Communism

The bankruptcy of communism can still be read from the vast majority of façades. We are witnesses to the ruins of a system, of an economically nonviable ideology. For a little while, we can still see in countless details how this system allowed half of Europe, and architecturally indisputably the most beautiful half, to go to rack and ruin, flake away, become mildewed and crumble to dust - in the name of a humanist utopia that went wrong. This is an historically striking fact which, in countries like Poland with its countless propped-up old mammoth buildings and abandoned factory sites, has something apocalyptic about it, something quite as exceptional as the sights people who went round Europe after the plague epidemics must have seen. Not so pathetic and awful, but on just as huge a scale. Thousands of kilometers of decay, rusty gates, broken windowsills, almost faded pale paint, hundreds of thousands of kilometers of cracked asphalt of dubious quality. But there are also wonderful old gateways everywhere with an almost medieval darkness, which have only survived because of the same neglect: in the West they've been long replaced by properties without a history. Communism lasted just as long as it takes to wear out a nineteenth-century building completely without maintaining or repairing anything. It lived as it were on what there was and finally let go of it again, just before it collapsed. In that sense, communism was also bond to collapse: all monuments, nineteenth-century blocks of houses, palaces, facilities, street paving, flats from the period of Art Nouveau or the Habsburg period, had simply worn out, were simply finished.

S. Hertmans, 'Bratislava: the age of anachronism', Intercities, 2001