Street lighting and the uneasy coexistence of socialist and capitalist urban imaginaries

Introduction

Over late-night ice cream in Eisenhüttenstadt, Germany, my friend Gerda told me how frustrated she was to be billed for the street lamps in front of her apartment building. It was 2014, and ever since the German government had pledged, three years prior, to divest from nuclear energy and decrease the nation’s carbon footprint, the price of electricity had steadily risen; hence, the city’s recent decision to distribute some electricity costs among its residents. Gerda was an ardent environmentalist; she attended rallies in Berlin, about an hour and a half west of this mid-sized city on the German–Polish border, to promote the policies that drove up electricity costs. Yet Eisenhüttenstadt had once been part of East Germany, and Gerda spoke longingly of the socialist era, when residents contributed to the city’s upkeep with obligatory labor rather than money. Today, she said, people felt squeezed dry as the bills piled up: façade repairs, garbage collection, lawn care, and now street lighting. “I pay for every little thing,” Gerda said.

I pay for the lamp in front of my house—and I had no say in the matter. And the same for the building next door, and next door to them, and so on. No wonder people here have become mean—they either cry or they become mean.

This meanness—or sadness—was, I would later learn, not a response to any financial burden that street lamps might pose, but rather a response to the way in which they brought materiality and visibility to an urban palimpsest (Huyssen, 2003). ¹ Street lamps are at once sensory objects and objects of urban planning. At the same time that they provide illumination, they also reflect the sociopolitical regimes that build and operate them, and the imaginaries deployed therein (Appel et al., 2018a; Degani, 2013). And as the material artifact of political logics, street lamps can present urban planners and municipal officials with unexpected frictions (Tsing, 2005: 6) as they work to adapt their material surroundings to changing political logics. This paper examines one such instance of friction: in 2014, in response to rising costs that resulted from the Energywende ² —Germany’s push toward near total reliance on renewable energy—Eisenhüttenstadt’s municipal government privatized around 10% of the city’s street lamps. ³ I consider this change within the broader context of Eisenhüttenstadt’s social and technological development, and examine not street lamps themselves, but rather the ways in which they reflect upon changing conditions in the sociopolitical landscape, as well as on the misapprehension of post-socialist territory as a tabula rasa in which capitalist relationships to space might be implemented wholesale (Verdery, 2003, 2008).

In this article, I bring together ongoing conversations in anthropology around post-socialism (Gal, 2002; Humphrey, 2002; Verdery, 1996, 2003, 2008) and landscape (Mathews, 2018; Tsing, 2017a, 2017b), and, informed by thinking about infrastructure (Appel et al., 2018a; Larkin, 2013) and ruination (Stoler, 2013, 2016), investigate how street lamps in Eisenhüttenstadt call attention to the ruptures and continuities between the socialist and capitalist urban imaginaries that have been successively deployed in Eisenhüttenstadt over the city’s 70-year history. Moreover, I show how residents with strong memories of the socialist era continue to struggle with the overwhelming boundedness—of tracts of land, of spaces over which one feels a sense of ownership, even of one’s own body—inherent to capitalist urbanism. ⁴ In doing so, I also illustrate the “uneven temporal sedimentation” (Stoler, 2016: 347) of socialism’s ruins—the fact that the impacts of defunct sociopolitical regimes unfold unpredictably and can emerge long after a regime’s demise.

Eisenhüttenstadt, the object of my ethnographic research, is a totalitarian planned city, founded in 1950 and imagined as a steel manufacturing hub and socialist utopia. Originally called Stalinstadt—and referred to in official documents as East Germany’s Model Socialist City—its products would power the rise of cities across the Eastern Bloc and its design, focused on the needs of young families, would be a model of humane urban living (Durth et al., 1998; Leucht, 1956; Ludwig, 2000). Bronze sculptures line the streets and municipal buildings have grand mid-century-modern flourishes: ornate brass balconies, chandeliers, and door handles. Low-rise apartment buildings, mostly built in a Stalinist neoclassical style, surround courtyards replete with playgrounds, soccer pitches, and mosaics of smiling children. During the socialist era, each neighborhood had its own 24-hour daycare, preschool, elementary school, shopping area, and services such as barbers, bakers, and cobblers.

Today, the city suffers from deindustrialization, urban decay, and a shrinking, aging population. The services in most neighborhoods are shuttered, fountains lay empty, and kiddie pools are filled in, their outlines still discernable in some courtyards. Thousands of apartments have been demolished. Yet Eisenhüttenstadt’s city center is Germany’s largest historically protected site; 232 acres of the city are under federal historic preservation for their importance to East German architectural history. The area cannot be demolished or substantially altered, and buildings must be scrupulously maintained to adhere to architects’ original vision (Pehnert, 2016). As a result, Eisenhüttenstadt is a city that strongly bears the imprint of East German socialism, both explicitly, through historic preservation, and implicitly, though its obsolete architectural styles and public art, including a five-story mosaic along the city’s main boulevard that still bears an image of the East German flag.

