A Cultural Shift in the 1970s

As elsewhere across the Eastern bloc, staple foods in Poland were greatly subsidized even though shortages were chronic. One solution to this problem was to raise prices. But in 1970, when Władysław Gomułka’s administration decided that prices had to be raised radically (by some 25 percent on bread, meats, and milk products), riots broke out in Poland’s shipyard cities. They were most pronounced in Szczecin and Gdynia, where thirty-four individuals were shot dead by government authorities. Though quashed, the riots affected the government of the People’s Republic, as could best be seen in January 1971. It was then that the new party leader, Edward Gierek, paid a personal visit to Szczecin. In the subsequent nine-hour session, the leader of a major Soviet bloc country sat down with shipyard workers in a smoky conference room and discussed the future of the country. It was at this meeting that Gierek adopted his trademark slogan: “Pomożecie?” (Will you help?) The shipyard workers responded: “Pomożemy!” (We’ll help!) In Szczecin, Gierek also highlighted his own worker background through his presentation and delivery. He sat at a simple folding table with other functionaries and workers. It had no tablecloth. Bottled beer, without glasses, was on the table. ¹

The encounter between Gierek and the workers in early 1971 is indicative of a new openness that occurred in many Eastern bloc countries. New leadership in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Poland led to an ironic liberalization in the 1970s. It was ironic, first, since immediately prior to liberalization the same states had cracked down on popular unrest. Second, it was ironic since the liberalization also aimed abroad. Just a few years earlier, members of the Warsaw Pact had sent troops to Czechoslovakia. Now, the liberalization aimed at being transnational in scope.

Nothing was more indicative of the transnationalism of the 1970s than the “Borders of Friendship.” In 1972, the governments of East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland embarked on an open border policy, allowing citizens unfettered mobility to neighboring countries (provided they had a personal identification card). ² The project was both transnational and international. It was international since it was initially planned in the upper echelons of power. Ministers and first secretaries contrived to “perform” the border through official contacts, joint celebrations, and propaganda in the daily press. Statistically, the project was a major success, and millions of people went abroad to explore what lay in so-called “fraternal socialist neighbor countries.” But it was not statistics that made the project transnational. It was transnational since everyday contacts did occur between citizens, and did so in ways that the government did not explicitly intend.

The transnational nature of the 1970s required new approaches to such touchy topics as the Holocaust and German expulsion. As I show here, they became more nuanced and complex in the 1970s. Authors explored notions of collective guilt, historical amnesia and personal responsibility. I argue that this new approach towards taboos was necessary given the fact that millions of people were travelling abroad: in light of transnational travel (as detailed by Dariusz Stola in his contribution to this volume), authorities had to permit greater cultural openness. Just as individuals were encouraged to go abroad, there had to be new approaches to confronting the past when there.

My first aim in this paper is to examine a handful of novels and films that highlight the shift in focus towards transnational exchange between socialist citizens. While certainly not a primary paradigm in 1970s Eastern bloc literature and film, transnational exchange at the everyday level nevertheless became a new trope in art. The focus here was not on an international project of realizing socialism, rather on transnational exchange between socialist citizens, and a slow but certain confrontation with the past.

After exploring select novels and films, my second aim is to show how liberalized travel meant that many local events became transnational affairs. The vast majority of the sites where foreigners flocked were officially sanctioned: they were festivals or sporting events. But in each case, ordinary people went and acted individually. Crucially, young people represented a large segment of the traveling population. This marks a change from the 1960s when (as Zdeňek Nebřensky argues in these pages) administrators selected delegations to go abroad and where the ordinary person’s experience of the foreign country was highly choreographed. ³

In this volume, Lisa Jakelski’s contribution on the Warsaw Autumn Festival distinguishes between international and transnational relations. She reflects on how an international event could (or could not) be considered transnational, depending on which actors one focused. I would like to continue exploring the distinction between international and transnational in discussing the “post-totalitarian” state. In this paper, I offer a snapshot of East Central European culture in the 1970s, and argue that mobility—coupled with cultural liberalization and the growing group of twenty-somethings—emboldened the youth generation of the 1970s to see the world not in black and white, but as full of shades of grey. Mass mobility was a key element of the socialist 1970s, bringing citizens to understand their world as a transnational one with connections across borders.

