East as true west: Redeeming Bourgeois culture, from socialist realism to Ostalgie

Kritika

Volumn 9, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 747-768

  Castillo, Greg ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77950304645     PISSN: 1531023X     EISSN: 15385000     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/kri.0.0037     Document Type: Review

References (73)

1. Carlo Spango, "Reinterpreting the Marshall Plan: The Impact of the European Recovery Programme in Britain, France, Western Germany, and Italy (1947-1952)," in The Postwar Challenge: Cultural, Social, and Political Change in Western Europe, 1945-58, ed. Dominik Geppert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 281
2. OMGUS "Report of Staff Conference," 27 September 1947, Microfilm M1075, Roll 3, U.S. National Archives at College Park, MD
3. A later volley in the campaign against Western modernism was fired off by Vladimir Semenov, the political advisor to the commander in chief of the Soviet Military Administration in East Germany. Under the pseudonym N. Orlov, Semenov authored a two-part broadside titled "Wege und Irrwege der modernen Kunst" ("Methods and Mistakes of Modern Art," Tägliche Rundschau, 20 and 23 January 1951)
4. Semenov revealed in his autobiography that the pseudonym 'N. Orlov' was his (Wladimir S. Semjonow, Von Stalin bis Gorbatschow: Ein halbes Jahrhundert in diplomatischer Mission, 1939-1991 [Berlin: Nicolai, 1995])
5. Volker Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), xvii
6. Paul G. Hoffman, Peace Can Be Won (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1951), 105
7. György Péteri, "Nylon Curtain - Transnational and Transsystemic Tendencies in the Cultural Life of State-Socialist Russia and East-Central Europe," Slavonica 10, 2 (2005): 113, 117
8. Terry Martin, "Modernization or Neo-Traditionalism? Ascribed Nationality and Soviet Primordialism," in Stalinism: New Directions, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (London: Routledge, 2000), 353
9. Alan Nothnagle, "From Buchenwald to Bismarck: Historical Myth-Building in the German Democratic Republic, 1945-1989," Central European History 26, 1 (1993): 96-97
10. Michael Vlahos, "Culture and Foreign Policy," Foreign Policy, no. 82 (Spring 1991): 60
11. John J. McCloy, quoted in Thomas Alan Schwartz, America's Germany: John J. McCloy and the Federal Republic of Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 28
12. Heinrich König, "Ausstellung: 'Wir bauen ein besseres Leben,'" Architektur und Wohnform 61, 2 (1952): 87
13. "Productivity and Integration Make for Higher Standard of Living," 286 MP GER 2221, Still Pictures Unit, U.S. National Archives, College Park, MD
14. "We Build a Better Life," undated typescript, RG59/150/71/35/04, Entry 5323, Box 8 (Records of the International Information Administration, Subject Files, European Field Program 1949-1952), U.S. National Archives, College Park, MD
15. Article in Der Tag, 22 September 1952, translated and quoted in Lyon to Secretary of State, 22 September 1952, RG59 862A.191 (Internal Affairs of State Relating to Exhibitions and Fairs in Germany), Box 5225, U.S. National Archives, College Park, MD
16. On the "Better Life" exhibition, see Greg Castillo, "Domesticating the Cold War: Household Consumption as Propaganda in Marshall Plan Germany," Journal of Contemporary History 40, 2 (2005): 261-88
17. G. Alexandrov, cited in Edmund Collein, "Die Amerikanisierung des Stadtbildes von Frankfurt am Main," Deutsche Architektur 1, 4 (1952): 151
18. As Susan E. Reid has demonstrated, Soviet specialists in fields ranging from housing construction to home decoration, backed by the party leadership, were in the process of defining a proprietary, socialist model of consumer culture. See Reid, "Cold War in the Kitchen: Gender and the De-Stalinization of Consumer Taste in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev," Slavic Review 61, 2 (2002): 211-13
19. and Reid, "Khrushchev Modern: Agency and Modernization in the Soviet Home," Cahiers du monde russe 47, 1-2 (2006): 227-68
20. Theo Harych, "Stalinallee," typescript, Mappe 7, Nachlaß Theo Harych, Literarische Abteilung, Akademie der Künste, Berlin
21. Ellwood, Rebuilding Europe, 137
22. Jennifer A. Loehlin, From Rugs to Riches: Housework, Consumption, and Modernity in Germany (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 52
23. Michael Wildt, "Changes in Consumption as Social Practice in West Germany during the 1950s," in Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century, ed. Susan Strasser, Charles McGovern, and Matthias Judt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 305