As Katherine Verdery (2003) has established, the post-socialist transition from state-owned real estate to privately owned real estate was really two processes: that of private property creation and private property restitution. Following German reunification in 1991, land that had been expropriated by the East German government or, immediately prior, the Third Reich, was returned to its pre-expropriation owners. In the case of Eisenhüttenstadt, the land on which nearly the entire city was built had been mortgaged in the 1920s by a long-defunct electric company, and there was no entity to which the property could be returned (Werner, 2001). The city is thus in a relatively unique position wherein its transition to capitalism has been, nearly entirely, one of private property creation rather than restitution. The two organizations which controlled real estate during the socialist era, called the GeWi and EWG, ⁵ continue to own the same holdings that they held under socialism, only now as private companies—the former as a corporation in which the city is the sole shareholder, the latter as a non-profit cooperative. There are privately owned single family homes and businesses in the outlying areas of Fürstenberg, Schönfließ, and Diehlo—medieval villages that were incorporated into Eisenhüttenstadt in 1961—as well as in small pockets of Eisenhüttenstadt proper, but the vast majority of the city’s real estate, a little over 75%, consists of rental apartment buildings and commercial properties owned by the GeWi or EWG (B.B.S.M. Brandenburgische Beratungsgesellschaft für Stadterneuerung und Modernisierung, 2015: 20).

The fact that the majority of Eisenhüttenstadt’s residents are not landowners whose property was returned to them but rather former socialist citizens on whom a system of private property was foisted makes clear, as Verdery (2003) writes, that property is a “western native category” (15), one that emerged out of a specific set of historical circumstances and which carries with it expectations about power relationships and value creation that are often mistakenly perceived to be “universal, natural, and neutral” (17). Eisenhüttenstadt was not planned according to a spatial logic in which individual elements in the built environment were assessed with regard to their ability to produce financial profit. Rather, attention was paid to how individual elements contributed to the urban atmosphere as a whole, a spatial imagination that imprinted itself deeply upon socialist citizens. As a result, the marriage of enclosure and improvement that defines capitalist property (Wood, 2002) and the boundaries produced by its implementation are not perceived by my informants as universal, natural, or neutral. Indeed, informants’ memories of learning to navigate those boundaries after their relationship to urban space was already fully formed reminds them of the contrast between socialist and capitalist urbanism—and of the fact that capitalist notions of private property were not always thus.

Urban landscapes are not static vistas, but rather “units of heterogeneity” (Tsing, 2017a: 7) that recruit time and space at varying scales. As such, their key components shift with each beholder. Anthropologist Andrew S. Mathews (2018) therefore suggests that we should speak not of landscapes but of throughscapes, “complex time machines” (392) able to recruit different histories, narratives, and ontologies depending on the components that come to the fore and the scale at which they are perceived. The varied reactions to Eisenhüttenstadt’s urban landscape can be conceived as a reflection of the variety of overlapping throughscapes inherently present in an urban landscape. Moreover, while landscapes, with their fractally reproducible heterogeneity, are a particularly useful lens for understanding the coexistence of human and non-human ontologies, throughscapes, with their “multiple beginnings and storylines” (Mathews, 2018: 409), emphasize the concurrent histories and multiplicity of remainders present in a given landscape, and potentially available to the humans who encounter them.

In this article, I describe the various throughscapes perceived by socialist planners, by capitalist planners, and by Eisenhüttenstadt’s residents—historical narratives whose recognition is provoked by street lamps. All three throughscapes speak to the ability of urban infrastructures to operate with different poetic resonances (Larkin, 2013) for different people and at different times, even as their material forms remain the same. ⁶

This article draws on ethnographic and archival research that I conducted in Eisenhüttenstadt between 2014 and 2016. I lived in Eisenhüttenstadt during that time and undertook participant observation, formal and informal interviews with residents, architects, urban planners, and city officials, and archival research at the Eisenhüttenstadt City Archive, the German National Archive, and the Brandenburg County Archive. In this article, I begin by tracing the history of street lighting in Eisenhüttenstadt, outlining the strategies deployed by socialist planners and the perception of street lamps during the socialist era and shortly thereafter. I then turn to citizens’ present-day concerns and understandings of public space, primarily through the lens of a town hall meeting that took place in February 2016. Third, I examine the perspective of contemporary municipal officials, and how their throughscapes are defined by histories separate from those with which my informants are most concerned. In closing, I examine how the political developments that led to the privatization of street lamps reinvigorate the temporal dimensions of socialist urbanism. Throughout, I track how the contrasting and opposing urban imaginaries that predominated during the socialist and capitalist eras have informed citizens’ perceptions of urban space and government’s relationship thereto.

