This is an extract of a longer preface that I have written for Michaela Janečková and Irena Lehkoživová’s new book, Enlightenment, Culture, Leisure: Houses of Culture in Czechoslovakia, published in early 2024 (see here). The book contains a set of brilliant essays by Jiří Andrs, Jan Galeta, Hubert Guzik, Katarína Haberlandová, Michaela Janečková, Laura Krišteková, Josef Ledvina, Irena Lehkoživová, Henrieta Moravčíková, Peter Szalay, Karel Šima, Jitka Šosová, Lukáš Veverka and Jan Zikmund exploring the long history of the idea of the house of culture as a site of public enlightenment. The book is also beautifully designed by Adéla Svobodová and Tereza Hejmová with contemporary photographs by Oskar Helcel and Martin Netočný. It is surprising – to me – how little has been written about the phenomenon before. My short preface attempts to set an international frame. This is the section on socmodernity …
…. Socialist realism passed away more quickly in some settings of Eastern Europe than others, but the house of culture remained a mainstay of architectural production and one of the defining features of the socialist cityscape right through to the end of the system in 1989–1991. In the era of socmodernity, inaugurated by First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Nikita Khrushchev’s 1954 speech to the All-Union Conference of Builders, Architects, and Construction Workers in Moscow calling for the industrialisation of building construction, two categories of houses of culture prevailed. One took a “typified” form and was specified by the authorities as a component of the new housing estates that were constructed extensively in the late 1950s and 1960s using panels and other elements prefabricated off-site. Boxy, highly functional buildings, combining different “modular” elements (a classroom, a café, a lecture theatre, a cinema and so on), these “off-the-shelf” centres of culture were designed to be constructed cheaply and with little need for local adaptation. Their only notes of distinction might be a semi-abstract painted mural or mosaic featuring familiar symbols of socialist progress or the region. The “typical” house of culture formed part of the standardised landscape which was later attacked for its lifelessness by critics of modernist urbanism. (Of the house of culture “stuck in the middle of almost every housing estate […] sometimes with a pub attached”, Michal Sedloň wrote in a Czech samizdat at the end of the 1980s, “there are few people who can stand its dehumanised environment”[1]).
The other face of socmodernity – well represented in this book – was marked by power, and was the result of considerable investment. A number of cities across the Bloc acquired highly prestigious cultural centres in the Cold War competition to demonstrate the vitality of socialist life as well as advances in socialist building industry. Architects were commissioned to design exceptional brutalist complexes. With its elaborate and massive concrete formwork, idiosyncratic bunker-like form as well as costly bespoke interiors, the house of culture in Trnava in Slovakia (1971–1988) designed by Jozef Danák, for instance, marked high ambitions on the part of the architect and the state. In East Germany, the Palace of the Republic (Palast der Republik) in the centre of Berlin, a massive cultural complex, was both home to the parliament (Volkskammer), art galleries, a theatre, a cinema, and also (and perhaps surprisingly) a bowling alley, a skating rink and many other popular attractions.[2] Constructed in the mid-1970s, the massive modernist box combining strips of white marble and bronze-tinted windows was often compared to commercial architecture in the West, not least shopping malls. Here, in a move to demonstrate that the East could match the pleasures of Western consumerism, culture was presented as entertainment.
The house of culture was not a Soviet invention, despite the central role that it was given in socialist society. As a number of the authors in this book stress, the phenomenon has deep footings in the 19th century. “Peoples’ palaces” were established across Europe, often by socialist political organisations or by liberal philanthropic endeavours as sites of assembly and education. The House of the People (Maison du Peuple) designed by Victor Horta and commissioned by the Belgian Labour Party (Parti ouvrier belge) that opened in Brussels in 1899 (now demolished) not only provided practical facilities like libraries and meeting rooms: its presence was an avowal on the part of the workers’ movement to influence and even lead national life. What could make this claim on the future more strongly than a packed 2,000-seater auditorium at the heart of an Art Nouveau building with large glass panes and graceful steel columns, and bedecked with red flags? At the same time in Bohemia and Moravia, the formation of “national houses” to advance the cause of national interests in the multi-ethnic Austria-Hungarian Empire provided important stages for the advancement of national culture – often expressed in music and theatre – by rival German, Czech and Polish communities. At the same time, the design and construction of these buildings in a “national” historicising style or in the expressive Art Nouveau manner could articulate the desire for national revival. Whether bourgeois or socialist in character, these 19th-century houses of culture were attempts to carve out space in the city for the formation of communities of mutual interest.
