Those backgrounds of algae greens, timber veneer panelling, geometric-patterned carpets, official-looking desks with brimming ashtrays and poky, grimly lit kitchens have been dimming down our TV screens at an alarming rate over the past few months. Amid the anaemic, fluorescent strip-lit greens, browns and peeling paint of the interiors and the grey, washed-out streetscapes of eastern Europe and the former Soviet bloc, men in nylon shirts with woollen ties and chunky plastic specs peer unsmilingly through the fug of smoke at women in tweedy skirt suits, nylon pussy bows and frizzy perms. There are uniforms and anonymous corridors, police cells and an aural landscape of scratchy, bugged conversations. There are dun-coloured plastic phones with curly cords and the occasional epic mosaic or wall sculpture adorning a ministry or a courtroom.
Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the aesthetic of the late communist interior is back with the energy of static sparks on a nylon carpet. In the gripping HBO series Chernobyl, the interiors and the impeccable production design can seem a more complete character than any of the main roles. At its centre, of course, is the gaping black maw of the burnt-out reactor, a metaphor so powerful it doesn’t need expanding on, but equally there are those unforgettable final shots of the abandoned city of Pripyat, notably that much-photographed decaying funfair awaiting a May Day holiday that never came. The disaster tourism that is now making Pripyat a charmingly post-apocalyptic travel destination is, surely, a symptom of the same architectural revival, an image of an abandoned aesthetic, a metaphor for the collapse of socialism and an entire society.
It isn’t only Chernobyl. The production design in Deutschland 83 and 86 outshone the series’ plot, dwelling long and hard on the details of everyday life in the east. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s recent film Never Look Away traced the story of its artist protagonist through a transition of interior landscapes from Nazi to socialist to capitalist Germany.
The same director’s 2006 film The Lives of Others revelled in its under-lit evocation of an East Germany with a moral darkness at its core, the Stasi offices, prisons and state bureaus a grim procession of late modernist ennui. The deliberate contrast of successful playwright Georg Dreyman’s comfortable, bourgeois fin de siècle apartment with stripped-bare surroundings of Stasi operative Gerd Wiesler seemed clear, yet there is also an ideological, minimal purity about Wiesler’s world (albeit one that collapses) while Dreyman’s is compromised, his comfort a symptom of his success with his sub-Brechtian socialist realist rubbish. Both men are complicit.
Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War (2018) also brilliantly contrasts the provincial world of folk dances and bleakly lit social spaces with the chic grandness of Paris, a place of parties and seductions but decadent and empty at its heart. And there, in a nutshell, is the issue.
We know about the Stasi and the KGB, about the informers on every landing, the surveillance, the intrusion, the coercion; yet in these films and series we are led to question the superiority of our shinier, higher-definition world. These dramas are given urgency by the intrusion of the state into every crevice of everyday life, the ubiquity of surveillance. The impeccably reconstructed (or found) interiors represent a whole raft of uncomfortable notions about repression and underlying threat. Yet in their simplicity, in the apparent plainness, drabness and their unassuming “people’s” modernism (the communists, for all their faults, really did deal with housing), there is the subtly underlying suggestion that these were, in fact, clearer times, as black and white as Pavlikowski’s exquisite cinematography of snowy landscapes and dark interiors.
We might come to the conclusion that underlying this uncertainty is that today’s surveillance is becoming similarly sinister. Google and Facebook are, in their own ways, every bit as insidious and all-penetrating as the Stasi but with the added uneasiness that we don’t know what they are doing with our data. In this context, the architecture and design of state socialism is presented as an almost beneficent, innocent, uncommercial backdrop.
These movies and mini-series have introduced the muddy palette of socialist design to global audiences
This trend for cinematic Ostalgie was kicked off by Wolfgang Becker’s slightly clunky Good Bye, Lenin! (2003), in which teenagers conspire to maintain the illusion that the bloc is still intact to their ideologically committed mother as she wakes from a coma in 1990. It’s a smart conceit as its protagonists become production designers and accessory scouts themselves, sourcing already disappeared communist-era packaging and stuffing new gherkins into old jars scavenged from bins. Within months an entire society has been transformed.
Ostalgie has also become a curious cliché. The success of these dramas has coincided with the fetishisation of mid-century and brutalist architecture in the west. In Chernobyl we see nuclear physicists striding into what might once have been derided as concrete bunkers but are now the architectural stars of Instagram. There are dozens of social media sites dealing with the ruins of socialism and the dramatic architecture of monuments and public buildings.
Publishers too have picked up on the sheer inventiveness, ambition and the almost alien nature of the civic architecture (notably, London’s brilliant FUEL, whose latest books celebrate Soviet metro stations and sanatoriums). From Soviet bus stops to Yugoslav memorials, Slovak ski hotels to Georgian traffic control buildings, we are rediscovering a seemingly golden age in which everything today’s starchitects do was presaged (and often bettered) by almost anonymous state architecture offices.
We can now, perhaps, see these for what they were: the final flowering of modernism as a cultural gesamtkunstwerk, places — and often palaces — for the people.
For these epic landscapes of socialism, production designers are spoilt for choice, but you have to wonder how it’s going for location scouts looking for authentic domestic interiors. Most of eastern Europe seems to have been swept clean by Ikea. The accepted opinion is that under socialism there was a lack of choice, everyone had similar furniture, similar wallpaper, similar enamelled saucepans and even similar trinkets on the shelves of their dressers. Yet perhaps we now see, with the influx of polite Scandi-modernism, that things were not so bad after all. The antique shops and markets of eastern Europe are filled with “vintage” mid-century designs of real quality now providing themed socialist interiors for hip bars, hotel lobbies and cool apartments. It all now looks pretty chic, in a muted, slightly perverse way.
In the west, we’ve begun refer to the period as “cold war modern”, a label that fits neatly with its depiction as the setting for cold war drama. In the east, of course, it means something else. But that “something else” is not one thing. It might be a cold shiver of recognition or it might be a nostalgia-tinged memory of granny’s apartment. It might be the sweaty, uncomfortable stuffiness of a government office or it might be a warm memory of a boozy wedding in a village hall or culture house. And there is no reason those seemingly contradictory remembrances of things past cannot coexist. These movies and mini-series have introduced the muddy palette of socialist design to global audiences, and perhaps in their portrayal of space designed by and for a very different kind of society they have also introduced an idea that architecture can have political and cultural meaning and can carry nuanced narratives.
We know we are supposed to be observing and absorbing the appearance of a realised dystopia and yet they also suggest that there was a depth and meaning to this modernism which is lacking in our architecture today. That, despite the inadequacies of the society that created it, architecture might be capable of building a society rather than merely accumulating capital.
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