimed, the transcendental had been immanent in the social structure” (6). In Lukács’ view ancient Greece was a world of “ready-made, ever-present meaning” (32). This idea is exemplified by Platonic philosophy which entails that behind all concrete, individual, imperfect manifestations within our lived world, lie perfect, ever-lasting concepts of these manifestations which enable us to recognize them as such. Hence, since all meaning is already in existence, the acquiring of knowledge is like the “raising of a veil,” (32). In consequence, ancient Greek society was “more general, more ‘philosophic’, closer and more akin to the archetypal home: love, the family, the state” (33). While the ancient Greeks are obviously a long way from the communist USSR, I still believe some metaphorical parallels can be made. Like in ancient Greece, the ‘meaning’ of the world in the USSR was already pre-established. Admittedly, knowledge of the Soviet world was not grounded within a Platonic metaphysical principle, but it was nevertheless embedded within an a priori foundation of meaning: that of Marxist-Leninist philosophy which stipulated that every individual should exert himself in order to reach the pen-ultimate communist utopia which entails the final meaning and end-goal of society. Society was fixed; every element took up its pre-established place. In relation to this worldview, the capitalist present is one, as Lukács observes, of which “the absence of any manifest aim, the determining lack of direction of life as a whole, must be the basic a priori constituent, the fundamental structural element of characters and events within it” (62).
Viewing post-Soviet nostalgia in terms of transcendental homelessness, we might thus understand it, Dominic Boyer states, “as a psychological or emotional prop, a “coping behavior”” against such absence of aim and lack of direction (19).
D. OSTALGIE AND VITA COLA: RESTORATIVE VERSUS REFLECTIVE NOSTALGIA
Taking the previous discussion into account I will briefly examine a concrete example of such post-Soviet nostalgia by means of its best-documented case: the Ostalgie of the former DDR. Considering Eastern Germany’s Ostalgie by means of a case study I will attempt to refine my understanding of the concept of nostalgia even further, this way establishing a substantial foundation on which to evaluate the nostalgic impulses within the Buzludzha monument.
After the initial enthusiasm at the Wiedervereinigung and the rapid dismantling of the communist industry, a rehabilitation of old DDR products and a museumification of everyday life under the communist regime took place. While initially this nostalgia for the communist past was considered a means of symbolic resistance against the Western hijacking of Eastern identity, the revival of DDR produce and artifacts was soon commercialized and appropriated to the new, postsocialist context. As Daphne Berdahl observes: “In this business of Ostalgie, East German products have taken on new meaning when used the second time around. Now stripped of their original context of an economy of scarcity or an oppressive regime, these products largely recall an East Germany that never existed” (198). This particular kind of nostalgia – this Ostalgie – might thus be considered as a way of coping with the transcendental homelessness evoked by the sudden dispersal of the communist regime and the ensuing onset of Western liberal democracy. By means of an appropriation of relics representing life under DDR-communism, these mementos come to represent a particular East-German identity which opposes itself against Western incorporation. Ostalgie is thus “an
attempt to reclaim a kind of Heimat (home or homeland), albeit a romanticized and hazily glorified one” (202).
In order to understand this kind of Eastern-European nostalgia Svetlana Boym offers a model which comprises two distinct ways of coping with the loss of identity evoked by the notion of transcendental homelessness: restorative and reflective nostalgia (41). Restorative nostalgia strives for the recuperation of certain aspects and qualities of the past, which are perceived to be missing from the present moment. In order to accomplish this, artifacts considered to embody these qualities are restored. Consequently, “restorative nostalgia has no use for the signs of historical time” (45), it quite literally attempts to “rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps” (41). Examples of such restorative impulse include the restoring or even rebuilding of old monuments, cathedrals, paintings, etc. so that all traces of the passing of time are removed. Reflective nostalgia is, in contrast, “more concerned with historical and individual time, with the irrevocability of the past and human finitude” (49). It gathers up remnants of the cherished past and brings them together in order to appeal to individual or collective memory. Central in this case is not the recreation of particular values, which a past situation is believed to embody, but the nostalgic longing in itself. The object of reflective nostalgia is the more abstract notion of the passing of time and in particular everything that gets lost in this passing.
