Bowling for Communism: Urban Ingenuity at the End of East Germany

By Andrew Demshuk

Bowling for Communism illuminates how civic life functioned in Leipzig, East Germany's second-largest city, on the eve of the 1989 revolution by exploring acts of "urban ingenuity" amid catastrophic urban decay. Andrew Demshuk profiles the creative activism of local communist officials who, with the help of scores of volunteers, constructed a palatial bowling alley without Berlin's knowledge or approval. In a city mired in disrepair, civic pride overcame resentment against a regime loathed for corruption, Stasi spies, and the Berlin Wall.

Reconstructing such episodes through interviews and obscure archival materials, Demshuk shows how the public sphere functioned in Leipzig before the fall of communism. Hardly detached or inept, local officials worked around centralized failings to build a more humane city. And hardly disengaged, residents turned to black-market construction to patch up their surroundings.

Because such "urban ingenuity" was premised on weakness in the centralized regime, the dystopian cityscape evolved from being merely a quotidian grievance to the backdrop for revolution. If, by their actions, officials were demonstrating that the regime was irrelevant, and if, in their own experiences, locals only attained basic repairs outside official channels, why should anyone have mourned the system when it was overthrown?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781501751677

Andrew Demshuk

Michael L. Walden is William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor and extension economist in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at North Carolina State University. He is author of seven books, including Smart Economics: Commonsense Answers to Fifty Questions about Government, Business, and Households. He also produces a daily radio program and writes a weekly syndicated newspaper column.

Book preview

BOWLING FOR COMMUNISM

URBAN INGENUITY AT THE END OF EAST GERMANY

Andrew Demshuk

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

For Rebecca and Archie Ray

Contents

Preface

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: Can Leipzig Still Be Saved?

1. Survival and Despair in Dystopia

2. Urban Ingenuity in the System

3. Utopian Visions in 1988

4. Urban Ingenuity Underground

5. The City as Stage in Revolution

Epilogue: Continuities in the Saved City

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

Along the main ring road across from Leipzig’s monumental new city hall, an octagonal sandstone façade with smashed windowpanes and a coat of graffiti festers behind weedy trees that wave in the wind. In a bowl-shaped depression of broken glass and pavement several meters back from this wreck, a corroded claw arises to clasp a red stone orb. Behind locked gates that face traffic on the ring road, a defunct neon sign gives a clue about this moldering enigma: in a mix of English and German, faded yellow cursive letters reveal that this had been the Bowlingtreff. Completed in 1987, this lofty little hall with its vast subterranean bowling lanes, cafes, bars, and hip accoutrements opened its doors to waves of eager citizens: a gleaming, popular magnet alone in a sea of rotting, collapsing historic neighborhoods that suffocated under a constant brown haze from the moonscape of strip mines and lignite power plants to the immediate south. Outfitted with Western technology and cutting-edge postmodern flourishes, this wonder arose thanks to unorthodox, even illegal, daring from local officials and architects, not to mention thousands of hours of free labor from Leipzig citizens. Ten years later, as the city awoke from its communist-era decay to miraculously transfigure into one of Germany’s most lively historic centers, the Bowlingtreff closed because of capitalist mismanagement and steadily metamorphosed into an eyesore akin to what the rest of the city had been back in 1987. The story of this unequaled late-communist, early-postmodern edifice was forgotten. Only its forlorn neon sign and bowling-ball-shaped fountain testify to its onetime identity. Like most passersby, I was dumbfounded when I first stumbled across what was left of Leipzig’s Bowlingtreff. Little did I suspect that this architectural riddle bore within it a host of human stories and contradictions that could unlock the inner workings of East Germany’s second-largest city on the eve of the 1989 Peaceful Revolution, in which it played a principal role.

This book first came into being amid a personal quest to understand the oddity that is Leipzig’s Bowlingtreff. Through previous research, I had explored how waves of public protest against heedless regime-led demolitions had peaked with the destruction of Leipzig’s intact Gothic University Church in 1968; from that point onward, ceaseless communist party (SED) propaganda of work with us (mach mit) had lost its dwindling sparkle, and urban planning objectives had met with disinterest, disbelief, and derision as damaging, hideous, and downright impossible anyway, given an ever more chronic shortage economy. Yet for all this profound pessimism, in 1987, 6,675 young Leipzigers devoted 40,050 hours of volunteer labor to ensure that this recreational center arose in only fourteen months on a shady budget—and without the knowledge of central authorities in Berlin until the very end. How did local authorities green-light construction of a major showpiece without permission from Berlin? How could it be that so many people had chosen to work with local authorities by devoting so many hours to such an optimistic project on the eve of a revolution when they marched against the regime?