Young people born after the War were neither old enough to remember Khrushchev’s secret speech condemning Stalin’s personality cult and politically motivated purges, nor to participate in the uprisings across Eastern Europe against workers’ norms and socialist leaders in the 1950s. More importantly, they would come to understand the state in drastically different terms than their parents and grandparents. They had grown up in state socialism, knowing neither pre–World War I cosmopolitanism nor the “Golden Twenties.” In their lifetime, they fought neither fascists nor capitalists. Given that many children were forced into kindergarten in their first year of life, they were spoon-fed socialism nearly from birth.

This generation had a sense of style that was completely different from that of its elders: it was infatuated with “Teksas” jeans and so-called elephant pants—or bell bottoms—and was already acculturated to the notion of Lenin in a mini-skirt. ⁴ In Czechoslovakia, the Škoda Š100, and in Poland the iconic Polski Fiat 125p, were rolling off the lot in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The explosive growth of these small, mass-produced personal automobiles in the early 1970s meant that even if the youngest generation did not immediately obtain an automobile (or a driver’s license), they went hitchhiking in them and grew an identity as their mechanical counterparts aged. ⁵ And they loved Hungarian beat.

Young people were pre-determined by socialist authorities to reap the fruit of a new border policy in the East. Tourist organizations, youth groups, and cultural organizations aimed to attract young people to celebratory events. After all, there was no more potent symbol of the socialist states’ drive for world peace and cooperation—indeed, of socialist integration—than children playing together at demonstrations, or an ethnically diverse group of teenagers singing communist fight songs and playing the guitar in an open park. As in the 1974 agreement between Czechoslovakia and Poland, both governments committed themselves to “deepen the development of cooperation in the field of culture, education, sports, and other areas of socialist society . . . and also develop relations between . . . the youth and social organizations, universities and other institutions.” ⁶

Just as there was a new focus on a younger generation who had not fought in World War II, there was also a significant element of generational change shaping a more complex understanding of the past. Traditional historiography on late socialism asserts that the horrors of occupation and the Holocaust were manipulated by state planners and paternalistic educators. Expressing intensely personal stories about brutality, rape, and murder at the hands of Germans, Russians, or one’s own neighbors was taboo, unless it was done to celebrate the legitimacy of the new socialist state as protector of the nation and guarantor of peace. Similarly, racial distinction was subsumed in the grand narrative of the fight against fascism. Museums such as the one at Auschwitz highlighted the Polishness of the victims and the fact that they were victims of fascism (as opposed to Jewish victims of Nazism). ⁷ But things did change. In literature and film, the 1970s marked the era when personal responsibility, national guilt, expulsion, and the Holocaust began to be explicitly problematized in a handful of novels and films.

I argue that it was the 1970s which truly witnessed a breakthrough in literary narratives. If the 1960s was about the introduction of global trends in the Eastern bloc, then the 1970s was about a shift towards transnational understanding. In the 1970s, some meta-biographies attempted to stray from the protective state, confronting the ghouls of the past. In Imre Kértesz’s 1975 Sorstalanság (Fatelesseness), the Jewish child narrator relates his experience of the concentration camp, his French and Polish friends, and the Hungarians’ public response to his return to Budapest. In one passage, he relates how he was greeted after fleeing Dachau:

I climbed aboard a streetcar because my leg was hurting and because I recognized one out of many with a familiar number. A thin old woman wearing a strange, old-fashioned lace collar moved away from me. . . . I said I had just come back from abroad and was penniless. . . . [The conductor] looked at my coat, then at me, then at the old woman, and then he informed me that there were rules governing public transportation [and] that if I didn’t buy a ticket, I’d have to get off. . . . I noticed that the old woman . . . turn[ed] to look outside the window, in an insulted way, as if I were somehow accusing her of who knows what. ⁸

The old woman, the other passengers in the streetcar, had already moved to forget the past. One Hungarian denies that there had been concentration camps. The novel was first translated much later and never gained a large readership until after the fall of the state socialism. But the fact that an author could deal with such delicate topics as Holocaust denial and Hungarians’ role in deportations signifies a change in the way that ideologically grounded governments sanctioned the memory of World War II. ⁹ The author’s semi-biographical description of his experiences clearly places some blame on ordinary citizens.