24. Walter Ulbricht, "Die grossen Aufgaben der Innenarchitektur beim Kampf um eine neue deutsche Kultur," in "Fragen der deutschen Innenarchitektur und des Möbelbaues: Bericht über die Arbeitstagung des Instituts für Innenarchitektur der Deutschen Bauakademie über Fragen der Innenarchitektur und des Möbelbaues am 14. März 1952," Bundesarchiv SAMPO, DH2 DBA A 141
25. Stefan Berger, Germany (London: Arnold, 2004), 208
26. Hans Hopp, "Gegen den Formalismus-für eine fortschrittliche Innenarchitektur," in "Fragen der deutschen Innenarchitektur und des Möbelbaues," Bundesarchiv SAMPO, DH2 DBA A 141
27. Hans Hopp, "Ansprache zur Eröffnung der Arbeitstagung für Innenarchitektur am 14.3.1952," SAMPO, DH2 DBA A 141
28. Cited and translated in Paul Betts, "Building Socialism at Home: The Case of East German Interiors," unpublished paper, March 2004
29. Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus and the postwar chair of Harvard's Graduate School of Design, believed that bombastic Third Reich architecture, "each doorway as huge as the gates of hell," had incubated Nazi Übermenschen. "Stop constructing superbuildings," he declared in 1947. "Then there will be no more supermen." Gropius's statement can be found in "Architect Would Make a Guinea Pig of Germany," New York Herald, 31 December 1947
30. The term "cultural revolution," although not used in the early 1950s by the SED, is used by scholars today to refer to the party's attempt to consolidate ideological control over the arts in 1951. This usage differs somewhat from the term's use in the GDR when it came into vogue much later in the nation's history. See, for example, Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim ZK der SED, ed., ...einer neuen Zeit Beginn: Erinnerungen an die Anfänge unserer Kulturrevolution 1945-1949 (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1980)
31. "Gesetz über den Aufbau der Städte in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik und der Haupstadt Deutschlands, Berlin (Aufbaugesetz), vom 6. September 1950," in Deutsche Bauakademie, ed., Für einen fortschrittlichen Städtebau für eine neue deutsche Architektur (Leipzig: Vereinigung Volkseigener Verlage, 1951), 7-11
32. Walter Ulbricht, Das nationale Aufbauwerk und die Aufgaben der deutschen Architektur (Berlin: Amt für Information der Regierung der DDR, 1952), 8
33. The volume was transformed in a 195 edition to "The Architecture of the Peoples of the Soviet Union," its coverage of contemporary Soviet architecture expanded, and any mention of the United States eliminated. Deutsche Bauakademie, Architektur der Völker der Sowjetunion, ed. and trans. B. P. Michailow (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1953)
34. Deutsche Bauakademie, Architektur, ed. and trans. B. P. Michailow (Berlin: Verlag Bruno Henschel und Sohn, 1951), 64
35. Deutsche Bauakademie, Architektur, Ibid., 73
36. Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style: Architecture since 1922 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1932) 41
37. "Amerika, das Geburtsland modernen Bauschaffens," Die Bauzeitung (October 1950): 406
38. Vera Tolz, "Russian Orientalists and the Transnational Discourses of Empire at the Turn of the Twentieth Century," unpublished paper (presented at the "Imagining the West" workshop of the Program on Eastern European Cultures and Societies, Trondheim, 11-12 January 2008), 11
39. Yuri Slezkine, "N. Ia. Marr and the National Origins of Soviet Ethnogenetics," Slavic Review 55, 4 (1996): 831
40. Yuri Slezkine, Slavic Review Ibid., 838
41. "Thema: Innenarchitektur im Wohnungsbau," 20 September 1953
42. "Protokoll über die vorbereitende Besprechung zur Konferenz über Fragen der Innenarchitektur," 2 June 1953, DH2 VI/61/8, SAPMO, Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde
43. Kurt Liebknecht, "Die Architektur der Wohnung," in Besser leben - schöner wohnen! 54, 15
44. "Besser leben - schöner wohnen" (typescript), 103, DBA-DH2 A43, SAPMO, Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde
45. A similar message is advanced in the exhibition catalogue: Besser leben - schöner wohnen! Raum und Möbel (Leipzig: VEB Graphische Werkstätten, 1954), 13
46. Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Aesthetic Dictatorship and Beyond, trans. Charles Rougle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 49-50
47. On the Away with National Kitsch exhibition, see Paul Betts, The Authority of Everyday Objects: A Cultural History of West German Industrial Design (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004),32-34
48. On the Nazi "Degenerate Art" exhibition of 1937, see Peter-Klaus Schuster, ed., Nationalsozialismus und "Entartete Kunst": die "Kunststadt" München 1937 (Munich: Prestel, 1998)
49. Wera Muchina, "Thema und Gestaltung in der dekorativ-monumentalen Bildhauerkunst," Studienmaterial 7 (1953): 2-24
