On October 9, 1989, as tensions between demonstrators and security forces on Leipzig’s Karl Marx Square threatened to explode into violence, Kurt Masur, conductor of the Gewandhaus orchestra, addressed the crowd. Reading from a statement he and others had written that afternoon, he asked for calm so that “peaceful dialogue” might take place (1). After the request, the pressure hanging over the square suddenly dissipated: the crowds marched that night, and authorities let them. Exactly one month later, the Berlin Wall opened, and within a year, communist East Germany had ceased to exist. As unlikely a hero as he was, Masur’s role during these tumultuous events shouldn’t be surprising. As Kyrill Kunakhovich explains, he was able to mediate between the people and the People’s State because “he had done so his whole career” (2). Indeed, the central contention of Kunakhovich’s splendid new book, Communism’s Public Sphere, is that cultural spaces had long functioned as sites where authorities, producers, and consumers negotiated the public good under communism.