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 recent film Good-bye Lenin!, a nostalgic romp through the East German past, the propaganda banner is one of the most telling motifs. The banner at the start of the film depicts the Soviet hero several stories high. By its end, the device on a towering swath of red is the CocaCola logo. It always gets a laugh.

Germans from both sides of what turned out to be an astonishingly flimsy Iron Curtain tend to be as matter-of-fact as their Russian counterparts in assuming that Communist propaganda is equivalent to capitalist publicity, particularly as applied to how the Cold War opponents implemented their antithetical goals for the masses: international socialism vs. global soft 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 hopelessness and repression in Soviet-era Moscow and East Berlin. But 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 counter the condescension with which we customarily dismiss art produced in the former Eastern Bloc. Only when you give equal consideration to cultural and esthetic strategies of both sides can you begin to understand the art, and then many of the artists of middle to late communism, unknowns in the West, look surprisingly persuasive.

Parallel thinking about the West and the former Eastern Bloc are at the core of a huge exhibition, "Berlin-Moscow/Moscow-Berlin 1950-2000," which was recently shown at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin. The show 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 Culture of the Stalin Era" at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt [see sidebar]--which constitute the government-sponsored initiative, "German-Russian Cultural Encounters 2003/2004." After 2003 as "The Year of Russia" in Germany, 2004 is "The Year of Germany" in Russia. The "Berlin-Moscow" exhibition is currently on view in a very different version at the Moscow Historical Museum, just off Red Square. The expansive show of 500 works by 180 artists exceeds the already generous 50-year time span of the title by stretching the starting dale back to the end of World War II; it also exceeds its stated geographical focus, widening the debate to reflect the broader Cold War confrontation between East and West. The work of such non-German and non-Russian artists as Picasso, Broodthaers, Warhol, Kienholz and Abramovic is employed to advance particular arguments. One of these is a key assumption of the exhibition: that official Socialist Realista had a Western parallel in what Ekaterina Degot, one of the Russian curators of the show, characterized as an official "Capitalist Abstraction."

The use of broad curatorial categories demonstrated the ability to reposition for Western eyes an entire segment of Eastern Bloc art that is commonly dismissed as impoverished, with the exception of a handful of artists, such 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 much more intense than in the U.S.)

"Berlin-Moscow" was conceived as a sequel to the much-praised "Berlin-Moscow/Moscow-Berlin 1900-1950," an exhibition that toured both capitals in 1995-96. (2) But the shows have little in common. Many members of the Berlin-Moscow avant-garde celebrated in the first exhibition traveled between the two capitals and regularly communed with one another; their work could easily be laid out nationally in separate but related galleries. In the second half of the 20th century, however, Russian and German artists, as well as those of the divided Berlin, developed in separate worlds, severed from each other except for trickles of data and chance encounters until the Wall came down.

Large-scale cultural exchanges like this German-Russian exercise in mutual appreciation (3)--which includes opera, theater, film, concerts and dance--are, of course, motivated by 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 both have reasons to draw closer to each other as an alternative to reliance on 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 people took to the Berlin streets to protest the imminent Iraqi war.

Jurgen Harten, the principal German curator, explained to me that after the first energy crisis, 30 years ago, the German government decided that at least a third of its energy should come from Russia, and the relationship between the nations had developed continuously since then. Degot, the Russian curator, said, "Germany is THE country with which we have had cultural contacts in the past 15 years, and most of the artists who emigrated are living in Germany." On 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."