Echoes of Central and Eastern Europe Underground Scenes in French Fanzines Before and After the Fall of the Berlin Wall

F are amateur and do-it-yourself (DIY) publications related to alternative media.1 The adjective “amateur” underlines the fundamental non-professional and non-commercial characteristics of these media,2 wherein the DIY ethos is embodied in the cheap aspect of the printed products. Scrutinised under the objective prism of media efficiency, amateurism and DIY practices might be considered as fundamental handicaps for information circulation; but their main advantage resides in the immediacy of (fan)zine production, thereby providing visual and verbal rants freed from the pressures of censorship, editorial dictates, subbing and deadlines, allowing insight into cultural preoccupations and socio-political understandings.3 Under political regimes with a high level of media control (i.e. where media are constrained to a blind and unquestionable allegiance to the ideology of the regime party and the ruling party), fanzines, like

"samizdat", 4 were supports of expression for alternative or opposition voices. 5 In a context where the European Union was built solely on the mental map of Western Europe, thus throwing out "the other Europe", 6 alternative media helped to fight against long-lasting prejudice and clichés built on erroneous mental maps. 7 Despite their low print runs, fanzines have established an international circuit of distribution using postal mail or "punk post", i.e. individuals transporting copies of the journal by train, car or bus, slowly building some exchange networks that can be mapped afterwards. 8 Thus, fanzines were also a means of communication across frontiers. The main object of this paper is to identify how alternative cultural scenes from Central and Eastern European countries have been presented in fanzines published in France over the last four decades. This study focusses principally on the geographical and temporal aspects of the question rather than the qualitative or cultural aspects (e.g. typology or sociology of scenes). I try to establish where the information came from at the country level, and how it arrived in France.

Methods
This study relies on the analysis of a corpus of fanzines published in France between the 1970s and 2018. I selected a corpus of fanzines echoing with consistency the alternative cultural scenes of Central and Eastern European countries. Consistency means that the written material is not limited to, for example, record or book reviews of music bands or authors from Eastern European countries, but includes scene reports, interviews and photo documentaries. In these latter cases, personal interactions of the zine writer with the country or its inhabitants were presumed. Book or record reviews were excluded, as they may only reflect the opinion of the writer acquired through reading or listening and did not require any direct contact with the distant scene.
A mapping problem arose with the shifting geography of Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In fanzines, especially those published in the 1990s, location after the Fall may refer to the geography of the socialist era (e.g. Czechoslovakia) or to the post-socialist one (the separation of the Czech Republic and Slovakia). 4 For instance, Revolver Revue / Jednou Nohou was published clandestinely in Prague between 1985 and 1989 but became a literary media after the Velvet Revolution. The first legally printed issue of the magazine for literature and art Revolver Revue came out in December 1990. At the present time, Revolver Revue has about 300 pages and appears four times a year. Source: https://www.eurozine.com/journals/revolver-revue/ 5 Following Jim McGuigan, Raymond Williams opposed alternative and oppositional practices: Alternative culture seeks a place to coexist within the existing hegemony, whereas oppositional culture aims to replace it. McGUIGAN, Jim. Cultural Populism. London : Routledge, 1992, p. 25 I maintained the geography in use in fanzines to fill my database, but to create a map ( fig. 3), I had to gather post-socialist data in the socialist states geography for Central Europe (Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia). Exceptions to this rule are the countries of the former USSR, where I have considered the post-communist borders to avoid dilution into a USSR category, where the weight of Russia could conceal the interest in the other Soviet provinces of Eastern Europe.