Applying these two categories to the East-German notion of Ostalgie is, however, not as straightforward as it might seem. This immediately indicates the main problem of Boym’s model of restorative- and reflective nostalgia. While these constructs provide, at least in theory, a very neat distinction between a highly concrete, action-based nostalgia and its abstract, more mentally engaged counterpart, such a stark division proves to be untenable in practice. For example, the rehabilitation of Vita Cola, the DDR’s answer to Coca Cola, seems to fuse both processes of restorative- and reflective nostalgia, this way
creating a distinct hybrid form. After the production was ceased at the time of the Wende, Vita Cola was reestablished in 1994 and attained a considerable market share in the former DDR republics. Subsequently, in 2006, the company decided to reintroduce the old design of the bottles with the slogan “Von August an […] ist alles wieder so wie früher” (“DDR-Design”). Clearly, everything is not back to as it was before. The reintroduction of Vita Cola, and the ensuing re-employment of its old, communist design is, on the one hand, a clear case of restorative nostalgia as it entails the literal recuperation and restoration of an artifact from the past. However, on the other hand, the aims of such recuperation seem to be more reminiscent of reflective nostalgia. To be clear, in form this is definitely not a case of Boym’s reflective nostalgia, as it does not involve the stockpiling of fragments, but an unvarnished recreation. The effect produced, however, does play into the yearning aspects of reflective nostalgia. Arguably, Vita Cola does not wish to revive certain concrete qualities of DDR-communism (scarcity, total state control, etc.). What it does want to accomplish is to offer a taste of longing itself, of yearning for a lost collective notion of identity. Vita Cola harks not necessarily back to the lived DDR, but to the cultural myth of the DDR involving the “shared assumptions that help to naturalize history and makes it livable, providing the daily glue of common intelligibility,” which got lost at the time of the Wende (Boym 54). However, I should not exaggerate the seemingly staunch binary Svetlana Boym exhibits in her categorization of her nostalgia. For, she argues in the online Atlas of Transformation: “These distinctions are not absolute binaries, and one can surely make a more refined mapping of the gray areas on the outskirts of imaginary homelands” (Boym). It is within these gray areas that much of the nostalgia worked out through the Buzludzha monument locates itself.
CHAPTER 2: HOW THE EAST WAS WON – WESTERN HEGEMONY IN EASTERN EUROPE
Meanwhile nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring. His window looked out onto the railway tracks, so that the chance of getting away never ceased to entice him.
- Vladimir Nabokov
“The horrors of the Second World War, the chilling winds of the Cold War and the crushing weight of the Iron Curtain are little more than fading memories. Ideals that once commanded great loyalty are not taken for granted.” This extract from a speech by former Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende given during the 2004 conference on “The Politics of European Values in The Hague is an accurate illustration of the prevalent attitude of Western Europe towards its Eastern neighbor. It exhibits the Western urge to incorporate the East within its own liberal, democratic societal system whereby the region’s recent communist history is quickly disposed of as a flaw. Hence, in this chapter I will examine how this paternalizing process is constructed by means of Edward Said’s concept of orientalization and confront it with the premise of the previous chapter in which I considered Eastern Europe as an inherently nostalgic society.
A. ORIENTALISM: THE SPECTRAL DEMI-ORIENT OF EASTERN EUROPE
“Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient – dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient” (3). This is Edward Said’s well-known analysis of the concept of Orientalism in his seminal work with the same title.
Orientalism, according to Said, is predominantly a Western construct, conceptualized in order to deal with its most significant other: the Orient. It is a means of European identity construction as the continent defines itself against and secures its hegemony over the East “politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period” (3).
