When Marx suggested in 1848 that under capitalism “all that is solid melts into air,” he almost certainly did not envision the emergence of a Socialist society immersed in middle-brow materiality a hundred years later. However, as Krisztina Fehérváry shows in her Politics in Color and Concrete, this is exactly what happened. Fehérváry argues that the middle-class values in architecture and interior design that dominate Hungarian taste today are rooted not in the 1990s imposition of the neoliberal economic model, but rather the Communist period itself. Hungarian sensibilities about aesthetics and material culture evolved separately from, and eventually in opposition to, the Communist program's attempt to refashion society in its own image. This transition was under way in the earliest period of Communist rule, and its key modern characteristics were apparent well before the system itself imploded in 1989.

Fehérváry argues that aesthetic regimes in Hungary follow a trajectory of five basic groupings: from Socialist Realism in the 1950s, through Socialist Modern and Socialist Generic in the 1960s and 1970s, and into Organicist Modern and Super-Natural Organicism in more recent times (3–6). Focusing on Dunaújváros (formerly Sztálinváros, or “Stalin-town”), the model city built almost from scratch in the 1950s, Politics in Color and Concrete reveals the tectonic shifts in aesthetic regimes during the Communist period and afterward. The aggressively monumental Socialist Realist apartment houses of the 1950s, bent on reshaping peasants into workers, gave way in the 1960s to Socialist Modern style, which “encouraged people to abandon a set of materialities saturated with history and class hierarchies and to embrace a clean, bright, and future-oriented modernism” (78). This utopian scheme failed as Hungarians, shoehorned into diminutive apartments and exposed to the good life promised by Western-style consumerism via the global media and the black market, responded by instead labeling this style “Socialist Generic.” Organicist Modern, “epitomized in natural materials and folk forms” (140), emerged in the 1970s in opposition to this Socialist “brand,” and today's Super-Natural Organicism is firmly entrenched in this supposed return to nature and nation—but available only to the new and exclusionary middle class, which can afford the suburban family houses that define it.

This brief summary does not do justice to the rich and nuanced theoretical and evidential tapestry Fehérváry weaves throughout Politics in Color and Concrete. Aesthetic sensibilities are profoundly difficult to analyze, but herein they are firmly and effectively located in their local, specific, and historic contexts. Fehérváry adroitly deploys Peirce's notion of “qualisigns,” noting that shifts between aesthetic regimes—specifically the one between Socialist Modern and Socialist Generic—are often contingent not so much on the actual objects in question but rather their perception by consumers (6–10, 112). Indeed, perhaps her most useful observation is how abnormal the idea of “normalcy” really is: as Fehérváry notes, Hungarians' standard for what constituted “normalcy” was predicated as much on what they thought life should be like (based largely on their perceptions of life in the West) as on what they experienced in their actual everyday lives (39–43, 238). These theoretical insights are brought to life by a rich body of evidence drawn from Communist-era and contemporary popular media, and interviews with several denizens of Dunaújváros. Movies, TV shows, advertisements, and especially the author's close reading of Lakáskultúra (Home Furnishings), the national home decor magazine started in the 1960s, provide the bulk of her evidence, including such fascinating minutiae as the 1967 article heralding the imminent introduction of room-cleaning robots (90). Fehérváry leavens these popular media sources with extensive in-depth interviews, most impressively in Chapter 7 as she follows three Hungarian families through the torturous process of designing and building their suburban family homes.

More broadly, this text makes a significant contribution to the current discourse on the so-called consumerist turn, or the point at which Eastern European Communist regimes began to accommodate their subjects' material desires in order to maintain control. Most scholars of Communist Hungary locate the turn around the 1960s, with the New Economic Mechanism and subsequent transition to Goulash Communism (see, e.g., Bren and Neuburger, eds., Communism Unwrapped, 2012). Fehérváry's work severely problematizes this notion, as she shows that this attempt to persuade popular opinion failed: the goods and lifestyle promised under Socialist Modern led to greater disenchantment with the regime, and its legitimacy actually eroded as a result. For this and the reasons above Politics in Color and Concrete is mandatory reading for all scholars of Communism in Eastern Europe.