Andrew Demshuk has written an engaging, well-researched regional study that focuses on the urban and civic life and built environment of Leipzig in the 1980s. Using the concept of “urban ingenuity,” he shows how local communist officials worked with ordinary East Germans to build and renovate buildings in the last years of communism. The book is filled with fascinating anecdotes and case studies, gleaned from the relevant archives and supplemented with interviews and other first-person accounts. It is a welcome contribution to our understanding of the last decade of communism in East Germany, a still under-researched area.
His chapters are interlinked case studies that provide a picture of the later 1980s in Leipzig. The first explores the ways in which Leipzigers attempted to renovate their historic neighborhoods and homes through petitions (Eingaben) to officials, their own semi-legal efforts, and illegal means like stealing and squatting. Chapter 2 examines the architects who attempted to preserve historic districts and buildings, while the third briefly looks at a 1988 urban planning competition. The fourth chapter focuses on local communist officials and especially their relationship to various Schwarzbauten (illegal structures), including the centerpiece project of a bowling alley. The final chapter examines local pushback against “Berlin,” with consideration of his subject for the collapse of communism.
The focus on Leipzig provides a compelling and rich local history, but the framing of the book frustrates on multiple levels. In particular, Demshuk sets up a series of stark dichotomies that obscure a more complicated, nuanced reality and undercuts the plausibility of his conclusions. Furthermore, Demshuk's description of Leipzig in the 1980s is also unnecessarily charged, and makes it hard for the reader to accept the author's dispassionate judgment of his subject. The crumbling architecture and dirty air of the 1980s GDR are well known, but a constant drumbeat of such terms distracts: “dystopian oceans of decay” (3), “wasteland” (10), “epic deterioration” (17), “choking gloominess” (18), “postapocalyptic cityscape” (47), “apocalyptic atmosphere” (67), “universal monotony” (83), “catastrophic decrepitude…putrid surroundings” (96), “city of ruins” (97), “hopeless dystopia” (151). All this extreme language undercuts faith in a sober analysis.
A more thorough grounding on architectural movements and trends would have aided readers less familiar with this specific subject, especially the pair of (high or utopian) modernism and historic preservation. In particular, “high modernism” is repeatedly evoked as a nefarious bogeyman without a clear explanation; socialist modernism is also referenced without clear definition. Embedded in his analysis is an aesthetic, indeed ideological critique of (high) modernism, which is constantly present but never fully articulated. Relatedly, a clear division is often set up between Plattenbau (pre-fabricated buildings) and the renovation of historic buildings (despite official attempts to meld the two, described and largely dismissed). Contrary to the findings of other historians (Eli Rubin and Ari Sammartino for the GDR, and Kimberly Elman Zarecor for Czechoslovakia, for example), the proponents of Plattenbau are here portrayed uniformly as faceless bureaucrats forcing unwilling citizens into unwanted apartments. Residents of Plattenbau are generally described as overwhelmingly dissatisfied, even when Demshuk's own evidence would seemingly indicate at least a somewhat more positive attitude (30–31). More interviews with those who lived in the Plattenbau in the 1980s, alongside his numerous interlocutors who pursued renovation, would have made Demshuk's conclusions more substantive.
Another binary also occludes a more nuanced understanding of the subject: the dynamic between local actors and “Berlin.” These local actors, both citizens and Leipzig officials, many of whom Demshuk interviewed to great effect, are used to represent “Leipzigers” as a whole, when it is unclear whether that is in fact the case. He relies largely on the work of sociologist Alice Kahl to provide further grounding for his claims on the views of these Leipzigers, but further sources would have strengthened the argument. Equally problematic is the largely monolithic representation of “Berlin,” which here refers to the central authorities. In Demshuk's retelling, they can do no right, extracting scarce resources from Leipzig and blocking needed initiatives. But a more nuanced view of these officials seeps through the text, as they reoriented towards historical preservation already in the 1970s (59ff, 72), sometimes supported policies like a fusion of historical and modern, as well as some policies of historic preservation that Demshuk (and many Leipzigers) seemed to support (70), and backed the 1988 urban planning competition (83). Perhaps most confusing is Demshuk's treatment of the building of the Gewandhaus (completed 1981), “centrally sanctioned and administered” (116) but nonetheless referred to with pride by some of Demshuk's protagonists (137) and praised by Demshuk himself (116, 150).
A constant sub-theme that emerges fully later in the book is the relationship between urban decay and the protests that led to the collapse of communism in 1989–90. Frustration with the quality of life, including housing, is a well-known factor, but Demshuk makes large claims that anger over the lack of historic preservation was a main cause. He offers considerable evidence, but it is unclear how widely shared or influential these views were.
There is much to praise about this fascinating study. But its tendencies towards moralizing, along with tendentious language and analysis, distract from and even undermine its intended arguments.