While not altogether belonging to the geographical entity which Edward Said designated as the ‘Orient,’ conceptually Eastern Europe roughly establishes itself along the same lines. Although Eastern Europe shares its geographical location and much of its cultural history with its Western neighbor,2 the region was, and arguably still is, not incorporated within the Western European process of identity formation based upon a presumably shared socio-cultural history that took its onset at the start of the Enlightenment period. Eastern Europe was, as Larry Wolff discusses in Inventing Eastern Europe, delineated as the West’s complementary half (4). Very much like the Orient, Westerners employed Eastern Europe as a means of carving out their own identity; a process which transpired through the synergy of simultaneous in- and exclusion. Its location of the fringes of the European continent “encouraged the construction of Eastern Europe as a paradox of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion, Europe but not Europe. […] [Eastern Europe was] made to mediate between Europe and the Orient. One might describe the invention of Eastern Europe as an intellectual project of demi-Orientalization” (7).
2 I use the adjectives East and West here not purely as geographical designators, but to indicate
geographical entities differentiated by means of (former) ideological differences (capitalism versus communism). Consequently, the concrete, geographical location of these entities does not necessarily fully correspond to their actual locality in relation to each other which these adjectives commonly designate. For example, Greece, which is commonly seen as part of Western Europe, lies more towards the East than, for instance, Poland, which was part of the Eastern Bloc.
Being a liminal entity neither native nor completely foreign to Western Europe, its Eastern neighbor acquired a peculiar status in the West’s imagination. In this regard, it is compelling to consider the demi-Orient of Eastern Europe in terms of Jacques Derrida’s notion of spectrality. By means of this Orientalizing process, the East turns into the West’s ghost. It is at the onset of his Specters of Marx that Derrida examines the concept. He observes: “[T]he specter is a paradoxical incorporation, the becoming-body, a certain phenomenal and carnal form of the spirit. It becomes, rather, some “thing” that remains difficult to name: neither soul nor body, and both one and the other” (5). In this sense, the specter is akin to the spirit. The spirit is that what haunts; it is the disembodied past that comes to bear upon the present: the unprocessed trauma, the instance of mourning. It quite literally disrupts, as Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock observes, “the presentness of the present” (63). For, the spirit does not so much reanimate the lived past, but revives particular aspects of this past which come to be rearticulated time and again within the present. Hence, the spirit is said to haunt the present moment. The specter incorporates this conception of haunting. However, in contrast to the spirit, the Derridean specter is embodied. Derrida continues: “For it is flesh and phenomenality that give to the spirit its spectral apparition, but which disappear right away in the apparition in the very coming of the revenant or the return of the specter. There is something disappeared, departed in the apparition itself as reapparition of the departed” (5). In this sense, the specter is a spirit which has embodied itself by means of a concrete, present element. However, by definition the spirit refers not to an actual, lived past. Instead, the concept relates to a past which has been turned into an artifact: a past that has been tinkered with through processes of recollection. Such a perception has consequences for the embodiment of the spirit as specter. Due to the fact that the specter refers to a not-entirely-lived past that nevertheless manifests itself in the concrete, not-entirely-lived present, its ontological status
becomes uncertain. The specter is a predominantly liminal entity positioning itself on the threshold of being and non-being. In an interview, Derrida states:
What has, dare I say, constantly haunted me in this logic of the specter is that it regularly exceeds all the oppositions between visible and invisible, sensible and insensible. A specter is both visible and invisible, both phenomenal and nonphenomenal: a trace that marks the present with its absence in advance. The spectral logic is de facto a deconstructive logic. It is in the element of haunting that deconstruction finds the place most hospitable to it, at the heart of the living present, in the quickest heartbeat of the philosophical. (39)
In other words, it is not just that the ontological status of the specter is uncertain, the specter challenges ontology itself. Concretely this entails that the specter cannot entirely be comprehended by means of our categories of knowledge. As a result of its in-between status, the specter challenges and thus deconstructs these categories of ontology, phenomenology, history, etc. It is thus, as Colin Davis argues, “a wholly irrecuperable intrusion in our world, which is not comprehensible within our available intellectual frameworks, but whose otherness we are responsible for preserving” (54). The specter is our own creation; it is our own past that is resurrected and comes back at us. This return, however, entails a vengeance. It is a past we cannot get hold of, and thus cannot fully comprehend, from which the specter comes to influence the present. Hence, as Derrida states: “The specter is not simply someone we see coming back, it is someone by whom we feel ourselves watched, observed ,surveyed, as if by the law” (40).
