of a huge petrochemical industry and evolved a galaxy of plastic objects in parallel.

Far from creating a day-glo picture of a misunderstood wonderland, the curators made room for the dark side of Soviet Communism. A clunky video camera installed on a staircase gives a hint, and on the top floor, a small room is crammed full of banal but insidious army-green and grey audio and video equipment. (Here, at last, is the lack of color we expected.) Amid the elegance and kitsch of the comfortable furnishings, the surveillance room reminds us that communist East Germany employed more spies to observe its own citizens than any other totalitarian government in recent history.

Breakfast Nook | Photo: David Hartwell

Kitchen | Photo: David Hartwell

Many house-museums, like the Neutra VDL House, can strugglearound the big questions posed by this exhilarating and confounding show: How was modernism developed on both sides of the Iron Curtain? What did modernism represent to each superpower? Clues emerge from every object in the house. The toy set of cowboys and Indians on the floor seems innocuous enough. But in East Germany, the meaning wasn't what was shown on American televisions. Here, the cowboys were evil imperialists.

And our mental image of a somber, grey society -- was that just what was marketed to Americans as a kind of capitalist realism? As Mansfield points out, "the promotion of our lifestyle was better" in the West. But what about the promotion of the Soviet lifestyle in the East which we weren't seeing? According to a couple of East