Communities formed in the houses of culture in the Eastern Bloc after the Second World War too, although not necessarily of the politically engaged kind imagined by the ideologists. Unable to draw the public to their dour programmes and competing with television broadcasting’s growing emphasis on entertainment in the 1970s, the managers of the houses of culture increasingly opened up their facilities to hobbyists and other amateur groups in an effort to staunch declining numbers. Amateur photography and film clubs, for instance, thrived, providing their members with the cameras, editing facilities and screening opportunities needed to share their cinematic dreams and fantasies.[3] In the more liberal regimes of the Eastern Bloc, houses of culture could be home to what historians call the “grey zone” activities between official order and anti-communist dissent. The discussions of intellectuals known as the Krzywe Koło Club (Crooked Circle Club) in the house of culture in Warsaw’s Old Town in the late 1950s and early 1960s were so aerated by reform politics and philosophy that the authorities clamped down on their meetings in 1964, for instance.[4] Similarly, the celebrated underground “Squat Theatre” which left Budapest for Paris and then New York began its life as the Kassák Studio in 1969, an amateur theatre ensemble based at the Kassák Cultural House in Budapest’s Zugló district.[5] How to bring in the young was a persistent question, reflecting the party-state’s desire to harness youthful energy and regulate behaviour. In the 1970s and 1980s, authorities across the bloc struggled to contain the growing appeal of pop and rock music, requiring groups musicians to apply for licenses to perform on stage in the houses of culture. Long hair, English songs and “wild” performances were, according to one Czech performer, guaranteed to be met with disapproval.[6] In 1981, the KGB in Leningrad initiated a “Rock Club” in the city’s Inter-Union House of Amateur Creativity to manage and, to some extent, monitor the burgeoning rock scene.[7] The popularity of rock music brought other benefits too, not least income to houses of culture, even if the genre remained suspicious in the minds of the gerontocrats in charge of cultural policy. As a general pattern over the decades, it seems that culture increasingly came to mean activities shaped by the users of the houses of culture rather than political enlightenment, a tendency which was accelerated by the policies of perestroika and glasnost announced by President Mikhail Gorbachev in the Kremlin in 1986. As one Lithuanian commentator observed in 1987: “The earth would not turn upside down if every house of culture could freely plan their work and not have to implement norms imposed ‘from above’.”[8]
Houses of culture could be both instruments of repressive regimes and, at the same time, homes of authentic community. This paradox is a simple historical fact, no more or less contradictory than many other aspects of life in Eastern Europe under communist rule. And it has been the ground of controversy attached to both the destruction and the preservation of the most prominent houses of culture in the years since. Wrecking crews were sent into the Palace of the Republic in Berlin after thirteen years of debates and protests following the 1990 decision to demolish it on the grounds of the risk to health presented by the asbestos used in its construction. In its place, a facsimile of the baroque palace which had once stood on the site was erected to function as the Humboldt Forum. Protesters objected to the assimilation of their memories and experiences into a discourse which saw East German life only in terms of Stasi repression and the failure of socialism. As one put it in 2005: “I have very positive memories of it. I used to go to the restaurants there. If it were torn down, something from me would be missing, something that connects me personally to Berlin.”[9]
Warsaw’s Palace of Culture and Science (Pałac Kultury i Nauki) has enjoyed a different fate. A massive stepped skyscraper containing offices, theatres, museums, a swimming pool and a cavernous conference hall, it had been “gifted” to the city by the Soviet Union in 1955. Designed by one of Soviet architecture’s stars, Lev Rudnev, it was regularly attacked by critics calling for its removal in the years after the collapse of communist rule. Its demolition was even the subject of cinematic fantasies (the climax of Sylwester Chęcinski’s comic movie Rozmowy kontrolowane / Controlled Conversations, 1991). The arguments for destruction turned on the alien appearance of this Soviet “monster” in the cityscape (as well as the cost of its upkeep). By contrast, its defenders pointed to the utility and centrality of the towering complex in the lives of ordinary Varsovians. It is the place where they learned to swim or where they heard the Rolling Stones play in 1967.[10] In other words, it is the site of authentic experience. In this contest of sharply-divided opinions, images were lined up against events: the alien silhouette on the skyline was contrasted with the memories of life inside; and the experience of community was pitted against that of communist rule. While the practical challenges of demolition and the ongoing use of the Palace of Culture and Science made its removal impractical, the fact that the building was put on the list of protected monuments in 2007 suggest that memories can have tangible effects.