All for one: Light, darkness, and urban space under socialism

East Germany was profligate with its electricity use, relying on subsidized hydrocarbon imports from the Soviet Union. Despite having a per capita income less than two-thirds of West Germany, a 1987 study by the United Nations concluded that East Germany’s per capita electricity consumption was nearly one and a half times that of West Germany and significantly higher than that of other socialist countries (Pfaff, 2006: 34–36). ⁷

Eisenhüttenstadt was no exception to this profligacy, and its street lamps existed at the nexus of two genealogies: the socialist glorification of technological progress—epitomized by Lenin’s proclamation that “communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country”—and western European urban development that saw that advent of public street lighting in the 19th century, when street lights were synonymous with the bright future that would be delivered by modern technology (Benjamin, 2002; Schivelbusch, 1995; Schlör, 1998). Eisenhüttenstadt’s infrastructure may have been built in the name of socialist progress, but the perception of infrastructure nonetheless owed much to capitalist urbanism.

Street lighting reflected the sentiment that Stephen Kotkin (1997) describes in The Magnetic Mountain: “for [socialist] authorities, no less than many ordinary people, their buildings had to … make one feel proud, make one see that the proletariat … would have its attractive buildings” (119). Herbert Härtel, Eisenhüttenstadt’s chief architect from 1958 to 1976, spearheaded the design of the city’s showcase boulevard, Leninallee. When I interviewed him in May 2016, he explained to me his motivation for illuminating Leninallee with neon signs and lit-up glass vitrines:

Socialist businesses didn’t have advertisements. The businesses just didn’t need them. People knew where to go to get their bread, and they went there. [The baker] didn’t have to guarantee that he made the best bread.

This conception of urban life as indivisible from the bustle of neon and crowds derives in part from East German planners’ distinction between a city (Stadt) and a settlement (Siedlung)—a distinction that was integral to Eisenhüttenstadt’s foundations, and which fostered an imagination of what it meant to be urban that relied on widespread engagement with public space at all hours of the day and night. A settlement, a term used only derisively, was what Americans might call a bedroom community—a place devoted to residential housing that did nothing to draw its residents into shared spaces and communal life. But a city—a socialist city—was a place where apartment buildings were designed in concert with the schools, shops, green spaces, and cultural offerings that would service them. It was a place where people of all socioeconomic positions could enjoy amenities such as theaters, dance halls, and department stores, and a sense of community derived from widespread civic and cultural engagement (Bauakademie der DDR, 1951: 36–38; Durth et al., 1998: 365). After all, as informants such as Härtel reminded me, in a command economy, planners would not have to worry about cultural organizations choosing to operate only in major cities. Without major variations in either income or real estate prices, planners would not have to worry about factory workers—the majority of Eisenhüttenstadt’s populace—becoming ghettoized in slums, or disconnected from the city in outlying, poorly serviced neighborhoods. Even today, all of Eisenhüttenstadt’s residential neighborhoods are within walking distance of the city center.

The city/settlement divide also led to the conception of urban space as a single totalized unit. Kurt Leucht, Eisenhüttenstadt’s chief architect, recalled late in his life what a privilege it had been to build an enormous neoclassical theater when the city had only 500 residents. Under capitalism, he imagined, a profit-minded employer would have evaluated the potential profitability of each lot and would not have provided outlay for cultural amenities until the city had a large enough population that something like a theater might turn a profit. But under socialism, Leucht (1956) could be more concerned with building “a city in the fullest sense of the word” (18), as he put it at the time, than with the financial profitability of each component. (Of course the construction of cultural amenities without an eye toward profitability was not unique to socialism, but East German planners of Leucht’s generation described their building practices as uniquely socialist. ⁸ ) Leucht (1993) called the city a “homunculus” to illustrate that it was conceived as a single, fully formed being rather than an assemblage of discrete elements. And he was not alone in this mentality. Jens Beige, an architect currently practicing in Eisenhüttenstadt, told me that when he was starting his career during the socialist era, he was of the mindset that, “there are no empty lots, only empty space.” Lots were a capitalist invention, an artificial division of continuous space relying on boundaries that existed only in the minds of those who adhered to them, and only for the purposes of capitalist valuation, sale, and profit-seeking. This conception of the city as a single, continuous unit would ultimately have profound consequences for residents’ understanding of urban space during the socialist era.

