I wish them and their city all the best for the future.
Many institutions have funded this project: the German Study Foundation, the University of Cambridge, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and the Economic and Social Research Council of the UK (PTA-031-2006-00210). I thank them for making this work possible. Parts of Chapter 2 have been published in FOCAAL 66 (2013) and an earlier version of Chapter 5 has appeared in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 20(S1) (2014).
I have presented aspects of this work at several research seminars. I owe debts to colleagues at the Anthropology Departments at Brunel (United Kingdom), Cambridge (United Kingdom), Maynooth (Ireland), Copenhagen (Denmark) and Vienna (Austria). I also owe Laura Bear and the colleagues of her ‘Conflicts in Time’ research network for inspiring conversations, Maya Shapiro for co-organizing the 2013 AAA panel on Urban Affect, and Tatjana Thelen and the Postsocialism reading group in Vienna for continuing debates. Nina Gribat and Wolfgang Kil have been co-explorers of Hoyerswerda many a time, and I hope we can 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
