Although many Hoyerswerdians claimed that they got used to the sight of the huge excavators tearing down apartment blocks, the noises of the concrete panels crashing down on huge heaps of rubble or the smell of the irrigated cement residue, they, like I, often still experienced a sense of confusion when stumbling yet again over the absence of a particular apartment house, school or kindergarten – not to mention the absence of friends, children and neighbours.
In my first chapter, I scrutinize the following possibility: anthropologists could convincingly approach life in Germany’s fastest-shrinking city from the perspective of postsocialism – composing a narrative about postsocialist failure and the burdens of the socialist past, tracking in detail what Caroline Humphrey aptly referred to as the ‘unmaking of socialist life’ (Humphrey 2002a). In a bleak version of this – common in German media – the Hoyerswerdians could then be seen not as facing problems with their future, but as postsocialist subjects who have never been fit for the new (Western) future in the first place. Accounts of nostalgic attachments to the past (which I hardly ever encountered during my sixteen months of fieldwork) would neatly illustrate this situation, and the failure of German reunification could remain as depoliticized as it is in most public discourses in Germany. As I argue, however, the fundamental upheaval in Hoyerswerda cannot be reduced to being merely a postsocialist phenomenon. Rather, much broader processes simultaneously come to bear in Hoyerswerda, producing an unprecedented dimension of change, which my informants tackled daily in their personal and professional lives.
From Hoyerswerda alone, approximately 50,000 people have left, with far fewer people moving to the city. What happens when more than half of a city’s population leave in a comparatively short period of time, and when urban life and sociality suddenly lose their endurance, permanence and predictability? In Hoyerswerda, the answer to these questions required the production of new knowledge in my informants’ continuously problematic presents. The shift from the refusal of the term ‘shrinkage’ to accepting it as a valid description of the process gave a new structure to this knowledge. One of the crucial understandings it entails is an ethical one, namely that a ‘good’ life is not only possible in times of growth. Rather, in the eyes of my informants, life in times of shrinkage and decline is to be lived in as good a way as possible, despite (or even because of) their hometown’s current decline. Established practices and institutions are to be maintained, and new forms of practices have to be tried out. At the core of this ethical response are the profound temporal operations in the form of temporal reasoning. This particular form of temporal agency allows for the reappropriation of the temporal dimension of the near future in concrete terms, and beyond the local politicians’ dubious invigorations of the ‘chances of shrinkage’ (Chancen der Schrumpfung).
That the city and its future are rendered problematic therefore invites an analysis with reference to the anthropologies of time and of knowledge. The key term ‘temporal reasoning’ combines these two aspects most effectively. In Jane Guyer’s definition, it refers to the different ways of ‘implicating oneself in the ongoing life of the social and material world’ (Guyer 2007: 409). In its original sense, it comprised ‘the reach of thought and imagination, of planning and hoping, of tracing out mutual influences, of engaging in struggles for specific goals’ (ibid.) – all regarding relations to the near future, particularly in modern times (see Bear 2014; compare Pels 2015). I explore with it knowledge practices also aimed at other temporal dimensions, in particular the past and the present, thus expanding its meaning to all epistemic investments in issues of time and particular temporal periods. Additionally, an analysis of human knowledge practices, temporal politics and the local production of meaning for the future also entails affective and ethical issues and questions about the efficacy of future knowledge more generally. The problematization of the city’s existence in time creates the city of Hoyerswerda as an object of knowledge and stimulates the personal and public production, exchange and dissemination of knowledge about it. Virtually all citizens are drawn into these discursive or representational practices. They are genuinely concerned about their hometown’s future and a potential loss of their quality of life in it. Since Guyer specifically attends the potential privatization of the near future, I focus on the public explication, dissemination and negotiation of the (near) future.
In the following chapters, I refrain from extensively describing disappearance, absence, change and hopelessness or the ongoing process of spatial and material deterioration, decay and deconstruction of lifeworlds and former socialist and postsocialist living spaces. Studying the epistemic or conceptual repercussions of the process of shrinkage, I instead focus on specific local clashes in – and through – which particular knowledge about the city and its future is made explicit. In an urban context, public arenas of knowledge explication are multiple, but in my case remain linked by the widely acknowledged problematization of Hoyerswerda’s future.
Problematizing urban life and the city’s future also entails a problematization of local citizenship and these citizens’ contemporary role and agency. What does it mean to be a citizen in and of a shrinking city? Uwe,5 the CEO of Hoyerswerda’s sociocultural centre, posed the ingenious question: ‘Once a city decreases in size, do its citizens subsequently increase in relevance?’6 He drew attention to the fact that those staying in Hoyerswerda are much needed for essential social responsibilities and functions. With every person leaving, the city’s quality of life was seen to further deteriorate – so the worth of each citizen should be at the centre of all political decisions in these troubled times. Such considerations were not new in Hoyerswerda. During the time of Neustadt’s erection, a time of constant growth, the famous East German author Brigitte Reimann publicly intervened on behalf of the young population and approached the problem of the quality of urban life by asking a simple question: ‘Is it possible to kiss in Hoyerswerda?’ In critique of the increasingly more economically restricted and functionally inclined official plans under state-socialism, she insisted that the city’s architects should include the new Hoyerswerdians’ social, cultural and emotional needs in their planning. She demanded more social meeting places, a central alley with shops and cafes, a theatre, a cinema, bars and a literature café. A socialist model city, she underlined, should consider the human beings in all their complexity. So should a shrinking postindustrial city, I hasten to add, because it is not only that socialist life, or modern industrial life, is being unmade, but a new form of life is emerging, and we – as my informants – should aim at finding words to capture this emergence.
In 2008, such questions were asked again in relation to the repercussions of the process of shrinkage. As Dorit Baumeister, a local architect, put it: ‘In this process of shrinkage, which we have come to accept as such, it is our aim to intervene positively, to remain capable of exercising agency. We want to create an optimistic atmosphere, which in turn produces a different, a new quality and culture of life.’7 Her club’s response was and is sociocultural: more ‘togetherness’ (Miteinander) of those who remain in Hoyerswerda. However, it is precisely these sociocultural arenas that faced the lack of public funds most severely. Since state money is allocated to local communities in relation to their population numbers, Hoyerswerda procured increasingly lower levels of funds, but still had to maintain the same urban infrastructure at increasing costs. The conservative Lord Mayor Stefan Skora was acutely aware of the fact that if he followed regional and state financial demands, he would have to close down most cultural institutions, all of which are sponsored – in legal terms – voluntarily by the city. He refused to do so in order not to ‘expel’ even more of his inhabitants. As he underlined, Hoyerswerda was, is and will be ‘a loveable and liveable city’. The quality of life the city was seen to provide is not only in this way an essential political, technical and personal tool to handle shrinkage; its invocation might also be a crucial, if nascent attempt to recolonize the city’s presumably lost near future.
For the same reason, Skora introduced another group intervening in the public definition of the city’s qualities: marketing and advertisement experts. In search of unique selling points, they approached Hoyerswerda’s quality of life as a major tool in the increasingly fierce competition between small- and medium-sized cities. For their survival, these cities compete not only for investors and state funding, but
