Back to the Post-Industrial Future: An Ethnography of Germany's Fastest-Shrinking City by Felix Ringel (review)

How do urban communities deal with the loss of their future? This is the central question Felix Ringel asks in his ethnographic study of Hoyerswerda in Saxony, often described as Germany's fastest-shrinking city. Hoyerswerda was planned as a socialist model town from the late 1950s onwards and experienced a rapid growth in the socialist era, with its Neustadt entirely built from prefabricated concrete blocks. However, following reunification, the privatization of the mining and energy industry that had provided the foundation for Hoyerswerda's postwar boom resulted in the loss of jobs and perspectives in the city. Hoyerswerda began to shrink rapidly from just under 70,000 inhabitants in 1988 to a mere 33,000 in 2016, and one housing block after the other fell victim to demolition. With high unemployment rates, an aging population and a growing neo-Nazi scene, Hoyerswerda became widely seen as a city without a future.

Ringel lived in Hoyerswerda for sixteen months in 2008–2009 and fully immersed himself in the local community of the dwindling city: he interviewed local politicians and activists, spoke with members of the clubs and associations, and boarded with local families to understand how the inhabitants of Hoyerswerda engage with different notions of the city's future. One of the great strengths of the book is Ringel's ability to strike the balance between capturing the richness of life in the community and, from a critical distance, carefully dissecting the locals' own assessment of their prospects. Back to the Post-Industrial Future is not a study of everyday life in the city per se, nor is it a history of Hoyerswerda's recent past. Instead, Ringel focuses on political debates, urban planning campaigns, or conversations within the community through which the future of the city is negotiated. The local really matters in this story: the author does not simply see Hoyerswerda as an example of larger phenomena, but examines how broader structural changes interact with the local context. This richness of local meanings is still too often missing from explorations of change in contemporary Germany.

In his stimulating analysis of official and private attitudes, Ringel shows that in Hoyerswerda the future has been rendered a problem in its own right—a phenomenon he describes as "enforced futurism" (23). He develops his argument in five thematic chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the locals' different attempts to contextualize shrinkage, while chapter 2 more specifically focuses on the engagement with the socialist and Nazi past in the city. The third and fourth chapters are devoted to attempts to envision an alternative future through urban planning interventions and the role of affect in local politics. Chapter 5 continues to investigate this search for a viable future and shows how the inhabitants of Hoyerswerda have tried to invent new "traditions" after 1990. The conclusion ties together the concepts developed in the previous chapters and also offers the author's reflections on his more recent return to Hoyerswerda, an important addition given that the ethnographic research at the heart of the book was carried out a whole decade ago.

For scholars of post-Wende Germany, Ringel offers a refreshing perspective that questions many of the established narratives about the legacy of socialism. A central strength of the book is that it does not rely on simplistic interpretations of Hoyerswerda's problems, which have often been explained with the failure of socialist planning or the unforeseen negative outcomes of reunification. Ringel repeatedly makes clear that he approaches the city "not with an eye on the past, but with a focus on the future" (55). In his refusal to locate Hoyerswerda's problems in its socialist past, he adds to a body of recent work by Eli Rubin and Annemarie Sammartino, which has reconsidered socialist model cities as more than just a failed utopia. Revealing the complex range of factors behind Hoyerswerda's recent...