Back to the Postindustrial Future. Felix Ringel

rather unclear) could create a renewed symbiosis between natural resources and the regional economy, determined, as history explained, by the region’s long-term natural conditions. By putting the current changes into an extensive geohistorical context, the hydrologist saw chances for the city’s future, but only ‘if one can understand the past and learn from it’ – as the academy’s head underlined in his introduction to the talk.

      The third example follows this logic too. Seventy-year-old Helfried, a former mining engineer, embedded Hoyerswerda’s present more thoroughly in the region’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century history of industrialization. On our many tours through Hoyerswerda’s surroundings in his flashy black Mercedes Benz, he showed me two of the mines still working; several landmarks of the coal industry such as the huge F60 cool excavator; old villages recently abandoned by their inhabitants because of the progressing mines as well as new ones built from scratch for resettled communities in the 1990s; and former model towns and villages from the 1920s and 1930s whose construction then accompanied the industrialization of open pit mining and energy production in the region. He even pointed out the hardly discernible reforestation areas from the same historical period, where an early specialist in forestry successfully implemented measurements to ‘renaturalize’ the postmining landscapes. On our way to the lakes of the emerging touristic Lusation Lake District (Lausitzer Seenland), we stopped along the many new cycle and rollerblade tracks for future tourists, looking at the channels connecting already half of the sixteen lakes. All of this supposedly ‘natural’ landscape, he underlined, was purposefully manufactured over the course of more than a century. And postindustrial planning continued in this longstanding effort despite the several regime changes of the last century: each tree, hill and stream was accurately positioned in the planners’ minds; each lake was prescribed one function or ‘unique selling point’: motor racing; canoe touring, water skiing, sailing, etc. In this context, spanning a history of industrial (and postindustrial) modernity intervening in the region, Hoyerswerda was just another manmade, planned, functional project, and its changes were subject to the same, enduring modernist logic. In the 1950s and 1960s, Neustadt was indeed the worldwide first city completely erected by industrially prefabricated concrete units. Such engineered projects can either succeed or fail.² However, the time of industrialization and planned progress was over – even the Swedish company owning the mines and power plants was predicted to retreat from the region (a plan it realized in 2016). In 2009, however, new hopes in the narratives of modernity and industrialization arose with the rediscovery of copper north of Hoyerswerda and a foreign investor promising the establishment of thousands of new jobs (which thus far remains unrealized). As much as the Lusation Lake District project, this plan provided new hopeful imaginaries for local life and future economic prospects by potentially slowing down or even reversing the process of shrinkage. Such hidden hopes, I often felt, also shaped Helfried’s take on Hoyerswerda’s present.

      For many of my young informants, in contrast, such hopes did not hold much currency in 2008/2009. Rather, for those who grew up in the time of postsocialist changes and increasing shrinkage, Hoyerswerda had no future perspectives at all. For most of them, it was a city of no hope, and having no future was, for them, somehow related to having no past. The commonly denied socialist-modernist past, which their parents and grandparents had advanced, seemed as far away as other historical epochs. For the city’s youth, present concerns were important and a historically informed context was therefore hardly of quintessential use. ‘Nothing is happening here either way’ was the most common description of their lives in Hoyerswerda.

      Like other peripheral small cities, Hoyerswerda had not only lost its economic foundations with reunification, but it also quickly lost its attraction. People’s expectations of a city’s quality of life aspired to metropolitan centres elsewhere. Although for a town of its size Hoyerswerda exhibited astonishingly many local sociocultural activities, the majority of local youth still aspired to go to Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig or even further away. There was no realistic narrative with which to describe their future in the city either in the near or in a more distant future of a potential return. Their older family members repeatedly supported such a view by expressing the fears and concerns in relation to their children’s seemingly inevitable outmigration. In contrast, many city officials and sociocultural clubs argued against such dystopian predictions and invested much of their professional and personal activities in providing local youth with an imaginary for staying in Hoyerswerda – invoking feelings of belonging and homeliness³ as well as pointing out potential job prospects in the region (see Chapter 3).

      These attempts at convincing Hoyerswerda’s youth to stay indicate the conflicts that can occur when different contexts, like those presented in this section, oppose one another. Having discussed three examples to show the diversity of local contexts deployed in the city’s economy of knowledge in contrast with one which showed the absence of a coherent narrative (the youth’s no future narrative), let me now discuss three further examples in more depth in order to underline the varying epistemic and political repercussions such contexts can have, as well as the conflicts they spur.

       The Politics of Context

      One interview partner, a self-describing Altstädter (inhabitant of the Old City), gave me a rather peculiar account of the process of shrinkage. He asked me to imagine a graph of Hoyerswerda’s population – stretching not just over the last fifty or sixty years, but incorporating data from almost two hundred years altogether. With such a broad scope, he explained, the current demographic changes do not look too bad. Rather, on such a graph we see Hoyerswerda slowly gaining a population of 7,000 inhabitants throughout the nineteenth century and until World War II, due to the region’s industrialization. With World War II, the city loses half of its inhabitants, until refugees from Silesia and other formerly German parts of Eastern Europe settle in Hoyerswerda. Then, suddenly in the 1950s and 1960s, we encounter what he called an ‘unnatural’ development: the unforeseen socialist explosion in Hoyerswerda’s population, enlarging the old city ten times with the incoming miners, engineers and energy workers of Neustadt. The rise to more than 72,000 inhabitants, he underlined, has already peaked in the early 1980s, that is, before German reunification. My interview partner suggested that rather than the economic changes following reunification, it was wealth and prosperity that slowed down Hoyerswerda’s population growth, not to mention the impact of female emancipation and the contraceptive pill. The following implosion in numbers of inhabitants will, he predicted, stop soon and Hoyerswerda will stabilize its population in the near future at around 20,000 or 25,000 people. From his point of view, Hoyerswerda proper (which for him most importantly referred to the Old City) will not have lost half its population, but rather will have gained triple its initial number – depending on the temporal context in which you understand the recent changes. For him, shrinkage is thus nothing abnormal. If anything, this graph’s – in his words – ‘socialist pimple’ (der sozialistische Pickel) is abnormal. As people were migrating to Hoyerswerda in the socialist past, coming to the then attractive expanding model city, this direction was now reversed. The ‘market’ determines these developments, he proclaimed, which allowed him to legitimize and naturalize them. Hence, he saw hardly any actual problems or a need to counteract them: Hoyerswerda is simply ‘shrinking to a healthy state’ (sich gesundschrumpfen). For him, the process of shrinkage remained unquestioned, uncritical and incontestable, rendering the many stories of those affected by these changes inevitably out of sight.

      In contrast, another interview partner thoroughly repoliticized Hoyerswerda’s present situation. A committed socialist and Neustädter (inhabitant of Neustadt), this person’s account did not accept the loss of more than half of the population as a ‘natural process’; rather, he embedded shrinkage in the current political economy of (globalized) capitalism. In his eyes, this extreme form of outmigration should be called ‘economic expulsion’ (Wirtschaftsvertreibung). Similar to political expulsion (in a German context, the expulsion of Germans after the end of World War II immediately comes to mind), this form of migration was enforced and happened involuntarily. Indeed, facing the imminent demolition of his apartment house as well as his district’s decay, one WK 10 inhabitant expressed the same logic by saying: ‘One