Meanwhile, the last inhabitants were moving out of next-door staircases, underlining that Bjarke had it right from the beginning: there is, after all, only one narrative that contains the many stories the Hoyerswerdians and the artists were telling one another, with only one directionality towards the future – that of decline and demolition. But how does the new surprise – the ‘ArtBlock’ building itself – fit into this narrative? And what other narratives could handle the heterogeneous complexity of the city’s present changes and the multiplicity of stories and perspectives produced in response?
When the Hoyerswerdians came to visit the ‘ArtBlock’ building, their reactions were shaped by their own experiences. People talked about how desirable these flats once were, how they already back then had come to take pictures of their allocated flat’s construction and how, with the changing times, they were now taking pictures of their demolition. But despite the apartments’ dilapidated state and the concrete’s much-discussed poor quality, most visitors remarked on the fact that they were ‘still OK’ (noch in Ordnung) and what a shame it was to tear them down. The context of art, which the artists had drawn them into, made them think about their city’s fate, its past, present and future. Just by coming to this site of demolition, it seemed, they halted the accepted changes for a moment and were invited to reflect on them.
This unexpected encounter thus provided different means for the production or reactivation of knowledge about their city. But, after all, there were no new narratives emerging – no ideas for alternative futures that could allow for the blocks’ survival (although one person suggested that the studios should remain opened indefinitely as a museum). Nonetheless, the Hoyerswerdians were impressed by the artists’ intervention: that the blocks could so unconventionally be used yet again seemed, if only for a moment, to challenge the idea of the one narrative of decline, even without factually overcoming it. Bjarke’s assertion might be contradicted by the unexpected premortem blossoming of those houses – and only the narrative of its final deconstruction held true. Still, I claim, even these blocks’ decline can be narrated, contextualized and directed towards the future in many different ways. Even in Hoyerswerda’s all too bleak present, one can find a whole variety of different contexts and narratives, a few of which I present in the next sections.
The differences between local forms of contextual reasoning partially resemble local political and spatial divisions: conservative Old City inhabitants and winners of the postsocialist changes contextualize their presents differently from left-wing Neustadt inhabitants, who have suffered from unemployment after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall. The following examples help to circumscribe the local economy of knowledge and some of its surprisingly far-reaching metaphysics. In them, specific local tropes such as ‘healthy shrinking’ (Gesundschrumpfen), ‘economic expulsion’ (Wirtschaftsvertreibung) and ‘the chances of shrinkage’ (Schrumpfungschancen) are used as epistemic tools and discursive armoury. Their analysis explicates differences in spatiotemporal reasoning. I focus on their explanatory and political value in their respective local sociopolitical contexts (see Strathern 1995b: 132) in order to assess whether Bjarke’s claim was right.
The Local Construction of Context
The contexts constructed for and in Hoyerswerda’s present situation are manifold; they involve both meaningful spatial and temporal relations. For example, spatial concerns in Hoyerswerda often involve the city’s actual distance from the Saxon and the federal capitals Dresden and Berlin respectively. This distance is bemoaned as a hindrance in Hoyerswerda’s development towards a better future. Another spatial imaginary stems from its citizens’ unparalleled outmigration, and the many better ‘imagined elsewheres’, where friends, relatives and colleagues had settled. The more than 50,000 inhabitants who have left Hoyerswerda over the last two decades link spatial distance and mobility to social relations and feelings of belonging. In contrast, temporal concerns, the overall focus of this book, include the considerations of different pasts, presents and futures. Giving a city a particular past or future, we often presume, helps to determine its existence in the present. Such positioning, however, is for many reasons far more complicated – and remains all the more contested. Although finding the ‘right’ context or narrative promises to stabilize the city’s existence in this crisis of meaning, the construction of context is highly contested and recurrently reproduces internal political fissures. In order to clarify this point, let me sketch out a few potentially more extreme and polemic examples. With them, I also show what is politically at stake for my informants.
Just before Christmas 2008, a group of young men dressed as Father Christmas stood on Neustadt’s central Lusatian Square (Lausitzer Platz), at the entrance to the city’s main shopping centre. They were handing out oranges and chocolate Santas, to which they had attached little propaganda leaflets. The narrative the leaflets told were about how democracy has led to the ‘fatal’ process of shrinkage, increasing poverty and inequality, and how it is to be blamed for harming the German Volks-body. The same group of local neo-Nazis propagated similar narratives at the 1 May Labour Day demonstrations. Hoyerswerda’s high unemployment, outmigration and subsequent physical deconstruction were presented as the results of the rule of ‘self-proclaimed democrats’ (selbsternannte Demokraten). For the future, the neo-Nazis’ historical implications evoked a swift return to National Socialism in order ‘to save the German people’. Otherwise, they predicted, ‘this system will bring us Volks-death’ (Das System bringt uns den Volkstod). As yet another flyer proclaimed, the Federal Republic of Germany is itself ‘planned Volks-death’ (geplanter Volkstod).
In the autumn of 2008 in the Seniors’ Academy (Seniorenakademie), an institution for lifelong education and concerted economic activity founded by a group of former engineers and miners after the changes of the early 1990s, a former hydrologist gave a talk entitled ‘Hoyerswerda – City on the Waterfront’. He informed his audience about current issues of climate change and their relation to the longstanding history of the extraction of coal and other resources in the area. In his contemplations, the retired expert reached much further into the past than the city’s right-wing youth in their nationalist ideas. In order to find a way out of the current crisis, he covered the period from the end of the last Ice Age, which left the region of Lusatia as a huge ‘swampland’ (the original meaning of the word ‘Lusatia’), the Stone Age, when coal extraction started, and the comparatively recent era of industrialization. Out of this long-term scope, the speaker developed an idea about how Hoyerswerda could tackle its present economic problems by being transformed into a city based on green energy and with new future perspectives. His strategy was hydrological; it implied that the many old waterways, in fact a geological result of the last Ice Age, can help restore Hoyerswerda to what it once was: the ‘Lusatian Venice’ (Venedig der Lausitz). They were to be revitalized by channelling water to Hoyerswerda from the distant river Elbe. Subsequently, tourism,