by Tony Judt
If anything, it was English manufacture that had until quite recently carried this reputation, a legacy of Britain’s nineteenth-century industrial supremacy. British-made domestic goods, vehicles, tools or weapons had for long been highly prized on foreign markets. But in the course of the 1930s and 1940s British producers had so successfully undermined their own standing in almost every commodity save men’s clothing that the only niche left to Britain’s retail merchants by the 1960s was high profile, low quality ‘trendy’ fads—a market they were to exploit ruthlessly in the following decade.
What was remarkable about European commercial style was its segmentation by product as well as country. Italian cars—FIAT, Alfa Romeo, Lancia—were notoriously shoddy and unreliable; yet their embarrassing reputation did no discernible harm to Italy’s elevated standing in other markets, such as leather goods, haute couture and even, in a less exalted sector, domestic white goods.149 International demand for Germanclothing or food products was all but non-existent, and deservedly so. But by 1965, anything turned on a German lathe or conceived by German-speaking engineers could walk out of a British or American showroom at a price of its own asking. Only Scandinavia had acquired a general reputation for quality across an eclectic range of products, but even there the market had distinctive variations. Well-heeled foreigners filled their homes with high-styled Swedish or Danish furniture, even if it was a little fragile, because it was so ‘modern’. But the same consumer would be attracted to Sweden’s Volvo cars, despite their resolute lack of style, precisely because they appeared indestructible. Both qualities, however—‘style’ and ‘value’—were now inextricably identified with ‘Europe’: often in contrast with America.
Paris remained the capital of high fashion in women’s clothing. But Italy, with lower labour costs and unconstrained by textile rationing (unlike France or Britain), was already a serious competitor as early as 1952, when the first international Men’s Fashion Festival was staged in San Remo. However innovative its styling, French haute couture—from Christian Dior to Yves St Laurent—was quite socially conventional: as late as 1960, magazine editors and columnists in France and elsewhere not only wore hats and gloves when attending annual fashion shows, they wore them at their desks too. So long as middle-class women took their clothing cues from a handful of Parisian designers and fashion houses, the latter’s status (and profits) remained secure. But by the early sixties European women—like men—were no longer wearing formal hats, styled outer garments or evening wear as a matter of routine. The mass market in clothing was taking its cues as much from below as from above. Europe’s reputation as the capital of style and chic was secure, but the future lay with more eclectic vogues, many of them European adaptations of American and even Asian prototypes, something at which Italians proved especially adept. In clothing as in ideas, Paris dominated the European scene and would do so for a little while to come. But the future lay elsewhere.
At a March 1955 gathering in Milan of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Raymond Aron proposed as a topic for discussion ‘the End of the Ideological Age’. At the time some of his audience found the suggestion a touch premature—after all, across the Iron Curtain, and not only there, ideology appeared all too alive and well. But Aron had a point. The western European state, as it emerged in those years, was increasingly detached from any doctrinal project; and, as we have seen, the rise of the welfare state had defused the old political animosities. More people than ever before had a direct interest in the policies and expenditures of the state, but they no longer came to blows over who should control it. Western Europeans seemed to have arrived rather sooner than anticipated at the ‘broad, sunlit uplands’ (Churchill) of prosperity and peace: where politics was giving way to government, and government was increasingly confined to administration.
However: the predictable consequence of the nanny state, even the post-ideological nanny state, was that for anyone who had grown up knowing nothing different it was the duty of the state to make good on its promise of an ever better society—and thus the fault of the state when things did not turn out well. The apparent routinization of public affairs in the hands of a benevolent caste of overseers was no guarantee of public apathy. In this respect, at least, Aron’s prognosis was off target. Thus it was that the very generation which came of age in the Social Democratic paradise of its parents’ longings was most irritated and resentful at its shortcomings. A pregnant symptom of this paradox can be seen—quite literally—in an area of public planning and works in which the progressive state on both sides of the Cold War divide was unusually active.
