1-Year Plan 
 Post 29: 7/1/06

With Adorno and Smithson
in Eisenhüttenstadt (DE)

Friday, 2 June 2006

On this date I traveled to Eisenhüttenstadt, a small industrial city on the Oder River, the present border between Germany and Poland. Eisenhüttenstadt was a planned community of the German Democratic Republic (DDR) designed and built the 1950s. With the Stalinallee (now Karl-Marx-Allee) in Berlin, it marks a highpoint of Soviet influence on German socialist architecture, which after de-Stalinization and with the limited market reforms of Erich Honecker in the 1960s, turned toward quasi-modernist influences and mass production techniques responsible for the numerous "faceless" Plattenbau (prefabricated concrete apartment buildings) that are everywhere to be found in the East. Honecker's face was circulated everywhere as well, in the manner of late-Stalinist party bosses, making it easy for a later Cold War triumphalism to overlook the actual social history it masks. This split, between political and cultural narratives, is what I wanted to look into, even overcome, in my visit to Eisenhüttenstadt, and specifically its Dokumentationszentrum Alltagskultur der DDR (Documentation Center of Everyday Culture in the GDR), situated in the former kindergarten of a housing complex in the planned part of town. Unlike the chronology of the Zeitgeschichtiliches Forum in Leipzig or the recently opened permanent exhibition of the German Historical Museum in Berlin, the political narrative of the culture of everyday life is downplayed in Eisenhüttenstadt. What takes its place is more a spatial matrix of petit histoire seen through the display of consumer objects produced in the DDR, framed within but not identical to the grand histoire of the Cold War and Fall of Communism. The center functions as a memorial site where former East Germans can reencounter and process the objects and structures of everyday life that they lived and, in fact, worked to produce. The historical intervention here is double: it is both a record of an overlooked history and a structure for remembering that is anything but monumental. As such, it takes its place with numerous antitriumphalist, antiprogressivist, and antinationalist monuments in both halves of post–Cold War Germany. It is the overcoming of triumphalism of whatever sort—Marxist or neoliberal—that Eisenhüttenstadt's antimonuments propose.

The hour and a half trip by rail was unremarkable. After leaving Friedrichstraße Station, one experiences a gorgeous display of every aspect of Berlin architecture in its current mixed condition in the East: new shopping malls around Alexanderplatz set off by quasi-modernist apartment buildings and the Karl-Marx-Allee; disused industrial spaces and postmodern housing complexes; and finally the East Berlin suburbs, but these rapidly devolve into mixed land uses typical of anywhere in Germany. The generally flat and sandy landscape is interrupted at several points by canals and the beginnings of the Spreewald, a still-preserved wetlands that is home to a Slavic-speaking minority, the Sorbs, as well as some skinheads, I have been told. Frankfurt-an-der-Oder is known for being one of the most boring cities in Germany, especially when compared to Frankfurt-am-Main, and I saw little of it except to note that most people got off there. In fifteen minutes, during which I tried hard to comprehend that the landscape on the other side of the Oder River was in fact Poland, the train ended at the Eisenhüttenstadt, with its two rail lines, some train station punks, and a diner where there was some talk about Schwuler (gay people) going on among the regulars. There I bought a map to Eisenhüttenstadt and set off on foot on a perfect early summer day, the first break in the weather after weeks of rain in Berlin. Smithson's tour of the Passaic was scarcely in mind as I stopped to photograph the first of many antimonuments to everyday life in Eisenhüttenstadt: a disused, graffiti-laden building opposite a new car dealership. To arrive in Eisenhüttenstadt was to arrive at a kind of nowhere at the end of the line that had been, at the same time, an embodiment or enactment of an historical ideal. Something other than Smithsonian irony seemed appropriate for the remains of a utopian experiment that was actually built.

