Book Reviews

and contrasts created between texts. Thus, this broad examination acquires
depth and comparative dimensions. The book allows its attentive reader to see
the continuities between the post-war period and the Metapolitefsi, the cracks
in the public gaze of post-war literature, the shift of later authors’ attention
to private experiences, existential void, autobiographical narcissism or apoliti-
cal floundering, as well as the terms of the turn, over the past twenty years,
towards social issues and political reflection; thus, such readers can observe
the movement of the pendulum from the collective towards the individual and
back again towards society. Casual yet thoughtful readers, on the other hand,
will find in this book rich presentations of the texts of interest to them.
With The Pendulum’s Swing remaining open to different readings and invit-
ing many critical discussions, Vangelis Hatzivasileiou offers us an impres-
sively large-scale and long-range history of the Greek prose fiction of the
Metapolitefsi.

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9680-4174

GREECE IN CRISIS: THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF AUSTERITY,

DIMITRIS TZIOVAS (ED.) (2017)
London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 323 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-78453-845-3, h/bk, $115

Reviewed by Maria A. Stassinopoulou, University of Vienna

1. See also the touristic A welcome addition to the growing ‘genre’ of books on or inspired by the
website https://
truevoyagers.com/
‘Greek crisis’, this volume begins with an introduction by the editor, Dimitris
blog/athens-street-art. Tziovas, and includes twelve chapters on the question of how auster-
ity resounds in the social and cultural realm. The repercussions on Greek
economy of the bank and finance crisis, now sometimes labelled the ‘Great
Recession 2008-09’, seem to have become the exemplary token in a distinct
‘class’ of crises. Discourses and narratives on Greece are developed in all
media in many different sociopolitical contexts. Through globally consumed
images, street fights and street art of these years appear to have achieved a
widely recognizable visual formalism, almost suggestive of a branding for a
‘dark’ or ‘radical’ tourism destination (Wills 2017; Vamvakas 2020).1
At the end of the twentieth century Pierre Bourdieu published the
outcome of a large sociological project carried out in the Parisian banlieue
(Bourdieu 1993). The book was to become an enormous publishing success.
Austrian ethnographers inspired by it conducted comparable interviews in the
city of Graz, which they published in a volume that appeared in German in
2003 (the year Graz was cultural capital of Europe). In 2005 Franz Schultheis,
a Pierre Bourdieu disciple himself, published together with Kristina Schulz a
study on the effects on German society of the German unification process
and the so-called Hartz-IV package of economic measures put forward by
the then social democratic government (Schultheis and Schulz 2005). Limited
Liability Society: Impositions and Suffering in German Everyday Life also included

286  Journal of Greek Media & Culture

 Book Reviews

extensive narrative interviews and was translated in French in 2015. The 2. See also interview to
Dimitris Athinakis,
(partial) Greek translation from the French version appeared in 2015 as well, Kathimerini, 13 August
as part of the three-volume publication Mirrors: Polyphonikes afigiseis gia enan 2017, https://www.
koinoniko kosmo se krisi (Mirrors: Polyphonic Narratives for a Social World in kathimerini.gr/922257/
article/politismos/
Crisis). The title changes serve perhaps also as an indicator of the different vivlio/h-krish-kai-ta-
time and context frames of economic and social policies in European societies istorika-traymata
since the end of the Cold War and of their effects on the safety nets, that had (downloaded).