As I delved deeper into archived public letters, architectural plans and correspondence, protest paraphernalia, and discussions with eyewitnesses, I came to realize that the Bowlingtreff in fact typified a larger, ultimately intractable quandary in state-citizen relations as they had evolved by the end of East Germany (the DDR). Though largely neglected in scholarship that investigates the bases of the 1989 revolution that brought down communist rule, runaway urban decay and the usually quixotic struggle to overcome it not only set the stage for the popular upheaval in which Leipzig helped to change the course of world history; they represented a conjunction of other factors already familiar to scholars. By using Leipzig—the capital of the Peaceful Revolution—as a case study, and by homing in on responses to urban blight by both local leaders and public actors, I found intimate details about how economic problems, the housing shortage, ecological disasters, political corruption, and loss of belief (even by party members) laid the groundwork for revolution when external factors, such as perestroika and Mikhail Gorbachev’s pacifism, ensured that it would not end like East Germany’s 1953, Hungary’s 1956, or Czechoslovakia’s 1968. For both local leaders and residents, their dismal surroundings eloquently portrayed how, to attain any positive outcome, one had to work around the system. Economically, functionally, and morally bankrupt, the centralized regime was proven to be an obstruction at best, parasitic at worst, and utterly counterproductive for attaining positive outcomes. The object lesson was plain, if often unstated: Why should locals or even leaders sustain a system that had condemned the historic city to destruction? For years, they had learned to work around it; were they not better off without it?

This book’s evidence upends the dual stereotype of both official incompetence and public passivity in the late DDR by documenting pervasive local initiative I call urban ingenuity. On the one hand, it redeems the intentions of a new generation of political and planning elites who expended considerable creative energy and innovation to try to combat urban blight and build a humane city. In their multipronged campaign to unify historical architecture with modern construction methods, they proved that in principle East German professionals were taking full part in the Western shift toward historic preservation after decades of rampant modernist destruction. Conscious that the previous modernist drive for utopia had instead wrought dystopia, they pushed a new vision that increasingly split off from contemporary limitations in material and labor and ultimately broke from reality itself—evincing not only rebellion from Politburo mandates but also disconnect from urgent public concerns. They wanted to revise utopia; political and economic realities made them produce serialized blocks that perpetuated the decimation of urban history and character. They wanted to win back public affections with a palatial bowling alley, wherein Leipzigers would sense they were bowling for communism, enjoying recreational fun imbued with gratitude for SED beneficence toward popular desires. But Leipzigers embraced the Bowlingtreff as an island of the West that only whetted their appetites for the better world so obviously lacking in the bleak cityscape outside.

On the other hand, urban ingenuity illustrates how disaffected local homeowners, preservationists, church communities, and young people sought to satisfy their needs and interests within the bounds of late communism. Having long since given up on taking part in shaping the overall appearance of their dear city, Leipzigers were nonetheless eager to take advantage of any opportunity to make something out of their rapidly decaying surroundings when the authorities gave them the chance to work with them—often necessarily working around existing strictures in the system. Notwithstanding platitudes from local officials once the Bowlingtreff opened, public participation in assembling the structure implied neither belief that they were building real existing socialism nor tacit support for local programs. Even employees at the sparkling new Bowlingtreff were so dismayed by years of accumulated disappointments, endemic corruption, and catastrophic shortages that, rather than stay to relish their East German recreational palace, some of them risked escape to West Germany. And two years after scores of young people had helped to build the Bowlingtreff, they marched against the very leaders who had made it possible. They knew this lone monument could not save their city. Numerous interviews in a late 1989 film had inspired its provocative title: Can Leipzig Still Be Saved? Change was urgently needed to ensure that Leipzig had a future. Few could have imagined that this future would mean German reunification and a wave of capitalist speculation that turned the Bowlingtreff into a tarnished specter and time capsule that captures the contradictions and dreams of the last communist generation.

