Synthetic Socialism: Plastics and Dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic

Synthetic Socialism

Synthetic Socialism

Plastics and Dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic

Eli Rubin

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

© 2008 The University of North Carolina Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rubin, Eli.

Synthetic socialism : plastics and dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic / by Eli Rubin. — 1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8078-3238-7 (cloth: alk. paper)

1. Consumption (Economics)—Germany (East) 2. Consumer behavior—Germany (East) 3. Plastics industry and trade—Germany (East). 4. Socialism and society. I. Title.

HC290.795.C6R83 2009

338.4′766840943109045—dc22

2008027371

CLOTH 12 11 10 09 08 5 4 3 2 1

TO KATIE, BETSY, AND MY PARENTS

Contents

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations and Acronyms

Introduction

1 1958, the Year of Consumption and Chemicals

2 Plastics and the Victory of Functionalist Design, 1945–1962

3 Plastics and the Socialist Apartment of the Future

4 Plastic Consumer Goods in the Everyday World of East Germany, 1958–1969

5 Centralization: Plastics, Design, and Total Control, 1962–1972

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Plastic chicken soft-boiled egg holder 2

Meladur (melamine) imitation wood plate 56

Intecta furniture from Hellerau 60

Sprelacart-surfaced wardrobe 96

Plastic table with modern and cultured accoutrements 97

Ratioküche on display for the public 101

Images of Erziehung 102

Explanatory cartoon from the comic book Mosaik 132

Ads for Leunawerke plastics 138

Ads for linens and curtains made from synthetic fibers 140

Cover of Kultur im Heim, 1961 142

Child’s room model named Dorle 143

Cover of Guter Rat, January 1966 144

Household plastics in pastel tones 145

Beach scene with all-plastic products 146

Tables

1.1 Original estimates for increases in production for the Chemistry Program 28

1.2 Projected production figures for three major plastics under the Chemistry Program 30

2.1 Results of DBA survey on sleeping furniture preferences 61

5.1 Numbers of household kitchen items to be replaced with plastics 182

5.2 PLS plan for total replacement of steel with plastic in four leading metallurgical industries 183

5.3 PLS plan for leading plastic types 184

5.4 Imports of plastic-processing machinery, 1964–70 187

5.5 Plan for increasing raw plastics, 1964–70 188

5.6 Planned increases in specific items from polystyrene 188

5.7 Planned increases for consumer items from polyethylene, 1965–70 189

5.8 Planned increases for product groups from Meladur (melamine), 1965–70 190

5.9 Planned increases for plastic starting products for consumer goods, 1967–70 191

5.10 Planned overall use of plastics in the third Five Year Plan, 1970–75 193

Acknowledgments

Many thanks, in no particular order, to Benita Blessing for her moral support; Silvia Rückert for providing the original work that inspired this book; Andreas Ludwig of the Dokumentationszentrum Alltagskultur der DDR in Eisenhüttenstadt for all his patience and help; Marion (Buddy) Gray, Judy Stone, Catherine Julien, Nora Faires, Robert Berkhofer, Edwin Martini, Lynne Heasley, Sarah Hill, and all of my wonderful colleagues at Western Michigan University; Konrad Jarausch for his crucial and ongoing support; Chuck Grench, Katy O’Brien, Tema Larter, Heidi Perov, David Perry, and everyone at UNC Press for their guidance and professionalism; Richard Wetzell, David Lazar, and Christoph Mauch of the German Historical Institute, and especially the late Gerald Feldman and the Friends of the German Historical Institute and Dr. Fritz Stern; Ed Ross Dickinson, Doris Bergen, and Kies Gispin of the Fritz Stern Dissertation Award Prize Committee of the GHI; Ray Stokes and Rainer Karlsch; the staff at the Bundesarchiv in Lichterfeld and Hoppegarten; Achim Kunze, Elke Beilfuß, and Siegfried Gronert at the Michel archive at the Bauhaus Universität Weimar; all those who provided me with tips, advice, and encouragement along the way, including Ina Merkel, Ralph Jessen, Thomas Lindenberger, Klaus Große Kracht, Marc Silberman, Eric Schatzberg, Laird Boswell, Lewis Siegelbaum and Leslie Page-Moch, Greg Engels, Paul Betts, Katherine Pence, Jonathan Zatlin, Albrecht Wiesner, Justinian Jampol, Elizabeth Otto, Pieter Judson, André Steiner, David Sorkin, Jennifer Jenkins, and everyone I have left out; and above all, Karin Goihl of the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies and my dissertation advisor, Rudy Koshar, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for their faith in me.

