Cold War icons revisited: at the heart of a huge German-Russian cultural exchange, a 500-work show at the Martin-Gropius-Bau examined a half-century of confrontation between East and West

In the novel film Good-bye Lenin!, a nostalgic rude girl through the East German past, the propaganda banner is individual of the most telling motifs. The banner at the start of the film depicts the Soviet hero several stories high. through its end, the device upon a towering swath of r is the CocaCola logo It always gains a laugh.

Germans from the one and the other sides of what turned without to be an astonishingly flimsy Iron Curtain look after to be as matter-of-fact as their Russian counterparts in assuming that Communist propaganda is equivalent to capitalist publicity, particularly as applied to by what mode the Cold War opponents implemented their antithetical goals for the masses: international socialism v global yielding drinks. The easy acceptance of this equation in Germany came as a surprise to me last fall, since it clashed with what I had seen and heard of hopelessnes and repression in Soviet-era Moscow and East Berlin. on the other hand as the joke that frames a film or the argument that shapes an art exhibition, it works. The idea has within it sufficient veracity to calculator the condescension with which we customarily dismiss art produc in the former Eastern Bloc single when you give equal consideration to cultural and esthetic strategies of the couple sides can you begin to understand the art, and then many of the artists of middle to late communism, unknowns in the West, gaze surprisingly persuasive.

Parallel thinking about the West and the former Eastern Bloc are at the core of a enormous exhibition, "Berlin-Moscow/Moscow-Berlin 1950-2000," which was not long ago shown at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin. The display was the centerpiece of the 250 Russian-themed exhibitions and events--among them "Art in the DDR" at Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie (1) and "Dream Factory Communism: The Visual tillage of the Stalin Era" at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt [see sidebar]--which constitute the government-sponsored initiative, "German-Russian Cultural meetings 2003/2004." After 2003 as "The Year of Russia" in Germany, 2004 is "The Year of Germany" in Russia. The "Berlin-Moscow" exhibition is publicly on view in a real different version at the Moscow Historical Museum, just not upon Red Square. The expansive present to view of 500 works by 180 artists surpasss the already generous 50-year time span of the title by means of stretching the starting dale back to the extreme point of World War II; it also transcends its stated geographical focus, widening the debate to throw back the broader Cold War confrontation between East and West. The work of of the like kind non-German and non-Russian artists as Picasso, Broodthaers, Warhol, Kienholz and Abramovic is occupyed to advance particular arguments. single of these is a lock opener assumption of the exhibition: that official Socialist Realista had a Western parallel in what Ekaterina Degot individual of the Russian curators of the exhibit characterized as an official "Capitalist Abstraction."

The use of broad curatorial categories demonstrated the ability to reposition for Western organ of sights an entire segment of Eastern Bloc art that is commonly dismissed as impoverished, with the exception of a handful of artists, similar as Kabakov and Komar & Melamid, who have established careers in the West. (The A list is rather longer in Germany, where cultural interchange with Russia has been abundant more intense than in the US)

"Berlin-Moscow" was conceived as a continuation to the much-praised "Berlin-Moscow/Moscow-Berlin 1900-1950" an exhibition that toured the couple capitals in 1995-96. (2) on the contrary the shows have little in public Many members of the Berlin-Moscow avant-garde celebrated in the first exhibition traveled between the sum of two units capitals and regularly communed with individual another; their work could easily be laid on the outside nationally in separate but related galleries. In the next to the first half of the 20th hundred however, Russian and German artists, as well as those of the divided Berlin, unfolded in separate worlds, severed from each other do not include for trickles of data and chance rencounters until the Wall came down.

Large-scale cultural exchanges like this German-Russian exercise in mutual appreciation (3)--which includes opera, theater, film, contrives and dance--are, of course, motivated by the agency of national political and economic interest. The initial impetus for this exchange came four years ago; now, in the anti-American climate of the Iraqi war and its aftermath, Germany and Russia the couple have reasons to draw closer to each other as an alternative to reliance upon the U.S. As the teams of Russian and German curators were making the final selections for the "Berlin-Moscow" exhibition last year, half a million nation took to the Berlin highways to protest the imminent Iraqi war.

Jurgen Harten, the principal German curator, explained to me that after the first potency crisis, 30 years ago, the German conduct decided that at least a third of its potency should come from Russia, and the relationship between the nations had unfolded continuously since then. Degot, the Russian curator, said, "Germany is THE political division with which we have had cultural contacts in the past 15 years, and greatest in quantity of the artists who emigrated are living in Germany." upon a political level, she told me "At times Putin wants to be closer to America against Europe at times he wants to be closer to Europe"