When Härtel proudly recounted, “finally we had a beautiful main street, shining with light,” the implication was that these lamps recruited ideas about urbanity and modernity that reached back to the Soviet Union and through the East German city/settlement debates. Street lamps were a centerpiece of the urban landscape as Härtel saw it. Yet, my informants told me, street lamps were often invisible to socialist citizens. In a socialist city, the darkness or illumination of a given street was not something that warranted attention. Darkness was not perceived as the absence of a protecting, surveilling light, nor a dangerous space punctuated by the safety of street lamps. ⁹ Darkness and illumination were not categories that my informants thought about; it was only after the collapse of the East German state that they began to perceive and react to changes in nighttime illumination. For these residents, street lamps recall not a history of socialist pride in technological progress, but the loss of the socialist era and the palimpsestic experience of everyday life that living among reminders of that loss engenders.

One Sunday I ran into Hanna, a woman in her 80s, on the city bus. The bus made irregular stops on Sundays, and we griped about how inadequate public transit often forced us to walk long distances. Then she told me, “In the GDR it was alright for a woman to walk around alone at night. Not anymore.” I asked her the reason, and whether there was more crime today. “Naja,” she said, “We were in socialism. All for one, like the Musketeers. You weren’t afraid that someone would be one for one.” She swung her elbows in reference to the selfishness and competition endemic to “elbow society,” the derogatory term that ardent socialists used for capitalism. Besides, with everyone provided for—no homelessness, no unemployment—who would have a reason to rob their fellow citizen under cover of darkness? With that, we reached her stop and Hanna got off the bus to start her long walk.

Women were not the only residents for whom capitalism ushered in a changed relationship to night. Van, an immigrant from Vietnam in his 40s, had lived in Eisenhüttenstadt since 1986. When I met him in 2015, he expounded on the myriad changes he saw after reunification: the transformation of Eisenhüttenstadt from a vibrant young city into a Rentnerstadt, a city of retired people, from a city where residents cared collectively for their lawns and apartment buildings to one where care was outsourced, and most of all, from a place where people said Guten Tag on the streets and where there was no prejudice against foreigners, where you went to a disco—when there were discos—and everyone was friendly, to one where people kept their heads down and eyed him suspiciously. He blamed the opening of the regional asylum processing center, in 1991, which introduced people he saw as desperate, without ties to the community, who might mug you, steal your bike, or break into your apartment. But to Van, the introduction of a foreign, allegedly criminal element itself introduced a general hatred for foreigners. He used to walk around at night all the time, all over the city, home from the disco in the early morning, and not think twice about it. Girls did too, he said. But after reunification he wouldn’t consider it. It was a privilege he noticed only in its absence.

For Van and Hanna, street lamps only became a perceptible part of the urban landscape with the introduction of capitalism. Like many elements of the built environment in the years following East Germany’s collapse, street lamps took on the ability to provoke histories and narratives of loss—the loss of predictable life trajectories (Rennefanz, 2013), familiar sights, smells, and sounds (Berdahl, 1999), educational, social, and political norms, and most notably, of the role of the individual within the social order.

Street lamps made visible the fact that one needed to be able to evaluate passersby—indeed, to surveil them—for one’s own safety. This new attention to individual self-interest reflected the loss of the city as a space of shared ownership, a space where every citizen was imagined as equally invested in the protection and well-being of a given apartment, bicycle, or body. And, as such, this new attention reflected a shift in residents’ overall conception of the city: from a homunculus, one indivisible unit, to one in which ever-more-specific boundaries of individual ownership had to be constantly projected onto one’s surroundings. The boundaries of that over which Hanna or Van could claim ownership—and which, by extension, warranted their attention and, at times, guardedness—was no longer shared among all citizens and coterminous with the boundaries of the city.

Not public lighting: Street lighting, ownership, and governance under capitalism

In 2011, the Eisenhüttenstadt city government began to overhaul its street lighting ¹⁰ in response to two related factors: new federal standards for renewable energy and the subsequent rise of electricity costs nationwide. Germany’s Renewable Energy Law (the EEG, or Erneuerbare Energien Gesetz) was first enacted in 1991 and revised in 2011 following the Fukushima nuclear disaster. That year the German parliament announced that the country would be free of nuclear energy by 2040, and, to jump-start the renewable energy market, parliament guaranteed renewable energy producers generous rates of return (Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Energie, 2017a).

When electricity companies bought power from these producers, the companies were obligated to pay the guaranteed rate of compensation regardless of market values; the difference between the market price and the price guaranteed to producers is called the EEG redistribution. As more renewable energy producers entered the market, the cost of production sank, but the EEG redistribution cost rose. The pattern continued such that by 2014 the average price of electricity nationwide was 10.5 cents per kilowatt hour, 4.2 cents for the electricity, and 6.3 cents for the EEG redistribution (Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Energie, 2017b).