In its long and unlikely gestation, this book has accumulated considerable debts. Back in 2006, a fellowship from the Dubnow Institut in Leipzig first exposed me to the city’s complicated urban geography, and a Humboldt Foundation fellowship in 2014–15 gave me access to the first materials that triggered my interest in writing this book. Not only did Leipzig’s Humanities Center for East Central Europe—especially my colleague and friend Arnold Bartetzky—host my Humboldt stay; its members believed in and helped to support a further research trip in summer 2018. Financial assistance from American University (AU) also supported summer research in 2017 and 2018, as well as publication costs. Feedback from colleagues at the German Studies Association and AU History Forum deeply informed how I shaped this project’s contours. Support for an AU book incubator workshop in November 2018 offered timely, specialized insight on the draft manuscript from my colleagues Gary Bruce, Brian Ladd, Eli Rubin, and Sam Sadow, as well as valuable brainstorming with my doctoral student Alexandra Zaremba. In Leipzig, I particularly thank Achim Beier alongside Saskia Paul and Diana Stiehl for their keen advice and support at Archiv Bürgerbewegung. Anett Müller and her colleagues at the Leipzig Stadtarchiv uncovered a host of archival files for me, as did archivists at Leipzig’s Sächsisches Staatsarchiv, Thomas Hoscislawski at Leipzig’s Stadtplanungsamt, Alexander Hartmann at Leipzig’s Stasi archive, and numerous archivists at the Bundesarchiv in Berlin. I also wish to thank Thomas Beyer and Adrian Dorschner for their inspiring 2016 documentary film on the Bowlingtreff as well as their support and encouragement as I pursued this project. Among archivists and librarians, colleagues and friends, participants in workshops and colloquia, and interview partners who furthered my research in Leipzig, I thank Renate Donath, Dietmar Fischer, Martin Helmstedt, Wolfgang Hocquél, Andreas Kalitynski, Hans-Wolfram Kasten, Werner Kießling, Gisela Kluge, Peter Leonhardt, Maximilian Maaß, Uta Nickel, Heike Scheller, Annette and Wilhelm Schlemmer, Liesel Schön, Johannes and Jutta Schulze, Horst Siegel, Christine Skodawessely, Winfried Sziegoleit, Thomas Topfstedt, Ursula Waage, Eva Wolf, Matthias Wolf, and Wieland Zumpe. Friendship and guidance across Germany and North America sustained this project in diverse ways. I extend special thanks to Claudia and Franz Bardenhauer, Matti Bunzl, Jim Chelich, Carol and Tom Demshuk, Jeffry Diefendorf, Amanda Gregg, Ilse and Karl-Heinz Hoffmann, Ursel and Christoph Hohl, Kyrill Kunakhovich, Kristy Ironside, Karen and Archie Mitchell, Will Pyle, the Rump family, John Takis, Annette and Andreas Wallrabe, Tobias Weger, the intrepid interlibrary loan staffs at AU and Middlebury College, and my colleagues in the AU history department. I am grateful to Contemporary European History for permission to apply data and argumentation from my article The People’s Bowling Palace: Building Underground in Late Communist Leipzig in chapter 4. My indefatigable editor Emily Andrew at Cornell University Press believed in this book from the start and worked with me to improve it in so many ways. My copy editor Florence Grant invested considerable skill in helping me to polish the final manuscript. And I thank Mike Bechthold for producing a beautiful treasure map of Leipzig’s historic core.

My dear friend Ray Bruck passed away as I was writing the first draft: it was with him that I made my initial visit to Leipzig back in 2005, and I hope that his questing spirit and good humor live on in these pages. As this book further coalesced, my son Archie Ray was coming into the world. It is to him and my beloved wife and intellectual partner, Rebecca Mitchell, that I dedicate this work. Rebecca and I discovered the Bowlingtreff together on that meandering walk along Leipzig’s ring road. And though we are not particularly devoted to bowling as a sport, that bowling center in all its faded glory has come to occupy a great many of our conversations. Perhaps one day we will bowl there together.

Abbreviations

Introduction

Can Leipzig Still Be Saved?