The post-World War Two combination of demographic growth and rapid urbanization placed unprecedented demands upon urban planners. In Eastern Europe, where many urban centers had been destroyed or half abandoned by the end of the war, twenty million people moved from the countryside into towns and cities in the first two post-war decades. In Lithuania by 1970 half the population lived in towns; twenty years before the figure had been just 28 percent. In Yugoslavia, where the agricultural population declined by 50 percent between the liberation and 1970, there was a great surge of migration from the countryside to the cities: between 1948 and 1970 the Croatian capital, Zagreb, doubled in size, from 280,000 inhabitants to 566,000; likewise the national capital, Belgrade, which grew from 368,000 to 746,000.
Bucharest grew from 886,000 to 1,475,000 between 1950 and 1970. In Sofia the number of inhabitants rose from 435,000 to 877,000. In the USSR, where the urban population overtook the rural one in 1961, Minsk—the capital of the Belorussian Republic—went from 509,000 in 1959 to 907,000 just twelve years later. The result in all these cities, from Berlin to Stalingrad, was the classic Soviet-era housing solution: mile upon mile of identical gray or brown cement blocks; cheap, poorly-constructed, with no distinguishing architectural features and lacking any aesthetic indulgence (or public facilities).
Where the inner city had survived undamaged (as in Prague), or had been carefully rebuilt from old plans (Warsaw, Leningrad), most of the new building took place on the edge of the city, forming a long string of suburban dormitories reaching into the countryside. Elsewhere—in the Slovak capital Bratislava, for example—the new slums were erected in the very heart of the town. As for smaller towns and rural villages, constrained to absorb the tens of thousands of former peasants now recycled as miners or steelworkers, they had nothing to preserve and were transformed, virtually overnight, into industrial dormitories, lacking even the grace of a remnant of an old town. Collective farm workers were forced into agro-towns, pioneered in the 1950s by Nikita Khrushchev and later perfected by Nicolae Ceauşescu. Such new public architecture as there was—Technical School, Culture House, Party offices—was carefully modeled on the Soviet precedent: sometimes consciously Socialist Realist, always oversize, rarely attractive.
Forced industrialization, rural collectivization and an aggressive disdain for private needs help explain the calamity of Communist town planning. But Western European city fathers did not do much better. In Mediterranean Europe especially, the mass migration from countryside to cities placed comparable strains on urban resources. Greater Athens grew from 1,389,000 people in 1951 to 2,540,000 in 1971. Milan’s population rose from 1,260,000 to 1,724,000 in the same period; Barcelona’s from 1,280,000 to 1,785,000. In all these places, as in smaller towns across northern Italy and in the rapidly expanding outer suburbs of London, Paris, Madrid and elsewhere, planners could not keep up with demand. Like their contemporaries in Communist city offices, their instinct was to construct large blocks of homogenous housing—either on space cleared by war and urban renewal, or else on green-field sites at the edges of cities. In Milan and Barcelona in particular, where the first generation of migrants from the south began moving from shanty towns into high-rise apartments in the course of the 1960s, the result was depressingly reminiscent of the Soviet bloc—but with the additional handicap that many would-be tenants could not afford to rent anywhere near their place of wor
k. They were thus forced into long daily journeys on inadequate public transport—or else in their newly-acquired cars, further straining the urban infrastructure.
