Title Image (Figure 1): Children in Marzahn. Courtesy Bezirksmuseum Marzahn-Hellersdorf, e.V.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n 8-1 | Table of Contents<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0DOI 10.17742\/IMAGE.GDR.8-1.3 | RubinPDF<\/a><\/p>\n Eli Rubin\u00a0|\u00a0Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo<\/p>\n I<\/span>f there is one particular type of urban space that is associated with Eastern European communism, it is the massive blocks of prefabricated housing, found both within older cities and on the outskirts of cities from East Berlin to Siberia. Prefabricated, mass-produced apartments, particularly those built in clusters or settlements, were not uniquely Eastern European or socialist. The technology of prefabrication came from the West, and western nations built them in postwar France, Britain, and West Germany, but because they were built to such a massive extent in the socialist Bloc, they were and remain among the most visible, immediate, and phenomenological links to the communist past. Nothing says \u201cthis was once a communist land\u201d like seeing the rows of nearly identical housing blocks, sometimes symmetrical, sometimes folded inward as semi-closed polygons, separated by green spaces, rising along the outskirts of cities. From earlier settlements such as Halle-Neustadt in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) built in the 1950s and 1960s to later settlements such as Przymorze in Gdansk and Ujplata in Budapest built in the 1970s and 1980s, this architectural and urban form remains as a spatial and visual element of the communist past that cannot be erased from the phenomenological field of urban space. Long after the statues of Lenin and the giant hammers and sickles have been removed, the outdated and polluted factories either dismantled or completely modernized, and idiosyncratically \u201cEastern\u201d signs and slogans replaced with western corporate advertising, these apartments remain.<\/p>\n To western visitors, the sight of these prefabricated blocks\u2014called Plattenbau<\/em> in German, Panelaky<\/em> in Czech, and Khrushchoyvka <\/em>in Russian\u2014immediately conjures up negative associations, that is, when visitors from the West see them at all. Most western visitors in Prague, for example, never take the metro line out of the historic district to see the immense housing settlements at the end of the line in Stodulky, nor do visitors to Berlin venture beyond the central historic and trendy districts immediately east and north of the city centre; thus they do not see the massive settlements of Marzahn, Hohensch\u00f6nhausen, and Lichtenberg. If anything, it is commonplace for westerners to assume that these housing settlements signify the failure of the communist regime; in this, their shared modernist heritage with the ill-fated housing projects of the 1940s to 1960s in the United States further taints them to western eyes. Indeed, many of these housing settlements have suffered after the fall of communism, becoming in some countries ghettos or bastions of right-wing extremism (see Sammartino; Urban, \u201cTower and Slab\u201d). A symbol of failure might be what these spaces look like<\/em> to westerners but, as always, there is a wide gap between the surface and the interior. What was life really like<\/em> in these spaces?<\/p>\n For a long time, scholarship has ignored life within the Plattenbau<\/em>. The central theorist of what has become known as the \u201cspatial turn,\u201d Henri Lefebvre, dismissed them as \u201cundifferentiated space\u201d (Lefebvre 54). Historians of Eastern Europe, and especially of the GDR, have largely ignored them except to suggest that they were artificial communities created by the state and the party (Palmowski 191). Much of the work done by urban and architectural historians has focused on the prestige or neo-historical projects that took place largely in city centres, such as East Berlin\u2019s Palace of the Republic or Television Tower (Pugh; Urban, \u201cNeohistorical\u201d). This is beginning to change, with a spate of studies on mass-produced housing in communist countries that attends to everyday life within these new apartment blocks.[1]<\/a> However, much more needs to be done, especially considering that this form of life was so prevalent and defined everyday life in socialism in its final decades.<\/p>\n This essay is based on my attempt to research and write a history of everyday life in the largest East German Plattenbausiedlung<\/em> (Plattenbau <\/em>settlement): a vast, mass-produced district on the northeast edge of East Berlin known as Marzahn.\u00a0 This project borrowed from the idea of a Geertzian \u201cthick description\u201d by paying close attention to the habits, experiences, and relationships of ordinary people, and not necessarily leading political or cultural figures. It sought to understand everyday life as it was lived within the space defined by the mass-produced buildings\u2014the Plattenbauten<\/em>\u2014that came to define East German and Eastern European socialist architecture. In attempting to construct such a thick description, this study employs a wide range of sources. I carried out interviews with former East Germans who lived in Marzahn, read published interviews and memoirs of former Marzahners, often available only locally, and examined printed and archival sources. Originally, I was expecting to find evidence that the ruling SED (Socialist Unity Party) had been able to transform the consciousness of ordinary East Germans by transforming the spaces that defined their everyday lives. In so doing, I was following one of the dominant tropes of GDR historiography over the past two and half decades: I was looking for the traces of what many historians refer to as Herrschaft<\/em>, loosely translated as \u201cdomination\u201d or \u201csoft power,\u201d described below. Instead, what