B. THE SPECTER HAUNTING EUROPE: HOW THE WEST ACTS UPON THE EAST AND VICE VERSA
Having been contained behind an iron curtain for thirty years, the East unleashed its ghosts upon its Western neighbor after the implosion of the Soviet Bloc. Or rather, it is
Western Europe that manufactured its own ghosts through the image of its Eastern other. For, ever since the enlightenment Eastern Europe has been a means of Western identity construction on two fronts: that of supposed superiority and that of a projection of anxieties. At the implosion of the Warsaw pact and the subsequent incorporation of Eastern Europe within the Western capitalist system, Western Europe is confronted with the very real, present realities of the East. It is at this point that the Derridean specter is created. The imagined communist Eastern Europe fused with Western anxieties is embodied within a contemporary, very real Eastern Europe spawning specters along the way which come to trouble the West.
On the one hand, the rift between Eastern- and Western Europe enables the latter to regard the former – very much like is the case with the Orient – as underdeveloped and thus in need of colonizing enterprises which would bring the supposedly much desired acculturation to the region. Looking at Eastern Europe from a Western perspective thus offered a glimpse at Europe’s pre-enlightenment, barbaric past as it was deemed a backwards region, while at the same time embodying exotic values and principles against which the West could counterbalance its supposed moral superiority.
On the other hand, in opposition to the radical othering of Eastern Europe, its semi-belonging within the larger European framework had quite disconcerting effects, which stand in sharp contrast to the attitude of superiority the West generally assumed towards the East. While this tendency goes back to the late nineteenth- and early twentieth century, not coincidentally the era in which socialism emerged, it only reaches its culmination during the Cold War when, to cite Winston Churchill, “[f]rom Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an Iron Curtain [...] descended across the continent.” This (not entirely) metaphorical iron construct, which isolated Eastern Europe and made it inaccessible for its neighbors, enabled Western Europe to profile its Eastern counterpart as a screen upon which it projected a dystopian image of its own future if it would give up on the quintessential democratic values
of individuality, liberty, equality, etc. This tendency directly manifests itself in the countless anti-communist propaganda posters which, from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards, provide a grotesque caricature of socialist and communist ideology disguised as hellish imps or slippery shadows threating the peace and prosperity of Western Europe (see fig. 5 and fig. 6). For, as Larry Wolff argues: “[i]n the shadow it was possible to imagine vaguely whatever was unhappy or unpleasant, unsettling or alarming, and yet is was also possible not to look too closely, permitted even to look away – for who could see through an iron curtain and discern the shapes enveloped in shadow?” (Wolff 1).
Fig. 5. Conservative Party.
“Socialism Throttling the Country”. 1909. Mail Online. JPG File. Web. 15 June 2015.
Fig. 6. Paix et Liberté. Pinterest. JPG File. Web. 15 June 2015.
The subsequent consequences of such vision are cogent: after the implosion of the Soviet Union and the rapid conversion of the former Eastern Bloc to the principles of market capitalism, the West finds its ultimate vindication over Eastern Europe’s backwardness and the triumph of its own system in offering much welcomed financial aid in the construction of an infrastructure and economy up to date with Western examples. In this respect, the supposed nostalgia with which the East resists its Westernization is yet another evidence of its backwardness. However, while phenomena such as Ostalgie, Soviet chic and Yugo-nostalgia are undoubtedly real, we – grounded within a Western European context – might all to easily disregard our own background. For, although these tendencies of engaging with Eastern Europe inherently belong to an era which in theory ceased to exist with the raising of the iron curtain in 1991, I belief they are, in practice, still to some extent ingrained within our contemporary dealings with the East. To what extent is the supposed nostalgic longing, which we deem an inherent part of the Eastern European psyche, thus a projection of our own concerns, a way of justifying our own societal flaws? In other words, can we read Eastern Europe as a specter emerged from behind the Iron Curtain to haunt the west? Hence, when analyzing the interactions of Western tourists with the Buzludzha monument we should take these questions into consideration.