Abbreviations and Acronyms

ABS acrylnitrite-butadiene-styrene Agfa Aktiengesellschaft für Anilinfabrikation AiF Office for Industrial Design (Amt für industrielle Formgestaltung) BASF Badische Anilin- und Sodafabrik CIAM International Congress of Modernist Architects COMECON Council for Mutual Economic Assistance DAMW German Office for Measurements and Goods Testing (Deutsches Amt für Messewesen und Warenprüfung) DBA German Architectural Academy (Deutsche Bauakademie) DIA Deutsche Innen- und Außenhandelsgesellschaft [East German export and import organ] FRG Federal Republic of Germany GDR German Democratic Republic HO Handelsorganisation, or trade organization HPPE high-pressure polyethylene KPD German Communist Party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands) MMW Ministry for Material Economy (Ministerium für Materialwirtschaft) NÖS New Economic System (Neue Ökonomische System) NÖSPL Planning and Leadership of the People’s Economy (Neue Ökonomische System der Planung und Leitung) NSDAP National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistiche Deutsche Arbeiterpartei) PLS Plastics Steering Office (Plastlenkstelle) SCK State Chemistry Office (Staatliches Chemiekontor) SED Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands) Stasi Ministry of State Security VbKD Federation of Visual Artists of the GDR (Verband bildender Künstler der DDR) VEBs individual factories VVBs industrial organizations (Vereinigung Volkseigenebetriebe, or Union of People’s Own Factories) ZWK–HW Central Goods Office–Household Goods (Zentrales Warenkontor für Haushaltswaren)

Synthetic Socialism

Introduction

Plastic eggcups in the shape of chickens were once ubiquitous in East German households. They have become popular once again, in museum shops, on websites, at flea markets, and in shops devoted to the material culture of the bygone German Democratic Republic (GDR). They are part of an odd phenomenon known as Ostalgie, a resurgence of interest in the culture of the GDR in recent years in Germany and elsewhere. The prominence of plastic items from East Germany within this phenomenon—from eggcup chickens to t-shirts bearing the slogan of a large East German chemical factory, Plastic and Elastic from Schkopau—is an indication that plastic was an important part of East German culture and history. Still, there is something uncanny about the strange persistence of something we normally consider so disposable, so mundane. Like an empty plastic milk jug that washes ashore, East German plastic is a remarkable example of the refusal of East Germany to biodegrade, and of its haunting of post-unification Germany, especially in the guise of its material culture.

This book is about East German plastic, and I examine East German plastic from a number of angles: in terms of the high-level political and economic decision makers in control of the Communist planned economy who oversaw the mass production of plastic in the GDR; in terms of the industrial designer who gave aesthetic form and aesthetic meaning to plastic objects in the GDR, and thus the homes, offices, and other scenes of everyday life where East German plastic became ubiquitous; in terms of the advertising, advice, science fiction, and propaganda literature and media that accompanied the arrival of plastic in the lives of East Germans; and in terms of the experiences and opinions of ordinary East Germans themselves, in both their praise and their condemnation.

Plastic chicken soft-boiled egg holder, manufactured from polystyrene by the VEB Plaste Wolkenstein. (Photo: Kathleen Rubin; courtesy of the Dokumentationszentrum Alltagskultur der DDR-Eisenhüttenstadt)

In a sense, though, this book is about more than just plastic; it is about the nature of power in East Germany, in Soviet-style socialism, and in totalitarian systems in general. It is also about the role of the mundane, the quotidian, the everyday, and especially the material in understanding the nature of power in societies like the GDR of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Looking at plastic offers one of many different views into the ways in which power can be unseen as well as obvious, and how that which seems innocent or even comical can be more insidious than that which seems initially most threatening.