Ist Leipzig noch zu retten? Can Leipzig still be saved? Such was the despairing title of East Germany’s first free and critical documentary television program just three days before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Across the republic’s second-largest city, the camera exhibited Kaiser-era tenement blocks sagging, collapsing, and infested with pigeons. Residents expressed hopelessness and anger. These were images that hurt, the director observed staidly. The city had fallen into a coma.¹ In this capital of the 1989 revolution, decades of demolitions, decay, and slipshod modernism had dramatically fueled the sense that communist leaders were incompetent, corrupt, and illegitimate. A profusion of local photography—typified by the snapshot of a tenement building in Leipzig’s Plagwitz district (fig. 1)—testified to an urgent sense that the historic cityscape must be captured on film before it was gone. The few residents who bothered attending a 1988 planning exhibition in city hall gave expression to this pervasive public dejection in the largely empty visitor book. Summing up the general sentiment, a young citizen deplored that, although sensible plans appeared on paper, "up to now, much has been ‘asleep’; some of the new buildings and reconstructions in the historic center are patchwork jobs! By the time the moldering city was at all habitable, he concluded with bitter irony, would he already be a pensioner???"²

Figure 1. View of a decayed house with broken windows. The windows and doors on the ground floor are bricked up. Leipzig-Plagwitz, 1992. Photograph by Guntram Fischer. ABL 030–003–027.

With tangible salience, the dismal prerevolutionary cityscape evoked a host of economic, environmental, and political problems that undermined faith in the SED regime. After gaining repute as the first German city cleared of excess rubble (as resourceful early postwar planners reinforced scores of damaged monuments for future restoration), by the 1980s Leipzig was one of the most decrepit cities in Europe, its old town disintegrating after decades of neglect and demolitions under a cloak of brown coal dust. Although by the early 1970s the Erich Honecker administration had promised historic preservation and innovative construction methods, centralized planning had diverted precious funds, materials, and workers to prefab Plattenbau housing in suburbs like Grünau (begun 1976) and prestige projects in Berlin.³ The resulting aura of soul-sucking dreariness and impending doom across the historic city made Leipzigers from diverse backgrounds scorn rhetoric about preservation and civic identity as a tragic farce. All around them, one of Germany’s most intact urban cores was succumbing to ruin. And communist authorities seemed incapable of saving it.

Across the republic, the documentary Ist Leipzig noch zu retten? spoke to a general angst that East German cities had become even less habitable than they had been in 1945 after wartime bombardment. From time to time, the television can still shock you, a villager southeast of Leipzig wrote to his friend in the city on November 9, 1989. Upon watching footage from Ist Leipzig noch zu retten?, it had dawned on him that Leipzig was everywhere. Right away, I went to look at Zittau, Görlitz, and Bautzen. In each of these neighboring towns, he found that the conditions are in some cases even worse than those in Leipzig. Just hours before crowds massed at the Berlin Wall, this ordinary Saxon villager was obsessed with urban decay, incensed by the realization that historic structures in his own surroundings were getting demolished all the time, replaced by dull blocks and furthering the ubiquitous aura of architectural misery.⁴

Late East German towns and cities were pervaded by this sense of urban dystopia, defined here as a conjunction of factors that made the city appear unlivable to both residents and a new generation of architects. And it held deep social implications in the latter half of SED rule. Notwithstanding the utopian visions of earlier architects about constructing a bright and modern communist future, most East Germans experienced their cities as dystopian oceans of decay punctuated by modernist boxes that seldom resonated positively. Whether they arose in place of razed historic ensembles or drew life out of the urban center to dwell in projects on virgin land, modernist achievements were wrought at the expense of the preexisting city. Although outcomes were regularly diminished by fiscal and material realities, even a cutting-edge showpiece like Leipzig’s 1973 university skyscraper desecrated a dear historic space: to clear the modernist ensemble’s footprint for construction on the central and symbolic Karl Marx Square, Berlin party elites (in concert with strident local officials) willfully dynamited Leipzig’s medieval University Church in 1968 despite years of popular protest. Decried as cultural barbarism, the dynamiting of this key landmark decimated hope from the once-engaged public that it could work with the regime to build a better city.⁵

In unfolding the dynamics of urban dystopia, this book draws from two pioneering approaches to East German power structures. Looking from the top down through serpentine SED administrative structures, Lena Kuhl and Oliver Werner rightly identify the marginalization of East German regions and disappointing planning outcomes through diversion of resources from the Bezirke (districts) to Berlin as a cause significantly contributing to the collapse of the DDR.⁶ Looking upward from the grassroots situation, Brian Ladd concludes that by 1989 a failure to provide adequate housing fueled public support for preservationists and activists committed to preserving old neighborhoods even in the face of official disapproval.⁷ Combining both approaches, this book uses Leipzig as a case analysis through which to sketch out a multilayered schematic of how the East German planning mechanism interlocked at the central, Bezirk, municipal, and private levels. Because so much of this machinery operated outside official ledgers, a thorough reading of archival and periodical sources had to be supplemented with personal interviews, correspondence, and informal conversations with diverse personalities from late-communist Leipzig, some of whom elected not to be named. Of course, especially after an epochal shift like 1989, memories can be colored by trauma, nostalgia, or an obsession with one’s legacy; but with critical distance and corroboration, they afford a rare, often singular means to recapture a more complete sense of the story.