In the GDR, starting in the 1970s, a series of films and novels were released that built on the theme of travel. Here, phantom borders and official narratives of East Germany’s heroic struggle against fascism collided with personal biography and national consciousness. Egon Günther’s 1973 film, Die Schlüssel (The Keys), is about a young pair (Ric and Klaus) who decide to visit Poland for the first time. They take a plane to Kraków from Berlin for what promises to be an unforgettable trip. “The Poles are more relaxed” is the constant refrain to be heard from the male protagonist in the film. That Poles are more “relaxed” is proven to the pair at the airport, where an unknown man urges them to stay at his apartment while he goes on vacation, to which they agree. In the taxi cab, the driver insists on illegally exchanging money with the East German couple. In clubs, Czesław Niemen publically performs to a captivated audience of young and old. And when the couple is caught in the apartment by neighbors, they are not admonished for living in the apartment, but invited to drink vodka in friendly circles.

Notable about the film are the numerous scenes where the German past is directly discussed. When visiting St. Mary’s Basilica in the city center, the guide to the church explains (in broken German) that “the altar was stolen by the Germans, by Hitler, by the Gestapo, the SS and brought into Germany. A young American soldier brought it back to Kraków.” ¹⁰ The fact that he highlights that the Americans were the heroes who returned the altar is as surprising as the fact that the guide charges “the Germans” with the crime. During the scene, the viewer hears crying from a young Polish woman in the background. In the following café scene, the female protagonist stops to recognize an elderly woman with short sleeves. There she sees a number tattooed on the woman’s arm. The camera holds still, allowing the audience to contemplate the meaning of the tattoo, after which the director scrolls across the room, focusing on the number of elderly people in the restaurant. Clearly making reference to the Holocaust and extermination camps (a few miles from Kraków), Die Schlüssel brings East Germans on a virtual trip to Poland, where they must confront the dark German past.

Travelling with a Polish soldier friend, the two protagonists stop frequently to speak with the elderly, and the camera continually counterbalances old people with deep wrinkles and expressive faces with the young, uninhibited, new Polish society. Ric returns to the GDR in an old cargo wagon, having tragically died in a tram accident. The director focuses on the old, wooden train wagon, which is slowly locked shut by a Polish soldier in uniform, and a white cross is sketched in chalk. One hears the old steam locomotive starting to churn, on a long return voyage to East Germany. For many viewers, the scene would call forth memories of expulsion of minorities and Nazi extermination.

For obvious reasons, it was the Germans who had the most to overcome. Authors throughout the 1970s used the trope of travel not only to detail adventures abroad but to confront difficult topics. Poland’s best travel literature was written by Kapusciński, who had the opportunity to travel west (and to Africa). In his 1978 novel on the downfall of the Ethiopian monarchy, Cesarz (Emperor), the author describes the complicity of ordinary people. For readers in the East bloc, the journalistic novel about a travel to a distant empire led by an old and out-of-touch despot was interpreted by some as a ill-disguised indictment of socialist society in the age of Brezhnev. In Ivan Klíma’s Návštěva u nesmrtelné tetky (Visiting the Immortal Aunt), the author tries to explain the ways in which Poles are more than the system in which they live and ways in which they are more similar to Czechs and Slovaks than at first glance. Bohumil Hrabal’s 1976 Příliš hlučna samota (Too Loud a Solitude), which although certainly not a travel account but did break taboos, depicts how the Czechoslovak government burned books that were not being exchanged for cash to West German imperialists. ¹¹

In Rolf Schneider’s 1972 work, Die Reise nach Jarosław (The Trip to Jarosław), the narrator—a girl born in the same month as the Polish uprising in Poznań (June 1956)—travels to Poland to find the hometown of her recently deceased grandmother, Grandma Helga. Along the way, she becomes romantically involved with a young Pole and ventures across East Germany and Poland with her new love. Die Reise nach Jarosław marks a watershed moment for historians of the GDR when state socialism had moved away from strict, patronizing styles, and toward relative cultural liberalization. On the one hand, the oldest generation is portrayed as apolitical and personable. The only person with whom the protagonist has a close relationship is her grandmother. “Grandma Helga came to Berlin in the middle of the war from Jarosław since she lost her husband, but had a kid in Jarosław, and leaving Jarosław, I think, is the only thing she ever resented. ¹² Germans were unhappy to leave their homes at the close of the War. Gittie’s grandmother regrets it, although she does not elaborate on the situation further. The questions are openly discussed, even if the answers are avoided. Why was Helga fleeing Jarosław? Where did her husband go? Who made her leave? Clearly, many elements are understood within a society such as the GDR, where one in five was a former inhabitant of either Czechoslovakia or Poland.