50. The article was translated from Sovetskoe iskusstvo, nos. 50-51 (1952). Mukhina's dismissal of a private aesthetic realm under socialism appears in German translation as: "In unserer heroischen Zeit ist im Menschen das gesellschaftliche Bewußtsein erwacht; alles Private hat aufgehört."
51. "Reisebericht," 20 October 1953, DH2 VI/61/8, SAPMO, Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde
52. Jakob Jordan, "Wie müssen wir unsere Innenarchitektur verbessern?" Neues Deutschland, 5 November 1954
53. On the broader history of postwar mass-produced apartments and their eventual degeneration into substandard housing, see Blair A. Ruble, "From Khrushcheby to Korobki," in Russian Housing in the Modern Age: Design and Social History, ed. William Craft Brumfield and Ruble (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 232-70
54. Deutsche Bauakademie, ed., Referate aus der Unionkonferenz der Bauschaffenden: Moskau 1954 (Berlin: Berliner Druckerei, 1955). The cover's cautionary note reads: "Nur für Dienstgebrauch. Als Manuscript gedruckt."
55. Kultur ins Heim 2, 1 (1959): 3
56. cited in Dominique Krössin, "Kultur ins Heim: Geschmackserziehung versus Eigensinn," in Fortschritt, Norm und Eigensinn. Erkundungen im Alltag der DDR, ed. Andreas Ludwig (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2000), 157
57. "An die 3: Parteikonferenz der Sozialistischen Einheitspartei Deutschlands" (petition from leaders of the Kulturbund der Demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands), 15 March 1956. DH2 DBA/A79, SAPMO, Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde
58. Successive volleys in this debate, which pitted reformists and traditionalists within East Germany's state-managed design establishment against each other, appeared in the DBA journal Deutsche Architektur in 1959. They include Herbert Letsch, "Das Bauhaus-Wegweiser zur sozalistischen Architektur?" (no. 8: 459-60)
59. and Lothar Kühne, "Der Revisionismus in der Architekturtheorie" (no. 10: 575-77)
60. L. Pazitnov, Das schöpferische Erbe des Bauhauses, 1919-1933 (Berlin: Institut für angewandte Kunst, 1963)
61. The last East German denunciation of the Bauhaus as a degenerate aesthetic was Herbert Letsch, "Die konstruktivistische Ästhetik und das Problem der künstlerischen Widerspiegelung der Wirklichkeit" (The Constructivist Aesthetic and the Problem of Artistic Reflection of Reality), Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 9, 2 (1961)
62. Karl-Heinz Hüter submitted his manuscript, "Das Bauhaus in Weimar: Studie zur Sozialgeschichte einer deutschen Kunstschule" (The Weimar Bauhaus: Toward a Social History of a German Art Academy), for publication by the Bauakademie in 1968, and received assurances that it would be published
63. Three years later he was still writing exasperated letters attempting to solve the mystery of why the Bauakademie had suddenly reversed itself and deemed the manuscript unpublishable (letter attached to Hüter's uncatalogued manuscript, archive of the Institut für Regionalentwicklung und Strukturplanung, Berlin-Erkner). Hüter's study was finally published in 1976, timed to coincide with the restoration of the Dessau Bauhaus building. On East Germany's retrieval of the Hannes Meyer Bauhaus as a beacon of socialist design, see Winfried Nerdinger, "Anstößiges Rot: Hannes Meyer und der linke Baufunktionalismus-ein verdrängtes Kapitel der Architekturgeschichte," in Hannes Meyer, 1886-1954, ed. Peter Hahn (Berlin: Ernst & Sohn, 1989), 12-29
64. "Beschluß des Sekretariats des ZK der SED," 7 April 1976, DH2 A/499, SAMPO, Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde, 5
65. "Origins of Socialist Countries' Architecture: Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, GDR, Hungary, Poland, USSR," Architecture and Society 4/5 (1985/1986): 50
66. Ina Merkel, "Consumer Culture in the GDR, or How the Struggle for Antimodernity Was Lost on the Battleground of Consumer Culture," in Getting and Spending, 284
67. The recollections evoked by these items are catalogued in Stadt Eisenhüttenstadt, Dokumentationszentrum Alltagskultur der DDR, ed., Alltagskultur der DDR, Begleitbuch der Austellung "Tempolinsen und P2" (Berlin: be.bra verlag, 1996)
68. Paul Betts, "The Twilight of the Idols: East German Memory and Material Culture," Journal of Modern History 72, 3 (2000): 746
69. Georg Bertsch and Ernst Hedler, SED: Schönes Einheits-Design (Cologne: Taschen, 1994), 27, 7
70. John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin, 2005), 81-82, 114
71. Duanfang Lu, Remaking Chinese Urban Form: Modernity, Scarcity, and Space, 1949-2005 (London: Routledge, 2006), 6
72. Mark Landsman, Dictatorship and Demand: The Politics of Consumerism in East Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 174-75, 205-7
73. Reid, "Khrushchev Modern."