Between Stalin and Coca-Cola: Postsocialist Geopolitics and Utopian Ambivalence at Castorf’s Volksbühne
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines Frank Castorf’s engagement with East-West geopolitics at the Volksbühne, especially in light of the subsequent Russian invasion of Ukraine. In the 1990s, Castorf’s productions focused primarily on postsocialism through an Ost-oriented lens. As NATO expanded eastward, Russia and the work of nineteenth-century novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky became a conceptual space for Castorf to explore the discontents of Western liberal democracies and to sustain a utopian ambivalence or openness. His interpretations of Dostoevsky, starting with Dämonen (1999/2000) and culminating in Die Brüder Karamasow (2015), however, reveal significant shifts in his reception of Russia. In Dämonen, Castorf projected onto Russia a combative, carnivalesque vitality that resisted the perceived consensus and conformism of Western liberal democracies. In Karamasow, the Russia that emerges is more violent, nationalistic, and authoritarian. Here, however, Castorf marks Russian Orthodoxy as the source of its otherness and hence as a terrain where existential questions of morality, politics, and religion remain open. Fully embracing these contradictions, Castorf treats contemporary Russia as a response to the postsocialist condition that takes us beyond the antipodes of Stalin and Coca-Cola.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".