Specifically, plastic is the focus of this book on East Germany because I argue that through the production of materials and goods like plastic, the East German state and party found a central point of agreement between the needs of the political economy, the aesthetic ideology of modernist industrial designers, and the desires of the population for a modern yet efficient life. The economic, political, cultural, and aesthetic history of plastic in East Germany illustrates an intersection of the government with the population and with economic and aesthetic influences, and thus helps us to see the role of the powerful in everyday life.

Using plastic as a means of showing the intersections of these different histories is a specific response to the development of the historiography of the GDR up to this point, a historiography that has made several impressive leaps but still leaves a number of glaring omissions. Originally, in the first few years after the end of the GDR and the opening of the archives, East German history seemed to many scholars and aspiring scholars of modern Germany to be a rare opportunity: with most of the historical work in the GDR discredited because of political censorship, many Western or relatively unknown and thus untainted east German historians rushed to fill in the tabula rasa of East German history. Many of the earliest histories of the GDR were simply extensions of other debates and agendas into this new real estate. Often, these early histories by Western historians advanced the Cold War view that East Germany was an inauthentic state, a puppet state, held in place only by the support of the USSR and by the terror imposed upon its unwitting citizens by the Ministry of State Security, the Stasi. Prominent historians such as Dan Diner, who described the GDR as a web of lies and a sham,¹ or Ernst Nolte, who called it a Soviet protectorate,² contributed to an air of neoconservative triumphalism during the 1990s.³ Most of the commentary and research in this vein focused primarily on the Stasi, the ruling Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, or SED), or other aspects of political, top-down history. The preeminent social historian Jürgen Kocka, whose interventions have been too thoughtful and considerate of divergent viewpoints to categorize in any one particular vein, used Alf Lüdtke’s term durchherrschte Gesellschaft (thoroughly dominated society)⁴ in a more nuanced and sophisticated attempt to describe East Germany as a top-down society.

As Catherine Epstein,⁵ among others, has noted, a backlash developed against this literature that attempted to depict life in East Germany from the bottom up as more or less normal and to depict East Germans as having a good deal of autonomy from the state. Edited volumes such as Ina Merkel’s Wunderwirtschaft,⁶ Andreas Ludwig’s Tempolinsen und P2⁷ and Fortschritt, Norm und Eigensinn,⁸ Ralph Jessen and Richard Bessel’s Die Grenzen der Diktatur,⁹ or Felix Mühlberg and Merkel’s collection of complaint letters known as Eingaben¹⁰ all provided a counterweight to the Orwellian narratives of the early to mid-1990s by showing a quotidian world behind the iron curtain that described a normal life centered around family and day-to-day concerns, not the supposedly all-powerful ideological state. In this view, the state and its secret police was just another obstacle to negotiate, like traffic, illness, or inclement weather. This wave of literature coincided with the rising phenomenon of Ostalgie in popular culture¹¹ and focused on many of the less political and more material or everyday themes that developed a cult following in the 1990s, such as Trabants (famous East German cars with fiberglass-plastic bodies and two-stroke engines, described later), plastic chickens, certain types of food, and many of the pieces of material culture featured in the popular 2003 film Goodbye Lenin!

Many of the historians inclined to see East Germany as a totalitarian state were (and still are) aghast at the rose-tinted view of East Germany and especially the extent to which its whimsical side has become fetishized. Such historians view Ostalgie as an unfortunate posthumous continuation of the regime’s use of carrots to cover up its use of sticks kept alive by former easterners who cannot adjust to the new Germany or who remain apologists for the regime. Moreover, they often ascribe blame for Ostalgie also to naive Westerners and unreconstructed Western leftists who cannot accept the implications that the fall of the Wall holds for their worldview. Andreas Ludwig, for example, founder and director of the Documentation Center for the Everyday Life History of the GDR in Eisenhüttenstadt (which features a display of plastic items that formed the inspiration for this project), was confronted angrily by one such conservative historian, Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk,¹² during a series of hearings held by the federal government to openly deal with the meaning of the GDR. Seeing plenty of cameras, toys, televisions, and furniture, Kowalczuk demanded to know where the important—as he saw them—items were, for example, the Red Army toy soldiers and tanks and other proof of the essentially oppressive and inauthentic nature of the GDR.¹³ The implication here and in similar instances was clear. Museums, shows, products, and scholarly works focusing on so-called everyday life are just escapist fantasies that allow the Left to deny the inhumane, illiberal, and even deadly crimes of the four decades of Soviet control over a part of Germany. The notion that the history of everyday life in East Germany is some noble, objective, anthropological reconstruction of a lost civilization and nothing more is, in the totalitarian school’s view, an illusion.

