BLUEPRINT FOR A CULTURAL REVOLUTION: HERMANN HENSELMANN AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF GERMAN SOCIALIST REALISM

Socialist realism, introduced to the East German architectural establishment as their nation's new design culture in 1950, brought with it much more than just the USSR's Stalin-era aesthetic. It presented new models of cultural authority, expectations of architects as socialist role models, and innovative systems of reward and discipline - all of these managed by a centralized design bureaucracy linked to party and state through a complex web of crossmembership. This article examines the Pauline conversion of a former German modernist, the architect Hermann Henselmann, and the rite of passage that yielded a loyal member of the intelligentsia and a poster child for Stalinist human reform. Henselmann's role in a campaign to bring Socialist Realism to West Germany is also considered, along with the results of this cultural initiative.