It is also understood that some topics are taboo. Still, the protagonist’s Polish boyfriend, Jan, explains that his “father hates all Germans. . . . I don’t get it. . . . He was in Germany . . . during the occupation. He had to work in a mine. He is organist, [and was] in an accident where he crushed his knee cap. It is very difficult for him to play the organ, because of the pedals.” ¹³ The teenager’s father openly expressed his hatred, but justifies it through the violence perpetrated upon him by Germans in World War II.

In contrast to earlier works, where public figures and family were held up as examples, in Die Reise nach Jarosław the protagonist rebels against her parents, whom she finds boring and conformist. ¹⁴ In her diatribes against her mother and father, Gittie uses the language of an eighteen-year-old—calling her parents “fogies” and old people “bums.” She also find things “cool,” and is open about formerly taboo topics: she details more-or-less open sexism at her school, her adoration of Western music, and her desire to view American movies.

More prominent than Rolf Schneider’s work was that of Christa Wolf. Having already established herself through Der geteilte Himmel (The Divided Sky) and Nachdenken über Christa T. (Thoughts about Christa T.)—both of which received considerable attention both in East and West Germany— she attempted to explain her own role in the Nazi past of a formerly German city (Landsberg, now Gorzów Wielkopolski) in Kindheitsmuster (A Model Childhood). She explains,

Back in the summer of 1971, [I] agreed to the proposal to drive to L., now called G. Although [I] kept telling [myself] that there was no need for it. Still, why not let them have their way. The tourist business to hometowns was booming. People who had gone came back praising the friendliness of the town’s new inhabitants, and describing the roads, the food, the lodgings as “good,” “fair,” “adequate.” You listened without any particular emotion. Topographically, you said—partly to give the appearance of genuine interest—you’d be able to rely on your memory completely: the houses, streets, churches, parks, squares, the entire layout of this ordinary town was forever preserved in your head. ¹⁵

The 1970s offered Christa Wolf, and her fictional narrative, the opportunity to transgress the borders. While she had found no need before, the new travel regulations of the 1970s allowed her (and millions of other East Germans) the right to travel to Poland and Czechoslovakia.

Wolf responds to a trip to Poland in 1971 by asking “how did we become what we are today?” ¹⁶ The protagonist and Wolf struggle to find an appropriate answer. The three main figures in her quasi-autobiography—that is, the narrator (who experienced the rise of Nazism as a child), her mother (who, in winter 1945, left her children), and her daughter (who, we presume, is enjoying a “model childhood”)—are blended together, and reveal the difficult process of remembering when new roles were adopted, or when new identities were imposed. The narrator of Kindheitsmuster struggles to find the language of consciousness:

To be inconsiderate—without looking back—as a basic requirement for survival; one of the prerequisites that separate the living from the survivors.

Question from the audience: And do you believe it’s possible to come to grips with the events that you write about?

Answer: No. ¹⁷

Wolf—who assured West German audiences when the book was published that it was fictional—recognizes that life after Nazism required an abdication from reflection, since continual thought about the past would lead to “severe, lasting depression.” ¹⁸

Kindheitsmuster is an important work reflecting on the Nazi past of ordinary Germans. She relates how, even though in her hometown there were only a few party enthusiasts, even she “longed to know how it felt to be at one with all, to see the Führer.” ^{[19] 19} Significantly, however, reflection stops in 1945, and Christa Wolf wonders “Stalin. . . . Has he died then? Has he already been buried? . . . When will we start speaking about that, too? To get rid of the feeling that, until we do, everything we say is temporary, that only then would we really begin to speak.” ²⁰

In one account, she told how her (fictional) daughter, Lenka, took a trip to Prague. “Can you guess what [the East Germans sang] at night when they got drunk on Prague beers?” Lenka asked. She responded: “In a Polish town.” ²¹ The song, about a girl who hung herself after having sexual relations with a German during World War II, was particularly distasteful and brought the narrator in Wolf’s novel to despair about her uncouth comrades and tourists’ ignorance of national sensibilities.

