and Demolition on Karl Marx Square: Cultural Barbarism and the People's State in 1968.Demshuk applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Bowling for Communism: Urban Ingenuity at the End of East Germany, and reported the following:
Page 99 works quite well for my book, as it showcases my use of oral history and unconventional archival analysis in reconstructing how the black market economy functioned that made “urban ingenuity” possible. The page explores how the “informal and deeply complicated patchwork construction method functioned at Leipzig’s district (Bezirk) and municipal (Stadt) levels, where the budget was managed respectively by the finance chairwomen Uta Nickel and Liesel Schön.”Learn more about Bowling for Communism at the Cornell University Press website.
Bowling for Communism explores a process I dub “urban ingenuity”: how ordinary residents and local communist officials in Leipzig worked around the centralized system to build a better city for themselves in the decades before Leipzig played a leading role in the 1989 Revolution. Because the Politburo in Berlin had steadily drained the republic of material resources and skilled labor in order to spruce up the capital, East Germany’s second-largest city had transformed over the course of the Cold War into a wasteland of decayed historic neighborhoods and boring apartment blocks. While the book’s early chapters explore how residents exploited the black market to repair their homes as well as how local officials worked inside the system (with meager results) to liven up urban modernism with historical citation and proportions, page 99 takes place in the fourth and largest chapter, wherein district and city officials sidestepped the centralized system to produce illegal and semi-legal structures (Schwarzbauten) through after-hours and free labor. Local officials did not expect the 1989 revolution (the subject of the following, final chapter), but they were disturbed by the extent to which urban decay was prompting widespread anxiety, even anger at the communist system. Through a chain of interviews and creative reading in diverse archives, page 99 features two obscure finance officials, whose creative allocation of scarce resources made urban ingenuity happen. Both city finance minister Liesel Schön and district finance minister Uta Nickel enjoyed considerable power to allocate internal “reserves”: enormous discretionary funds off the official balance sheets that almost never appear in archival records. Like many of their fellow local officials, both Schön and Nickel saw that Leipzigers were starved for recreational spaces. As page 99 observes, “Leipzig was not a fun city, and both finance ministers were keen to see that change.” This prompted their close collaboration with city recreation minister Theo Ullrich, who was himself proactive in securing what he needed to build illegal and semilegal swimming pools, parks, cafés, playgrounds, and ultimately a state-of-the-art leisure center with wild postmodern aesthetics and fourteen underground bowling lanes. Despite such ingenuity from local officials, however, Leipzig could not be saved by Schwarzbauten. Indeed, when Leipzigers entered their palatial “Bowlingtreff” in 1987, the stark contrast with surrounding urban dreariness outside only reinforced their sense that the communist system was incapable of saving their dear city.
The Page 99 Test: The Lost German East.
The Page 99 Test: Demolition on Karl Marx Square.
--Marshal Zeringue
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