But the distinctive ugliness of urban architecture in Western Europe in these years cannot be attributed to demographic pressures alone. The ‘New Brutalism’ (as it was dubbed by the architectural critic Rayner Banham) was not an accident or oversight. In West Germany, where many of the country’s major cities were rebuilt with a breathtaking lack of imagination and vision; or in London—where the Architect’s Department of the London County Council authorized mass housing projects like the aggressively linear, windswept, Le Corbusier-inspired Alton estate in Roehampton—ugliness appeared almost deliberate, the product of careful design. Milan’s awful Torre Velasco, a reinforced concrete skyscraper built between 1957 and 1960 by a private Anglo-Italian consortium, was typical of the aggressive hyper-modernism of the age, in which the point was to break all attachments to the past. When, in March 1959, the Council of Buildings of France approved the design for the future Tour Montparnasse, their report concluded: ‘Paris cannot afford to lose herself in her past. In the years to come, Paris must undergo imposing metamorphoses. ’
The result was not just the Tour Montparnasse (or its natural child, the hideous complex of buildings at La Défense) but a rash of new towns: ultra-high density, multiple housing block-units (‘grands ensembles’, as they were symptomatically designated), bereft of employment opportunities or local services, parked at the edge of greater Paris. The earliest and therefore best known of these, at Sarcelles, north of Paris, grew from a population of just 8,000 in 1954 to 35,000 seven years later. Sociologically and aesthetically it was rootless, resembling contemporary worker-dormitory suburbs in other countries (like the remarkably similar settlement of Lazdynai at the edge of Vilnius, in Lithuania) far more than anything in indigenous French housing design or urban tradition.
This break with the past was deliberate. The European ‘style’ so much admired in other spheres of life was here nowhere in evidence. Indeed, it was consciously and carefully eschewed. The architecture of the 1950s and, especially, the 1960s was self-consciously ahistorical; it broke with the past in design, in scale and in materials (steel, glass and reinforced concrete being much the most favoured).150 The result was not necessarily any more imaginative than what had gone before: on the contrary, the ‘urban redevelopment’ schemes that transformed the face of so many European towns in these decades were a colossal missed opportunity.
In Britain as elsewhere, urban ‘planning’ was at best tactical, a patch-up: no long-term strategies were worked out to integrate housing, services, jobs or leisure (hardly any of the new towns and housing complexes had cinemas, much less sports facilities or adequate public transport).151 The goal was to clear urban slums and accommodate growing populations, quickly and cheaply: between 1964 and 1974, 384 tower blocks were thrown up in London alone. Many of these would be abandoned within twenty years. One of the most egregious, ‘Ronan Point’ in London’s East End, actually had the good taste to fall down of its own accord in 1968.
Public architecture fared little better. The Pompidou Center (a 1960s design, though not opened until January 1977)—like the Halles complex to its west—may have brought an assortment of popular cultural resources to central Paris but it failed miserably in the longer run to integrate with the surrounding district or complement the older architecture around it. The same was true of London University’s new Institute of Education, ostentatiously installed on Woburn Square, at the heart of old Bloomsbury—‘uniquely hideous’, in the words of Roy Porter, the historian of London. In a similar vein, London’s South Bank complex brought together an invaluable assortment of performing arts and artistic services; but its grim, low elevations, its windswept alleys and cracking concrete facades, remain a depressing testimony to what the urban critic Jane Jacobs called ‘the Blight of Dullness’.
Just why post-war European politicians and planners should have made so very many mistakes remains unclear, even if we allow that in the wake of two world wars and an extended economic depression there was a craving for anything fresh, new and unlinked to the past. It is not as though contemporaries were unaware of the ugliness of their new environment: the occupants of the giant housing complexes, tower blocks and new towns never liked them, and they said so clearly enough to anyone who cared to enquire. Architects and sociologists may not have understood that their projects would, within one generation, breed social outcasts and violent gangs, but that prospect was clear enough to the residents. Even European cinema—which only a few years before had paid loving, nostalgic attention to old cities and city life—now focused instead on the cold, hard impersonality of the modern metropolis. Directors like Godard or Antonioni took an almost sensuous pleasure in filming the tawdry new urban and industrial environment in films like Alphaville (1965) or The Red Desert (1964).
A particular victim of post-war architectural iconoclasm was the railway station, the lapidary incarnation of Victorian achievement and often a significant architectural monument in its own right. Railway stations suffered in the United States, too (the destruction of New York’s Pennsylvania Station in 1966 is still remembered by many as the defining moment of official hooliganism); but American city planners at least had the excuse that, squeezed between the car and the airplane, the prospects for rail travel appeared grim. But in the overcrowded circumstances of a small continent, the future of train travel was never seriously in question. The stations that were torn down in Europe were replaced by insipid, unappealing buildings performing the identical function. The destruction of Euston Station in London, or Paris’s Gare Montparnasse, or the elegant Anhalter Bahnhof in Berlin had no practical purpose and was aesthetically indefensible.