State socialism required that new roles be adopted after the collapse of the fascist regimes. In contrast, the new generation could discuss the fascist past, personal responsibility in the Holocaust, and even the illegitimate use of force during Stalinism. Travel literature, like the millions of people who travelled, began to problematize difficult history; people were actually brought to establish contacts with foreigners while abroad, and travel brought themes of confrontation with the past into literature.

Children born and raised into state socialism, who neither fought in World War II nor participated—or only limitedly—in the wave of uprisings in 1956, grew up in a society of normalization, where there were spheres of compromised space. It was not compromised in the sense of counter-revolution or revolt against the state, rather in the sense that people felt they were outside of the purview of state security. The largest compromised space for these youngsters was foreign land, to which they travelled with relative ease after the borders were opened in 1972.

The best known case of such a happening was the 1973 World Youth Festival in East Berlin. ²² The state-sponsored mega-event coincided with the completion of the TV tower in Alexanderplatz, along with its fountains and institutional buildings, as well as the groundbreaking for the Palace of the Republic. ²³ Since Berlin hosted an earlier festival in 1951, the state had moved to drastically liberalize their policing of public order. Here, the police are described as being friendly. One eyewitness said,

We were lying early in the morning somewhere and the police woke us up in a friendly way. . . . There was an atmosphere that before then you would never have thought possible. In the morning at the fountain this huge orgy of washing took place. And nothing happened. They just turned a blind eye. And the amazing thing was that there was food round the clock, everything was working. In the city center until eight in the morning you could drink, eat, without any hassle, without someone saying, “That’s an end to it now.” The amazing thing was that people stood around at Alex discussing throughout the night. Not just young people but then also workers from the pub or from their shift . . . something like that had never happened before. . . . The police were really like “your friend and helper,” just like in a children’s magazine. ²⁴

On the streets, twenty-five thousand people from over one hundred nations were allowed to debate, and the state did not try to control what was said. African American Angela Davis was brought to the festival as an honored guest of Erich Honecker. And while there were public marches of youth organizations, the seemingly never-ending mass calisthenics and cultlike celebrations of the leader were nowhere to be seen.

In lieu of mass exercise, there was entertainment. In the spirit of the open border with Poland, Anna Jantar (who tragically died in a plane crash only a few years later) as well as Polish hippie groups like the Amazonki performed to an international audience. Wearing long hair and bell bottoms, they contrasted with many of the delegations on the other side of the Oder. ²⁵ The American Eastern bloc superstar Dean Reed played folk music in the evenings. ²⁶ R.B.—a student of Esperanto—remembered that people went “skinny dipping at night, which [she] thought was pretty funny, but never wanted to join.” ²⁷ Polish guests spontaneously held happenings, undressing on the Alexanderplatz and streaking the public. Markedly, the police did not arrest foreign guests. ²⁸

The important aspect that many—even functionaries in the festivities—remember was that people were not forced to spend time in group organizations. G.A., who was at both the festivals in 1951 and 1973, remembered that the second World Youth Festival “was arranged individually” and that “political propagation . . . was not the most important aspect” of the festivities. ²⁹ Scarfs were handed out to youngsters to collect signatures from new friends. But here, too, most remember how uninterested they were in the so-called “friendship scarfs.” ³⁰ Another remembered that “there were always fewer blue shirts,” indicating both that it was so warm that they took off their FDJ uniform and that people were going nude more often. ³¹

Not only were the celebrations of the leader missing, the leader had actually died during the festivities without anyone noticing. Long-time leader Walter Ulbricht had a stroke and a heart attack sitting at his home in East Berlin while the World Youth Festival was taking place outside his window. ³² Ulbricht had been deposed with the support of the Soviet Union in 1971. As soon as Honecker came to power, he commenced a name changing campaign to erase Ulbricht’s ubiquity from the city (the stadium of the World Youth Festival had its name removed before the festivities began). The festivities distracted youngsters (and their parents) from thinking about politics. ³³ Still, it would be expected in such an atmosphere of radical liberalization and inhibition that a relatively unloved figure of GDR history—the man most responsible for the construction of the Berlin Wall and the suppression of the July 1953 Uprising—that acts of defiance would be spontaneous and widespread. But Hagen Koch, who worked as a cultural officer of the Stasi, noted that nothing of significance happened, even during the funeral ceremony for Walter Ulbricht. ³⁴ His death was not even mentioned until the closing ceremonies. ³⁵