Indeed, there is some truth to the view that the fascination with plastic chickens is as much about politics—left-wing politics—as it is about posterity. Some of the less academically rigorous attempts to study East Germany from the bottom up and many of the more gaudy recurrences of East German popular culture are motivated more by politics or just uncritical and amateurish historical nostalgia than a real interest in the past.¹⁴ However, there are three groups of historians (sometimes overlapping) who have made tremendous progress in advancing posterity over progress—without losing sight of the importance of politics—and it is within these groups that this book is situated. The Alltagshistoriker (historians of everyday life), the Potsdam Group, and the Fulbrookians have all moved beyond the totalitarian model by using more sophisticated techniques of analysis to investigate the extent and nature of state power in the society of the GDR.¹⁵

The Alltagshistoriker, including Alf Lüdtke, Dorothee Wierling, Alexander von Plato, and Lutz Niethammer, who had imported versions of micro-history and cultural anthropology and ethnology into histories of modern Germany in the 1980s, clustered around the journal Anthropologische Geschichte. They produced highly detailed works of East German everyday life, such as Wierling’s 2002 Geboren im Jahr Eins,¹⁶ which restored autonomy and dignity to East Germans by making them the subjects, rather than the objects, of their own history.

Another group, focused around the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung in Potsdam under the leadership of Konrad Jarausch, Martin Sabrow, and Thomas Lindenberger, attempted to grapple specifically with more nuanced and sophisticated notions of power under socialism. In particular, studies on consumption by Patrice Poutrus, the media by Simone Barck and Siegfried Lokatis, and the fate of intellectuals by Sabrow¹⁷ highlighted the complex nature of what Lindenberger conceived of as Herrschaft¹⁸—a kind of power that, in a Gramscian or Foucauldian sense, is what we might call soft power in that it works through the modes of everyday life in unseen ways, less direct and therefore more difficult to resist than a secret police agent or a Red Army tank.¹⁹ Perhaps the most important conceptual achievement in this regard was Jarausch’s idea of the welfare dictatorship, because it refocused the object of the roots of state power on the issue of meeting the material needs and wants of the population, on consent rather than coercion—a crucial step in being able to focus on the quotidian without losing sight of the role of ideology in East German history.²⁰ Playing no small role in bridging the work in Potsdam and work being done in North America, Jarausch’s writings, along with the work of Merkel and others, inspired a spate of studies by North Americans such as Jeffrey Kopstein, Katherine Pence, Judd Stitziel, Jonathan Zatlin, and Mark Landsman²¹ (among others) that focused on the role of the GDR’s attempts to create a kind of socialist consumer society²² capable of winning East Germans’ support for the ideological goals of communism. Other members of the Potsdam institute, such as André Steiner, have attempted to emphasize the importance of economic choices—rather than the political immorality or predetermined failure of the GDR—by the East German economic planners.²³

For English-reading audiences, however, the most prominent literature on the issue of power and society in the GDR is the work of historians Mary Fulbrook of University College London (UCL) and her current and former students.²⁴ The Fulbrookians are comprised mainly of British or U.K.-based historians Corey Ross, Mark Allinson, Jeannette Madarász, Alan McDougall, and Esther von Richtofen,²⁵ all former students of Fulbrook. The Fulbrookians have forcefully written against the totalitarian view, maintaining that East Germans had a very clear level of autonomy apart from the regime, that in fact the regime was more incompetent than inhumane, and that specific groups within society (workers, women, writers, churchgoers, etc.) were able to bend and manipulate the system to an extent that they created a normal society for themselves behind the facade of Soviet socialism.

