'Disagreeable to the Eye and Wounding to the Soul'

“[I]n the large towns of East Germany, everything, or almost everything, was either grey or brown: not necessarily old, dirty or down-at-heel, but a sad grey or a dull – as it were, dead -- brown.”  

The author is Michel Pastoureau, the French historian of color, writing in The Colours of Our Memories (trans. Janet Lloyd, Polity, 2012). In a section titled “Greyness,” he describes his first visit behind the Iron Curtain, in 1981, in East Germany. Everything seemed “gloomy, weary and vulgar.” This is not the flashy, aggressive Las Vegas-style vulgarity, which implies a corrupted aesthetic sense. Rather, it suggests the absence of any aesthetic sense among totalitarians – the visual counterpart to socialist realism.  

“The number of aesthetic experiences accessible to a city-dweller in [Communism] is uncommonly limited,” Czesław Miłosz writes in The Captive Mind (trans. Jane Zielonko, 1953). He identifies the monotonous drabness as an intentional aspect of Communism – sensory deprivation as a spirit-numbing political tool, present everywhere in clothing and architecture. “Fear paralyses individuality,” he writes. “[T]he union of colour and harmony with fear is as difficult to imagine as brilliant plumage on birds living in the northern tundras.”

Pastoureau discovers what he concludes is the defining color of Communism, a shade he had never before seen, present in raincoats, building facades, bicycles and automobiles:

“It is not easy to find words to describe it. It was not, strictly speaking, just a purplish brown, rather a shade somewhere between brown, grey and purple with (and this is perhaps the most remarkable thing about it) a slight tinge of greenish yellow as if, as a finishing touch, there had been an attempt to add a hint of ‘mustard’ to this revolting colour. In the West it would have been hard to produce such a colour and impossible to sell it.”

One more reason to favor a market-driven economy. Pastoureau continues:

“Disagreeable to the eye and wounding to the soul, it was as ugly as could be and, on top of everything, there was something brutal and uncivilized about it that appeared to stem from the most uncouth codes of social life, a kind of Urfarbe (original colour) inherited from the barbaric times of the first industrial revolution and resistant to all modernity.”