Corpus
Here, I explore the zine collection of La Fanzinothèque 9 library from Poitiers, France. La Fanzinothèque, established in 1989, is one of the oldest and biggest zine collections in Europe and currently has archived circa 56,000 volumes. 10 I have searched keywords related to Central and Eastern European country names (the keywords are in French, Table 1). In total, 618 volumes matched the selected keywords. In the next step, I checked all the paper versions in the library to evaluate their relevance for the study: That is, were they published in France? Does the content substantially deal with Central and Eastern Europe countries? This allowed me to screen out the area results: e.g., Gabriel, a French--speaking fanzine is excluded from the corpus because it was published in Belgium and Romania; Stripburger, published in Slovenia, is also excluded, while it counted 55 occurrences over 89 results for this country. Some cataloguing mistakes appeared in the database (e.g., fanzines K9 and Dark Warriors are identified as Belarusian fanzines in the database, although they were published in Kiev, Ukraine). Svoboda (c. 1990) -the title seems to refer to the Slavic word "freedom", but in issue N°2, a newspaper fac-simile reveals a tragedy that occurred in an "asylum" (psychiatric hospital) in Brno (Czechoslovakia) concerning a patient called Svoboda, thus explaining the choice of the zine title. In this latter case, the title evokes Central-Eastern European countries but not the content of the zine, so I considered this fanzine as a false-positive. The corpus of zines suitable for analysis was thus reduced to 171 volumes. However, in addition to La Fanzinothèque archives, I also searched for information on the web forum punxforum.net (active since 2003) dedicated to punk DIY culture with a special interest in fanzines and punk writings ("Punkpress, la bibliothèque est en feu!" 11 ). There I identified a further 29 relevant items. With the zines from my personal collection that were not present in the two mentioned databases (15 items) the studied corpus grew to 214 volumes of amateur journals published in France between 1977 and 2018. Note: keywords are labelled in French consistently with the database interrogation process.

Data treatment
Data were computed in spreadsheet software (Microsoft Excel) and analysed for their temporal and spatial dimensions. The dataset was subdivided into two parts considering the year 1989 as a dividing point between two historical periods: 1977 -1989 as "before the fall of the Berlin Wall"; 1990 -2018 as "after the fall of Berlin Wall". 12 Eight fanzines had no date and were excluded from the temporal analysis. Fanzines were classified in five categories following their main content: music zine, artzine (including poetry and photozine), comics, graphzine (graphic art zine) and political zine.

Temporal and geographical evolution of the zine coverage
Temporal coverage is variable during the period, with four years without a match (i.e. no fanzines were uncovered, which does not mean that no relevant fanzines were published during these years), and a maximum of 14 fanzines in 1994 ( fig. 1). The mean is 5.1 fanzines per year with a slight difference between the Berlin Wall period (1977 -1989: 55 fanzines = 4.23 fanzines/yr) and the post--Berlin Wall period (1990 -2018: 153 fanzines = 5.26 fanzines/yr). The period 1985 -1994 is the most prolific, with 92 fanzines exhumed (9.2 fanzines/yr), i.e. 43 % of the corpus.
Geographically, a group of four countries (socialist/communist period frontiers) gathered 57 % of the corpus: Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia ( fig.  2). Poland appears as the most covered country, with 44 volumes publishing information on this country (21 % of the corpus, fig. 3). This interest is especially strong in the period 1985 -1993 (54.5 % of the sub-corpus). Hungary and Czechoslovakia (including the Czech Republic and Slovakia after the separation in 1993) follow with a similar coverage (13 %). Yugoslavia (including individual countries of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia after the separation in 1992) completes the "Big-4" with 10 % of the corpus. The easternmost countries, especially those from the former USSR (Baltic countries, Belarus, Moldavia), were covered less, with 5 % of the corpus at most. Albania also appears as very poorly covered (three occurrences during the whole period, 1.4 %).

Zine Typology
Eighty percent of the corpus consists of music zines, essentially punk-hardcore genres; 8.5 % are graphzines, artzines and comics zines; and nearly 5 % are political zines ( fig. 4).

Music zines
The Paris fanzine New Wave (1980 -1989, fig. 5    The fanzine Totalitarizm, from the Auvergne region (central France) with articles on nine different countries covered the largest area geographically during its publishing period (1995 -2002, 29 issues). The fanzine Are you a man or are you a mouse? was short-lived (1990 -1994, nine issues) but brought to its readers information coming from eight different Central and Eastern Europe countries.

