amanda rivkin, photographer

Two weeks from today, on May 14, the Eurovision Song Contest will take place in Dusseldorf, Germany after last year’s German contestant, Lena, won in Oslo, Norway with her song “Satellite“. More than just a Eurotrash version of American idol, a kitsch showcase, and an evening of Europe at its most fabulous, Eurovision embodies all the finer qualities of true geopolitics: ambition, scale, scope, grandeur, and the embrace of the superficial and culturally symbolic. Quite simply, Eurovision is that Saturday night a cultural kitsch observer waits year round for.

While English is the unofficial language of the contest, many contestants still choose to sing in their native languages risking the ire of other competing countries – possibly with competing nationalisms. There is a “Slavic bloc” to speak of when the text message voting comes around at the final stage of the competition. With most Balkan countries putting forth respectably kitschy enough candidates to make it to the finals, usually under the tutelage of grand masters such as Goran Bregovic, the old fault lines of tensions there come shining through the text message vote as well. Because the Brits, the Germans, the French and the Swiss pay for the hugely expensive concerts, their candidates make it to the finals no matter how terrible they are or how many years in a row they consistently rank last in the text message vote. It is a sort of swan song to the final vestiges of colonial dominance over trade on the continent because everyone knows that when it comes to kitschy Europop extravaganzas, you cannot compete with the East. And if you cannot wait until May 14 to get your Europop on (or feel an urge to relive some of the finer aspects of the Cold War), the American Embassy in Baku is sponsoring a little May Day rock and roll diplomacy with a band called “The Loaded Ladas”.

With significant oil wealth and little support from the “Slavic bloc” of Eurovision viewers and voters, Azerbaijan has done extraordinarily well most years in the contest by prioritizing the role the contest could play in the making of the future of Azerbaijan, should the country win and play host to the concert spectacular. The Azeri Eurovision contestants of the last two years, photographed in July 2010 in Baku, Azerbaijan:

Aysel Teymurzadegi, who performed as Azerbaijan’s contestant in the Eurovision song contest in 2009 and currently stars in Azeri commercials, with a friend and colleague, Zaur Darab-Zadeh (left), director of an internet radio station, on the rooftop of the Landmark Hotel in central Baku, Azerbaijan on July 3, 2010. In an effort at public promotion and demonstrating European aspirations, the Azeri government spends untold amount which one consultant estimated at 15 million in an effort to win the Eurovision song contest.

Safura Alizade, Azerbaijan’s Eurovision contestant in 2010, performs her single “Drip Drop” at the opening ceremony of the International Wrestling Final Golden Grand Prix at the Heydar Aliyev Concert Complex in Baku, Azerbaijan on July 16, 2010. One goal of the current President Ilham Aliyev is to win Eurovision investing huge amounts of Azerbaijan’s vast oil wealth in the effort, which some estimate at $20 million, and would result in hosting the European pop song contest in the Azeri capital Baku in an effort to show off the country’s European qualities.

Yesterday, I won a Fulbright (!!!) student scholarship to Azerbaijan. Today I began to reflect on what this might mean and began to think of some images, among many other things, that united me to Azeris and other people in the region. Peculiarly, the first thing that came to mind was this quote from my U.S. passport that anyone who has seen it from Bratislava to Baku (if you were a “Seinfeld” fan you must surely remember, “It’s been a long journey from Milan to Minsk…”) cannot help but memorize, recite and possibly even begin to call me “young man”. One friend sent a note when I received the Fulbright, “Go east, young man,” no doubt a tribute to the Horace Greeley quote in the latest U.S. passport design:

“Go west, young man, and grow up with the country.” – Horace Greeley

Additionally, I combed through some old images to find a few that united east, and west in some interesting form:

Alexanderplatz, a symbol of communist East Berlin, is today home to several multinational fast food chains and shops. September 20, 2007.

El Lissitzky and Sergei Sen’kin’s “The Task of the Press is the Education of the Masses,” on exhibit at “Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918-1945,” at the Guggenheim in New York on October 20, 2007.

The guide in the manor house museum, a classic mess of a Slovak museum, in Oponice, Slovakia on June 17, 2010 beside the remains of an airplane that, according to locals, dismantled over the skies of Oponice before an American parachute brigade landed in the town during the Second World War. Other exhibits in the museum include a room that is in tribute to a hometown hero and fascist sympathizer, Queen Geraldine of Albania, a hunting trophy room, and a room replete with priestly frocks.

Grant Newburger, 50, a supporter of Bob Avakian’s Revolutionary Communist Party, in his apartment at a Cabrini Green high rise building on the northeast corner of Halsted and Division streets in Chicago on December 18, 2007. There are red portraits of Mao and Stalin on the walls.

A coke machine stands at the entrance to the United Electrical Workers Western Region Union Hall in Chicago, Ill. on February 26, 2009, a day after Serious Materials of Sunnyvale, California announced plans to buy the Republic Windows and Doors Factory whose closure led to a 6-day sit-in strike last December and rehire the old workers.

Two young Cuban girls study the doll in which messages were hidden by Ernesto Che Guevara and his companeros to deliver messages to the frontline of their guerilla war against the Cuban state headed by Fulgencio Batista at that time in the Museum of the Revolution during a tour with their grandather in Havana, Cuba on March 7, 2010. One of the girls is wearing a Miley Cyrus purse.

(It is the 50th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs, celebrated as a triumph at the Museum of the Revolution and in Cuba. Raul Castro suggested for the first time the imposition of a limit of two, five-year terms for all politicians, including himself, a remarkable gesture in a country ruled for 52 years by Fidel Castro and now, as of late, his brother Raul.)

Bruce Riedel‘s recent recollections of Alex von Tunzelmann‘s book Indian Summer reminded me of a famous photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson of Lord and Lady Mountbatten and Nehru. Looking at Cartier-Bresson’s image with my papa, he said it made Nehru look like a buffoon. Von Tunzelmann’s scholarship suggests a different theory, namely that it is Lord Mountbatten who was cuckolded. And all this from the human atrocity of Partition, talk about a torrid sideshow.

The destruction of the 1940s ended with walls and partitions for half a century or longer, most concretely in Europe, the subcontinent, and the Koreas. On a system’s level the partitioning of ideologies occurred on a global scale, dividing the world accordingly between Soviet and American principles. After Germany’s official reunification in early 1990, new discussions and monuments began to appear in the newly reunified city of Berlin. The government of West Berlin moved from Bonn, the government of East Berlin moved from East Berlin to the Reichstag, one of the most historically fascinating architectural treasures in continental Europe. Then newer discussions began yet: how many monuments to the crimes of the state? Where will they be placed? Who should the streets be renamed after? And critically for this archival image from 2007 of the Holocaust memorial on Hannah Arendt Strasse: is it appropriate to mourn one’s victims?

Partition, albeit not on the subcontinent, was the reason I was in Germany to report and research an article, “Germany’s History Problem” for e-politik.de, about Erika Steinbach and her efforts on behalf of Germany’s Federation of the Expelled, a quasi-German nationalist organization with a great deal of controvery attached to its postwar history, to build a Center Against Expulsions in Berlin.