A last approach was neither really depoliticizing nor repoliticizing the process of shrinkage. It was the common practical approach of most city officials, especially Hoyerswerda’s Lord Mayor. It attempted to focus on what is widely propagated in bureaucratic jargon as the otherwise unspecified chances of shrinkage. As the Lord Mayor repetitively proclaimed, Hoyerswerda was, is and will remain a ‘loveable and liveable city’ (liebens- und lebenswerte Stadt). Like many others, he accepted the process of shrinkage as a given and suggested that the people of Hoyerswerda should focus on their own strengths. It was the responsibility of all inhabitants as much as of the city officials to preserve and use these advantages against looming negative developments. This approach took change itself as the context for practice. It did not develop the idea of a context that could account for this change. As I will argue in Chapter 3, it finally failed to provide new stabilities, also because there is then obviously no need of further politicization. This arguably pre-empts both analytical rigour and the production of new, alternative or different narratives. It also shows the limiting impact that a context can have on human agency in times of crisis.
Figure 1.2 Fake bell button panel, ‘PaintBlock’ building, summer 2008
To sum up the argument thus far, local accounts of shrinkage followed two main contextual logics. One was to accept and naturalize the outmigration of people; the other perspective focused on the potential political regulation of this process by depicting these changes as being unnatural and not given. Both convictions stimulated particular practices: on the one hand, educational practices targeting local youth and their knowledge about Hoyerswerda and its future prospects, as I will discuss in subsequent chapters; on the other hand, a more general critique of contemporary capitalism. To account for such narratives or contexts is all the more important since each contextual construction entailed, as Greenhouse (1996) showed for different cultural conceptions of time, further understandings about one’s agency and how the world works. Do we as analysts simply combine these heterogeneous local metaphysics by constructing a metacontext or by choosing between them – and, if so, on which analytic, political or ethical grounds? What is the context or narrative an anthropologist should establish for Hoyerswerda and the many diverse contexts produced in it? In order to circumvent this question, one solution is to transform these narratives into ethnographic objects (as I have done in this section); another is to scrutinize our own involvement in the contexts we deploy in our academic knowledge practices, which I will pursue in the following three sections.
Social Science Contexts: Postmodernism
From an academic point of view, several perspectives come to mind with which to approach Hoyerswerda’s problematic present. The German social science literature on East Germany, for instance, often embeds what is happening in Hoyerswerda in a narrative of failed reunification, presenting Hoyerswerda as a prime example of this ‘failure’.6 In a broader postsocialist approach too, a narrative of failed transformation could be deployed, especially since Hoyerswerda as a former socialist model city lends itself neatly to explaining why it was not prepared to catch up with the West. Such account could be used for different aims: to critique the elites in charge of the transformation or to celebrate the many local responses. With a wider temporal perspective, one could also claim that Hoyerswerda is yet another city affected by the post-Fordist changes in the dominant modes of capitalist production and distribution. Hoyerswerda could then be presented as a prime example of deindustrialization or postindustrialization and the inequality resulting from a neoliberally orchestrated form of globalized capitalism. This approach could concentrate on new flows of people and other demographic repercussions of contemporary socioeconomic changes.
On the one hand, all overarching contexts create useful insights via their potential for broader comparison and subsequent abstractions and generalizations; on the other hand, they might also prevent rather than enable a detailed analysis of local specificity. For example, postmodernism as the cultural clothing of flexible accumulation (Harvey 2000) is indeed somewhat traceable in Hoyerswerda, especially in the architectural reshaping of the city after 1990. A whole postmodern architectural axis was spread right across the former socialist city centre, which despite all plans for a better socialist future remained unfinished until the fall of state-socialism. The axis evoked a very specific historical and spatial context, that of the region of Lusatia, in order to add symbolic value to its new, and typically postmodern, entertainment-based and consumption-orientated socioeconomic foundations. Hence, the Lausitz Square was grouped with the Lausitz Center (a big shopping centre) and the renamed concert venue Lausitzhalle (the former Mine- and Energy-Workers’ Cultural House – Haus der Berg- und Energiearbeiter) lined up with the Lausitz Tower (sic; a newly renovated eleven-storey apartment house turned architectural landmark with iconic red illumination of its roof terrace) towards the Lausitz Bad (the city’s new leisure and aquatic centre). These shopping, leisure and architectural spectacles were built or renamed after 1990, and may indeed be seen as indicative of the actual postmodern forces at work and the respective changes they brought by. In their stereotypical postmodern character, they were only outdone by the never-realized plans for a Karl-May-Leisure Park, which would have used the sandy postmining areas for a Wild West amusement park in reference to Karl May’s still very popular cowboy and Native American stories around the characters of Winnetou and Old Shatterhand from the late nineteenth century.
However, the apparent impact of the global phenomenon of postmodernism would only rarely be the context of reference used in my fieldsite. Rather, my informants very specifically talked about the West German head of the post-1989 urban planning department, who left most of these postmodern traces in Hoyerswerda’s cityscape, as a ‘postmodernist’. He was repeatedly remembered as not understanding ‘Hoyerswerda’s modernist architectural spirit’. My informants also bitterly remarked that his West German architect friends realized many of his projects rather than one of the many local architects. Indeed, such invocations of the context of postmodernity are situated political attempts, embedded in the local economy of knowledge, in which different issues are at stake. If I were to impose any of the common academic contexts (such as neoliberalism, postmodernism or globalization), I might miss out on exactly these diverse local meanings and situational uses of (contextual) knowledge and specific narratives and stories. The same applies to two further predictable contexts: that of Marxism and postsocialism, which I respectively discuss in the following sections. After that, I suggest that the local context of shrinkage combines some of the advantages of other contexts and still entails new imaginaries because its main focus is not on the past, but on the future.
Marxism as/in Context
Marxism could be one of the overarching perspectives as well as a good strategy to repoliticize Hoyerswerda’s current changes. Interestingly, Marxism rather than, for instance, ‘postsocialism’ was actually often invoked in my fieldsite, despite being generally devalued in German political discourses. In Hoyerswerda, Marx himself