Industrial transformations and changing political orientations in Eastern Germany

Nearly 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall the symbolic, economic, and political divide between East and West in Germany remains. The last Federal elections (2017) also showed significant support for right-wing populism among the population of the former GDR regions, including Saxony. It is commonly argued that right-wing populism flourishes in poor, de-industrialized regions with high levels of unemployment. Saxony, however, is neither of those: it is highly industrialized and has a relatively low level of unemployment. The automotive industry in Zwickau in particular is often used as a success story of postsocialist transition. Unlike many other industrial towns of the former GDR, car production here didn’t stop after the re-unification of Germany. On the contrary, in May 1990 at the Volkswagen plant in Mosel (a suburb of Zwickau) the first Trabant 1.1 and the first Volkswagen Polo symbolically left the assembly line at the same time. Today the automotive industry plays a central role in the region’s economy and employs about 40,000 people. Given its rich history and its significance for the region, the automotive industry in Zwickau area presents an exceptional case for anthropological research on the social implications of industrial transformations.

This research project relies on a one-year ethnographic fieldwork stay in Zwickau, including participant observation and in-depth interviews. By focusing on the experiences of the automotive industry workers in Zwickau, this research project explores the moral, political, and social effects of the transformation of labour relations under modern capitalism and how these are intertwined with local narratives about work, morality, and economy. Following Kalb and Halmai (2011), I suggest that the changing class relationships and the experiences of economic and cultural dispossession framed along ethnic or nationalist lines stand at the core of the success of the right-wing populist project. However, this does not mean reducing populism to the economic dispossession of the working class. On the contrary, a deeper look needs to be taken at the local cultural and historical context of Eastern Germany that might shape these processes, including collective memories of socialism, experiences of postsocialist transformations, and the hegemonic relationship between the dominating West and dominated East.