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

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