CHAPTER 3: BACK TO THE FUTURE – ANATOMIZING THE BUZLUDZHA MONUMENT
Il en est ainsi de notre passé. C’est peine perdue que nous cherchons à l’évoquer. Tous les efforts de notre intelligence sont inutiles. Il est caché hors de son domaine et de sa portée, en quelque objet matériel (en la sensation que nous donnerait cet objet matériel), que nous ne soupçonnons pas. Cet objet, il dépend du hasard que nous le rencontrions avant de mourir, où que nous ne le rencontrions pas.
– Marcel Proust
“You’re probably wondering why I’d risk life and limb to take the ultimate selfie, but sometimes we have to push ourselves to the physical and mental limit, sometimes we have to stand on the ledge to truly feel alive, and boy oh boy did I feel alive. This wasn’t about forgetting the past but being in the present” (Sherifi). This is how British travel blogger Macca Sherifi recounts the crowning experience of his expedition to Buzludzha: a selfie on top of the monument’s impressive 107 meter high tower. I believe his reaction neatly incorporates much of the common parlance on exploring the Buzludzha monument: it is an exhilaration, quite unreal, quasi-spiritual experience offering a heightened sense of “being in the present” while at the same time hinting at a deeper notion of nostalgia. In this chapter, I will thus tie up the strands of nostalgia, demi-Orientalism, spectrality and abandonment and apply them to the Buzlduzdha monument by means of concrete interactions of Western tourists with the edifice.
A. BRUTALIST MAYHEM: THE NOSTALGIC (UN)REALITY OF BUZLUDZHA
“If you don’t know what it is it really must appear like it’s been dropped down here from outer space by some alien race,” Peter Hohenhaus observes on his travel blog
(Hohenhaus). Peter is, however, not the only one – or the first for that matter – to describe his impressions of Buzludzha as “alien” or “surreal.” Photographer and blogger Rebecca Litchfield characterizes the monument as “a place of dreams unimaginable in it (sic.) beauty” (Litchfield). She continues: “I almost felt like I was not on earth anymore, that I had been transported to a different planet” (Litchfield). Nate Robert, in addition, describes his encounter with Buzludzha along similar lines: “We were laughing like naughty high school kids. It was quite surreal – I know I’m a long way from home now, geographically, but considering I was with a group of people I had just met, being lead in the darkness upwards through the enormous abandoned communist meeting house, I was seemingly quite a long way from reality as well” (Roberts).
Admittedly, Hohenhaus, Litchfield and Roberts’ reactions upon encountering the monument are not quite surprising. For, it is Buzludzha’s ideological message, embodied within its architectural conception that elicits them. Envisioned by the Bulgarian government and designed by its architect Georgi Stoilov to showcase the wealth and power of the regime, the Buzludzha monument exhibits the uncompromising ambition and the decisive future-orientation of the Bulgarian Communist Party by means of its architecture, which – indeed – very much resembles a flying saucer descended upon a desolate mountaintop. Reportedly, the authorities even enclosed a “time capsule” in the structure’s foundations containing a message for future generations which justifies the construction of the gargantuan project (Minard). In other words, Buzludzha was conceived to defy reality, to offer a glimpse of the utopian future promised by the communist regime. The fact that the monument, a quarter of a century after its dereliction and in its current state of severe disrepair, still manages to astound visitors in conveying a sense of other-worldliness is a testimony to its liminal status of not-quite-belonging. For, within our supposedly depolarized world, the current impotence of the remnants of the old ideological systems, which once managed to rally entire populations to its
cause, leaves us astounded. As Mikhail Epstein argues: “We gaze at them with curiosity, amazed by their powerful muscles, their gigantic organs, their taut joints. Yet at the same time we are perplexed: how could these dusty stuffed animals once have inspired so much terror and ecstasy; how could they even have supported their own weight and not been destroyed by the mere gravitation of the earth?” (8).