As the Fulbrookians argue, the Stasi may have had up to 10 percent of the population working as informants, and still the GDR crumbled in a month; so what does that say about the ultimate weakness of state coercion and the power and autonomy of society? Indeed, in the works of Ross and Allinson, especially, the GDR government and party is portrayed in a series of events—the collectivization, 1953, 1961, etc.—as incompetent, impotent, and barely in charge, more Keystone Kops than Orwellian thought police. The GDR held together—power, or Herrschaft, adhered within the system—until 1989 not because the USSR was an ever-present threat to invade or because Big Brother was watching, but simply because various social groups within East Germany adjusted the system to their needs, normalizing socialism and choosing to live within it, until it no longer fit their needs. In fact, the term normalization has become one of the central concepts for the Fulbrookian school in the last couple of years.

The problem with the Fulbrookians has a great deal to do, however, with methodology. By using internal party memos and other government sources, they replicate precisely the kind of top-down analyses they claim to reject. Most of their accounts come from government and party sources. There is little real investigation of ordinary East Germans. Also, although they argue that proponents of the totalitarian school cannot explain the change of 1989, the Fulbrookians have the opposite problem: they err on the side of downplaying the state and overplaying society to the point where it seems amazing that 1989 did not happen much, much sooner. For example, in Ross’s account of the collectivization campaigns in his monograph Constructing Socialism at the Grass Roots, there are so many instances of incompetence on behalf of the regime and outright noncompliance on behalf of the citizenry that it seems amazing that the fools atop the SED could tie their own shoes, let alone run what became the most stable and most prosperous of all the Soviet Bloc countries. Ross—echoing other UCL alumni—paints a picture of a society that bucked the regime and had relatively little trouble doing so due to the ineptness of the Communist Party bureaucrats.

Indeed, if one looks only at the obvious records of power in the GDR, such as party memos, one does, in fact, see a regime beset by resistance and recalcitrance from virtually all sectors of society to its overt ideological campaigns, such as the collectivization campaign, the New Course of 1952–53, and the New Economic Policy of the early to mid-1960s. In his major historiographical overview of the literature on East Germany, The East German Dictatorship, Corey Ross fallaciously conflates East Germany with the state and party of East Germany. Ross is incorrect when he claims that, unlike Hungary or Germany, the GDR was a creation of international diplomacy, a web of organizations and institutions that are now gone, and that when they collapsed, much of what constituted ‘East German society’ disappeared with them.²⁶ A major impetus for this study of plastic in everyday life under socialism is to argue directly against this viewpoint: there was a distinctly East German society; it was not just the state or the party, but it was constituted and shaped by the economic processes put in motion by the state. As such, East German society was not as autonomous and the limits of the dictatorship were not so clear as the Fulbrookians would have us believe. Plastic was just one of several aspects of material culture created by the ideology in control of the East German economy, and though ordinary East Germans certainly exercised some autonomy over the meaning of plastic goods in their lives, they were nonetheless caught up in a series of changes and experiences that was a result of power of the state. In other words, to focus on histories of facets of everyday life like plastic is also to focus on the state—there is no distinction between the two.

The Fulbrookians’ insistence on the concept of normality and normalization is problematic in this regard, and not only because of the checkered history of that term in regard to the debates from the 1980s over the history of the Third Reich. To use normality as a central organizing concept implies there is a universal standard, or norm, that East Germans were able to match or live up to. In his monograph Politics and Popular Opinion in East Germany, Mark Allinson seems to suggest that, essentially, normal is defined by the standard of living in postwar, Labor-era Britain.²⁷ The Fulbrookian definition of normal seems to refer to a society in which most people are concerned with mundane concerns like family, work, and material welfare. Indeed, most of the complaint letters and grumbling and foot-dragging encountered by the state (the limits of the dictatorship), which the Fulbrookians use heavily, had to do with seemingly petty concerns about material, not ideological, problems. East Germans, it seems, could have cared less about Marx; they wanted to know when the store was going to have more Spreewaldgürken (beloved East German pickles).

