Iron Curtain (68 page)

A few weeks later, there was a discussion in the factory itself. Nerlinger began by asking for “the helpful criticism of the workers.” Some of the responses were surprisingly precise. One comment was signed by three trade union members: “We like the black-and-white drawings very much, but the watercolors must be lighter and more natural.” Another complained that in one of the pictures he couldn’t recognize the faces of individuals, the figures were too generic. A representative from the Free German Youth was more enthusiastic: “This is probably the first time in the history of our people that an artist presents his work for critical discussion to the workers who gave him motivation and strength.”
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Nerlinger’s critical triumph was complete, and his psychological transformation had progressed as well. Like Max Lingner, he had truly wanted to conform to the spirit of his era, and he knowingly underwent a process of “reeducation” so that he would better fit into his new surroundings. In that sense, Nerlinger had a good deal in common with the workers who appeared in his paintings, as well as the workers of Sztálinváros and Nowa Huta. They too were allegedly being re-formed and reshaped by their surroundings—and they too were supposedly going to conform to the spirit of their cities.

The dreams of the socialist city planners went far beyond bricks and mortar. From the beginning, their ambitions included not just the transformation of art and urban planning but of human behavior. Sztálinváros, in an early description, was supposed to be a “city without beggars, and with no periphery”—that is, with no slums on the outskirts.
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Inside the socialist city, workers were meant to follow a more “cultured” way of life than they had known in the past—one that bore an overwhelming resemblance to the life of the prewar bourgeoisie. In Sztálinváros, a glimpse of this appealing future
finally became available in the summer of 1952, by which time the apartment blocks along May 1 Street were relatively orderly, the street itself was covered in asphalt, and the building debris and rubble had been carried away. The area had become a place where well-dressed people could go for a leisurely Sunday walk, and it soon became known as the “Switzerland of Sztálinváros.” This, in the words of the historian Sándor Horváth, was exactly what was supposed to happen. The new urban spaces would breed a new kind of worker, the “urban human”:

But the Switzerland of Sztálinváros was tiny. In 1952, it consisted of only a single street. Daily life on the rest of the building site, and on the building sites of Stalinstadt and
Nowa Huta, looked rather different.

During their first decade, the socialist cities met one of their goals with stunning success: all of them achieved extraordinarily rapid growth. Nowa Huta, founded in 1949, had 18,800 inhabitants by the end of 1950, and would have 101,900 inhabitants by 1960.
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Sztálinvarós had 5,860 inhabitants at the end of 1950, but the number had more than doubled to 14,708 by a year later.
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Stalinstadt had 2,400 inhabitants in 1952, and 15,150 in 1955. In any developing country such rapid growth was guaranteed to bring chaos, disorganization,
mistakes, and worse. And so it did. As Józef Tejchma remembered, “It was all … incredibly primitive.”

Tejchma arrived in Nowa Huta in 1951 at the age of twenty-four, the same year he attended the Berlin youth festival. Born into a peasant family in an isolated village in southeastern Poland, Tejchma had finished high school thanks to the free education that his parents would never have been able to afford before the war. He had joined the Peasants’ Party’s youth movement as a student, and when it merged into the
Union of Polish Youth (ZMP) in 1948, he automatically became a member. Talented and enthusiastic, he was quickly invited to work in the ZMP headquarters in Warsaw. Though he had hopes of attending a university, there were other, more urgent tasks. Unexpectedly, the head of cadres in Warsaw called him into his office and told him there was an urgent need to open a ZMP office in Nowa Huta. Would Tejchma become its first leader? He agreed. And thus, as he remembered, he became “the leader of several tens of thousands of young people. I was responsible for their education, for culture, for sport—for everything.”
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Tejchma stayed for three years, during which time he encountered “the vast complications that accompanied the transfer of young people straight from the countryside into big factories.” Many of those who arrived in Nowa Huta were illiterate or semiliterate. They had never left their small villages, never been away from their families, and knew nothing of the outside world. Tejchma did not immediately see this as an insurmountable problem. He himself was the product of an impoverished village, and the modest “corner” he inhabited in a workers’ hotel in Nowa Huta was more luxurious than anything he’d known growing up: “There was water, electricity.” He also had a secretary and a salary, paid by the ZMP, which made him independent of the factory.

At first, Tejchma’s days were packed with interest. Though he had instructions from Warsaw, telling him how to organize lectures and parades, he also had a good deal of independence. He walked around the building site, “interesting myself in how the young people were working, maybe intervening, making suggestions, looking at the dining hall, the educational system.” He brought his conclusions to the construction bosses and argued for changes. In order to prevent workers from “lying around on benches” after work, he organized a fleet of construction site trucks to take a group of workers, many of whom had never been inside a theater before, to attend a performance in Kraków. Tejchma also organized meetings
with the important writers, artists, and poets who came to Nowa Huta in search of creative inspiration. At the same time, Tejchma kept track of who was meeting construction norms and who had beaten them. True to the spirit of the age, he encouraged “socialist competitions” and rewarded the victors. Some people listened: “They engaged, they tried to do well, they raced against one another. But of course it didn’t look, in real life, the way it did in the newsreels.”