Graphzines, artzines, comics zines
Lola Fish was published at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s by Bruno Pommey (fig.  6). It was an artzine dedicated to mail-art but also including an international zine review and sometimes information on punk-rock scenes. Contributors from Central and Eastern European countries were present on a regular basis, for instance Robert Rupocinski 15 and Belin Czechowicz, 16 both from Poland. Also advertising articles calling on eastern artists for participation were published, for instance by Birger Jesh from the German Democratic Republic (GDR). 17 Anthracite was another mail-art zine from the 1980s that gave space to contributions from the GDR (Manfred Martin) and Yugoslavia (Nenad Bogdanovic). 18 Although mail-art is a kind of abstract non-textual contribution, it indicates that relationship and exchange were established between artists and zinesters from both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Political zines
Articles on alternative cultural scenes and actors were not the most important written matter in this category of zines, where social and political contents predominate. They appeared in the mid-1980s (Sherwood, 1985 and their presence has been stable over the years (AIM in the 1990s; Bilan et Perspectives, Contre-Culture, Spasme in the 2000s).

Information typology
To analyse and quantify the mere content of papers published in these zines would deserve a separate study. I propose here only a concise overview of the main categories of information to give a rough picture about what kind of information about the Central and Eastern European scenes came through to France. Interviews are privileged channels to get first-hand information. For example, when Central-Eastern European bands toured in France, they offered a direct opportunity for French zinesters to get information. I remember having the opportunity to interview Aldo Ivančić from Slovenian electro-rock band Borghesia during their Resistance tour (Nantes, 8 February 1992). Besides the usual questions about the last album and their musician's life, interest in the politic situation of the country (Slovenia had just declared its independence) arose at the end of the interview, which was later published in issue N°0 of the Armageddon fanzine. 19 At that time, I believed that gaining direct information from Central and Eastern people was necessarily more valuable than facts reported on French television, for example. Tour reports from French bands that played in Eastern European countries were also one of the ways of bringing back exclusive material from abroad and sharing it through fanzines. Local correspondents were an important source of information on alternative cultural scenes. They might produce scene reports like the reportage by Pavel Tušl from Stříbro (Czechoslovakia) published in Guérilla Urbaine ( fig. 7). 20 Tušl explained that his motivation was to inform foreigners about the evolution of the Czech and Slovak punk and hardcore scenes since the fall of the communist regime in 1989. Similarly, Gvido Obradović, a member of the fanzine 24 Casa (Belgrade, Yugoslavia), also bassist for the band Crist, contributed regularly to the French fanzine Gabba Gabba Fuck! (1983 -1989 Lyrics in vocal music are a way of expressing emotion, telling and retelling stories, developing fictional characters and commenting on events. 22 Translation is the interlingual transfer of content from one language to another, which might offer a particular information and understanding of a foreign culture. In issue N°2 of the fanzine Manifestes (1985), an article on punk in Hungary, based on testimonies by Lucile Chaufour, is documented with the translation of song lyrics from two Hungarian punk bands 23 : Primitív bunkó (Rough hick) from CPG and Drogue communiste from Qss. 24 In the early 1980s, Lucile Chaufour travelled to Hungary with a Super-8 camera and clandestinely documented the Budapest punk scene. 25 As previously mentioned, she contributed to the Parisian fanzine New Wave, being a precious source for first-hand information on Hungarian scenes. In 2013 she returned to Budapest and again met some actors of the 1980s punk movement. Her sequel documentary, East Punk Memories, was finalised in 2014 and released in theatres in 2016. 26 All this work, from lyrics translations to documentaries, was intended to offer an alternative view of the official history 22 LOW, Peter. Translating Song: Lyrics andTexts. London : Routledge, 2016. 23 Manifestes, 1985, No. 3 Social papers are a means of presenting the originality of lifestyle in different countries. They are quite common in fanzines whose editors have travelled abroad, but they also fit well with the centres of interest of the concerned subculture. For example, in the skinzine 28 Symphonie Urbaine N°6 (1990), an article titled Beer in Czechoslovakia was published, whereas in the anarcho-punk fanzine Outrage N°2 (2009) a report on the Milada squat in Prague confessed the living experience of the French zinester in this alternative place ( fig. 8). In Calade Shnikov N°4 (June 1990), a paper on the illegal press in Hungary highlighted the difficulty of publishing freely in the 1980s even for the small press like fanzines. In this issue of Calade Shnikov, zine and band contacts are grouped on a full page with the following recommendation "N'écrivez jamais le nom du groupe ou le nom du zine sur l'enveloppe !!!", 29 a statement which frequently appeared in other French fanzines. This r e c o m m e n d a t i o n maintained the idea for French readers that the regime in Central and Eastern European countries was very oppressing.