I found was that in Marzahn everyday life was defined by a lived and experienced a kind of socialism that was not a form of domination or Herrschaft<\/em>, and can perhaps be best described as a mostly self-organized socialism built around the local community that developed in these spaces–what one might call a \u201ccommunitarian\u201d socialism. In the spaces of Marzahn, people did not live under the yoke of the ruling party. Yet their community could only be described as a form of socialism, one that functioned well. In the case of this qualitative oral history project, I did not use questionnaires or surveys. I met Marzahners, spent time with them in their homes and their familiar spaces, talked with them, listened to them tell the story of their lives and their family histories, looked through their photo albums and documented their prized possessions, furniture, mementos, and read their letters and unpublished novels and poems. Lives are lived in spaces, and spaces intertwine with lives to create topographies of memory. Some of my informants were inclined to view the topographies of their lives in Marzahn through the rose-colored glasses of Ostalgie<\/em> (a German neologism referring to nostalgia for the bygone days of East Germany). As described below, many of those who moved to Marzahn did so because they were privileged by the system\u2014acquiring an apartment in Marzahn was in certain ways connected to belonging to important state or party institutions and organizations.<\/p>\n Yet even if we allow for some ideological bias in the respondents and archives, the narrative that emerged for me from listening to East Germans recount their lives on their own terms stood in stark contrast to the narrative that surrounds prefabricated, mass-produced communist housing blocs and, more broadly, the narrative of top-down power that has defined the historiography and popular discourse on the GDR. Since the collapse of East Germany in 1989-90, often called the Wende <\/em>(\u201cturning point\u201d), a focus on studying the power of the state and the ruling Communist party profoundly overshadowed and framed GDR historiography in Germany. Books, dissertations, articles, funded institutional research projects, publication series, museum exhibitions, conference papers, etc. abound with terms like Macht <\/em>(\u201cpower\u201d), Diktatur<\/em> (\u201cdictatorship\u201d), and Herrschaft<\/em>, as well as the related terms Widerstand <\/em>(\u201cresistance\u201d) and Opposition<\/em>.[2]<\/a> Public pressure from well-organized and politically connected former East German dissidents ensured that topics such as the oppression by the secret police (Stasi) and other security organs, the Berlin Wall, and the failed uprising against the party and state on June 17, 1953 have been thoroughly researched and have dominated the historical literature on East Germany.[3]<\/a> As a result, numerous research institutes, archives, museums, and subsidized publications have appeared in Germany, all dedicated to the Aufarbeitung<\/em> (the \u201cworking-through\u201d) of the legacy of the GDR, many of which are supported with state funds or other political sources of capital. Many of these, such as the Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur<\/em> (Federal Foundation for the Working-Through of the SED Dictatorship) and the B\u00fcrgerb\u00fcro <\/em>(Citizens\u2019 Office) are led by former dissidents and vehement anti-communists who are fiercely opposed to any interpretation or representation of the GDR that does not centre state repression and its victims and resistors.[4]<\/a><\/p>\n Even German scholars who have conducted more nuanced scholarship and discourse on everyday life in the GDR define their work largely by a need to understand the extent to which the state and the party controlled that everyday life. Specifically, many scholars have made significant use the concept of Herrschaft<\/em>\u2014a concept introduced by Max Weber and later became associated with Alf L\u00fcdtk\u2014to explain how those who hold power often depend on the consent of those they rule. These analyses of East Germany focus on the more subtle and cultural ways in which the party \u201cdictatorship\u201d exercised \u201csoft power\u201d[5]<\/a>\u2014the framing for a large number of works done on the GDR in Britain and North America. Many studies in this vein looked, for example, at consumer culture, sports, gender, domesticity, private life, etc.[6]<\/a> However, the general purpose was ultimately to uncover the extent of party Herrschaft<\/em> over East German society. To a degree, the reason that the term Herrschaft <\/em>became so ubiquitous was its conceptual flexibility\u2014it could accommodate a more nuanced, even Gramscian, or Foucauldian interpretation of power, or it could mean power more generally or colloquially.[7]<\/a><\/p>\n By the early 2000s the scholarship on the GDR, particularly in history, had become so profoundly shaped by the search for Herrschaft<\/em> that it seemed as if there were no other way to think about studying the GDR. Nearly every study, in both English and German, began with the paradigm of the GDR as a state and party as well as a society, and essentially tried to document the extent of the imposition of the former onto the latter. Most of this scholarship, as valuable as it was, bordered on question-begging, containing much of the conclusion within its premise. It began with the notion that there was a state on the one hand and a society on the other, that there was interpenetration, and ended with the conclusion that, in fact, the state\/party penetrated into the society. The only real point of contention in this scholarship was the degree to which that penetration happened and how to characterize it. The focus on \u201cpower\u201d from the beginning was self-reinforcing because, as Michel Foucault argues, power, especially in