The gateway to the utopia of Eisenhüttenstadt was a small group of pedestrians trying to cross the main thoroughfare, where timed lights never seemed to display a "walk" sign. A socialist collective of people waiting for something to happen seemed to have formed spontaneously, despite anyone's intention. While the road was a four-lane highway suitable for any industrial or residential traffic, I noticed immediately the numerous bicyclists of all ages that populate Eisenhüttenstadt. In the background, the cooling towers and blast furnaces of the steel mill were visible. This industry, around which the town had been planned, had employed 25,000 workers under socialism; now owned by a Belgian combine, the labor force has been reduced to 4,000, but it is still in production. From the road I entered the former utopian zone: cement and stone-faced row housing, most renovated and occupied but some boarded up, alternated with park spaces. There is still for me a euphoria in walking down streets named after Rosa Luxemburg or Bertolt Brecht (the permissible DDR names remain in use, though conspicuously absent are any Stalinists: Stalin himself, Thälmann, Ulbrich, Honecker, or anyone with a Stasi past). Eisenhüttenstadt itself was called Stalinstadt from 1953 to 1961; there is a complex history of which names from Marxism, the Soviet occupation, or the DDR are preserved, and where. After a brief walk through Wohnkomplex II (housing complex II), I arrived at the planned shopping area, reflecting the builders' ideal of a social space where production and consumption would equally frame the residential complex: a prescient attempt at the "live-work-shop" idea now being marketed in postmodern cities like Detroit. Here, of course, the work is industrial rather than service-oriented; Lindenallee, the main shopping street, is sited directly at the steel mill in the near distance—this may be compared to recent Smart Cities initiatives, where large-scale production is located "elsewhere." The defamiliarization that takes place on entering a socialist public building refunctioned as a Dresdner Bank is primary; I went inside to check my balance. Thus reassured, I made my way past a still extant peace mural, down the Straße der Republik, to the Center—which would not open until 1 PM.

There was nothing to do but explore the public areas between the Center, the former Youth Palace, and the park at the border of the planned zone. In the space between, I began to notice details, beginning with the  importance of the Youth Palace in the DDR versus its current state of neglect. The park areas that sloped upward from these institutional spaces were more appealing, where I found many of the small- to medium-sized figurative sculptures that punctuate every available space in Eisenhüttenstadt. Mixing the genres of impressionism (Maillol), social realism (a kind of cartoon rendering of typical activities), and fantasy sculpture (dream visions of endless time and space), the sculptures were largely human-sized and devoted to leisure time and familial care rather than industry and production. Father held sons aloft, mothers caressed daughters, naked striplings lay in the sun, wrestlers and others pursued their sports, literary figures (Heine) looked on, and imagined characters from literature were materialized in bronze. In some cases the sculptures were enhanced by graffiti, as with the pink breasts spray-painted on a female figure, which seemed more to bring them into the democratic present than to deface or mock them. I was impressed by the ubiquity and measured placement of these representations of human scale: throughout the housing complex, human (and animal) figures in some form of play, repose, inspiration, or care rendered the scale of the space between buildings inhabitable. Meanwhile the occasional bicyclist or mother with baby stroller passed by; at one point, a school group looking much like the former Pioneers but without red scarves was being herded on toward some goal. I felt as if I were in the set of The Prisoner, and that a fantasy of a collectivist society "elsewhere" (Albania? North Korea?) had crystallized out of the Island premise of the mini-series—or perhaps from H.G. Wells's collectivism in The Time Machine (not the film version, which is more postindustrial Detroit than any utopia). There was, above all, a feeling that pleasure (never divorced from care but not reducible to mere leisure) had been located in the space between buildings in the DDR utopia. Affect was being designed as a complement to production in everyday life.

