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 was often accused of having made an anthropological mistake, namely, misunderstanding that the human being, as it were, ‘is not made for socialism’ (nicht für den Sozialismus gemacht). However, even his own otherwise convincing narrative of history as class struggle seems hard to deploy. Once we dissolve the metacontext of historical materialism and class exploitation, again, into the actual social context at place, it gains, if anything, unexpected explanatory value.
On a class trip in July 2008, eighteen-year-old Willy and some of his classmates had a passionate discussion about the Communist Manifesto. Willy had bought a cheap paperback version of the Manifesto because of his interest in leftist theory. In a long debate, the application of its insights to their hometown’s current problems proved more difficult than expected. No classes to be easily identified; only the ever-looming confrontation with the big historical disproval of actually existing socialism: its own failure. Instead of problematizing their hometown’s present, Marx’s text made this group of young anarchists reconsider the GDR, a country most of them were just about born into, as yet another ideological project in world history. This project of socialist modernity was as ‘unfree’ and ‘oppressive’ as any other ideological project, such as contemporary global capitalism. The context, in which their hometown gained so much prominence, was thus put in another temporal frame (anarchist if you wish), which in turn devalued Marxism as a context to think with.
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