The sheer scale of urban destruction, the pan-European urge to have done with the past and leap in one generation from ruins to ultra-modernity, was to prove its own nemesis (thankfully aided by the recession of the 1970s, which trimmed public and private budgets alike and brought the orgy of renewal to a halt). As early as 1958, even before the paroxysm of city renovation had peaked, a group of preservationists in Britain founded the Victorian Society. This was a typically British volunteer organization, devoted to identifying and saving the country’s threatened architectural heritage; but similarly inspired networks emerged all across Western Europe in the following decade, pressing residents, academics and politicians to act in concert to avert further loss. Where they were too late to save a particular district or building, they at least managed to preserve whatever was left—as in the case of the façade and inner cloister of the Palazzo delle Stelline on Milan’s Corso Magenta: all that remains of a seventeenth-century city orphanage, the rest of which was torn down in the early 1970s.
In the physical history of the European city, the 1950s and 1960s were truly terrible decades. The damage that was done to the material fabric of urban life in those years is the dark, still half-unacknowledged underside of the ‘thirty glorious years’ of economic development—analogous in its way to the price paid for the industrial urbanization of the previous century. Although certain amends would be made in later decades—notably in France, where planned modernization and heavy investment in roads and transport networks brought a distinct improvement in the quality of life to some of the grimmer outer suburbs—the damage could never be wholly undone. Major cities—Frankfurt, Brussels, London above all—discovered too late that they had sold their urban birthright for a mess of brutalist pottage.
It is one of the ironies of the 1960s that the ruthlessly ‘renewed’ and rebuilt cityscapes of the age were deeply resented above all by the young people who lived there. Their houses, streets, cafés, factories, offices, schools and universities might be modern and relentlessly ‘new’. But except for the most privileged among them, the result was an environment experienced as ugly, soulless, stifling, inhuman, and—in a term that was acquiring currency—‘alienating’. It is altogether appropr
iate that when the well-fed, well-housed, well-educated children of Europe’s benevolent service states grew up and revolted against ‘the system’, the first intimations of the coming explosion would be felt in the pre-fabricated cement dormitories of a soulless university ‘extension campus’, heedlessly parked among the tower blocks and traffic jams of an overspill Parisian suburb.
XII
The Spectre of Revolution
‘Sexual intercourse began in 1963,
Between the end of the Chatterley
ban and the Beatles’ first LP’.
Philip Larkin
‘The Revolution—we loved it so much’.
Daniel Cohn-Bendit
‘The rebellion of the repentant bourgeoisie against the complacent and
oppressive proletariat is one of the queerer phenomena of our time’.
Sir Isaiah Berlin
‘Now all the journalists of the world are licking your arses . . . but not me,
my dears. You have the faces of spoilt brats, and I hate you, like I hate your
fathers . . . When yesterday at Valle Giulia you beat up the police, I
sympathized with the police because they are the sons of the poor’.
Pier Paolo Pasolini (June 1968)
‘We are not with Dubček. We are with Mao’.
(Italian student slogan, 1968)
Moments of great cultural significance are often appreciated only in retrospect. The Sixties were different: the transcendent importance contemporaries attached to their own times—and their own selves—was one of the special features of the age. A significant part of the Sixties was spent, in the words of The Who, ‘talking about My Generation’. As we shall see, this was not a wholly unreasonable preoccupation; but it led, predictably, to some distortions of perspective. The 1960s were indeed a decade of extraordinary consequence for modern Europe, but not everything that seemed important at the time has left its mark upon History. The self-congratulatory, iconoclastic impulse—in clothing or ideas—dated very fast; conversely, it would be some years before the truly revolutionary shift in politics and public affairs that began in the late 1960s could take full effect. And the political geography of the Sixties can be misleading—the most important developments were not always in the best-known places.