The goal of the Documentation Center is to preserve objects of everyday life from a culture that originated in desperate historical circumstances, developed in ways that were massively compromised by the great power politics of the Cold War, and that was irrevocably altered with die Wende and reunification. Thus its historical argument must devolve onto the objects themselves, as any narrative that tries to subordinate them can only be provisional. The objects of everyday life in the DDR cannot be explained either by Marxist teleology or Cold War triumphalism; they persist as material evidence of the culture that produced them, in however deformed a manner, as they argue for the survival of that culture and its values in the present. While they are clearly objects of mourning, they are only partly that—they are also partial objects in an economic rather than a psychological sense, arising from the circulation of goods within a restricted economy while preserving a place for (and competing directly with) the more attractive objects from free market economies in the West. "We have a consumer society too," they seem to say, even as their relations to production and consumption differ markedly from those of an economy that delivers us a world of Wal-Marts and K-Marts. On display when I visited were not only an exhibit of objects from various categories (clothes, children's toys, school books, pharmaceuticals, electronics, furniture) but documentation of the Konsum movement of cooperatives, which had its origins in the  early twentieth century and was revived in the DDR as a basis for distributing goods (at one point, feeding a third of the population). The consumer cooperatives extended socialist ideals into the distribution of items necessary for life; later, as they developed, they began to take on values in which the commodity was not merely determined by necessity. Product design and advertising from Konsum thus convey a hybrid mixture of functionalist and consumerist appeal, as is generally true of many of the consumer objects of the DDR. Necessity intersects with aesthetic appeal in ways that achieve a curiously defamiliarizing effect, much like my experience of walking into a socialist space converted into a bank. For this reason, there is a current enthusiasm for DDR design, and certain neighborhoods in Berlin and Leipzig designed on its principles have become fashionable in a not entirely retro or nostalgic sense. Rather, the minimalist functionalism they convey has become hip because it proclaims the pleasure of living in a world in which one is aware, rather than in denial, of the limits the material world puts on social existence. It is evident that we can live within our means on this planet if we can scale down our rampant consumption of it; the possibility of creating an aesthetic out of what can only be ignored as a grim reality is what the revival of DDR design is all about. Here, another sense of the aesthetic than that of context-independent pleasure in the contemplation of objects with no practical purpose is obvious.

What would Theodor Adorno make of all this? Probably not much, mired as he was in the Cold War compromises of the West. But there is certainly a basis for thinking through Adorno's account of the aesthetic in the objects of everyday life in the DDR. At the heart of the aesthetic, for Adorno, was precisely a relation to necessity, directly connected to the determination of necessity by nature, that can be found in the hybrid aesthetics of market socialism. The "windowless monad" of the artwork still conveys its social constructedness through the critical distance from the relations of production it demands to be a work of art; the artwork is critical precisely insofar as it escapes from mere necessity (of production and consumption) as its fundamental determinant. For Adorno, it is clear that the artwork cannot be easily returned to the lifeworld it criticizes: this is a separation of spheres that would become crucial for the historical development of Aesthetic Theory within the ideology of the Bundesrepublik, where disavowal of the Stalinist society of the DDR was de rigueur. At the same time, negative dialectics suffered from its refusal of positivity as a site for critical engagement. As reinforcing the Great Divide at the heart of Critical Theory, rather than any simple precondition of it, Adorno and company could only be dismissive of the deformed societies of the East and their authoritarian leadership. Adorno could not, as a result, read Eisenhüttenstadt; it was on the other side of a separation that was operative for him. There are two primary entailments here in what I see of Adorno's absence from Eisenhüttenstadt. The first is the failure to understand how the hybrid aesthetic of the socialist object could be constructed precisely along the lines of the critical but windowless monad that Adorno reserved for the work of art. The second, more interesting, concerns the deployment of the aesthetic in the time and space of everyday life under socialism. While Eisenhüttenstadt's collection of sculptures clearly developed within the confines of a model city plan that could not replicate itself as a social blueprint, they demonstrate the way that time and space can be seen otherwise than in the commodified regimes of total economic rationalization we increasingly inhabit. The temporal and spatial fields they declare as proximate to the zone of production are concomitant to the hybrid nature of the commodity produced. They declare the sites, as it were, that dialectically map onto the nonsites of the commodity form in the realization of social life. With such happy thoughts in mind, I headed back to Berlin, where I continued to map the refunctioned space of utopia.

[Text and photographs copyright © Barrett Watten 2006. Not to be reprinted without permission, except in short excerpts in electronic media.]

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