its subtler or more diffuse forms (such as Herrschaft<\/em>), is everywhere, in every society, and not just dictatorships. That there was Herrschaft <\/em>in the GDR is not, in the end, what is most important. Instead, I argue that one of the aspects of East German society and everyday life that tends to be de-emphasized in the literature is the reality of socialism<\/em> itself, as both an ideology and a system of organizing everyday life. That is, the impression emerges from much of the literature that the \u201csocialist\u201d part of East German everyday life was merely epiphenomenal\u2014almost as if it were incidental whether East Germany was socialist, or fascist, or whatever\u2014and that what really matters when studying the GDR is gaining an understanding of how power-in-general works. Yet East Germany was unique not because of Herrschaft<\/em> but because it was socialist. This was a core of its existence, not an epiphenomenon.<\/p>\n Indeed, the experience of former East Germans highlights this discrepancy between the politics of academic discourse on the GDR and the actual lived experience in the GDR. In interview after interview, East Germans in Marzahn painted the same kind of picture of their life in the Plattenbausiedlung<\/em>\u2014a new beginning, a progressive community, a major upgrade into the long awaited socialist good life, and most of all, a real and authentic everyday lived experience of socialism\u2014not ideological socialism, not the socialism of the party line, but a true communitarian socialism that worked even where and when the system did not function. They attributed little importance to their belonging to the SED or the presence of that official system, but rather described a lived experience that was, in fact, socialism. Furthermore, what many complained about, and what many East Germans in general have found hardest to understand in the years since 1989, is that their experience in the GDR seems to have been grossly misunderstood by westerners, especially historians.[8]<\/a> The narrative below depicts a very different reality than much of the German and English scholarship on the GDR.<\/p>\n The importance of this disconnect goes beyond the milieu of former East Germans. Quite apart from the politics of GDR historiography, there has been a transatlantic explosion of interest in East German everyday life and material culture.[9]<\/a> While this interest is perhaps easy to explain away as Ostalgie <\/em>among former East Germans, it is much harder to understand its transatlantic and international appeal. The well-known GDR Museum located in the heart of the most touristy area of Berlin\u2014just off Unter den Linden, between several museums and monuments\u2014is not large but it is heavily visited, almost exclusively by foreign tourists. Shops selling former East German consumer goods, marketed as \u201ccommunist kitsch\u201d have appeared in hip, trendy neighbourhoods, especially in Berlin, where many foreigners or young people with no memory or connection to the GDR live. The largest existing museum devoted to the material culture and everyday life culture of East Germany now exists in California. Known as the Wende Museum, it houses an impressive array of objects, visual art, film, clothing, and printed sources (including Margot Honecker\u2019s papers).[10]<\/a> The Wende Museum has demonstrated that, amazingly, in Los Angeles there is a strong interest in East Germany\u2014the museum\u2019s success has led it to recently move to a new, larger building, and it managed to stage an impressive spectacle (even for Hollywood\u2019s standards) for the 20th<\/sup> anniversary of the fall of the Wall, shutting down Wilshire Boulevard with segments of the Berlin Wall placed across it, the Mayor of Los Angeles and the Governor of California in attendance. Indeed, interest in East German everyday life and material culture is found throughout the world.<\/p>\n One might argue that in a neoliberal era this interest signifies a strong yearning for \u201csomething else\u201d (Rubin, \u201cFuture,\u201d 2). Indeed, East Germany represented an alternative modernity–not just any alternative, but a distinctively non-capitalist<\/em> modernity. As such, the suggestion here is that the GDR holds a strange and uncanny fascination for westerners. This is especially true of the younger generation, which is apt to be both attracted to and condescendingly amused by the phenomenological world left behind by a highly developed, modern socialist society. One of the enduring slogans of the Occupy movement is \u201cAnother World is Possible.\u201d Among the political left in the United States and throughout the millennial generation, there is a radically new openness to considering alternatives to capitalism itself. This has been made clear by the success of Bernie Sanders\u2014a self-avowed socialist\u2014in nearly gaining the nomination of the Democratic Party, as well as by a recent Harvard study revealing that just over half of all millennials do not support capitalism and one-third support socialism (Ehrenfreund). Yet in the suddenly flourishing discourse to be found, for example, in magazines and blogs such as Jacobin<\/em>, Dissent,<\/em> and The Baffler<\/em>, there is little to no mention of what life was actually like in a modern socialist society that existed in recent memory. Beginning to understand everyday lived socialism on its own terms<\/em>s a first step in filling in the blind spots regarding what \u201cother worlds\u201d are possible and what they actually look like. What follows is an attempt to write a history of everyday life in socialist East Germany beyond Herrschaft<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\t\t
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\nBeyond Domination:
\nSocialism, Everyday Life in East German Housing Settlements, and New Directions in GDR Historiography<\/strong><\/h4>\n