That year, the Eisenhüttenstadt city government determined that it could save, at minimum, around €65,000 annually by turning street lamps over to the city’s two real estate companies. In 2015, the city transferred responsibility for the material and monetary upkeep of 448 lamps to the GeWi and EWG, 317 to the GeWi and 131 to the EWG. The lamps were located on property throughout the city owned by the real estate companies, most often in the courtyards of apartment buildings or other areas with limited through-traffic (Neiser, 2016).

While the GeWi, a corporation in which the city is the only shareholder, and the EWG, a non-profit, are not tasked with maximizing profits for their shareholders, they are nonetheless private institutions. They have an obligation to remain solvent in order to maintain the structural integrity of their real estate holdings, and their finances are separate from those of the city; hence, this cost-sharing measure. However, because of the limited number of landlords and the fact that both landlords benefit when property values increase, the real estate companies operate in cooperation with the city government under the logic that coordinated efforts in urban planning benefit all three entities.

The real estate companies could, more easily than the city government, devise a new stream of income to cover the cost of street lighting; they distributed the costs among their renters as an additional operating cost, a standard component of apartment rentals in Germany. Operating costs (Betriebskosten) are non-negotiable and billed annually, and generally go toward paying communal tasks overseen by a landlord: garbage collection or hiring a company to periodically clean an apartment building’s stairwell. My lease, when I signed it in October 2014, stated that beginning in 2015, all renters would pay for the street lamps in the inner courtyards of their apartment buildings and any passageways that might be adjacent; the costs would be distributed among the residents of each building and proportional to each apartment’s square footage. For EWG residents, the cost in 2015 was between €4 and €8 annually (Neiser, 2016). The GeWi costs ranged from €1.75 to €8 annually (Neiser, 2016).

It was February 2016. At a town hall meeting, an older woman stood up and asked about the status of the plan to turn “public lighting” over to the city’s renters. The mayor, Dagmar Püschel, answered with a forced laugh, “Not public lighting I hope.” Oliver Fünke, the GeWi chairman, explained that the lamps in question were not considered public because they stood on ground owned by the GeWi and EWG. He knew that this plan was not ideal for residents—paying for lamps was “not much fun”—but he had to work with the city council to find a solution to rising energy costs.

The woman remained standing, an indication that her question had not been fully answered. “The other thing,” she said, “is that they used to be free, and now they cost money.” Mayor Püschel, sat to Fünke’s left. She leaned toward him and, in a stage whisper clearly audible from where I sat in the back row, said, “They were never free. The city always paid.” Fünke responded to the audience directly, “Yes, they were free to you.”

The mayor later spoke of how exceptional the city had been to have paid for street lighting up to that point. Her paternalistic tone communicated to citizens that they should be grateful for what they have, even if it’s a diminished version of what the government had previously provided. But having to pay for lighting when it was previously perceived as free reminds citizens of the limits of and decline in those provisions. And with many street lamps permanently disabled, they serve as a further reminder of the failure and loss of the East German era, and—for citizens old enough to remember—the sense of collective endeavor that was integral to it.

The gaps in illumination or dark sides of the street where lamps are disabled illustrate how previous generations and previous iterations of urban and technopolitical ideals leave their imprints on the material world. The dark gaps gesture to both past and present, revealing how traces of the past force themselves onto the present even when the ideals which they embody have not survived. As such, they illustrate what Antina von Schnitzler (2016: 30) calls the “illiberal foundations” on which the liberal order rests—that neoliberal reformers must grapple with the political and social histories embedded in the infrastructures that they inherit, and that what is often imagined as the implementation of a fundamentally new logic is in fact the reconfiguration of a thing with its own histories and associations.

Perhaps citizens’ attention to street lighting is rooted in the specificity and materiality of the transaction. This is the crux of the throughscape: it is not merely an idea that enters one’s mind but a landscape that comes into view, organized around an element physically present in the environment. Unlike the non-specific goods funded by tax revenue, the payment scheme for privatized lights draws attention to the material qualities of the built environment—you pay for this lamp in front of your window. And that lamp is a material trace of the city’s history. The experience of viewing it is bundled, to use Webb Keane’s (2003) term, with the decision to lay cable along the banks of the Oder River, and with the desire of East German planners to build the kind of city that needs street lamps, bustling at all time of day and night. Infrastructures constitute a key point of interface between citizens and government. Yet, for those aware of Eisenhüttenstadt’s history, they are also inextricably bound to the city’s failure to live up to the hopes and expectations that were originally engineered into it, including the hope and expectation that the socialist project would endure.

