Iron Curtain (67 page)

The construction of
Nowa Huta followed a similar trajectory. In the early period, the city architects wanted to continue building in the styles they had pursued before the war. In Poland, this was not strict Bauhaus design but rather garden suburbs of the kind built in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s: low one- or two-story buildings, surrounded by green plots and trees. Although these were diametrically opposed to the socialist realist ideal, several such developments were completed. But the tone quickly changed in Nowa Huta too: party authorities declared these new buildings to be insufficiently ideological and insufficiently reflective of Poland’s national character.

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.
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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.
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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.
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Another told the city newspaper that her definition of a “socialist” city was one in which there was “light, greenery, air, and space everywhere.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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:

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.
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(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.
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) Juchnowicz also once received, out of the blue, a phone call: “Build a theater,” he was told.
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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.
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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.
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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:

Tadeusz Konwicki also spent parts of 1949 and 1950 working 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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.