Iron Curtain
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New plans for the city were drawn up in Warsaw at great speed and in an atmosphere of high tension. Nobody was allowed to see them before they were made public, and they were transported to Kraków under armed guard.17 Like the Russian architects who had placed Renaissance decorative elements on the Palace of Culture, the Nowa Huta architects also decided that the moment when Poland had been most Polish was the sixteenth century. While the real sixteenth-century buildings of Kraków were thus put at risk by air pollution, Nowa Huta duly acquired a neo-Renaissance factory headquarters with an elaborate, crenellated façade. A town hall was designed in the style of Zamość, a Renaissance city in southeast Poland, though it was never built. Like Stalinstadt, Nowa Huta was also the first Polish city in many centuries to have been constructed without a church.
Equally grandiose designs were drawn up for Sztálinváros. According to the plans, the city would contain canteens where people would eat collective meals, instead of cooking at home; nurseries and preschools would be within walking distance; theaters and sports halls would be in close reach. People would also need spaces where they could gather to express their support and love for the regime. Accordingly, the city’s architects drew up plans for a wide boulevard—Stalin Street—which would stretch from the factory to the central square and was ideal for May Day marches. The square itself was meant to have one side open to the Danube and a larger-than-life statue of Stalin in its center.18
Outward appearances were not the architects’ only concern. The socialist cities were to be, in the words of Leucht, “a visible expression for the economic and cultural upswing of the German Democratic Republic.” Implicitly or explicitly, the new cities promised their workers a higher living standard. They might be living for the moment in primitive barracks of the sort that horrified Júlia Kollár, but they all believed that this was temporary. “You knew, from the beginning you believed, that it would work out with an apartment at some point. Even if you didn’t say so, in the beginning,” one German woman remembered.19 Another told the city newspaper that her definition of a “socialist” city was one in which there was “light, greenery, air, and space everywhere.”20 In Sztálinváros the authorities duly set themselves the ambitious goal of completing 1,000 new apartments every month while leaving plenty of space for parks.21
Expectations were high, and the authorities raised them even higher. Workers’ apartments were not only to be plentiful; they were to be large, comfortable, and equipped with the most up-to-date designs. After Ulbricht’s visit to Stalinstadt in 1952, construction authorities drew up a protocol stating that the height of rooms in the flats was to be raised from 2.42 to 2.7 meters; that window frames and ledges were to be of higher quality than normal; that buildings were all to be of the same height.22 Leucht declared that apartment buildings must have central heating and the new occupants must “have a say” in their construction. Architects alone should not decide how much space people got.23
Prime Minister Otto Grotewohl also paid a visit in 1952. He inspected some newly constructed apartments and “came to the conclusion that the workers had not been given sufficient advice on how to furnish and equip their new homes.”24 An exhibition of “show apartments” was duly created in order to teach people how to decorate an apartment, if and when they received one. The furniture on display was “factory made,” and thus “more advanced” than the primitive furniture the new workers had previously used, back when they were still peasants. Of course only those worthy of living in one of these socialist homes would receive one: because some 80 percent of these new living spaces belonged to the steel combine, they quickly became part of the “workers competition” awards system and were used to encourage shock workers to fulfill their norms even faster.25
Shops were to be of high quality too. In Nowa Huta, great effort went into the design of those that lined the central square. One of them, now part of the Cepelia chain, still retains its 1950s decor, including an enormous ceiling light that looks like a Renaissance chandelier as conceived by someone who has never seen a Renaissance chandelier. Shops were also meant to be full, and in some cases they were. In Sztálinváros, many who came from peasant families, Kollár included, sent food home to their families.26 Nowa Huta also had a reputation for having a better range of goods than nearby Kraków.
Stalinstadt initially had more trouble meeting its inhabitants’ material demands, so much so that the shortages there became a matter of national concern. In August 1952, the East German minister of trade wrote an angry letter to one of the city authorities:
When I visited EKO [the steel combine] on Saturday, August 16, many workers as well as members of the party organization within EKO told me that for workers’ families the supply of vegetables, fruits, and other goods is very bad. I was told to get in touch with the housewives to get more information … I was told to “dress warmly” in anticipation of the reproaches that I would hear. The shopping street in the new district, which was to be finished on May 1 of this year, is still incomplete, allegedly because of disagreements over interior decoration.27
After receiving this letter, city authorities agreed to organize special “shopping fairs” in the city, supplying, among other things, 740 bicycles, 5,000 buckets, 2,400 pairs of shoes, and 10,000 meters of bed linen.
