Politics in Color and Concrete: Socialist Materialities and the Middle Class in Hungary

Preface

Preface this book moves between the seemingly disparate worlds of state socialist material culture and postsocialist middle-class life. This structure is an outcome of my own experience of hungary as two distinct places, separated by time, in which my own status was as implicated in the shifting landscape of identity and belonging as those of the people populating the narrative—and as grounded in the constantly transforming material environment. My fieldwork in the 1990s was focused on the building and renovation practices of an aspiring middle class in a former “socialist new town.” The picture of everyday life i came away with was one overwhelmed by economic insecurity and status anxiety, but also one at odds with the world i had known from my travels to socialist hungary in the 1970s and 1980s. it was a picture easily explained, or so it seemed, by the fall of state socialism and the effects of the neoliberal form of capitalism that then enmeshed the region. And yet there were glaring problems with such a view. it posited eastern europe during the state socialist period as an economic and material wasteland, in which the absence of a “capitalist” economy somehow implied the absence of consumer culture—with its accompanying panoply of dreams and frustrations, forms of sociality, and social distinctions. focused on transformations of material worlds—especially of that particular place called “home”—this book lays bare the ways in which the embodied experience of state socialism, in all its robust materiality, structured the decade after its fall and continues to shape attitudes and practices in the region. My first trip to hungary was in 1972, when my American mother bravely ventured across the “iron curtain” so that my brother and i could visit my father’s family. we traveled to Budapest, the southern town of Mohács, and also to the socialist, planned “new town” of Dunaújváros, where i first became friends with laura, then aged twelve, and her family. My father stayed behind, sure that if he returned to hungary, communist authorities would return him to the political prison system in which he had already spent eight years of his life between 1948 and 1956.1 After this trip, i returned every couple of years. so began an ongoing debate with him about what was happening in his homeland—one i experienced during the more lenient and prosperous 1970s and 1980s of the Kádár era, and one he remembered from his youth and had seen darkened by the oppression of soviet russian occupation and 1950s stalinist communism. in my trips to hungary, i was embraced as hungarian despite my kitchen knowledge of the language and mixed parentage. once past the compulsory ordeal of ix x | Preface reporting in to the local police, my presence was valued in ways not in keeping with my age and gender because i was from “the west.” when the women retreated to the kitchen after a meal, the men would keep me with them to discuss politics, hungry for what i could tell them of what was going on “out there” (oda kint). in return, they regaled me (and each other) with their analyses of otherwise inexplicable state machinations—scrutinizing why authorities had allowed the American film The Deer Hunter to be shown, or what it meant that it was suddenly possible to open a savings account of foreign currency when possession of such currency over a small amount was still illegal. The socialist state’s combination of secrecy and unpredictability made it appear omniscient and omnipotent , as Daphne Berdahl so cogently observed (1999a). This state also enchanted the material world, making any event that was out of the ordinary seem a potential sign of the behind-the-scenes working of an inscrutable state. later, traveling by myself, these trips were framed by tense border crossings with armed guards who inspected train compartments for banned items—not just drugs, but those things feared by a paranoid state: samizdat publications and pornography, computer equipment, cigarettes, and other contraband consumer goods. once beyond the border, my journals of these trips describe reunions with relatives and friends; wonderful meals and evenings spent discussing politics and life; trips on crowded ikarusz buses flying by fields of sunflowers; sitting in old world cafés and swimming in olympic-size pools; and enjoying the summer ritual of watching wimbledon on tv with laura’s father, gorging on bowls of dark cherries in their Dunaújváros apartment...