But so what? This does not mean they were normal, nor does it mean that the state failed to construct some form of ideological Herrschaft. Without delving into the everyday histories of the components of this supposedly normal life—the experiences of shopping, interior decorating, education, fashion, sex, cooking, etc.—the Fulbrookians are not in a position to make a judgment about the normality and autonomy of ordinary East Germans. That East Germans wanted a modern, nice life tells us nothing; how they went about getting that modern life and how this process shaped their lives are what we need to know in order to judge the extent and reach of the state’s Herrschaft.

In this book I argue, in contradistinction to the Fulbrookians, that, in fact, East German society was not normal in any conceivable way but, rather, was a wholly unique confluence of bottom-up influences; external influences; economic conditions; preexisting notions about aesthetics, gender, and material values; and the centralizing impulse of the GDR’s command economy. East Germans may have rejected the more overt forms of ideology in their daily lives—for example, by using the official party newspaper, Neues Deutschland, to line their birdcages instead of reading it—but this does not mean that everyday life was an ideology-free zone. Here, the methodology I have chosen plays a major role: East Germans in many cases may have been rather shallow, petty, and materialistic, fretting over mundane things, but all the things over which they fretted were produced by the state and designed by modernist industrial designers. By buying, using, wearing, and living in the material culture of the People’s Economy, or Volkswirtschaft,²⁸ East Germans were caught up in a web of Gramscian hegemony, a kind of Foucauldian microphysics of power, of Herrschaft. Looking at the GDR on the level of everyday life through the kinds of discourses and narratives that centered around its material culture reveals this web, in a way that simply looking at the overt performance of hard power in the government and party files cannot. Plastic played a major role in the creation of this web, as I will explain shortly.

Ross’s claim that East Germany was bound up with its institutions and organizations and is thus gone forever is simply wrong. Clearly, East Germany has come back to haunt modern Germany; it is not gone, and never was. True, as an organized and institutional form of political ideology capable of taking over and running a state, the GDR and the SED are dead forever, but that fact, juxtaposed with the wave of Ostalgie that extends from Eisenhüttenstadt to Culver City, California,²⁹ further underscores the fact that East Germany was more than just its state: it was a unique culture that had its own center of gravity. The fact that the plastic chickens have survived where the SED Central Committee has not ought to suggest that East Germany was as much about the plastic chickens as it was about the SED, and historians of East Germany ought to be as concerned about polyethylene poultry as about the party. It also suggests that the power of a government to shape consent rests as much in the small things of everyday life as in the big events and big narratives of political history. The SED tried very hard to persuade East Germans that their state and their society were desirable and worth having and keeping, and the fact that anything East German now sells like hotcakes indicates that, indeed, on a level we have yet to properly understand, the SED was, in fact, successful in this endeavor.

Ultimately, this book does not side with the totalitarians, for the totalitarian school sees only state power and only in hard forms—the Stasi, the Schiessbefehl, the Wall, and so on. This book also does not side with the Fulbrookian view of an autonomous and normalized society, which also fails to understand the forms of diffuse power that characterize this welfare dictatorship. Instead, this book attempts to use plastic as a vehicle for exploring the ways in which state power influenced everyday life and was also affected by the demands of ordinary East Germans, so that the result became a confluence, a sharing of values, that created a unique culture, something purely East German, a combination of state and society but representing the power of neither over the other. This confluence I liken to the centripetal effect of gravity in physics: objects drawn to each other are not always bound to clash but sometimes orbit each other until a new entity is born, one that spins due to the force of its own gravity. In this way, East Germany was quite the opposite of normal. It was an entity unto itself, sui generis, and that is why essential components of East German everyday life have refused to dissolve into the modern Germany but, rather, keep returning, like a second coming of the Communist specter haunting Europe.³⁰