Far more than just a housing crisis, urban dystopia in Leipzig threatened a deep-held civic pride in built history and urban community. Attempts to arrest this seemingly unstoppable decline exhibit the gray zone between legal and illegal activities in a complicated web of human motives and actions through the last decade of East Germany. For both engaged citizens and local officials, SED dictates from Berlin consistently impeded their vigorous efforts to restore a healthy cityscape. With each attempt at saving the city, the truth became more apparent: Leipzig was dying because of Berlin. And so to save Leipzig, both private and official actors had to work around the centralized system through enterprising acts of what I call urban ingenuity. Discourse about urban decay thus illustrates the decay of communist power.

Urban Dystopia as a Window into State-Civic Relations

In our country the communication between state and society is obviously troubled. After its opening line, the September 10, 1989, founding manifesto of the Neues Forum opposition group went on to assert that this imbalance had paralyzed the creative potential of our society, to the extent that citizens were dissipating our energy in ill-humored passivity at the same time that loafers and loudmouths in cushy jobs misruled the country.⁸ While one can understand the frustration Neues Forum activists felt as they struggled to get legal recognition, their diagnosis caricatured an officialdom that was, in all actuality, multifaceted and sometimes in step with grassroots desires.⁹ By exploring how engaged local officials and residents tried to redeem their urban dystopia, this book offers a glimpse into how civic life functioned in the city that started the Peaceful Revolution and ended SED rule. Neither a totalitarian model nor a halcyon people’s state, East German civic life played out at the complicated intersection between local officials’ goals (often distinct from democratic centralist objectives in Berlin) and the desires of local residents. This nuances the work of Mary Fulbrook, who has led the charge against the totalitarian model by framing East Germany as a participatory dictatorship, within which the state and populace worked together to attain common humanitarian goals such as healthcare, mass housing, organized sports, and universal employment.¹⁰ It also builds on my earlier work which found that, when the state pursued a direction at odds with public wishes (such as its 1968 demolition of Leipzig’s University Church), participatory dictatorship broke down.¹¹ Combining both arguments in the distinctive context of East Germany’s final decade, I find that local officials successfully garnered public participation to complete shady projects like the Bowlingtreff, because (1) in this joint architectural venture public interests coincided with those of officialdom and (2) Leipzig’s leaders had decided that Berlin’s interests ran contrary to their own and labored discreetly outside the centralized system to produce a visible sign of communist efficacy to combat public alienation. Rather than participatory dictatorship, then, this was participation without dictatorship under the auspices of local communist authorities. To attain socialist goals, Leipzig’s party elite broke with democratic centralism that served Berlin above all else. To win public participation, they circumvented their SED superiors in Berlin.

Juxtaposing the 1968 University Church demolition alongside the 1987 Bowlingtreff project certainly highlights just how much the local state-civic dynamic changed over the course of SED rule.¹² Back in the 1960s, Leipzig officials under the iron hand of the Bezirk boss Paul Fröhlich had operated in lockstep with the Politburo, and pushed through demolitions that had shattered belief that the regime honestly welcomed (much less heeded) public input on planning. Whereas wartime trauma had at first prompted public enthusiasm for regime-backed architectural exhibitions and plans, after the 1960s, residents lost their dwindling belief that they could take part in shaping the city as a whole.¹³ In addition to feeling dismay that the authorities would unleash wrecking balls regardless of what they proposed, engaged citizens also grew agitated that the regime was incapable of building a better city. Although East Bloc architects envisioned state-owned prefab apartment estates as an instrument for social reform and although these blocks offered much-needed housing,¹⁴ Leipzigers typically saw displacement from a historic neighborhood (or defacement of that neighborhood with Plattenbau rows) as the destruction of community and their sense of rooted space. Like the dereliction of the historic center, whose dilapidated edifices still harkened back to the city’s glory days as Germany’s fourth-largest city at the turn of the century, the rise of a prefab city had little in common with their dreams of a restored metropolis. Such was the cynical state of public belief when at last, in contravention of Berlin’s dictates, local authorities tried to give the people an urban icon like the Bowlingtreff. Although officials professed that the people were working with them as a sign of belief in the system, in reality the people came, not for communism, but for the sake of Leipzig and their urban community.