Can the state sponsor and organize an event which is not political in nature? After all, the Stasi was still monitoring the crowd, albeit with blinkers. “Amongst [informal] singing groups” and “in group discussions,” the Stasi was told only to “paint a positive picture of the GDR.” ³⁶ The Youth Festival was a carnivalesque event where people lost their sense of living in a repressive government. Perhaps for that reason, even would-be dissidents came to exchange at the World Youth Festival. One man from Altenberg, who had painted graffiti (“Dubček”) in 1968 on trains in the GDR, and who carried the Czechoslovak flag with him to provoke the authorities, decided he could not miss out on the celebration. ³⁷ The young man—a twenty-three-year-old in 1973—maintained contacts with people in the CSSR, although he admitted not “having the conscience of a dissident.” ³⁸ During the festival, he came with his girlfriend to Berlin without a passport, and remarked how there were

so many people [who came] illegally to Berlin that they were selling blankets at Alex[anderplatz]. . . . I can remember that we once were sleeping somewhere in the morning and then we were awoken by the police with the friendly notification that the spots were needed, and that we should go to the grass in front of the Rotes Rathaus, [where] we could continue sleeping until 11. The metro stations were opened in the evening, there was an atmosphere that no one thought could exist before. ³⁹

People could write graffiti on the walls, and nothing was done. ⁴⁰ It gave him hope for the Honecker regime. They could even talk about Prague and Ostpolitik with West Berliners. For that reason, the festival was commonly known as the “Red Woodstock.” ⁴¹

Similar international—and explicitly intra-bloc events—occurred at intervals. The Meeting of Friendship in Frankfurt Oder in June 1977 brought together thousands of people young and old to the city. Despite the highly orchestrated nature of many events, documentary films from the festival show the unorganized contacts created between Polish and German young people. Even today, the (now elderly) participants of the festival display with pride their cloth bags, clay beer mugs, and porcelain plates. Many other events were less organized. In Warsaw, people from across the bloc travelled to the Jazz Jamboree every year in the spring and to Prague for the Jazz Festival. ⁴² Similarly, the Workshop Peitz/Free Jazz hosted musicians in the small town of the Spreewald until it lost prestige in 1982. ⁴³ There was a close connection between Warsaw and Peitz. As Christoph Dieckmann explains, he nearly missed his first premier as a jazz musician in Poland:

I drove annually starting in 1975 [to Poland], as did hundreds of my peers. The Jazz Jamboree was the largest East bloc festival and our Oktoberfest. The relations between jazz fans and GDR border guards were not so relaxed. The latter naturally knew where the weird youngsters were going and tried to prevent them from going to Poland. The train reached Frankfurt Oder: Passports! They contemptuously inspected the [jazzkids]. Your personal documents. I handed them my passport. Rip, the guard tore out half of the first page. Citizen, he laughed maniacally, I see that your passport is damaged. It is impossible to let you into the People’s Republic of Poland. Get off the train. ⁴⁴

Fortunately, the jazz fan was able to go away from the train station and pass through an alternate pedestrian border with his regular ID. Then he took a bus to the next train station, arriving in Warsaw in the early morning. His friends were surprised that he even made it to Warsaw. ⁴⁵

A more common way for adventure seekers to travel through Poland was by hitchhiking. Poland was one of the few countries that actually supported legalized hitchhiking (albeit only during the summer months). However, since it was nearly impossible to control every individual, the official hitchhiking program—called “autostop”—virtually legalized informal travel by foreigners in the People’s Republic. After the borders were opened in the 1970s, growing numbers of young tourists took to the street in Poland to meet the locals and to get around cheaply. ⁴⁶ Organizers noted that by the early 1980s, more than a million hitchhiking booklets (the “pass” to hitchhike) had been sold over the history of the program, an increasing number of which were being purchased by non-Poles. ⁴⁷

Governments would grow more resistant to letting citizens meet and congregate informally in the 1980s. Czechoslovak and East German officials sealed the border to Poland after the rise of Solidarity, and all countries ramped up arrests of dissidents in the late 1970s. In this regard, the East German government’s reaction towards the World Youth Festival and the Polish government’s response to hitchhiking were the exceptions that proved the rule. But the extent of transnational contact between individuals is still remarkable. Citizen complaints reveal the degree to which ordinary tourists intermingled transnationally with locals of foreign countries.