The destruction of Berlin’s Palace of the Republic was a slow process that concluded with the opening of the Humboldt Forum (aka the Berliner Schloss). Yet the building did not end there. Even after its destruction, the Palace of the Republic continues to haunt the imagination of Berliners. In 2021, a gently ironic campaign was mounted by the Friends of the Palace of the Republic Association (Förderverein Palast der Republik e.V.) calling for its reconstruction in terms that had been used to advance the revival of the Baroque palace on its site almost twenty years earlier, literally. The Association published this statement, with the original references to the Berliner Schloss struck through:
The reconstruction of the
Berlin PalacePalace of the Republic
The PalaceThe Palace will restore the familiar image of Berlin, make the historic centre of Berlinmorecomplex but also more liveable, and heal the cityscape. Its reconstruction makes Berlin once again the beloved Spree-Athenscultural metropolis.This creates a forward-looking counterpoint to the masses of
modernhistoricized new buildings being built in the centre of the city.[11]
The Association has a five-point “wayback” plan to see the resurrection of the building by 2050. While the prospects of that happening are no more than zero, the point of the young artists and architects behind the proposal is to invite a more complex remembering of the history of this site and the “ambiguous” role played by this workers’ palace in East Germany.
Eastern Europe has witnessed many such combustible controversies in the years since the fall of the wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. When the communist past still carries strongly negative associations, high profile landmarks from the era have often attracted deeply negative and positive emotions.[12] What the essays in this book – as well as Helcel and Netočný’s photographs – offer is a much more long-term and dispassionate understanding of the house of culture as a phenomenon with deep historical footings. In that history, we can discover changing ideas about the formation and control of public space; shifting notions of citizenship and culture; ordinary pleasures taken in communality as well as ideological imperatives; and visions of the new alongside adaptive reuse of the old. And, in so doing, we can perhaps see buildings with futures as well as pasts.
[1] Michal Sedloň, “Betonová kultura”, Lidové noviny 1, no. 6 (1988), p. 19.
[2] Jörg-Uwe Neumann and Elke Neumann, eds., Palast der Republik: Utopie, Inspiration, Politikum (Halle: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 2019).
[3] See Enthusiasts Archive, available at https://entuzjasci.artmuseum.pl/en (accessed 30 November 2023). See also David Crowley, “Socialist Recreation? Amateur Film and Photography in the People’s Republic of Poland and East Germany”, in Balázs Apor, Péter Apor and E. A. Rees, eds., The Sovietization of Eastern Europe: New Perspectives on the Postwar Period (Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 2008), pp. 93–114.
[4] Witold Jedlicki, Klub Krzywego Koła (Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1963).
[5] See Emese Erden-Vörös, “A cserepesház – zuglói művelődési ház és tagintézményeinek története”, available at http://www.bmknet.hu/kozmuv-cdk/6/html/pages/20_50.html (accessed 30 November 2023).
[6] Interview with Czech guitarist and saxophonist Mikolaš Chadima by Anna Vaniček in “Passion Play: Underground Rock Music in Czechoslovakia” (master’s thesis, York University, Ontario, 1997), p. 47. See also David Crowley and Daniel Muzyczuk, Notes from the Underground: Art and Alternative Music in Eastern Europe, 1968–1994 (Łódź: Muzeum Sztuki Łódź; London: Walter Koenig, 2016).
[7] See Anna Zaytseva, “La légitimation du rock en URSS dans les années 1970–1980: Acteurs, logiques, institutions”, Cahiers du monde russe 49, no. 4 (2008), pp. 651–680.
[8] Cited in Eglė Rindzevičiūtė, Constructing Soviet Cultural Policy Cybernetics and Governance in Lithuania after World War II (Linköping: Linköping University, 2008), p. 237.
[9] Thomas Opreit, quoted in Joellen Perry, “Berliners Split on Future of East German Palace”, NPR, 11 December 2005, available at https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5048280 (accessed 30 November 2023).
[10] Michal Murawski, The Palace Complex: A Stalinist Skyscraper, Capitalist Warsaw, and a City Transfixed (Bloomington, IA: Indiana University Press, 2019). For a rather more nostalgic account of the building, see Agata Passant, Pałac wiecznie żywy (Warszawa: Spis Treści, 2004).
[11] See https://palast.jetzt (accessed 30 November 2023).
[12] For a discussion of this phenomenon see my “Art, Emotion and Activism in the Post-Socialist Cityscape in Eastern Europe” in Juliane Richter, Tanja Scheffler and Hannah Sieben, eds., Raster Beton: Vom Leben in Großwohnsiedlungen zwischen Kunst und Platte. Leipzig-Grünau im internationalen Vergleich (Weimar: M Books, 2017), pp. 103–106.
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