In its examination of the everyday give-and-take between populace and officials, as well as grassroots adaptation of official precepts, this book builds on twin trends that have featured in DDR scholarship at the Potsdam Center for Contemporary Historical Research: Herrschaft als soziale Praxis (authority as social practice) and Eigen-Sinn (self-awareness, or individual initiative).¹⁵ As project leader Thomas Lindenberger observes, Herrschaft als soziale Praxis implies agency on behalf of both sides within an otherwise asymmetric power relationship. Not just force, but mutual dependence, could thus imply that authorities sought to compensate those whom they ruled in return for subjugation and compliance. Meanwhile, Eigen-Sinn indicates that subjects were not programmed by authorities, but exerted their own stubborn or plucky interpretations for how they would behave under and interpret regime expectations.¹⁶ For the purposes of this book, I translate Eigen-Sinn to mean self-conscious selective appropriation and maneuverability in a system of authoritarian top-down strictures and slogans.

If through these twin concepts one reads the last decade of communism without anticipating the 1989 revolution, one uncovers a society that had grown accustomed to working within and around a broken system to survive and find meaning. While previous scholarship has peered into parties, churches, clubs, or deviant lifestyles to identify late-communist spaces where public opinion might exist separate from the SED,¹⁷ this book examines how unaffiliated everyday citizens individually practiced their own Eigen-Sinn through acts of urban ingenuity. In addition to a small cast of future activists, local residents disinclined to carry banners in 1989 had long since taken as self-evident that the system could not satisfy their most basic needs. Although they did not believe in working with their leaders in the name of socialist slogans, they were often willing to take action (sometimes collective action) to build a better city for themselves, their friends, and their families. Seldom did this quest to get what they wanted yield a well-functioning dialogue with local regime structures.¹⁸ And by contributing their time, labor, and creativity to illegal construction projects, Leipzigers demonstrated how Eigen-Sinn meant occupying, reshaping, and appropriating public space—the very opposite of retreating into private niches.¹⁹

It should be noted that engaged citizens shared their local leaders’ desire to solve the housing shortage. As Paul Betts has shown, the domicile let individuals seek refuge from officially prescribed public life and find more private understandings of the self.²⁰ Yet in their desire to solve housing issues, Leipzigers often militated against the prescribed solution of identical Plattenbau cities. Against official pressures to migrate them into anonymous prefab settlements, many Leipzigers practiced Eigen-Sinn to repair their homes in historic neighborhoods. A profound sense of Heimat—intimate surroundings deeply tied to memory and personal identity—stood as chief among their motives for working with leaders they generally distrusted, even resented.²¹ Ashamed of their once-proud city’s decrepitude, they built local landmarks like the Bowlingtreff out of civic pride and even won support from local authorities when their efforts to save the city drifted into legal gray zones.

Eigen-Sinn also characterizes how local leaders themselves sought to maneuver and adapt strictures and slogans from the center to serve their purpose of sustaining as much popular engagement as possible within dystopic conditions. Hardly the undifferentiated mass of despotic overlords caricatured in mainstream surveys of communist decline, local officials often exerted considerable dynamism to save their communities.²² As Lena Kuhl and Oliver Werner contend, "at all times, decision-makers on the level of Bezirke and Kreise were bound [to] the state’s overall economic plan. There existed no dependable way to have regional interests recognized, unless these were directly connected to the economic plan.²³ As a result, Kuhl concludes, local officials often pursued their own, even differing objectives, enhancing local stability, but failing to stimulate the nationwide reforms needed to save East German cities.²⁴ To attain this goal, Christian Rau adds, local officials had to engage dynamically with the center and navigate extremely chaotic and inefficient overlapping administrative jurisdictions on the ground. Such energy stemmed not least from the fact that local politicians were also part of the local societies they lived in and were responsible for."²⁵ While this may underpin Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk’s observation that there were no genuine reformers in the SED, one should perhaps interrogate further what in fact local officials were seeking to achieve.²⁶ For even if they did not question single-party rule, the fact that local authorities sought so assiduously to work around it proves that they were deeply aware of its weaknesses. Incapable of reforming the behemoth of SED bureaucracy, Leipzig’s authorities nonetheless tried to patch its many holes. To prove they could still act in the interests of the people, they