By means of its architectural and ideological conception Buzludzha seems to confound the boundaries of time as it definitely is not part of the contemporary post-socialist Bulgarian society, while at the same time not belonging to any past era either. Blogger Kevin Read explains: “Years of politics and history have spat out a building which it’s hard to believe really exists: an incredible modern day ruin which not only looks like it doesn’t belong, but that it never should have been” (Read). Through its radical future orientation and its present state of dereliction, Buzludzha remains stranded in a twilight zone between past grandeur, future orientation and present desolation. This liminal, in-between status seems to elicit quasi-religious experiences in the monument’s visitors who frequently designate their encounters, in addition to their sense of otherworldliness and unreality, as mythical and infused with a spiritual dimension. Roman Veillon states in an interview with cultural trends magazine
Dazed & Confused: “I wanted to feel what it was like to stand in the middle of a gigantic
room with the hammer and sickle on top of me. There is almost a religious atmosphere, as we were in a temple (also because of the fact that I were alone there and didn’t see anybody). But in the end it’s more an impression of peace that comes out of it, when you try to envision what it was like before it was abandoned, even if we can still feel the ghosts of some Soviet soldiers in the corridors!” (Gorton). In addition, blogger Matt makes the reference to places of worship even more explicit: “Imagine your (sic.) going to a church with great fresco’s or paintings from a famous painter or your (sic.) at the Sistine Chapel and looking at the paintings from Da Vinci or Michelangelo. Buzludzha is like a church made for communists.
The amount of artwork done with mosaics is mind blowing. I haven’t seen anything like this before. Staring at the old USSR Flag with the cross-peen hammer crossed with a sickle on the ceiling is also amazing” (Matt).
It is possible to relate these reactions of otherworldliness and spirituality to the notion of nostalgia. As is the case with the Vita-Cola example, upon which I elaborated in the first chapter of this thesis, these nostalgic impulses are, although definitely related to Svetlana Boym’s conceptual subdividing of nostalgia, neither completely reflective nor restorative in nature. Instead, within these statements, these two modes engage in a tense correlation. For, while not explicitly designating a sense of nostalgia, Rebecca Litchfield connects her notion of otherworldliness upon visiting the Buzludzha monument and climbing its impressive tower to feelings which are intrinsic to the concept of nostalgia. She states: “This was one of those ethereal moments in life, the ones that will stick with you an entire lifetime, one you will tell for years to come, because standing on top of a 70m high tower on top of a 1441m mountain, on top of the clouds watching as the mist clears and witnessing possibly the best sunset I have ever seen in my life, with friends, is a moment I will never forget” (Litchfield). It is the architecture’s sheer exuberance and its connection to an old, supposedly dead ideological system that urges Rebecca Litchfield to express a sense of ethereality and of – what the nineteenth-century Romantics described as – the sublime, an experience of a dumbfounding and transcendental force beyond human comprehensibility.3 These notions are strongly related to Georg Lukács’ concept of transcendental homelessness and what Svetlana Boym describes as the mythical return to an enchanted world, which is inherent to the notion of nostalgia (8). Through Buzludzha’s very real and physical architecture Rebecca Litchfield
3 The concept was developed in Edmund Burke’s 1756 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of
the Sublime and Beautiful and in 1764 taken up again by Immanuel Kant in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime.
seems to achieve a feeling of spiritual wholeness occasioned by and grounded within a physical situation. Her account of the situation might not yet give expression to nostalgic longing, but all its elements are already there. For, besides pertaining to a sense of the sublime and ethereality, Litchfield describes her experience no less than three times as a moment she will remember: “the ones that will stick with you an entire lifetime,” “one you will tell for years to come,” and “a moment I will never forget” (Litchfield).
