Sozialistische Stadte zwischen Herrschaft und Selbstbehauptung. Kommunalpolitik, Stadtplanung und Alltag in der DDR

The fruit of a well-conceived collaborative project led by Adelheid von Saldern, this edited volume explores industrial towns and cities in the GDR. Comparison with Eastern and Western European developments is integrated into the project from the beginning. Chapters by Dagmara Jajesniak-Quast, Lukasz Stanek and Ivan Nevzgodin explore developments in Poland and Siberia. The focus is on the relationship between inhabitants (men and women, young and old) and their built environment. The SED's ability to shape and improve such everyday environments was a key plank of its utopian programme to transform society. Towns such as Rostock, Neubrandenburg, Ludwigsfelde, Jena and Schwedt were showcases for what socialism could achieve. Hopes for dramatic improvement in the standard of living reached a peak in the early 1960s. Everyday life in the new towns found expression in the optimistic ‘arrival literature’ (Ankunftsliteratur) fostered by the Bitterfelder Weg (p. 215). In the Honecker era, less dramatically, many young families did achieve an improvement in their standard of living by moving to a new apartment on the edge of town. But by the mid-1980s such hopes were increasingly replaced by disbelief in the utopian project's feasibility (p. 312). Towards the end, the state's ability to transform society was much less evident than the widespread decay, pollution and neglect.

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