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, the fishing industry, green energy production and large-scale CO2 reduction (the latter two points remained 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