Most of all, the exchange at the town hall meeting illustrates how citizens continue to grapple with—and contest—a shifting boundary between the public and private, even decades after German reunification. At the meeting, the word “public” (öffentlich) was used to refer to public goods, things that are paid for and used collectively and that contribute to collective well-being. Yet the boundary between public and private has multiple, overlapping definitions, and is always difficult to pin down. As Jeff Weintraub (1997) describes it, the distinction between public and private is drawn, most broadly, along either lines of visibility or lines of collectivity, the former being a distinction between that which is legible by others and that which is hidden from society, and the latter being a distinction between that which supports individual self-interest and that which supports a collective goal.

In the exchange between Eisenhüttenstadt’s mayor and her constituent, the lines between these two types of distinction appear blurred. The constituent had assumed that the space outside her home, by virtue of its visibility, would be considered public—anyone could gather in her building’s courtyard and utilize the lamps’ light, and any actions undertaken there would be potentially visible to the buildings’ residents. But the mayor, in her mock horror—“not public lighting I hope”—indicated that although a space might be perceived as public via the distinction of visibility, it was the distinction of collectivity that should be considered primary, and the lamps were paid for and operated by a private company.

During the East German era, spaces that were considered public via the distinction of visibility were also public via the distinction of collectivity. With no notion of private property, collectively used urban spaces were imagined as serving the community at large. Today, what was once a spatially defined and absolute division between public and private has instead become an ambiguous and indecipherable boundary. With no isomorphic correspondence between public spaces of visibility and public spaces of collectivity, a citizen’s understanding of the status of urban space is dependent on that citizen’s knowledge of or relationship to it. Who owns a given space, who uses it, manages it, and pays for its upkeep? A landscape formerly eminently legible was now riddled with an invisible patchwork of boundaries. And no clues in the physical environment could make that patchwork intelligible, further compounding the capitalist landscape’s opacity.

Furthermore, during the socialist era, the imagination of the city as wholly within a collectively owned public sphere fostered a sense of proprietorship over urban space. With the loss of isomorphic boundaries between public and private came a loss of proprietorship over the space outside one’s home. This is the rupture to which Hanna and Van referred when they told me about the self-interest that swept in alongside “elbow society”—the startling idea that damage to something within one’s personal boundaries could be considered separately from damage to something within the collectively held boundaries of the city at large.

Eisenhüttenstadt’s earliest residents had seen the city rise from a forested area scattered with Nazi-era industrial buildings. They worked collectively to maintain the city’s communal spaces, and they appreciated the effort that went into building a city on a site where, only a few decades prior, the East German national newspaper wrote that “the hares and foxes bid each other good night” (Pfannstiel, 1951)—a turn of phrase that evokes an area untouched by human development. The isomorphism of the boundaries of individual and collective ownership was emotionally resonant, fostering pride in the social experiment that was socialist urbanism. And the fracturing of those boundaries resulted in a sadness—similar to that which Gerda referenced when she told me about her bills—whose provocation was not exclusively the result of conversations about street lights.

Helga, now in her early 90s, had fled a traumatic childhood and young adulthood in Berlin—Allied bombings, a failed marriage. When she moved to Eisenhüttenstadt in 1961, she fully embraced the idea of building a new life alongside the construction of a new city. The region’s sandy soil could only grow small Kiefer trees, and more nutrient-rich soil had to be imported to support Kurt Leucht’s landscaping plan. Helga watched as massive amounts of soil were trucked in, and as diverse flora took root. She wished that younger generations would recognize the city as an “artificial milieu” (Foucault, 2009: 22), not a naturally occurring backdrop to the unfolding of human life, but a product of human ingenuity and effort not to be taken for granted.

We were discussing the term Rasen-Latscher, lawn-stomper, a derogatory term for someone who cuts across a lawn—I had recently been out walking with a group of retirees when one cut across a road median and the rest shouted “lawn-stomper” in reproach. Helga told me, “people who have been here since the beginning know how many thousands of cubic meters of soil had to be brought here.” The city’s greenery, she said, “was put here with so much love, and put here with so much work, people who were here at the beginning always made sure that it would stay like that.” Today you found desire lines everywhere—unplanned paths trodden across grassy areas, usually on a diagonal where sidewalks border a rectangular lawn. But unlike younger residents—or more careless older ones—Helga would never cut across a lawn, trampling grass whose presence was so hard-won, just as she would never stomp with muddy boots across the carpet in her own apartment.

Gerda told me how, as a child, she had tended to the cherry trees on Rose Hill with her Free German Youth brigade, a socialist organization in which all children enrolled. (While enrollment was not mandatory, abstaining brought substantial political consequences.) Adults, too, communally cared for public green spaces through brigades organized by both their work places and apartment buildings. Gerda said that during the East German era, the trees were well respected because they had belonged to everyone. Today, she lamented, people break the branches off the cherry trees because they belong to no one. Such is the loss of coterminous boundaries of ownership. Yet those same people who break the branches ask you to take your shoes off in their apartments, she said. People have a sense of ownership only over what they pay for—or at least, though Gerda didn’t say it, what they perceive themselves to be paying for—and they are mindful to take care of the things that they think of themselves as owning.

