Back to the Postindustrial Future. Felix Ringel

at some point put these conversations in writing. I am also grateful for the advice of three anonymous reviewers, the old and new series editors Eeva Berglund and Aleksander Bošković, and the rest of the team at Berghahn Books. Over the years, many scholars have influenced my thought and facilitated my intellectual wellbeing. Special thanks goes to Paul Rabinow, Alexei Yurchak, Marilyn Strathern, Susan Bayly, Chris Kaplonski, Stef Jansen and, most importantly, Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov.

      Finally, I am endlessly grateful to my family and friends from my original home, especially to my father Thomas, my sister Nadja with Norbert, Clara and Hannes, and my grandmother Ilse Purfürst. Alice von Bieberstein and Eirini Avramopoulou have shared the burden the whole way. Even more so has Emily Thomas, who continues to impress me with her own metaphysics everyday anew. She has endured much in relation to this book. To spend as many presents with her as I can is my best reward.

Notes on Translations

      All translations are mine. I provide as much of the original German as possible, either in brackets or in footnotes. Some German terms such as Neustadt (New City), Herr (Mr) or Frau (Mrs) are used throughout the book.

Abbreviations

e.V.	eingetragener Verein/registered association
FRG	Federal Republic of Germany
GDR	German Democratic Republic
IM	Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter/Informal Collaborator
KuFa	KulturFabrik/Cultural Factory, referring both to the social club and their domicile, Hoyerswerda’s sociocultural centre
MfS/Stasi	Ministerium für Staatssicherheit/Ministry for State Security
SED	Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands/German Socialist Unity Party
SuB HY	Stadtumbau und Bürgerbeteiligung Hoyerswerda/Urban Redevelopment and Citizens’ Participation Hoyerswerda
WK	Wohnkomplex/residential complex

       Hoyerswerda, Germany, in Europe. Map designed by artourette

Introduction

       Anthropology and the Future

      Notes from a Shrinking Fieldsite

      The future is a flying bullet.

      It carries my name and it’s going to hit me no matter what. /

      My question is, How shall I catch it? –

      With my head, my arse, my hand or with my cheek? /

      Does it hit me like a torpedo, or brush me like a kiss?

      —Gerhard Gundermann, ‘The Future’¹

      I started fieldwork in the East German city of Hoyerswerda in 2008. On my arrival, huge excavators were busily tearing down several of the socialist apartment blocks in Hoyerswerda’s New City (subsequently Neustadt). Some used the usual wrecking ball; others deployed enormous forceps, breaking up these formerly five-, six- or eleven-floor buildings piece-by-piece. The piercing sounds of the heavy machines contrasted with the dull noise made by the falling concrete units. When mounting the heaps of rubble left over from what just months before had still been people’s homes, the excavators wobbled like a ship on a sea of concrete, adding a crunching sound to the somewhat eerie situation. Only the water pumps, fighting the dust formation, ran constantly. Once in a while, a former resident would pass by, take pictures and start a chat with the usually smoking operator of the excavator. The latter might have already heard some stories from the lifeworlds he was deconstructing here. He was, however, more eager to answer the not uncommon question of where all the debris would be going when his work is done.

      Figure 0.1 Excavator on remains of the ‘PaintBlock’ building, WK 10, winter 2009

      The process of the city’s large-scale physical demolition had started exactly ten years earlier in 1998. That same year, the local singer-songwriter Gerhard Gundermannn performed a song, ‘The Future’, for the last time. In this song, whose first lines open this Introduction, Gundermann describes the future as a ‘flying bullet’, which carries his name and is going to hit him ‘no matter what’. In Hoyerswerda, which would later in 2009 be officially labelled Germany’s fastest-shrinking city, the future indeed appeared to relentlessly bring its demise. However, Gundermann adds a twist to his deterministic, hopeless characterization of the future as a flying bullet: ‘My question is, How shall I catch it?’ Instead of giving in to the inevitable flow of time, he claims that we have the power to relate to the future in our own ways: we can – arguably – determine whether this future is to hit us ‘like a torpedo’ or brush us ‘like a kiss’.

      For the urban community of a shrinking city, the future poses an ongoing problem. This monograph explores the ways in which inhabitants of Hoyerswerda relate to their oncoming futures and shows how their experiences of shrinkage can help anthropology as a discipline to properly constitute the future as an integral part of its analysis. In the following sections, I will first introduce my fieldsite and then sketch my vision of the anthropology of the future, continuing an old tradition in the anthropology of time by taking inspiration from recent philosophical work on metaphysics. Having linked ‘ethnographic’ to ‘metaphysical’ presentism, I show how in Hoyerswerda the future has been rendered problematic and how it has become an epistemic object in its own right – for both my informants and myself – in the third section. In the last two sections, I proceed by conceptualizing knowledge and time in relation to one another I close by reviewing my overall argument. This book’s general aim is to provide the reader with an ethnography of hope and the future in a city that, for many, was doomed to have neither of those. However, I read this city’s present not through the lens of its (failed) past(s) – socialist or postsocialist – but from the perspective of what my informants considered a much more pressing concern: their personal and collective futures.

       Introducing Hoyerswerda

      Gundermann’s song poses the question for the whole book: how is the urban community of a shrinking city to relate to the future; and how is the discipline of anthropology to account for this effort? Gundermann’s life is intimately linked to Hoyerswerda’s past, and I will briefly reconstruct it here by way of introducing the troubled history of my fieldsite. Importantly, Hoyerswerda is much more than an old town in the Lausitz region (Lusatia)² near to the Polish and Czech borders, which rose to national and international fame as a model industrial city during state-socialism. As will become apparent, Hoyerswerda’s current problems might be intimately linked with the recent political and economic past of Germany. However, these problems are similarly, if not more, drawn to the dystopian futures they seem to prefigure.

      Gundermann grew up in Hoyerswerda during Neustadt’s construction. The construction started in the mid 1950s and was part of the socialist government’s response to a widespread existential housing crisis. The socialist part of Germany, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), like all of Germany – indeed, most of Europe and many other places in the world – lay bare and devastated at the end of World War II. After the official division of Germany in 1949, early Cold War conflicts