Very quickly, Tejchma’s job became a disappointment. Some of his new charges appreciated his work, wanted to broaden their horizons, learn the history of the workers’ movement, become acquainted with theater and literature. But others were not only bored by his efforts; they were actively hostile. Many of them “had no cultural standards at all. No education, no need for higher things. They were constantly drunk, they entertained themselves by fighting. They had no sense of unity. They wanted nothing that we had to give them.”

He was not the only one to come to that conclusion. In 1955—after Stalin’s death, by which time the press was much freer—the young journalist
Ryszard Kapuściński visited Nowa Huta on behalf of
Sztandar Młodych
(
Banner of Youth
), the newspaper of the ZMP. In the recently completed apartment blocks, Kapuściński met many people who were satisfied with what they had achieved. “I’ve been here two years and won’t leave for anything,” one man told him. But in the barrack cities on the outskirts of town, he found dramatic, even Dantesque living conditions and an emerging underclass of impoverished and degenerate factory workers:

Tejchma made the same observation. He tried to hold group discussions with the most apathetic workers, but while they would happily complain about working conditions, it was impossible to get them to talk about much else. When famous writers came to visit, they mostly sat silent, as if waiting to be instructed by these visitors from a different world. Tejchma began to warn these literary figures in advance, even advising them against overselling Nowa Huta. He told
Kazimierz Brandys, at the time a leading Stalinist writer, to tone down his description of the building site: real life was not so optimistic, so joyful as it appeared to be in Brandys’s work. There was a vast gap between daily life as it was actually lived and daily life as it was described in the newspapers, the newsreels, and the novels.

Vast gaps were also emerging between the different districts of the socialist cities. Not far from May 1 Street, the Switzerland of Sztálinváros, there were barrack cities with names like “Radar” and “South.” These were in fact slums, with no running water, no indoor toilets, and no asphalt streets. Rubbish collection was irregular. People kept pigs and chickens in sheds alongside the barracks—and sometimes in the half-finished apartment blocks nearby. When it rained the mud was so deep that parents had to carry children to kindergarten on their backs. Sometimes two, three, or more families lived in spaces meant for one.
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For entertainment, the inhabitants of the barrack cities visited not theaters and hotel restaurants but pubs. The most notorious—Késdobáló, which literally means “the Knife-Thrower” as well as “pub” or “joint” in Hungarian slang—was, according to press reports, a place of drunkenness, wild singing, fights, and stabbings. Of another pub—Lepra, or “the Leopard”—it was jokingly said that one had to fire into the air upon crossing the threshold, and if no one shot back then it was possible to enter. Periodically the police tried to close these establishments, but the pubs had become gathering places for former peasants, who defended them vigorously against the “urban” police and media.
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Stalinstadt was equally divided. In one part of the city, the lucky few were able to move into new apartments and were genuinely enthusiastic about their new circumstances. Elsewhere, things were harder. Most of the workers who came to the site in the early days were young people who came from all over
Germany—one in three was a refugee from Poland,
Sudetenland, or elsewhere in the former Reich—without their families. They lived in barracks, ten to a room, and their main entertainment was drinking. One remembered going “over the rail tracks to
Fürstenberg,” where, as in Sztálinváros, there were bars with nonutopian names like the Wild Boar and the Cellar.
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Another remembered a pub that was so crowded it was difficult to enter—unless you were lucky enough to get there after a fight, when the clients had all been tossed out.
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The speed of the construction, the use of night shifts, the long working days, and the inexperience of both workers and management also meant that there were frequent technological failures in these supposedly ideal construction sites. The loose, sandy soil of Sztálinváros caused enormous problems and slowed down progress. Tevan remembered waking up early on Sunday mornings and sneaking out to the construction site to make sure that “the walls and the buildings were still there.”
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Her piece of the factory survived, but a wing of one of the local schools did collapse and had to be reconstructed. In 1958 the entire sewage system had to be refurbished. Ideology itself was the source of technical problems: at one point Tevan requested that a much-applauded brigade of shock workers be removed from one of her projects because they were so anxious to finish quickly and collect their rewards that they cut corners and did the work badly. That kind of problem arose at many other building sites and in many other factories in this era, but heightened propaganda made the problem worse in the socialist cities.

Technical problems arose within the steel mills too. At Stalinstadt, a furnace designed to produce 360 tons of raw iron was initially only able to produce about one and a half tons. After about two months of repairs and adjustments, it could produce around 205 tons—which meant, at least, that the plan could be “fulfilled by 58 percent.” The output eventually improved, but poor planning and engineering failures meant that parts of the steel production process at the Stalinstadt mill would be carried out in the Soviet Union for many years. Decades after the mill was “complete,” unfinished materials still had to be shipped back and forth across the border for processing. The entire plant, encompassing all of the stages of the steel production
cycle, would not be completed until the 1990s, after East Germany no longer existed.
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