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One interview partner, a self-describing Altstädter (inhabitant of the Old City), gave me a rather peculiar account of the process of shrinkage. He asked me to imagine a graph of Hoyerswerda’s population – stretching not just over the last fifty or sixty years, but incorporating data from almost two hundred years altogether. With such a broad scope, he explained, the current demographic changes do not look too bad. Rather, on such a graph we see Hoyerswerda slowly gaining a population of 7,000 inhabitants throughout the nineteenth century and until World War II, due to the region’s industrialization. With World War II, the city loses half of its inhabitants, until refugees from Silesia and other formerly German parts of Eastern Europe settle in Hoyerswerda. Then, suddenly in the 1950s and 1960s, we encounter what he called an ‘unnatural’ development: the unforeseen socialist explosion in Hoyerswerda’s population, enlarging the old city ten times with the incoming miners, engineers and energy workers of Neustadt. The rise to more than 72,000 inhabitants, he underlined, has already peaked in the early 1980s, that is, before German reunification. My interview partner suggested that rather than the economic changes following reunification, it was wealth and prosperity that slowed down Hoyerswerda’s population growth, not to mention the impact of female emancipation and the contraceptive pill. The following implosion in numbers of inhabitants will, he predicted, stop soon and Hoyerswerda will stabilize its population in the near future at around 20,000 or 25,000 people. From his point of view, Hoyerswerda proper (which for him most importantly referred to the Old City) will not have lost half its population, but rather will have gained triple its initial number – depending on the temporal context in which you understand the recent changes. For him, shrinkage is thus nothing abnormal. If anything, this graph’s – in his words – ‘socialist pimple’ (der sozialistische Pickel) is abnormal. As people were migrating to Hoyerswerda in the socialist past, coming to the then attractive expanding model city, this direction was now reversed. The ‘market’ determines these developments, he proclaimed, which allowed him to legitimize and naturalize them. Hence, he saw hardly any actual problems or a need to counteract them: Hoyerswerda is simply ‘shrinking to a healthy state’ (sich gesundschrumpfen). For him, the process of shrinkage remained unquestioned, uncritical and incontestable, rendering the many stories of those affected by these changes inevitably out of sight.

In contrast, another interview partner thoroughly repoliticized Hoyerswerda’s present situation. A committed socialist and Neustädter (inhabitant of Neustadt), this person’s account did not accept the loss of more than half of the population as a ‘natural process’; rather, he embedded shrinkage in the current political economy of (globalized) capitalism. In his eyes, this extreme form of outmigration should be called ‘economic expulsion’ (Wirtschaftsvertreibung). Similar to political expulsion (in a German context, the expulsion of Germans after the end of World War II immediately comes to mind), this form of migration was enforced and happened involuntarily. Indeed, facing the imminent demolition of his apartment house as well as his district’s decay, one WK 10 inhabitant expressed the same logic by saying: ‘One is downright expelled here!’ (Man wird ja regelrecht vertrieben hier!). My leftist interview partner denounced the fact that the market dictates the movement of people; rather, it prevented them from freely deciding where to stay whilst political leaders refrained from intervening in this enforced process.⁴ Such supposedly enforced mobility, he underlined, could have been prevented. The repercussions the city contemporarily incurred are the outcome of many different and politically initiated failures: German reunification and the politicians who designed it; the privatization of the brown coal complex by imported new West German political elites⁵; and the way in which the market economy is more broadly (not) regulated. His reasoning provides a critical analytical framework. Shrinkage and massive outmigration should not be accepted; in order to understand and stop it, one should embed it into a critical understanding of contemporary global capitalism. In an open letter to the local newspaper and as a response to one of my weekly newspaper columns, he even publicly encouraged me to write this book solely about economic expulsion as the cornerstone of contemporary forms of capitalism.

A last approach was neither really depoliticizing nor repoliticizing the process of shrinkage. It was the common practical approach of most city officials, especially Hoyerswerda’s Lord Mayor. It attempted to focus on what is widely propagated in bureaucratic jargon as the otherwise unspecified chances of shrinkage. As the Lord Mayor repetitively proclaimed, Hoyerswerda was, is and will remain a ‘loveable and liveable city’ (liebens- und lebenswerte Stadt). Like many others, he accepted the process of shrinkage as a given and suggested that the people of Hoyerswerda should focus on their own strengths. It was the responsibility of all inhabitants as much as of the city officials to preserve and use these advantages against looming negative developments. This approach took change itself as the context for practice. It did not develop the idea of a context that could account for this change. As I will argue in Chapter 3, it finally failed to provide new stabilities, also because there is then obviously no need of further politicization. This arguably pre-empts both analytical rigour and the production of new, alternative or different narratives. It also shows the limiting impact that a context can have on human agency in times of crisis.

Figure 1.2 Fake bell button panel, ‘PaintBlock’ building, summer 2008

To sum up the argument thus far, local accounts of shrinkage followed two main contextual logics. One was to accept and naturalize the outmigration of people; the other perspective focused on the potential political regulation of this process by depicting these changes as being unnatural and not given. Both convictions stimulated particular practices: on the one hand, educational practices targeting local youth and their knowledge about Hoyerswerda and its future prospects, as I will discuss in subsequent chapters; on the other hand, a more general critique of contemporary capitalism. To account for such narratives or contexts is all the more important since each contextual construction entailed, as Greenhouse (1996) showed for different cultural conceptions of time, further understandings about one’s agency and how the world works. Do we as analysts simply combine these heterogeneous local metaphysics by constructing a metacontext or by choosing between them – and, if so, on which analytic, political or ethical grounds? What is the context or narrative an anthropologist should establish for Hoyerswerda and the many diverse contexts produced in it? In order to circumvent this question, one solution is to transform these narratives into ethnographic objects (as I have done in this section); another is to scrutinize our own involvement in the contexts we deploy in our academic knowledge practices, which I will pursue in the following three sections.