Leipzig: A walk around a city reborn
literaryreview.co.uk
literaryreview.co.uk
Today, when I come back to Leipzig, things feel very different. More refined - true. But also much more bland and faceless. Leipzig's countless little quirky shops have largely made way for the same cookie cutter shopping malls you find everywhere - with your Zara's, H&Ms and G-Star stores. Lot's of places are empty, such as Karstadt and Petersbogen, owing to an over-supply of department stores for what's still a fairly small city. Larger industries have attracted more settled workers - and the crazy punks and metalheads of 2004 have grown into eco-conscious citizens with pension plans and immigration concerns.
Maybe (certainly) I'm just getting old - but god, I miss the raw and wild nature of the post-reunification days...
Isn't some of that just generational change? In the US, kids seem a lot more tame these days than kids of the previous few decades. They have a different set of pressures, and social media has grown in power quite a bit over a decade.
Can you imagine watching your parents flame war over politics and social issues on fucking Facebook? I feel like the only way to rebel would be to act like an adult.
Why are people surprised about this? This is all old news.
Did you accidentally hit reply under the wrong comment?
We then went to Berlin and had a wonderful time similar to what you're describing. It was still a pretty chaotic and interesting city, with lots of art squats and cool parties. Probably not as cool as it was a few years earlier, but still pretty neat.
I understand in the intervening years Berlin has started to become a sea of condos and boring glass buildings and inflated real estate like every other western city. Or so I hear. So yeah, they "fixed" it.
That same trip we passed through Leipzig and it seemed pretty run down but kind of interesting bit obviously not as "active" as Berlin. My techno friend had good things to say about it, though.
Don't know why, but I stopped being shocked by the things I saw in that documentary a while ago.
"Super rich corporate entity buying properties in soon-to-be hotspots while avoiding taxes through complex foreign based shell structures, with the working class squeezed to death by higher rents and taxes, all while our elected officials look the other way since they've been well greased, wined and dined and their privately schooled kids are offered top positions in said corporate entities", has become such a common M.O. behind the façade of free market capitalism, that I'm not even surprised at this point.
I just wonder when we'll have the next violent revolution or civil war and radical regime change as inequality can't continue to rise like this forever and still have a stable and peaceful, functioning society.
Didn’t communism have its chance in Leipzig?
1) The city was 100% Steampunk !
There where steam heat pipes everywhere along and over the streets. Those pipes where the main source of heating for the city houses and facilities.
Things like this one, but everywhere in the city : https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Haltepunkt_Leipzig_A...
The steam was produced by dedicated factories near the city, and the main energy to produce this steam was lignite (brown coal) excavated near the city at Bergbaurevier Südraum Leipzig.
There was gigantic and very impressive bucket-wheel excavators south of the city (some of the biggest of the world at the time) :
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Bucket-wheel_exc...
But the pipes where in bad state, so you could see steam escape from every tubes at every street. At the time it was estimated than 50% of the energy produced by the factories was lost during transport...
2) The houses where all greys and dusty because of said lignite factories around the city. There was steam from the pipes, but also smoke from the factories... That said you coul still imagine the former glory of the houses under the grey.
3) There was still many "bomb holes" here and here along the streets since World War Two. The GDR did try to patch the city centre with impressive (and ugly) buildings and but i did see plenty of missing houses in the main streets.
District heating was quite common across the former Eastern Bloc and Russia. In the winter, you could see bands of melted snow on the sidewalk where the pipes ran. I hear the ones still in use have been better insulated since then.
> i did see plenty of missing houses in the main streets.
Yeah, this I've also been told. Compare that with the impressive rate at which Polish cities were rebuilt (aside from the beautiful historic centers, we can debate about the desirability of the modernist architecture that was built in places where it was decided that the historical building was not to be rebuilt; some of them are actually quite interesting, to be sure, but certainly not all of them). Not sure why the GDR took so long, or how they fared next to West Germany.
If you plan to visit: be sure to check out the Museum der bildenden Künste and a boat-tour through Plagwitz / Karl-Heine Kanal (esp. nice in spring at night).
Little caveat obviously: there are also quarters where it's not that simple and you are looked at sideways if you have the "wrong" skin tone -- Grünau, Gohlis-Nord etc. But these are the parts of the city tourists usually don't visit...
I had a much harder time trying to get by as a white anglophone in Leipzig for about a month in 2018 than I had in Berlin, but much of that was admittedly my own anxiety around asking people for help in the wrong way, and travel-green-ness.
For example, I definitely can't pronounce entschuldigung correctly! As in well enough for people to know what I said. I then often perceived a palpable disdain or exasperation after not having been able to ask for simple things in German or understand simple German responses, compared to other places I've been where people seemed more excited to try to help someone who seemed lost than annoyed at the disturbance. I frankly shared the feeling, though: I found it very frustrating that my long duolingo practices had yielded almost no ability to ask for or understand things in the language of the country I was visiting.
I also found the in-town train terminal UIs to be incomprehensible as a foreigner: long lists of abbreviated names of places, with sub-menus holding more abbreviated names! A name like "Strasse Something Name" could end up "S. Sth. N." and without fluency it was very tough to pick apart. I ended up with a ticket to the wrong place once and the fare inspector, who I had to communicate with via Google translate, was very skeptical of my innocence (and absolutely incredulous that someone would not be able to grok the menus) but ultimately let me just pay the difference and go on, after initially threatening to levy a fine.
I still loved the city! It's beautiful and has very nice walks and libraries, but I personally often felt uncomfortable and out of place while visiting.
They are allmost incomprehensible for natives, too. They could be a textbook example of bad UX design.
Edit: And Bach, of course.
The best thing is IMHO that we have the Grüner GÜrtel ("green belt") which is a pretty large area of real primeval forest right crossing through the town and suround the city core.
In future outer leipzig will be surrounded by seas (7 Seen gebiet) which emerged from old mining holes and are all connected with each other.
September 2020 on a Sunday - https://youtu.be/yriaEFxLblQ
February 2019 evening - https://youtu.be/udrqN2QArHo
edit: formatting
Today it's the new hip location to live at, like Berlin. People are gentrifying it in swarms.
It's a pretty nice place and compared to the rest of east Germany pretty leftist. But, yeah, when you leave the city there is nothing much.
Well, there are lots of nice lakes around. (left from open coal mining and renaturated). And if you drive a bit, you can reach quite nice mountains, for example, or other cultural interesting places, like Weimar or Dresden.
And the average village around is indeed quite right leaning, but more and more nice projects are growing as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_the_Battle_of_the_...
The feeling you get inside under the unyielding gaze of the granite "Watchers of the Dead" is absolutely creepy.
It's how you turn an innocent population into a unified fighting force (or whatever). You exacerbate and channel existing tensions and/or exploit a crisis. You frame your story in terms of popular narratives.
They teach this stuff in Dictatorship 101
Oh, come on, don't be such a tease.
It kind of felt like time had slowed in Leipzig after the war. It reminded me of a quote I heard from a guide when we toured a home near the harbor (now government owned) in Gloucester, MA that a family had lived in for generations and never updated: "Nothing preserves like poverty".