Last but not least, a “socialist” city was supposed to be one in which the workers not only would eat and sleep but would enjoy leisure activities of the sort only the bourgeoisie had enjoyed in the past. Visiting Sztálinváros in 1952, Zoltán Vas—the Hungarian communist who lost his eyeglasses while visiting Hungarian partisans in 1944—arranged a meeting with young engineers and asked them what they did after work. Upon hearing that “there was nothing to do, so usually after work we went to sleep,” he ordered city planners to build a restaurant. They did.28 (On the same trip, Vas asked the head of the central planning bureau where he could get a taxi. “We don’t even have roads,” he was told.29) Juchnowicz also once received, out of the blue, a phone call: “Build a theater,” he was told.30 He did. The Nowa Huta’s People’s Theater was completed in 1955. Stalinstadt finished its theater—named in honor of Friedrich Wolf, Markus Wolf’s father—in the same year. Designed to resemble a Greek temple, the Stalinstadt theater was not connected to the city’s heating system and for a long time had to be kept warm with the help of an old locomotive engine. But the projects kept coming. In Sztálinváros, pressure to raise the cultural level of the city’s inhabitants resulted in a new hotel, the Arany Csillag (“Golden Star”), in 1954. The building was described by one newspaper as “the most beautiful in the city” and its restaurant was meant to be the “best in town.” Waiters and cooks were imported from Budapest, and the mayor grandly declared that in this restaurant, ordinary people would be served before dignitaries.31
In addition to entertainment for the workers, the socialist cities were also meant to provide cultural inspiration for everyone else. In the early 1950s, artists, writers, and filmmakers all came to visit in order to “learn from the workers.” The Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich came to Stalinstadt in 1952. The East German director Karl Gass made a laudatory newsreel there in 1953. Though his equipment was too primitive to do interviews, Gass filmed the construction of the steel furnace in monumental detail.32 An East German novelist, Karl Mundstock, also published a book based on his experiences in the city. Helle Nächte (White Nights) contained a lyrical description of the construction site:
Piles of wood, scaffolding, finished barracks, furnaces, tables, chairs, beds, piles of gravel, all of this lay about wherever there was any space … But soon the rows of barracks, the shops, the storage for material, could be seen, proving that a rational system underlay the apparent chaos. Soon the bulldozers cleared the canal, which had turned into a river of mud in the ten years since the war. And soon the saws began to sing, and the road to the center of the steelworks, the road of friendship, had been built.33
Tadeusz Konwicki also spent parts of 1949 and 1950 wor
king at Nowa Huta, using the material gathered there to write Przy Budowie (At the Building Site), possibly his worst novel. The plot concerns a work crew that has to meet its construction deadline but is frustrated by class enemies and insufficiently enlightened colleagues. Naturally, they overcome all difficulties and fulfill the plan.34
But it was not just the experience of work that writers and artists sought at the new city building sites. In some cases, they were also looking for an opportunity to remake themselves, much as the workers were remaking society. In 1952 the painter Oskar Nerlinger came to Stalinstadt, hoping to cure himself of any remaining traces of bourgeois formalism. Nerlinger had been an active member of the prewar avant-garde, and after the war was appointed director of the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste, the school of fine arts in West Berlin. His close association with his communist counterparts in the East, his loud opposition to “capitalism,” and his support for the East German “peace” campaigns soon won him many enemies, however. After taking part in some exhibitions on the eastern side of the border, he was dubbed one of the West’s “rotten professors” and—like several others—lost his job.35 In the early 1950s, it was not only communists who were intolerant.
With a great flourish, Nerlinger emigrated across the border in 1951—one of the few to make the move from West to East—and joined the East German artistic establishment. Yet he remained, in his own words, “insecure in his artistic attitude.” His wife, Alice Lex-Nerlinger, had trouble having her paintings exhibited in the East, even though, as she complained in a letter to the authorities, “my whole life as an artist I’ve done nothing but work for peace.”36 Nerlinger himself felt it was a “relief” to be in the East, but the aesthetics were hard to understand for someone best known as a highly abstract painter. Hoping to educate himself out of his “pessimism” and to acquire “optimism” like the workers, he determined to live for a time in the new socialist city.37
Nerlinger received a commission from the factory management to paint a mural, and thus became an employee of the steel mill, with the “rights and duties of a factory worker.” Determined to experience every aspect of his new colleagues’ lives, he visited their apartments, their restaurants, and their sports stadium. By day, he sat “wrapped in blankets in the winter mud, stood by the furnaces, experienced the construction of the great ovens, listened to the many noises of the machines,” hoping to learn from “the wonderful human beings who have caused this courageous project to rise from former forests.” In the evenings, he studied technical engineering literature. He tried to paint workers as they worked, which wasn’t easy: “The factory was noisy and dangerous, and the camera didn’t help because the glow of the metal was too hot and bright.”38
His first results didn’t please his subjects. They thought the scenes were too gloomy and unpleasant—“like in a bad West German company”—and they began to advise Nerlinger on how he should change them. Nerlinger complied. He began to paint the factory as a brighter, more cheerful place. He painted the workers looking happier, more optimistic. He thought it important to show the engineers looking “proud” of what they were doing. His worker-critics approved, so much so that he made prints for them, which they hung in their apartments.39
His style had indeed changed, as he himself boasted at an exhibition of his sketches, studies, and works in progress, which took place in November 1952—the very first art exhibit in Stalinstadt. To demonstrate how far he had come, Nerlinger brought four of his prewar paintings and introduced them as evidence that “it could not go on like this.” In the words of an art critic who reviewed the show, these older works included “an icy depiction of a very solemn factory” (1930) and “a melancholic, dark landscape” (1945), behind which lay “the tragic situation of an artist whose political openness had led him astray.” Fortunately “his progressive spirit turned against the paralyzing pessimism. In the pulsating rhythm of the Eisenhüttenstadt combine, the depressing fears of growing lonely in a studio became the utopian dream of a new reality.”40
The factory workers were pleased with this first exhibition. “Dear colleague Nerlinger,” wrote one in the visitors’ book that evening, “I was very happy when going through the exhibition, I could see how you, with a warm heart and unbroken creativity, have addressed new problems … I hope the finished work will be a great success.” Another declared that “our conviction that the human being lies at the center of all of our efforts cannot remain a mere saying, it must be expressed in art.” Representatives from friendly socialist countries wrote admiring notes in Polish, Hungarian, and Czech.
