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

This paper scrutinises how alternative cultural scenes from Central and Eastern European countries have been represented in fanzines published in France since 1977. The study focusses principally on the geographical and temporal rather than the qualitative or cultural aspects of the question. Four countries clearly stand out, representing 57 % of the analysed corpus: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Hungary. These special interests may be explained by macrosocial factors (for example, the search for alternative information to counterbalance those diffused by French mainstream media) or microsocial factors (i.e. personal interest/linkage of a zinester (zine publisher) to a country of Central and Eastern Europe). Fanzine analyses underline the importance of individuals in the cross-border diffusion of alternative scenes’ echoes, rather than established professional networks.