City officials, like their constituents, saw the socialist past as essential to informing contemporary debates about the respective roles of government and citizens. But unlike their constituents, officials did not see a lamp—or a branch, or a trampled lawn—and recall the introduction of capitalist private property. Instead, street lamps were sobering reminders of the city’s struggles, its shrinking tax base and aging population. Street lamps provoked an entirely different throughscape, one whose story was of contrast between a city once flush with manpower and state-supplied material goods and a city with shrinking human and financial resources.

Architect and city official Gabriele Haubold had friends and neighbors who, like Gerda, perceived a €2.50 bill to be an undue burden, a reminder of an individual’s powerlessness in the face of neoliberal capitalism, and happily recalled a time before operating costs. But Haubold saw the love that people professed for East German collective maintenance of the urban landscape as shortsighted. She, like I, had heard residents wax nostalgic about state-mandated spring cleanings and chore charts. But if you handed someone a paintbrush today and said, “Go paint the antechamber of your apartment building,” she said, they were not likely to happily accept. She explained that the city government could easily organize the collective care of apartment buildings or public spaces but did not do so under the assumption that residents would be reluctant to participate. From her perspective, the upkeep of communal space during the East German era had often felt like a burden. Haubold had grown up in Eisenhüttenstadt during the socialist era, and in her less-than-rosy memory of communal maintenance, if you were tired, or sick, or had family obligations, you still had to clean the stairs. ¹¹ According to Haubold, paying for professional cleaners, gardeners, and garbage collectors via operating costs was the lesser of two evils. But she found it difficult to convince her constituents, blinded by nostalgia.

Moreover, though Haubold often sought to dispel Eisenhüttenstadt’s reputation as an aging city, the fact remains that its average age has risen dramatically since the socialist era. During the 1960s, Eisenhüttenstadt had the youngest median age in East Germany (Deutsches Institut für Urbanistik, 2006: 81). As of 2014, around 15% of residents were over 75 (Stadtverwaltung Eisenhüttenstadt, 2014). It is therefore likely that city administrators assume that there is not a high enough proportion of able-bodied residents to reliably provide care for public spaces.

When I asked Oliver Fünke, the GeWi chairman, about the exchange that had taken place at the town hall meeting, he replied, citing the average cost that citizens pay for street lighting, “It’s not about the four Euro per year. It’s about the principle of the thing.” Taking on the voice of a hypothetical citizen, he groused, “I don’t want to!”. Fünke recognized that older residents on fixed incomes felt overwhelmed by ever-mounting bills, but to him the more serious issue was that citizens, no longer contributing bodily to their city’s upkeep, had lost sight of the massive efforts that went into maintaining their city’s built environment. Citizens, Fünke said, did not understand how hard it was to maintain infrastructures and provide services with a radically shrunken tax base. Over the last two decades, Eisenhüttenstadt has lost nearly half its population—it has gone from a city of around 59,000 inhabitants in 1989 to just under 27,000 in 2018 (Lötsch, 2018)—and while massive demolitions have consolidated urban space, the most recent survey, conducted in 2014, showed a vacancy rate of 11% (B.B.S.M. Brandenburgische Beratungsgesellschaft für Stadterneuerung und Modernisierung, 2015: 21), compared with a national average of 7.9% (Statistisches Bundesamt, 2016). The highest vacancy rate recorded in 2014 was 13.8% in Saxony and the lowest was 4.4% in Hamburg (Statistisches Bundesamt, 2016). Despite having found a solution that was, in his opinion, much better than the alternatives—letting street lamps go dark or having the city take on huge amounts of debt—Fünke was frustrated that the city, having handed the operation of some street lamps over to private companies, was now seen as, in his words, “the bad guy.”

Mayor Püschel expressed similar sentiments. At the February 2016 town hall meeting, she said that many other municipalities in the region had entirely privatized their street lights shortly after German reunification—residents of Eisenhüttenstadt were only bearing 10% of the cost of illuminating their streets. But a groan went through the audience when she called the privatization of street lamps “normal.” ¹² Püschel went on to say that she wishes she could un-privatize street lamps but, with shrinking tax revenue, she “has to manage with less and less.”

It seemed that Püschel could not get her constituents to perceive their city as one in which late industrial decline forced the administration to make certain trade-offs. The different throughscapes that had crystalized around street lamps for Püschel and for the audience seemed mutually unintelligible. Their conversations were at cross-purposes. And the effort and struggles that went into maintaining the city’s infrastructure seemed obscured behind a monolithic image of the city government as boss, bill collector, and bad guy.