Relating Rebecca Litchfield’s nostalgic impulse to Svetlana Boym’s categories of nostalgic longing is, however, more complicated. Evaluating Litchfields’ not-yet-quite nostalgia in terms of Boym’s restorative or reflective categorization is altogether speculative, but if we set aside our reservations for a moment and work out this thought experiment, it becomes clear that Litchfield’s impulse is definitely not restorative in nature. She clearly does not wish to restore the values that the Buzludzha monument embodies or restore a particular past moment by means of the monument. On the contrary, Litchfield’s motives are more in line with Boym’s reflective category, as she is clearly interested in the transcendental aspect of nostalgia itself; it is the longing for such experiences of spiritual wholeness shared with friends that is up fronted. However, in this respect it is important to note that this reflective nostalgia is acted out through a very physical entity: the Buzludzha monument. This is in contradiction with Boym’s definition of the category which is manifestly not embedded within a single material entity, but delineates itself through a shoring up of fragments and reminiscing in endless details in order to defer the homecoming and flounder in its longing. Nostalgia embodied within brutal materiality, such as the Buzludzha monument, is a distinct aspect of restorative nostalgia. Hence, it is not that Rebecca Litchfield’s nostalgic impetus completely collapses Svetlana Boym’s categorization of the concept, it simply blends several of the aspects which are supposedly specific to either reflective or restorative nostalgia in its implementation.
I have established this preliminary analysis of Litchfield’s not-yet-quite nostalgia in reaction to the Buzludzha monument in order to be able to evaluate the nostalgic impetus in her response to abandoned communist heritage in general. In a promotional article for her recent photo book Soviet Ghosts: The Soviet Union Abandoned: A Communist Empire in
Decay, she states: “My aim with the book was to capture the crumbling empire of the former
Soviet Union, before it is gone completely. The title Soviet Ghosts comes from the ghosts and stories that are left behind after the collapse of the Soviet Union” (Litchfield). Litchfield highlights that her incentive of photographing these abandoned structures is one of conservation. She does not necessarily want to have these buildings restored, for she has grasped the impossibility of that desire, but wishes at least to save some aspect of their physicality for posterity. It is this desire to protect that openly relates to a restorative nostalgic impulse. Hence, she purportedly continues by explaining the reasons of this impulse: “While some may look at the decay in these places as simply reflecting the destruction of the Soviet Union and the moral bankruptcy of a flawed ideological system, in reality they will cease to exist. As the memories fade, these places and the communities who once gave life will be forgotten. They deserve to be recorded for posterity” (Litchfield). However, although Litchfield herself claims this is the case, I believe this conservational impulse does not necessarily emerge out of a desire to save the remnants of communist ideology which are destined to disappear. While she is careful to distance herself from those who consider the decaying remainders of communism as testimony to the justified destruction of the Soviet system, she still explicitly designates its ideology as flawed and related to moral bankruptcy. This point of view is, as I have outlined in the previous chapter, indicative of a sense of Western superiority towards its Eastern neighbor. It is reminiscent of the colonizing attitude of the West in which it considers its neoliberal, democratic system as superior to the Bolshevik communist one and thus sees itself obliged to incorporate Eastern Europe within its
own societal structure. On the one hand, this impulse emerges out of a belief that the West is destined to save the East’s population from repression and barbarism and, on the other, to prevent the spread of communism in its own territories. Apparently, even twenty-five years after the dissolution of the Warsaw pact and the supposed triumph of Western capitalism, the process of demi-orientalization still leaves its imprint upon contemporary interactions with the East.
Seen in light of her reaction to the Buzludzha monument, Litchfield’s call for preservation acquires quite a different meaning. It is not necessarily the concrete, material structure that the nostalgic incentive urges to preserve, but the memory of her experience which is centered on a sense of otherworldliness. In other words, while Rebecca Litchfield claims to want to retain something physical of the Buzludzha monument in her act of photographing decaying structures which are destined to disappear in the near future, relating her statements back to the concept of Orientalism shows that it is not the monument per se that should be conserved, but what the monument comes to mean for Litchfield personally.
In order to evaluate whether I might be able to generalize this claim of Orientalization occasioning a nostalgic impulse, I turn to Peter Hohenhaus, who responds to the Buzludzha monument in a similar vein as Rebecca Litchfield does. He explains: “The aura of Buzludzha was a strange mix: the echoes of former glories, and the quietly oppressive feeling of transience of such glory, coupled with a good dose of regret for the sorry state of this massive monument now looking so feeble … and with more than just a small dose of anger at all those vandals and thieves responsible for its present state” (Hohenhaus). The nostalgia in which Peter Hohenhaus engages is, outwardly at least, distinctly restorative in nature. This not only becomes clear through the anger he expresses at the vandals defiling the monument, but also by means of direct calls for restoration. Hohenhaus wonders “what will happen to Buzludzha. Will it be left to fall apart completely? Or will it somehow be saved?” (Hohenhaus).
