Back to the Postindustrial Future. Felix Ringel
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WK 10 (beige buildings, centre left), with the coal-fired power plant Schwarze Pumpe in the background (centre right)
All of these practices conceptually, practically and affectively targeted the temporal dimension of the future (in the present). Nonetheless, they still did not add up to a local temporal culture. Rather, my informants’ production of knowledge and affects about themselves, their city and respective futures remained concrete and situated. Their epistemic practices answered specific questions and concerns, and indicated in their variety a complex, diverse and even contradictory reservoir of temporal thoughts and relations, and a certain flexibility in people’s capacity to negotiate this multiplicity. If anything, it was the then current omnipresence of potential and widely feared repercussions of the drastic local economic, social and demographic decline that characterizes this local economy of knowledge.
Despite the fact that actual shrinkage has very different effects on different people, depending on their socioeconomic standing, age, education and personal conviction, all Hoyerswerdians were forced to ask themselves what kind of future their hometown has. In concrete terms, this meant that they had to define what for them, in their particular circumstances, the locally ubiquitous phrase ‘quality of life’ entailed and how much of that they were ready to sacrifice when facing a bleak future. Is life worth living in a shrinking city? The sometimes prosaic, performative claim that Hoyerswerda was, after all, a ‘loveable and liveable city’ (liebens-und lebenswerte Stadt) – a phrase continuously brought forward by the Lord Mayor, local journalists and other public voices – has a somewhat empty and sober, but at the same time passionate and desperate appeal to it.
However, actual shrinkage as well as its imagined future consequences impeded on the most intimate, relational aspects of social life – and even there sparked the production of knowledge about the future. The severe holes in the city’s social fabric affected every citizen. For example, all of the seven host families I stayed with during my sixteen months of fieldwork faced important changes stemming from their children’s outmigration. Out of my seventeen host siblings (all in their late teens to early thirties), thirteen had already left the city when I was doing fieldwork; by 2011, only four remained with three more to leave soon. Most host families usually housed me in the bedrooms of their offspring, who had already left the city. Even if the parents’ own futures in the city seemed secure (and three of the seven families seriously considered leaving during my time in Hoyerswerda), there were still potentially dramatic changes ahead. My first host parents, both teachers, worried about the future of the respective schools they worked at. If one of them closed down due to a lack of new pupils, where would they be allocated to – another school in Hoyerswerda or another city altogether? My second host mother’s main concern was the impending move out of her WK 10 apartment. Already in 2008 WK 10 was widely predicted to be completely demolished by 2013 (which, indeed, it was) despite being Hoyerswerda’s youngest living district. Should she move to Dresden where her two sons live? Should she stay in Hoyerswerda where she is only precariously employed? Until that decision was made, she had to endure all the concerns of living in a WK that is doomed to be demolished: the ongoing deconstruction of nearby apartment houses, the decay of green spaces and playgrounds, the accelerating departure of neighbours and friends. My third host parents faced leaving after their two children finished their A-levels and started university degrees elsewhere. They seriously considered moving to Dresden, Berlin or some alternative living project in the countryside. My host mother was constantly on the brink of being made redundant from her job as a headmistress of a local nursing school due to the school’s potential closure. My host father commuted daily to Berlin – why not move there for good?
Such personal concerns, problems and impediments are themselves not unusual and can be found in most parts of the world. Everywhere, institutions, shops and surgeries shut down; people face migration, insecurity and temporary hopelessness. Worldwide, children are leaving their parents’ homes, and communities are forced to deal with fundamental alterations stemming from such outmigration. In particular, what is known as the former First World suffers from ageing populations and demographic implosions. The division into winners and losers of contemporary changes has set into motion new flows of people, goods and investments, which severely affect – as this account’s focus on outmigration suggests – not only those going away, but also those staying behind (compare Ferguson 1999; Walley 2013; Young 2013; Gaibazzi 2015; Vacarro et al. 2016). In Hoyerswerda, it is not the kind of social, economic and cultural change – postindustrial, after all – that is significant, but rather its magnitude and rapid intensity. For many inhabitants, the actual survival of their city is under threat, since there seems to be no end to this accelerated process of change. At its core, then, ‘shrinkage’ precisely entails this problematization of the future because it pre-emptively prescribes to current changes a bad outcome, directing them to a future that seems already lost. It is for this reason that inhabitants of Hoyerswerda continuously renegotiated their personal and collective futures with one another.
The Future as an Epistemic Problem
Once a city decreases in size, do its citizens subsequently increase in relevance?
—Uwe Proksch, CEO KulturFabrik e.V., September 2008
At the end of my fieldwork in the spring of 2009, the Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning pronounced Hoyerswerda to be Germany’s fastest-shrinking and soon (demographically speaking) oldest city. More than before, the term ‘shrinkage’ came to signify the myriad intricate and large-scale changes experienced by Hoyerswerda’s citizens, and put their city in the national media spotlight. The future dimension, as shown in the previous section, had a special role to play in locally perceiving and making sense of these alterations. But how did shrinkage – or what it refers to – come to be a problem, and with which epistemic and social repercussions? In particular, the search for a proper context, out of, in and with which to create new meaning for the present and the future in it, was essential in Hoyerswerda, since the daily encounters with the deconstruction of major parts of the cityscape and continuous threats of further deconstruction, closure and new impediments kept on influencing my informants’ lives. Although many Hoyerswerdians claimed that they got used to the sight of the huge excavators tearing down apartment blocks, the noises of the concrete panels crashing down on huge heaps of rubble or the smell of the irrigated cement residue, they, like I, often still experienced a sense of confusion when stumbling yet again over the absence of a particular apartment house, school or kindergarten – not to mention the absence of friends, children and neighbours.
In my first chapter, I scrutinize the following possibility: anthropologists could convincingly approach life in Germany’s fastest-shrinking city from the perspective of postsocialism – composing a narrative about postsocialist failure and the burdens of the socialist past, tracking in detail what Caroline Humphrey aptly referred to as the ‘unmaking of socialist life’ (Humphrey 2002a). In a bleak version of this – common in German media – the Hoyerswerdians could then be seen not as facing problems with their future, but as postsocialist subjects who have never been fit for the new (Western) future in the first place. Accounts of nostalgic attachments to the past (which I hardly ever encountered during my sixteen months of fieldwork) would neatly illustrate this situation, and the failure of German reunification could remain as depoliticized as it is in most public discourses in Germany. As I argue, however, the fundamental upheaval in Hoyerswerda cannot be reduced to being merely a postsocialist phenomenon. Rather, much broader processes simultaneously come to bear in Hoyerswerda, producing an unprecedented dimension of change, which my informants tackled daily in their personal and professional lives.
From Hoyerswerda alone, approximately 50,000 people have left, with far fewer people moving to the city. What happens when more than half of a city’s population leave in a comparatively short period of time, and when urban life and sociality suddenly lose their endurance, permanence and predictability? In Hoyerswerda, the answer to these questions required the production of new knowledge in my informants’ continuously problematic presents. The shift from the refusal of the term ‘shrinkage’ to accepting it as a valid description of the process gave a new structure to this knowledge. One of the crucial understandings it entails is an ethical one, namely that a ‘good’ life is not only possible in