been constructed during comparable post Second World War versions, of what 3. https://www.
the French call the ‘Trente Glorieuses’, in many European states of the politi- pavlostsakonas.
com/5718725-selected-
cal West. From the French Misery of the World (1993) to the Austrian Simple worksum;36.
Everyday Misery (2003) and the German Limited Liability Society: Impositions
and Suffering in German Everyday Life (2005) via the French Limited Liability
Society: Inquiries on the Crisis of the German Model (2015), emerges the Greek
The Misery of the Economy: The Invisible Face of the German ‘Miracle’. The
contrasting subtext between Germany and Greece is enhanced in the latter
by colour choices. The cover of the Greek translation of Schultheis/Schulz is
held in white, in distinct opposition to the massive black volume by another
Bourdieu disciple, sociologist Nikos Panagiotopoulos, containing the outcome
of a project carried out in Greece between 2010 and 2015, under the title The
Economy of Misery: Greece 2010–2015. The white cassette comes complete
with an art project by Venia Dimitrakopoulou in a slender, appealingly bound
volume. ‘Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli’; it might be a rewarding
research subject to look into the intellectual background and academic and
social networks of publications in different countries on the socio-economic
crises at the beginning of the new millennium.
Although Greece in Crisis touches upon socio-economic aspects, as in
Chapter 3 on ‘Crisis brain drain’ co-authored by the then SYRIZA govern-
ment member Lois Labrianidis and by Manolis Pratsinakis, the book is on
the whole more interested in approaches to language, literature and cultural
studies. Tziovas (Chapter 1, 27–31) points also towards the internationally
rediscovered inter-war formula by E. M. Butler, about the cultural ‘tyranny of
Greece over Germany’, and towards the intellectual and memorial histoire
croisée of the two cultures (cf. on this subject also Kambas and Mitsou 2010,
2015) and the retrograde symbolism of Germany being the leading economy
in the European Union during the economic crisis in Greece. Greece in Crisis
emerged out of research conducted and workshops organized during a two-
year research project financed by the AHRC from 2014 to 2016. According to
Tziovas (Introduction, 2) ‘[the Greek crisis] is occasionally treated as a kind
of colonial spectacle by foreign commentators and artists. Yet the dominance
of the label “Greek crisis” in the international media discourse risks produc-
ing facile and blanket readings of Greek cultural developments […]’.2 The
book was published in 2017, the year when Documenta 14 (mentioned in the
Introduction, 4) caught the public eye with its double exhibition concept in
Athens and Kassel. In what seems to have become a trend (cf. now Stauning
Willert and Katsan 2019) the cover of Greece in Crisis is based on Athenian
street art. The particular artwork is by Pavlos Tsakonas, who has reworked the
famous Albrecht Dürer motive of hands held in prayer in different versions
and with different materials.3
The twelve chapters are structured in five parts under the titles ‘Crisis
Narratives and Cultural Politics’, ‘Crisis Brain Drain and Diaspora’, ‘Cultural
Economies and Institutions’, ‘Street Art and Nostalgia’ and ‘Literature and the
Discourses of Crisis’. The volume includes an end bibliography and an index.

www.intellectbooks.com  287
Book Reviews

Authors cover a wide range of expertise and discuss their current research ques-
tions with a focus on the theme of the volume. Dimitris Plantzos, known from
his publications on the ideological and political usage of archaeology, looks
at heated debates on findings in the small Macedonian town of Amphipolis
in the summer of 2014. Petros Markaris’ translator into English, Patricia Felisa
Barbeito, focuses here on gender issues in his Crisis Trilogy (by now a tetral-
ogy). Yiorgos Anagnostou discusses Greek American identity, focusing in
this specific case on attempts by Greek American groups to promote iconic
biographies of success, as a counter measure to a perceived loss of minority
identity prestige during the economic crisis. We reencounter Maria Boletsi’s
‘middle voice’ (cf. Boletsi 2016 and other recent publications), this time with
an interpretation of Sotiris Dimitriou’s 2014 novella Close to the Belly. Julia
Tulke, who conducts visual ethnographic research on the ‘aesthetics of crisis’
(and provided a photograph of the Tsakonas artwork for the cover), reflects
on cultural politics of street art in contemporary Athens. Lydia Papadimitriou
invites us to observations on the phenomenon of the Greek Weird Wave as
part of radical generational and production mode changes in Greek film
during the crisis. Andromachi Gazi discusses Greek museums while Katerina
Levidou tries to interpret the heightened interest in festivals of ‘Western art
music’ (equals conventionally called classical music) in Greece. Trine Stauning
Willert offers readings in recent television shows and novels characterized by
a nostalgia for the Greek countryside or in other cases by what she defines,
following Jennifer Ladino, as counter-nostalgia. The first and the last chapter
frame the book by discussing ‘Narratives of the Greek Crisis and the Politics of
the Past’ (Dimitris Tziovas) and from a critical linguistic perspective ‘Discourses
and Counter-discourses of the Greek Crisis’ (Dionysis Goutsos and Ourania
Hatzidaki). The individual chapters are well crafted and highly readable. I
would have appreciated sometimes a more thorough discussion of the ques-
tion if in all case studies the phenomena described could be interpreted as
effects of the economic crisis. As Papadimitriou shows in ‘The economy and
ecology of Greek cinema’ the crisis limelight, which brought success to Greek
films internationally, be they ‘weird’ or not, does not offer sufficient herme-
neutic context for the challenges facing Greek cinema ‘some ingrained, others
new’ (135). As is also the case with the Amphipolis findings, the crisis brought
to the fore other lingering issues, which have shaped cultural politics for a
long time. In that case the so-called ‘Macedonian Question’, turned excavation
findings in a Macedonian town (in contrast to other findings of equal impor-
tance at the same time in other regions of Greece) into a mediatic showcase
of national politics: as Plantzos aptly names a subchapter of his study, to the
historically minded, this was a case of ‘Vergina revisited’ (67–72). This observa-
tion confirms the longue durée in the discourses of history politics examined
by Adamantios Skordos, regarding Greek archaeology in Macedonia since
1945 (Skordos 2012: 253–66). Sometimes one also wishes for more empiri-
cal support in quite sweeping statements. For example when Levidou speaks
(Chapter 7, ‘Feasts in time of Plague’, 184) of ‘a country [i.e. Greece] where
familiarity with this [i.e. classical] musical tradition, and its popularity, are
even lower than in most other European countries’, one would like to see a
graph or at least be offered some data of comparison, to understand which
periods and which countries are compared.
Greece in Crisis is an invitation to the reader to look into contemporary
Greek culture through subjects ranging from migrant identity building to
linguistic discourse analysis, from cinema to street art, from the rediscovery

