Postsocialist Dialectics or Postindustrial Critique? On Discomfort in a Former Socialist Model City in East Germany

Felix Ringel

Europe-Asia Studies, 2021, vol. 73, issue 9, 1748-1767

Abstract: Over the last 30 years, the inhabitants of Hoyerswerda, the German Democratic Republic’s second socialist model city, have struggled through de-industrialisation, unemployment, outmigration and urban decay. With the help of Karl Polanyi’s concept of ‘countermovement’, this essay scrutinises their various critiques of contemporary forms of capitalism. I investigate how these critiques help them to navigate their hometown’s prospects in the postindustrial era in order to rethink more generally the temporal implications of the social sciences’ conceptualisations of postsocialist critique. I approach my interlocutors’ expressions of discomfort amidst current political and economic crises as complex negotiations of the postindustrial present that are not determined by their socialist past.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09668136.2021.1998380 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:ceasxx:v:73:y:2021:i:9:p:1748-1767

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/ceas20

DOI: 10.1080/09668136.2021.1998380

Access Statistics for this article

Europe-Asia Studies is currently edited by Terry Cox

More articles in Europe-Asia Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().