A few weeks later, there was a discussion in the factory itself. Nerlinger began by asking for “the helpful criticism of the workers.” Some of the responses were surprisingly precise. One comment was signed by three trade union members: “We like the black-and-white drawings very much, but the watercolors must be lighter and more natural.” Another complained that in one of the pictures he couldn’t recognize the faces of individuals, the figures were too generic. A representative from the Free German Youth was more enthusiastic: “This is probably the first time in the history of our people that an artist presents his work for critical discussion to the workers who gave him motivation and strength.”41
Nerlinger’s critical triumph was complete, and his psychological transformation had progressed as well. Like Max Lingner, he had truly wanted to conform to the spirit of his era, and he knowingly underwent a process of “reeducation” so that he would better fit into his new surroundings. In that sense, Nerlinger had a good deal in common with the workers who appeared in his paintings, as well as the workers of Sztálinváros and Nowa Huta. They too were allegedly being re-formed and reshaped by their surroundings—and they too were supposedly going to conform to the spirit of their cities.
The dreams of the socialist city planners went far beyond bricks and mortar. From the beginning, their ambitions included not just the transformation of art and urban planning but of human behavior. Sztálinváros, in an early description, was supposed to be a “city without beggars, and with no periphery”—that is, with no slums on the outskirts.42 Inside the socialist city, workers were meant to follow a more “cultured” way of life than they had known in the past—one that bore an overwhelming resemblance to the life of the prewar bourgeoisie. In Sztálinváros, a glimpse of this appealing future finally became available in the summer of 1952, by which time the apartment blocks along May 1 Street were relatively orderly, the street itself was covered in asphalt, and the building debris and rubble had been carried away. The area had become a place where well-dressed people could go for a leisurely Sunday walk, and it soon became known as the “Switzerland of Sztálinváros.” This, in the words of the historian Sándor Horváth, was exactly what was supposed to happen. The new urban spaces would breed a new kind of worker, the “urban human”:
The “urban human” leads a sober life, visits the cinema and theater or listens to the radio instead of going to the pub, wears modern and comfortable ready-made clothing. He likes going for walks and loves to spend his spare time “sensibly” on the beach. In contrast to the villager he furnishes his apartment with urban furniture, preferring furniture from a factory to that designed by carpenters, and he lies on a practical sofa. In the urban human’s flat there is a bathroom where he regularly takes a bath. He does not use the bathtub for his animals or to store food. During the day he eats at the factory, and only uses his kitchen to cook light meals. The rest of the time he spends with his family in the living room. The urban human sunbathes on the balcony of his modern, light, and airy apartment, or lets his children get fresh air there. He does not dry clothes on the balcony, but uses the communal laundry in the building.43
But the Switzerland of Sztálinváros was tiny. In 1952, it consisted of only a single street. Daily life on the rest of the building site, and on the building sites of Stalinstadt and Nowa Huta, looked rather different.
During their first decade, the socialist cities met one
of their goals with stunning success: all of them achieved extraordinarily rapid growth. Nowa Huta, founded in 1949, had 18,800 inhabitants by the end of 1950, and would have 101,900 inhabitants by 1960.44 Sztálinvarós had 5,860 inhabitants at the end of 1950, but the number had more than doubled to 14,708 by a year later.45 Stalinstadt had 2,400 inhabitants in 1952, and 15,150 in 1955. In any developing country such rapid growth was guaranteed to bring chaos, disorganization, mistakes, and worse. And so it did. As Józef Tejchma remembered, “It was all … incredibly primitive.”
Tejchma arrived in Nowa Huta in 1951 at the age of twenty-four, the same year he attended the Berlin youth festival. Born into a peasant family in an isolated village in southeastern Poland, Tejchma had finished high school thanks to the free education that his parents would never have been able to afford before the war. He had joined the Peasants’ Party’s youth movement as a student, and when it merged into the Union of Polish Youth (ZMP) in 1948, he automatically became a member. Talented and enthusiastic, he was quickly invited to work in the ZMP headquarters in Warsaw. Though he had hopes of attending a university, there were other, more urgent tasks. Unexpectedly, the head of cadres in Warsaw called him into his office and told him there was an urgent need to open a ZMP office in Nowa Huta. Would Tejchma become its first leader? He agreed. And thus, as he remembered, he became “the leader of several tens of thousands of young people. I was responsible for their education, for culture, for sport—for everything.”46