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8 heterotopias of the normal in Private worlds in 1997, I met a local journalist who wrote for the steel mill newspaper. when i explained my research to her, she immediately understood it to be about the relationship between one’s living space and one’s sense of self in the world. she referred me to an article she had written on a new local handyman business that specialized in refurbishing panel apartments. i reproduce the first part of it here, as it gives articulate form to narratives and expressions in regular circulation during the late 1990s in Dunaújváros, a narrative that will feel familiar to the reader of this book. it is a narrative of recent history and of the expectations for and disappointments in the system change. it is also a narrative about the resilience of the idea that transformations to one’s home can produce transcendent transformations to one’s life. And finally, it is a narrative that hints more broadly at the emerging relationship between one’s private home life and the wider sociopolitical and economic order. The title of the article? “My home, my castle!” (Kozma 1995). There was a time when we used the summer vacation for rest. The entire family retreated, if nowhere else, then to Balaton széplak [the steel mill’s resort for workers at lake Balaton called “Beautiful Dwelling”]. when the second economy picked up, everyone used their free time for working, and with the diligence of bees, tried to create better circumstances for themselves. A “real estate” phenomenon began, and family house belts developed. standards (igények) arose which exceeded the panel apartment’s “complete comforts” [namely]: a green belt, a little garden, and the expression: “i don’t want to hear my neighbor’s snoring.” The system change paralyzed this kind of change in quality, this progressive movement. in the past, building a house was never a cakewalk and many failed—if not materially, then by sacrificing the marriage. now, the practice of putting up a house through kaláka has almost completely ceased, and slowly, its meaning is also being lost in common knowledge. today, only a very few are able—using a new word—“to finance” (megfinanszírozni) a life space fitting their standards (igények). And the majority? The majority these days doesn’t even think of changing their furniture . . . they look at the colorful brochures (iKeA, tutto Mobili , Michelfelt) and try to be satisfied with the good old “french bed” in their bedroom. in place of a new kitchen, they buy a few rows of tiles, change the linoleum floor and cover the old, built-in cabinets with self-sticking wallpaper. Men with clever hands will sometimes wallpaper, paint, plaster, and even make 220 heterotopias of the normal in Private worlds | 221 do-it-yourself furnishings (barkácsolni). for those who can’t, the old furnishings stay, and they have committed themselves to a lifetime of the wall-unit closet, the two sofa beds, and the coffee table. Burned out desires and people, petrified relations. what can be done?! . . . Those who still have some spirit tear down walls, open up rooms, or divide them. it is no longer forbidden, and most apartments are now in private ownership : just the grounding wall must stay as is! “Difference” attracts, something special, “let mine not be the same as the neighbor’s.” Breaking out of the grayness , the habitual, the panel masses. if i can’t do it on the outside, then at least let me enchant from the inside, so that my individuality can be seen. i don’t want mass housing, i want a home, a real one, where not just my body, but my spirit can rest! My house, my castle! . . . [with such changes . . . ] we can make peace with the world, with ourselves, knowing that we don’t have to look, helplessly, at others’—perhaps visible— well-being. even within the panel walls we can create for ourselves a little island . . . one that can mirror our dreams. —erzsébet Kozma (1995) The anxieties and desires Kozma expresses here are familiar. There is the obligatory alignment with the “moral losers” of the system change, the population of the socialist middle stratum who in retrospect realize that even though life was difficult during state socialism, the last few decades were a time of steady “progress ” in standards of living. for many in Dunaújváros’s broad middle stratum, the regime change “paralyzed” this...

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