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introduction The Qualities of Color and Concrete in November 2010, two decades after the fall of the state socialist system in hungary , the glossy headline of an interior decorating magazine on a Budapest newsstand caught my eye: “gray, grayer and grayest!” The words were a startling provocation in a place where gray had come to stand in for the eastern european material and political landscape during state socialism and remained an image the country sought to escape. “we tend to associate gray with what is boring, but there are a thousand kinds of gray, and when combined with colors its varieties are endless,” wrote the author as she described a lush interior of multiple textures and hues of gray created by a decorating firm called Zinc. The accompanying photo featured silver frames and silvery satins, a velvet armchair in gun-metal gray, coalcolored pillows strewn on a soft, light gray carpet, and a lamp shade the color of anthracite. “Just look around,” she enthused, “how these furnishings evoke the dawn fog, the rain-soaked highway, the pebbles on the lakeshore! . . . But here in our home [hungary], everything gray is bad. The weather is gray, the people are gray, gray is all that is dull, depressing, uninteresting. it’s time to rehabilitate the gray!” (Kelemen 2010). in hungary, gray is far more than a color. it is an aesthetic quality that powerfully links material environments with political affects. gray evokes not just a landscape dominated by concrete block housing, but a whole array of impressions and sentiments. During socialist times, western observers often invoked the grayness of eastern europe as a shorthand for their perceptions of life behind a dark iron curtain, of enforced poverty and the fatigue of daily provisioning, of unsmiling salesclerks, scarce goods, and the lack of colorful advertising and commerce . in these accounts, color often signified the pleasures and possibilities of capitalist consumption, of the freedom to express one’s identity through style. in the political rhetoric of the 1990s, the claim that state socialism failed because the state could not satisfy the consumer desires of its population became uncontroversial . “capitalism” rapidly displaced “democracy” as the ultimate victor of the cold war, and color became a powerful tool for asserting its legitimacy (Manning 2007a). for eastern european dissident intellectuals and émigrés, however, the grayness of the material world during the socialist period was iconic not so much of deprivation as of political repression.1 run-down built environments, industrial 1 2 | Politics in color and concrete pollution, second-rate consumer goods, and uniformity were indexes less of scarcity than of an oppressive and negligent state. Desire was less for consumer goods in and of themselves than for a kind of political-economic system that allowed for creative productivity, intimate social relationships, aesthetic pleasures, and free expression without fear of state retribution. But gray continues to color both perceptions of the region from elsewhere as well as the desires and ambitions of an aspiring middle class in hungary to achieve membership in a wider community of value. such expectations were inculcated during the socialist period, for state socialism had promised to provide citizens with the material goods and environments necessary to realize the well-being and dignity of modern citizenship. The planned city of Dunaújváros, where i conducted my fieldwork, had come to epitomize the gray of state socialism. founded as hungary’s model socialist town in 1951, it was first named sztálinváros, or city of stalin. Throughout my years of visiting the mill town, from the 1970s through the 1990s, hungarians i encountered from Budapest or other historic towns couldn’t contain their disapproval: “why would anyone want to go there?” they cried, distancing themselves and indeed the country from everything the city stood for.2 Dunaújváros was regarded as the ugliest city in hungary, the much-publicized exemplar of soviet city planning and emblematic of hungary’s subordination to the soviet union. indeed, its distinction as the first planned socialist city in hungary had long served to link it with other such cities in the soviet bloc—and consequently denied it an identity as organically hungarian. for many, it was a reminder of a tragic history in which communist rule had suppressed or distorted hungary’s bourgeoisdemocratic development, forcing this small, central european country to undergo a soviet rather than a “normal” western-style modernization.3 in Dunaújváros itself, residents were acutely aware of this stigma, yet...

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