Back to the Postindustrial Future. Felix Ringel
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and economic success (Borneman 1992), and Hoyerswerda, part of the GDR, was quickly caught up in this conflict: which political system could overcome the war legacies quicker and provide its population with the much-needed material goods, housing and sociocultural infrastructure? Which system could better live up to its promises of a better future?
Gundermann was part of the second generation of Neustadt’s inhabitants, the children of those workers who had come to build Hoyerswerda’s Neustadt as the GDR’s second socialist model city and the major settlement for the nearby emerging brown coal industrial complex exploiting the region’s vast lignite deposits. He was raised in an avant-garde city that was constructed from scratch on top of the endless Lusation sands and the heaps of brown coal, which, as a local Sorbic myth has it, the devil himself had placed beneath it. And the different political economies surrounding the exploitation of lignite proved to be a blessing and a curse for Hoyerswerda’s existence – although at first a blessing. Hoyerswerda Neustadt was the first city in the world solely erected using industrially prefabricated concrete units; a vanguard socialist-modern project – meticulously planned, quickly expanded and fervently drawn towards a socialist future. Hoyerswerda was a GDR state experiment, full of personal promises and splendid future prospects for those privileged to live and work there.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Gundermann witnessed the construction of most of Neustadt’s ten living complexes (Wohnkomplexe – subsequently WK), including their many schools, kindergartens, ‘WK-shops’ (Nahversorger), playgrounds, parks, sculptures, streets and pavements – everything that belongs to a new city. He attended local schools, did his A-levels in the Old City’s prestigious Lessing Gymnasium and then found a job in the mines, as did so many Hoyerswerdians of the first Neustadt generation. On his arrival, the city’s population had already dramatically increased in size, from previously 7,000 to over 70,000 inhabitants by the early 1980s. Besides being a professional operator of one of the huge coal excavators (the length of which is twice the height of the Eiffel Tower, I was told proudly by many informants), he also played in Hoyerswerda’s most famous band of that time: the ‘Brigade Firestone’ (Brigade Feuerstein). This band was not part of the socialist plan for the city. Neither were the many social, cultural and musical clubs and associations founded by those inhabitants who were ‘hungry for life’ – as a local idiom has it – in an environment dominated by planned efficiency and functionality.
With German reunification in 1990, the Cold War ended in Germany. The former GDR’s sudden incorporation into the capitalist world system had severe social and economic consequences all over East Germany: unemployment roared and outmigration skyrocketed. With the modernization of the industrial complex, for which Hoyerswerda was originally built, Gundermann lost his job too. Of the original 30,000 ‘miners and energy workers’, only a tenth were still needed. The city’s population shrank drastically in a very short period of time, eventually causing the widespread demolition of Neustadt’s cityscape. In the mid 1990s, Gundermann tried to retrain as a carpenter. Meanwhile, he was touring around the former GDR, celebrated as ‘the voice of East Germany’. For many, he was one of the few public figures expressing the feelings and problems of a whole society in rapid transformation. Change, justice, solidarity and the future were topics of his songs. He found words for what – from one day to the next – had hit the whole region, but Hoyerswerda most dramatically: deindustrialization, decline and the loss not only of the socialist future it once had, but also the future of the ‘imaginary West’ (Yurchak 2006: 158ff). It was the latter capitalist future that earlier came to dominate the nascent East German peaceful revolution and later, after the 1989 ‘turn’ or Wende, failed to deliver on its promises of post-reunification prosperity. Another recurrent theme in Gundermann’s work is the inevitable finitude of life. His own premature death in 1998, at the age of forty-three, tragically underlined the melancholy of his songs.
As an ethnography of the failures and aftermath of German reunification, this book could be an elaborate account of dying, vanishing or demise. Hoyerswerda is a city of ‘historically unprecedented decline and deconstruction in peacetimes’, as German journalists were recurrently eager to point out. Between 1989 and 2009, Hoyerswerda’s population halved from approximately 70,000 to less than 35,000 residents. The average age of the remaining inhabitants had doubled over the course of four decades. Demographically speaking, Hoyerswerda had turned from Germany’s youngest city in the 1950s into one of its oldest by 2009. The future prospects were, to put it mildly, bleak, and especially the young and well-educated continued to leave the city; already at the beginning of my fieldwork in 2008, the population was predicted to halve yet again by 2020.
Furthermore, Hoyerswerda not only had the reputation of having ‘no future’, it was also widely known to be of the past in at least two different ways. First, as a socialist model city, it seemed stuck in the socialist past, unable to enter the capitalist present and future. The local election successes of the leftist successor party to the former state-ruling Socialist Unity Party seemed to confirm this in the early 1990s. The same goes for the city’s apartment houses built in prefab style architecture (Plattenbau; see Hannemann 1996), which – as in West Germany – soon became defamed as soulless social housing for the poor and a representative of the failed project of state-socialism. Second, in September 1991, Hoyerswerda was also the first city in Germany to showcase xenophobic attacks on foreigners – newly arriving asylum seekers and former contract workers from other social states. The images of a drunken mob harassing innocent refugees went around the world and linked the city to the even more distant past of Nazi Germany.
However, rather than providing an ethnography of dramatic demise or heroic survival, this monograph seeks to advance something different: an ethnography of the future.3 From a presentist perspective (and despite the initial historical contextualization), this study takes as its ethnographic objects the many explicit, tacit and always concrete temporal notions that are sparked by – as much as they relate to – the temporal dimension of the future. These temporal relations to the future include all kinds of representational and nonrepresentational forms of knowledge that pertain to this dimension. In Hoyerswerda, they obviously first of all deal with the negative developments the city faces. However, relations to the future have been rendered problematic in many parts of the world. The postindustrial era, which arguably started with the 1970s oil crises, has had severe effects. As Jane Guyer argued in her seminal 2007 article on contemporary forms of temporal reasoning, people worldwide have lost their hold particularly on the near future. In place of five-year plans and widespread construction, they experience what Guyer labels ‘enforced presentism’: they are coerced to live only in the immediate present, having lost the ability to plan ahead. The post-Cold War era and its numerous new crises have, indeed, forced many people to face a reality in which the (better) future seems to be lost to the realm of fantasy (Guyer refers to this as fantasy futurism). However, the idea of the modernist future, of ongoing economic growth as well as urban and other development has been overthrown in Hoyerswerda and in many other parts of the former socialist bloc much more suddenly than elsewhere in the postindustrial world. In less than a decade, the city had changed from a booming and lively mining settlement to a drastically shrinking city without a future. In 2008, this loss of the future constituted the city’s most important problem.
In what follows, I ethnographically explore Hoyerswerda’s future. My central thesis is that the future as an ethnographic object should be an integral part of anthropological analysis – regardless of whether it seems lost or not in a specific fieldsite. Anthropologists as much as other social scientists tend to think that our present lives are the results of complex historical processes of causation. Accordingly, when analysing peoples’ presents, their pasts are frequently discussed to the exclusion of their futures (see Persoon and van Est 2000). Against this, I argue that the different ways in which people relate to the future is as, if not more, crucial for understanding their presents. This book explores the postindustrial condition and its social, cultural and epistemic repercussions in one social setting by mapping the loss, and reappropriation, of the future by a particular urban community. Hoyerswerda is an ideal place to study this. No longer a vanguard socialist industrial city, it can be understood as a vanguard city of a different kind: a herald of the postindustrial future in Europe and beyond, to which, as I claim in the book’s title, we should return more consciously.