288  Journal of Greek Media & Culture

 Book Reviews

of idyllic nature in visual and literary representations to crime novel as social

commentary. Although the authors engage with the international debates
of their specific field of expertise, reaching out to other comparable crises in
Europe as a whole is not conceptually sought. Such comparisons could have
provided a more extrovert perspective onto well-treaded paths in Greek
cultural studies. Nevertheless, the book avoids mono-dimensionality by giving
space to its authors to introduce concepts often probed in the context of their
research, in order to discuss the effects of the past decade on society and
culture in Greece. At the same time there is a subtext of engaging in ongoing
political debates, both as scholars in a given academic environment and as
public intellectuals, doubly involved due to their specific subject matter. In that
sense Greece in Crisis preserves for interested future readers, in an era of rapid
theme succession and discursive fluidity, contemporaneous academic and
intellectual approaches to the effects of the 2008–09 recession on the cultural
realm.

REFERENCES
Boletsi, Maria (2016), ‘From the subject of the crisis to the subject in crisis:
Middle voice on Greek walls’, Journal of Greek Media & Culture, 2:1, pp.
3–28.
Bourdieu, Pierre (ed.) (1993), La misère du monde, Paris: Seuil.
Kambas, Chryssoula and Mitsou, Marilisa (eds) (2010), Hellas verstehen:
Deutsch-griechischer Kulturtransfer im 20. Jahrhundert, Cologne, Weimar and
Vienna: Böhlau.
——— (eds) (2015), Die Okkupation Griechenlands im Zweiten Weltkrieg.
Griechische und deutsche Erinnerungskultur, Cologne, Weimar and Vienna:
Böhlau.
Katschnig-Fasch, Elisabeth (ed.) (2003), Das ganz alltägliche Elend: Begegnungen
im Schatten des Neoliberalismus, Vienna: Löcker.
Panagiotopoulos, Nikos, Schultheis, Franz and Dimitrakopoulou, Venia
(2015), Mirrors: Πολυφωνικές αφηγήσεις για έναν κοινωνικό κόσμο σε κρίση, Athens:
Alexandreia.
Schultheis, Franz and Schulz, Kristina (eds) (2005), Gesellschaft mit begrenz-
ter Haftung: Zumutungen und Leiden im deutschen Alltag, Konstanz: UVK
VerlagsgesellschaftmbH.
——— (eds) (2015), Société à responsabilité limitée: Enquête sur la crise du modèle
allemand, Paris: Raisons d’agir.
Skordos, Adamantios (2012), Griechenlands Makedonische Frage: Bürgerkrieg
und Geschichtspolitik im Südosten Europas 1945–1992, Göttingen: Wallstein
Verlag.
Stauning Willert, Trine and Katsan, Gerasimus (eds) (2019), Retelling the Past
in Contemporary Greek Literature, Film, and Popular Culture, Lanham, MD:
Lexington Books.
Vamvakas, Vassilis (2020), ‘Athens, an alternative city: Graffiti and radi-
cal tourism’, P.  Panagiotopoulos and D. P.  Sotiropoulos (eds), Political
and Cultural Aspects of Greek Exoticism [Reform and Transition in the
Mediterranean 6], London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 153–66.
Wills, David (2017), ‘The Greek crisis at the movies: Jason Bourne (2016)’,
Journal of Greek Media & Culture, 3:1, pp. 117–24.

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