Tadeusz Czekalski

The text examines how the Bunk’Art 1 and Bunk’Art 2 exhibitions, opened in 2014–2016 in Tirana fit in the main narrative trends of the Albanian memory of the communist past. The project of the Italian journalist Carlo Bollino has become one of the key elements of the new policy of socialist memory of the government of Edi Rama, and at the same time an attempt to create modern  cultural institutions in the old atomic bunkers from the time of Enver Hoxha, in which history becomes a space dominated by artists and journalists, and at the same time competitive towards professional histori ans

What seems to be especially interesting to historians undertaking research into the issue of the “culture of fear” in the 19th century is a confrontation of “traditional” fear associated with forces of nature with “civilization-based fear”, caused by a rapid development of industrial culture and a demographic revolution. Yet although the 19th c. literature devoted to the theory of fear seems to be quite prolific and varied, the topic of battlefield fear, or else fear experienced by soldiers, seems to be relatively unexplored. The image of an undaunted fearless soldier, which had been shaped by European Romanticism up until the end of the 19th c. had not been subjected to a fundamental verification.  It was only the studies carried out by psychologists at the turn of the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th c., and especially the experiences of the First World War that had forced researchers to modify their views with regard to soldierly fear. The protracted trench war had caused reactions among soldiers which had by far surpassed the schematic conceptions of emotions experienced on the battlefield, inducing scholars to undertake more complex research devoted to the issue of soldierly fear.

The First World War was an extremely difficult challenge for services and offices responsible for supplying the soldiers fighting on the front as well as all the citizens working at the rear of the front line. The decline in food production during the war forced the belligerent States to use top-down mechanisms to reduce the demand for food. The most commonly used method of adjusting the demands became food rationing during the war, as well as the promotion of food substitutes instead of deficit products like meat, sugar and fats. In the course of war, the inhabitants of European countries became aware of a new, previously practically unknown, role of the States – as a controlling factor of their daily eating habits. Changing these habits during the war opened up new prospects for the implementation of dietary programmes in society as a whole. Food storage experiences of urban population and the use of extended durability products in everyday life were building a survival strategy for future economic crises.

The paper follows in the assumption that the transformations of central-European and Balkan cities taking place in the second half of the 20th century can be considered a symptom of complex economic, social and political processes related to the development and decline of the culture of socialism. Changes after the Second World War were closely interconnected with the urbanization project, which was implemented in two ways – either by rebuilding, reorganizing and resemantizing old cities, or by creating cities and urban communities – in a modernist spirit – from scratch. We consider these issues by comparing three examples of cities with different historical experience, which shaped their identities within culturally and politically different frames of reference.

The subject of thus oriented considerations is the question of what happened to the socialist utopia which at the end of the 20th century was put to the test. What was its fate depending on various politically – but also culturally-motivated scenarios of political transformation? In what way and by whom is its heritage appropriated in the 1990’s? While analyzing the fate of the utopia of the new city from a post-communist perspective, it should be noted that although individual projects did not meet the ideals and hopes of their designers, they proved to be an impulse that released social activityqualitatively different from existing traditional patterns and initiated a thorough redefinition of urban identities.