Discussion
Zines help to draw a portrait of alternative cultural scenes, but is it an accurate one? The above outline is probably partly biased by the corpus itself: La Fanzinothèque library gathers all kinds of zines, but its original background is rooted in music zines with graphic and comics zines becoming more important in the last twenty years. This might explain the relative overrepresentation of music zines in the corpus. However, among the music zines, punk and hardcore zines are the most common, and it is well known that these subcultures relied preferential- ly upon zines to disseminate their information and build their networks. 30 Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the general interest of French zinesters for Central and Eastern European countries was justified in the writings by the feeling that it was more difficult to be an actor in alternative scenes there than in Western countries. For example, in Alienation N°11 (1985), the author introduced a paper on punk in the GDR: "Some will think that I have special sympathies for communist countries. This is not the case, but I truly feel deep respect for these people because their struggle is much more difficult than the one in the West." 31 The interest of the French press in Poland was particularly high during the 1980s, when France, under the François Mitterrand presidency, offered long-lasting humanitarian and financial help to both the Jaruzelski regime and the Solidarność syndicate. 32 The French press also contributed significantly to support Solidarność morally and materially during the decade. However, by often conveying the wrong stereotypes because of incompetence or ideology, French newspapers also offered a distorted image of the situation in Poland. 33 Karolina Pietras described the "informative interference" of French political parties with the media treatment of information at the time, i.e. how French politics used masked propaganda to build a false image of Poland. 34 The interest of French fanzines is interpreted as an attempt to offer alternative pictures of Poland. Hence the high interest of French fanzines in the Polish scenes is a direct reaction to the biased image built by mainstream media.
The interest in Hungary appears more enigmatic if we try to fit it in with general news coverage. Here we must shift from a macroanalysis to a microanalysis, i.e. underline the importance of individual interest or familial roots to explain the importance of information coming from Hungary. In December 1986, Eddy Basset (b. 1964 from Villefranche-sur-Saône, host of the radio program "Apunkalypse Now" (1983 -1985), started to publish a fanzine called Il fait froid chez nous (It's cold at home). The subtitle was "samizdat du groupe post-punk hongrois Trottel!" ("samizdat of the Hungarian post-punk band Trottel!") because it was a translation of the zine originally published by this Hungarian punk band.  POUP (août 1980POUP (août -janvier 1990, à travers la presse française. Doctoral Thesis, Université de Nantes, 2011. 34 PIETRAS, Karolina. L'image de ''Solidarność'' dans la presse française et ouest-allemande (1980-1982  On a more micro scale, a person like Lük Haas was very active in disseminating information on Eastern European countries through his own fanzines (Lük Haas's Hairrising Travel & Tour Unltd, Mala Ewolucja) or by contributing to several zines in France and abroad (New Wave, Sub-Rock, Aga, Maximum Rocknroll, Flex Digest, Zap, Trust, etc.). Based in Strasbourg, Haas used to travel by car in Eastern Europe and report on his travels and contacts with local artists through a perzine writing style. He had a strong personal interest for discovering new places and new people; however, he had no familial connections with Eastern Europe. 37 His networks steadily cover Poland, GDR, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, the Baltic States and Bulgaria, and later Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia and Bosnia. These networks were established with punk or underground activists, e.g. Jazzová sekce (Jazz Section) or musicians like Mikoláš Chadima in the former Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. He was also in touch with Janus activists in Paris who had underground contacts in the Soviet Union. In the mid-1980s Haas ran the cassette label Ukrutnost Tapes and released several recordings from Czechoslovak bands. In 1993 he founded the label Tian An Men 89 Records, releasing more punk music from Central and Eastern Europe and beyond, a label that is still active today. Sometimes Lük Haas published the same papers or interviews in different zines: for example, a paper on punk in Czechoslovakia published in Gabba Gabba Fuck! N°15 and Invocation Macabre N°2 in 1986; or an interview with Imad, the guitarist of the band L' Attentat (GDR), published simultaneously in Calade Shnikov N°1 and Invocation Macabre N°3 in 1987. This strategy of disseminating information through identical texts published in several fanzines was particular to zine production, allowing information to diffuse over larger territories than the one covered by a single zine. Replication was possible because the exclusivity of the published material was not mandatory and copyleft was widely accepted.   litarizm, 1995, No. 4. (Source: author's archive)