The New Socialist Man in the Plattenbau: The East German Housing Program and the Development of the Socialist Way of Life

Abstract

This article argues that the importance of housing and the urban environment in East Germany in the second half of its existence grew in tandem with a new vision of socialist society and the means that the state should employ to create it. The East German Housing Program, inaugurated in 1971, made space the primary category in which individual and social transformation was envisioned, replacing the pedagogical processes that had originally stood at its heart. In doing so, architects and urban planners drew on three strands of urban planning that have often been seen in conflict in other contexts: the Soviet concept of the Mikroraion or socialist neighborhood, the modernist housing ensemble of Le Corbusier, and the new urbanism of Jane Jacobs.

Do Autocrats Respond to Citizen Demands? Petitions and Housing Construction in the GDR

“…However, planning and construction began already in late 1971(Steiner 2007), which is why we use 1971. This coding decision is consistent with relevant literature on the program (see e.g Tesch 2001;Sammartino 2018).…”

Politics of the Blessed Lady: Catholic Art in the Contemporary Hungarian Culture Industry

“…Yet, anthropologists who study religion in Eastern Europe's formerly socialist societies have begun to question the universality of this focus on subjectivity in research on religious materiality. Luehrmann (2011), Wanner (2007, and Rogers (2011), for instance, have argued that this theoretical orientation reflects the normative assumptions of a parochial tradition of Western European and North American political liberalism-especially the assumption that society should be a collection of autonomous individuals and politics should be the negotiation of personal interests. Following these critics' calls to look at dimensions of religious materiality beyond its role in subjective formation, in this article, I highlight how the ideological legacies of state socialism inform a national politics of Catholic devotional art.…”