Conclusion

I have sought throughout this article to outline the ways in which the social history embedded in and evoked by infrastructure foments a confrontation between the socialist and capitalist urban imaginaries. I aim here to focus on the continuities between them. In particular, I find that the Energiewende allows the socialist urban chronotope (Bakhtin, 2010) to reemerge in a new form: a promised era of security and satisfaction will commence on some future date, but for now it remains only hinted at via the built environment.

This throughscape, in which street lamps simultaneously evoke antipodal histories and temporalities—the socialist valorization of technology, with its blindness to excessive resource consumption, and the Energiewende, with its awareness of the earth’s fragility—illustrates what Howe et al. (2015) call the “paradox of infrastructure.” Infrastructures are radically future-oriented, embodying, in their material durability, the expectation that contemporary technologies will continue to act on the world in predictable ways. Yet they are also always tied to the past through their inevitable and immediate march toward obsolescence (Howe et al., 2015). They are inextricable entanglements of social and material ruins, “concrete instantiations of visions of the future” (Gupta, 2018: 63), the moment they are built, and visions of futures past from thereon. Indeed, this paradoxical quality is what enables them to act as throughscapes. And street lamps in Eisenhüttenstadt are particularly paradoxical. Their silhouettes—concrete lampposts with circular corrugated glass lampshades—are recognizable to the trained eye as distinctly socialist, and lampposts along main streets still bear metal fittings where flags would be inserted during celebratory marches. Glowing with the bright blue light of LED bulbs, they are reminders that infrastructures often keep the past present, available to perception and, as such, durable, even when they are intended as instruments of disruption.

Socialist cities were considered machines for conditioning ideal socialist citizens—an idea drawn from early 20th century modernism (Le Corbusier, 1985). But that conditioning was not only a process of constraining or anticipating citizens’ movement. Susan Buck-Morss writes of Lenin’s decision to erect statues of socialist revolutionaries around Moscow in the 1920s. The artworks, “wrote history onto urban space,” and through them, “the revolution entered the phenomenal world of the everyday” (Buck-Morss, 2002: 42). Moscow residents were reminded daily of the utopian ideals and international agenda toward which their nation strove, and of the future that they were promised. In Eisenhüttenstadt, history was written not onto urban space so much as into it; the housing complexes with their palatial entryways, the oversized mosaics with idealized images of atomic scientists, industrial workers, or smiling children of various ethnic backgrounds, all were in service of reminding citizens that socialism would enable a world that was more prosperous, equal, and free from toil than the present day. ¹³ Socialism existed at the precipice of radical change that, its aesthetic reminded citizens, was always on its way.

Similarly, the Energiewende promises a future free from the anxieties of the present: the decreasing availability of carbon fuel sources, a warming planet, and the myriad consequences thereof. Yet that future is not likely to be experienced by any citizen currently being billed for street lamps. The existing cohort of German citizens is being asked to make sacrifices—financial and, at times, bodily, via the consumption of electricity-dependent infrastructures such as light and heat—for the well-being of future generations and the ecological conditions that will sustain them. While the federal government sees the rapidly rising energy costs that have resulted from the Energiewende as a problem, it is not a greater problem than climate change. Current efforts in the German parliament to help citizens cope with rising energy costs focus only on alleviating energy’s financial strain, rather than reversing the statutes that have contributed to its expense (Pronold, 2017). As under socialism, Germans live in an imperfect present where glimpses of a perfect future, currently being formed, are just beyond the horizon.

Street lamps create the aesthetic-atmospheric conditions of the present while simultaneously indexing a promised future. Like socialist urbanism, infrastructure “draws us into another way of thinking beyond the human that has to do with other timescales, times that are not scaled (down) to human life,” as Appel, Gupta, and Anand remind us. This is particularly true of electricity-dependent infrastructures, which rely on hydrocarbons forged over centuries and produce atmospheric pollutants which will long outlive us (Appel et al., 2018b: 20).

It therefore seems fitting that the same infrastructure once used to illuminate streets in order to foment pride in the socialist project would now be an instrument of a vastly different ideology that nonetheless re-presents the socialist era’s temporal landscape. After all, super-human timescales are not only geological, but also multi-generational. They link our (hoped-for) post-carbon future with a recent past in which we produced the heavily consumptive technologies that must now be reimagined.

If Eisenhüttenstadt were built today, would it have street lamps? They are remnants of an era heedless about the future of our planet. Yet as engines of the vibrancy that we now consider inseparable from the urban (Benjamin, 2002: 563–570), even amidst the Energiewende, no one in Eisenhüttenstadt, where vibrant atmospherics are in short supply, considers living without them.