In August 1974, the East German Central Committee was flooded with citizen complaints about the treatment of campers in Brno. ⁴⁸ According to numerous witnesses, one evening at ten, police in riot gear had come, demanded (in Czech) that the campers disperse, and almost without warning, surged into the crowd swinging batons. J.V. described how, “when I asked a policeman, why we weren’t told during the day [to move camp], another policeman pulled my head back by the hair and another sprayed tear gas in my face.” ⁴⁹ Another complained that when families with small children attempted to hold out in their tents, the police “slit them open with knifes and sprayed teargas inside.” ⁵⁰ Those with vehicles were forced to drive out of the city, even when they let the police know they were intoxicated; dozens were beaten in jails at night; when the jails filled up, GDR citizens were taken to the insane asylum, where they were not only held against their will, but were forced to pay 125 koruna for room and board. Of course the authorities in Czechoslovakia had an explanation. According to the Ministry of State Security, that weekend in Brno nearly fifteen thousand primarily young East Germans had come for the annual motocross race and had chosen to illegally occupy a football field on the outskirts of town. They had begun to dismantle street signs and block traffic. The Czechoslovak police, the ministry reported, interfered only when campers began setting up on the street itself, lacking room on the field. ⁵¹

The presence of tens of thousands of East Germans in Brno—which was still at least a six-hour drive from the nearest GDR border—is telling not only for the conflict between drunken youngsters and police. It also reveals how the annual “Race for the Big Prize” was a magnet for Eastern bloc tourists—especially from the GDR and Poland. ⁵² There, young people set up early and enjoyed cool Czech beer and hot summers. If the 1973 World Youth Festival attracted twenty-five thousand to East Berlin, at least as many Eastern bloc citizens visited Brno every year for the race. Like the visitors to the Jazz Jamboree or the Workshop Peitz, fans who visited the race expected at least some trouble when going abroad, even if they were not self-ascribed dissidents.

Recent literature—most notably Anne Gorsuch and Diane Koenker’s volume on “the Socialist Sixties”—argues that the Soviet bloc began integrating globally in the 1960s. ⁵³ That came in the form of popular culture and youth movements. They ask whether the developments were “transnational, implying the circulation of information, organization, ideas, images, and people across borders,” or whether they were “global, suggesting parallelism but not interpenetration.” ⁵⁴ They conclude that it was primarily the latter: the “socialist sixties” was a time when youth movements, music festivals, cult films, and other cultural phenomena became global in scope. What I emphasize here is that, if the 1960s were “global,” the 1970s were transnational, even if this was limited to particular regions of the Eastern bloc.

From East Germany to Poland and Hungary, an increasing segment of the population moved across state borders and they did so regularly. Novels, films, and music also revealed a new focus on the so-called Northern Triangle. The travel policy between the GDR, Poland, and Czechoslovakia was not only a safety valve to keep the population compliant; it was utilized to challenge the promises of each respective regime as it became more of a normality than an oddity to travel. Even if people were occasionally prevented from entry to third countries or harassed at border crossings, passage into foreign (if socialist) countries had become commonplace. That was particularly true for people growing up in the 1970s.

If there was any generation that liberalized travel was meant to affect, it was the youth generation of 1972. In each member country of the “Borders of Friendship,” party officials declared their support of youth projects, and even after some restrictions were put in place, administrations worked to ensure that the younger generation was the least affected. From music to cuisine, the Eastern bloc experienced a significant and symbolic change that embraced transnationalism and youth culture. This generation has been variously called by scholars the “Hineingeborene generation,” or the last Soviet generation. ⁵⁵ It understood the necessity of marching on May Day but also understood the ins and outs of rock-n-roll and underground clubs. The youth understood that you could diverge from the path of the faithful socialist as long as you atoned through participation in the local youth group or a similar communist-organized group. It was the generation that drank Pepsi Cola (also launched in 1972). At the same time, it participated in youth organizations and clubs in the search for negotiated or compromised spaces. They understood the principal immutability of the communist regime, but also grew up in a normative system where limited criticism was, in varying degrees and depending on the country, publicly tolerated. The freedom of mobility afforded by the “Borders of Friendship” emboldened ordinary people to think beyond the nation-state.