Unfortunately, he “doubts there is even the remotest chance it will ever be restored to its original state – who’d pay for that?” (Hohenhaus). Still, however, he hopes “something would be done to at least preserve it in a stable state, rather than letting it rot, rust and be further vandalized” (Hohenhaus). This is Boym’s restorative nostalgia at its finest: it expresses the hope for a complete restoration of a past artifact. However, the reasons for this restoration are, arguably, not quite in line with Boym’s definition of restorative nostalgia. For, Hohenhaus definitely does not want to rehabilitate the old communist values pertaining to the monument. He argues that “[i]t’s of course alright to wish away oppressive totalitarian political systems, cheer their demise and say good riddance to those who ran them” (Hohenhaus). However, what he does not understand in this sense is “this kind of triumphant zeal for iconoclastic vengeance” (Hohenhaus). In other words, Peter Hohenhaus is not nostalgic for the communist regime that erected the monument, but for the monument’s architecture itself, for its opulence and grandeur: “Witnessing the dilapidated state of the monument’s interior you can’t help but wonder what it must have looked like in its full glory” (Hohenhaus).
Contrary to Rebecca Litchfield’s incentive, the nostalgia of Peter Hohenhaus is directly aimed at preserving the architectural masterpiece that Buzludzha once was. However, while the direction of his nostalgia – the restoration of the monument – is undoubtedly honest and harmless, Hohenhaus implicitly relates, like Litchfield does, his call for rehabilitation to Orientalizing processes. Concretely, Orientalization happens in his doubts regarding the actual restoration of the monument. The exclamation “Who’d pay for that,” is quite telling in the sense that it explicitly reveals his distrust in the capability of the official authorities, represented by the Bulgarian Socialist Party, to take proper care of its heritage and implicitly demonstrates a sense of Western triumphalism over the supposed incompetence of Bulgaria’s post-communist government. For, stating there are no funds to restore the monument supposes governmental mismanagement of both patrimony and finance. This way, and again
in accordance with Rebecca Litchfield, the monument seems to enable Hohenhaus to conceive of his own vision in relation to the edifice’s past and future. In short, Buzludzha seems to enable its visitors to create their own meaning out of the remnants and fragments which make up its contemporary appearance. These are the Soviet ghosts to which Litchfield refers in her book: residues of the past inciting the living to produce meaning in order to come to terms with that past in light of the present. It is this characteristic of the Buzludzha monument I will explore in the remainder of this thesis and relate to the concept of nostalgia tied in with West/East relations.
B. THE ANGEL OF HISTORY: THE (UN)REALITY OF BUZLUDZHA REVISITED
As blogger Nate Roberts sensed during his visit to Buzludzha, it is not necessarily the monument’s otherworldly architecture, but the idea of groping about in an “abandoned communist meeting house” that constituted the core of his experience. The abandonment and ruination of the monument is undoubtedly an important aspect of Buzludzha’s attraction for Western tourists. Hence, my question: Would Robert Nate’s experience have been the same if Buzludzha had been restored and converted into a museum or memorial? I doubt it. For, as photographer Timothy Allen recounts of his visit to the monument, ruins have a very particular lure: “Over the years I’ve visited my fair share of abandoned buildings. They’ve always held a very strong attraction for me. Somehow, their silent decaying façades offer the perfect blank canvas for an introverted imagination like mine. Literally allowing me to conjure up vivid images of the past in my present” (Allen). Ruins, according to Timothy Allen, are projection screens for the imagination. In this capacity they somehow manage to confound common conceptions of time, blending the past into the present, thus producing specters which produce nostalgic longing questioning the supposed status quo of the societal framework.
