„God created Lusatia and the devil put the coal under it.“ Consensus and dissent on socio-economic change in Lusatia
 

PhD Project by Charlotta Cordes

Supervisors: Prof Dr. Susanne Schattenberg; Prof. Dr. Jutta Günther
 
“The brown coal from here doesn’t want any more.” The sentence could currently come out of the mouth of a lignite worker in Germany. Only Gerhard Gundermann, an excavator driver and songwriter from Lusatia, sang it in the early 1990s. Then as now, the former 'GDR energy centre', the 'Sorbian cultural area' and the 'historical textile and glass region' were confronted with structural change. Deindustrialisation after 1989/90 is now followed by the complete end of the regional lignite and energy industry as a result of the coal phase-out. This project will examine how the construction of Lusatia has changed since the 1970s.
 
The following questions guide the insights: How did the meaning of regionality change from socialism to market economy - as an economic area, a political unit and as Heimat? And how did the actors involved in its construction shape and interpret the socio-economic change in Lusatia?
 
The work focuses on SED economic and territorial planners, as well as cultural functionaries at district level and politicians of the Federal State of Brandenburg. Their activities will be considered in the context of regional construction processes - in which many actors, from companies to local activists, were involved.