How does an investigation of plastic—a rather unorthodox subject for a historical monograph—in East Germany help us understand this confluence of forces that lent the GDR’s society its uniqueness? Plastic was one of a number of technologies the regime hoped would transform East Germany into a modern, industrial, and consumer society able to compete with West Germany in terms of living standards and economic achievement. It was part of a greater campaign, the Chemistry Program, unveiled in 1958, that promised to build upon the large chemical and synthetic factories Bitterfeld, Buna, and Leuna the GDR inherited from past German states in a part of Germany known as the Chemical Triangle. The Chemistry Program itself dovetailed with a general push in the Soviet world toward technology such as cybernetics, nuclear energy, and aerospace that characterized the Cold War of the late 1950s and 1960s. It also dovetailed with a sea change in the Soviet world’s attitude toward consumption and domesticity. Led by Nikita Khrushchev, the USSR and its satellites began redirecting their attention to the production of consumer goods and building new housing in order to gain the support of their populations, who could plainly witness the postwar consumer bounty created by economic booms in West Germany, France, Italy, Japan, and elsewhere. This was especially true for the GDR, which, lying so close to West Germany, bore the harsh spotlight of the direct comparison between the ability of the Marshall-Plan-infused capitalist Federal Republic of Germany to give people what they truly wanted and the inability of the planned economy of the GDR to do the same. Not only did East Germany not get any support from Moscow comparable to the Marshall Plan; it was caught in a semi-closed economic system that lacked the ability to provide enough raw materials to form the basis of a modern consumer economy. Wood, metal, natural fibers, and especially petroleum were hard to come by for the GDR, not only because it was a resource-poor nation, but because East German marks were no good on the world market, unlike West German deutschmarks.

So the regime hoped that by using one of its only domestic strengths—its chemical industry—it could parlay plastic technology into a massive ersatz consumer culture. East German leaders and the East German media announced plans after 1958 for the mass production of clothes, furniture, kitchens, cars, and at one point even entire buildings and cities of plastic. Plastic was considered a wonder material, capable of imitating and replacing just about anything. There was a danger, of course, that the citizenry of East Germany would see this as a hollow attempt to produce a cut-rate version in melamine and polystyrene rather than oak and granite of the very real prosperity across the border (and, after 1961, on the other side of the Wall). But the discourse concerning plastic and plastic consumer goods was shaped by a group of industrial designers who, essentially, came to the rescue of the GDR’s government and party by applying certain functionalist, anticapitalist elements of modern, Bauhaus-inspired concepts in their designs for plastic goods. As a result, East Germans’ ideas concerning the plastic in their everyday world were shaped in clear distinction to those of West Germans or Americans or others outside the Soviet world. This is a major argument against any normalization theory: the mainstream of East German society considered plastic, for the most part, a very valuable material, a high technology, and a precious collective resource, to be cherished and not disposed of. This is a value very different, almost inverted, from that assigned to plastic goods under capitalism (including, with a nod to Allinson’s postwar Britain), where anything plastic is considered inferior and a sign of cheapness and disposability. Thus the ideological and aesthetic control of consumption under communism created, in fact, an everyday society that was in many ways quite different from the everyday culture that resulted under capitalism. This difference is one of the reasons for the persisting Wall in the head that Germans euphemistically refer to in discussing the continuing difficulties of former East Germans and West Germans to integrate.

Ultimately, the Chemistry Program was beset by too many failures, as was the entire planned economic system, to survive on its own. However, the processes it set in motion clearly changed the lives of ordinary East Germans. The most important point of analyzing these changes, of which plastics were an important part, is that they were the result of give and take between the state and its society, and that many of the outcomes documented in this book were not originally intended but were, rather, responses to influences from all directions. As this narrative proceeds from the prelude to the events of 1958 through the development of modern design, consumption, the plastics industry, and the discourse and planning of plastics, as well as the everyday experience of plastics in the GDR throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, what will hopefully emerge is that the everyday culture that developed around plastics was not only the result of the government or the party but a hybrid of the wants and needs of ordinary East Germans and the wants and needs of the powers that were in control.

Chapter 1 introduces 1958 as a year of consumption and chemicals, laying out the immediate origins of the consumer turn, as I term it, as well as the Chemistry Program that issued from the heady and euphoric days of 1958. Chapter 2 outlines the rise of functionalist design, from its disgrace and persecution under the conservatism