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

322 Pages·2013·14.348 MB·English

by  Krisztina Fehérváry

POLITICS in COLOR an1 CONCRETE
NEW ANTHROPOLOGIES OF EUROPE POLITICS
in
Matti Bunzl and Michael Herzfeld, editors
Founding Editors
Daphne Berdahl COLOR
Matti Bunzl and
Michael Herzfeld
CONCRETE

SOCIALIST MATERIALITIES AND THE
MIDDLE CLASS IN HUNGARY
POLITICS
in
COLOR
and
CONCRETE

SOCIALIST MATERIALITIES AND THE
MIDDLE CLASS IN HUNGARY
KRISZTINA FEHÉRVÁRY
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Bloomington and Indianapolis
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© 2013 by Krisztina Fehérváry
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fehérváry, Krisztina.
Politics in color and concrete : socialist materialities and the
middle class in Hungary / Krisztina Feh Fehérváry.
pages cm. — (New anthropologies of Europe)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-00991-3 (cl : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-
00994-4 (pb : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-00996-8 (ebook)
1. Hungary—Social conditions. 2. Hungary—Economic conditions.
3. Hungary—Civilization. 4. Material culture—Political aspects—
Hungary. 5. Consumption (Economics)—Political aspects—
Hungary. 6. Middle class—Hungary. 7. Post-communism—
Hungary. I. Title.
HN420.5.A8F44 2013
306.09439—dc23
2 013005870
1 2 3 4 5 18 17 16 15 14 13
For my parents
Deborah S. Cornelius and
István L. Fehérváry

Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction: The Qualities of Color and Concrete 1
1 Normal Life in the Former Socialist City 27
2 Socialist Realism in the Socialist City 52
3 Socialist Modern and the Production of Demanding Citizens 78
4 Socialist Generic and the Branding of State Socialism 111
5 Organicist Modern and Super- Natural Organicism 139
6 Unstable Landscapes of Property, Morality, and Status 164
7 The New Family House and the New Middle Class 189
8 Heterotopias of the Normal in Private Worlds 220
Epilogue 239
Notes 245
Bibliography 261
Index 281

Preface
T
7is b22k fi26es between the seemingly disparate worlds of state socialist ma-
terial 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 fi ldwork 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 social-
ism and the eff cts of the neoliberal form of capitalism that then enmeshed the
region. 8nd yet there were glaring problems with such a view. It posited East ern
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 ma-
terial 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 ro-
bust materiality, structured the decade after its fall and continues to shape atti-
tudes and practices in the region.
My first trip to Hungary was in 1972, when my American mother bravely ven-
tured 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 po liti cal
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 knowl-
edge of the language and mixed parentage. Once past the compulsory ordeal of
ix