Café Europa Revisited: How to Survive Post-communism, by Slavenka Drakulić

Teaching the history of everyday life in eastern Europe during the era of state socialism has always been a challenge in Western universities. Pervasive Cold War stereotypes about Gulags, famines and purges crowd out topics such as the pre-1989 history of athletics, architecture or popular culture. Revisionist historians try to complicate our understanding of the quotidian experience of authoritarianism, while adherents of the so-called totalitarian thesis produce evidence to support a vision of bleak and grey societies crippled by gerontocratic one-party regimes with moribund centrally planned economies.

Given the fraught politics of knowledge production during and after the Cold War, it is occasionally refreshing to assign a book that dispenses with theory and focuses instead on vivid and compelling episodes to convey the lived realities of state socialism and its aftermaths. Since I began teaching more than 20 years ago, the works of the Croatian journalist Slavenka Drakulić have populated my syllabi – to the unending delight of my students. Her clear and lively prose captures in bite-sized essays what most scholarly works take scores of pages to provide: a thoughtful insider’s view of the sudden and unexpected transition to capitalism and democracy following the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Her latest offering, Café Europa Revisited, returns to the themes she explored in her two essay collections from the 1990s, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed (1992) and Café Europa: Life After Communism (1997). 

Drakulić opens with reflections on the profound disappointments of eastern Europeans who naively expected paradise with the coming of multiparty elections and free markets. In a brilliant chapter on “food apartheid”, she exposes how Western companies sell poorer quality products to eastern Europeans under the same brand names and packaging they use in the West: fish sticks with less fish and biscuits with palm oil instead of butter. She explores the exodus of doctors and nurses from Romania, the anti-immigrant sentiments that underpinned Brexit and the rise of nationalism in Poland and Hungary. Eastern Europeans feel themselves the victims of history, she argues, and this fuels “a desire to have an independent nation state and a population that is as ethnically homogenous as possible”.

Perhaps most pedagogically useful for those of us teaching students born well after 1990 is Drakulić’s frank acknowledgement of the red nostalgia that some still feel for various state socialist pasts as well as the rhetorical challenges posed when trying to discuss any positive legacies. “In all former communist countries in Eastern Europe,” she writes, “it is difficult to mention the merits of communism, a system that, in a short time, brought modernization and changed an agrarian society into an urbanized, industrial one. It meant general education as well as the emancipation of women; this has to be recognized, even though such changes were accomplished by a totalitarian regime.”

Café Europa Revisited breaks down the old dichotomy: communism, bad; capitalism, good. In Drakulić’s astute observations of the Europe of today, indeed, there seems to be plenty of bad to go around.

Kristen Ghodsee is professor of Russian and East European studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her books include Why Women Have Better Sex under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence (2019).

Café Europa Revisited: How to Survive Post-communism
By Slavenka Drakulić
Penguin Putnam Inc, 256pp, £14.99
ISBN 9780143134176
Published 7 January 2021