The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
A second renaissance for Karl Marx City
Renamed Chemnitz after the Cold War, the former communist utopia has just been crowned European City of Culture. William Cook finds out why
Sitting in the penthouse bar of the Congress Hotel in Chemnitz, looking down at the bleak modern cityscape below, you get a good idea of what Western Europe might have looked like had Russia won the Cold War. Beneath this ugly socialist skyscraper are rows of brutalist apartment blocks – soulless, anonymous, monotonous – and at the centre of the concrete maze, glowering like a grumpy prophet, is a huge bust of the man who gave his name to this communist dystopia, Karl Marx. “Workers of the world, unite!” reads the proclamation on the wall behind him.
Whatever happened to Karl-MarxStadt? As a schoolboy in the 1980s, gazing at maps of Eastern Europe and wondering if I would ever get a chance to travel there, I thought East Germany’s Karl Marx City seemed especially strange. What had it done to deserve that spooky title?
Did you have to be a Marxist to live there? If you went there and you weren’t a Marxist, would they ever let you out again? Even as a child, I could sense that there was something quite sinister about imposing the name of a single person upon an entire city. And then the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, and Karl-Marx-Stadt disappeared.
The actual city didn’t disappear, of course. It merely reverted to its old name, Chemnitz. However for anyone outside Germany, it might just as well have vanished. After Germany was reunited, in 1990, western tourists flooded into Eastern Germany, but they gave Chemnitz a wide berth – and no wonder. By all accounts, there wasn’t much there left to see.
Next year, however, the city formerly known as Karl-Marx-Stadt will be crowned European Capital of Culture. I must admit, when I first heard the news, it sounded like a particularly unfunny German joke. Has this forgotten city had an unlikely renaissance? I had come here to find out.
I first visited Chemnitz in 2010, some 20 years after German reunification. I had travelled all over Eastern Germany and been impressed by the rapid pace of change, but here in Chemnitz it felt as if the Berlin Wall had only been down for a few months.
“All power to the Five-Year Plan!” read a faded slogan on a derelict factory wall. It wasn’t just the massive bust of Marx that made me feel that way, or the proletarian housing schemes that surrounded it. Above all, it was the air of listless inertia. The city centre seemed deserted. Where had everybody gone?
In 1900, Chemnitz was one of Germany’s richest cities, an industrial boomtown, the engine room of the Second Reich. It wasn’t just famous for its factories. It was renowned for art and music too. Remarkably, it came through the Second World War relatively unscathed, until March 5 1945, when its handsome, historic Altstadt (Old Town) was flattened by the RAF.
When Germany surrendered, most of Chemnitz lay in ruins, but other German cities were even more badly damaged and have since been remarkably restored. The reason so little of Chemnitz survived was because its new communist rulers decided to create a brand new city amid the rubble, a futuristic citadel of faceless tower blocks. In 1953, this new city was renamed Karl-MarxStadt. Chemnitz was no more.
Ironically, Marx never even set foot in Chemnitz (he was born and raised in Trier, in Western Germany, 350 miles away). It was so renamed because the communists wanted to turn it into a proletarian utopia, a workers’ paradise built in a stark new Soviet style.
After reunification, the inhabitants of Karl-Marx-Stadt voted three-to-one to restore the city’s old name. For all those who had been repressed by the old regime, this was an important symbolic change – under the communists, even referring to your hometown as Chemnitz was a black mark against your name – but the practical benefits took a lot longer to filter through.
More than any other East German city, Chemnitz epitomised the painful transition from communism to capitalism. If you were young, it was a fantastic opportunity. If you were middle-aged, you often ended up redundant, left behind.
Old rust-belt industries collapsed, and the new hi-tech equivalents that replaced them required far fewer workers. The population shrank as youngsters went west in search of work. Germany’s new far-Right party, Alternative für Deutschland, attracted significant support.
Returning there after 14 years, it is clear that Chemnitz is much improved. Smart new buildings are springing up, shabby old ones have been improved. There are more people in the shops, and on the streets. Unlike on my last visit, in 2010, it feels like somewhere you could make a future.
But it is still a million miles away from what most Britons would regard as a conventional holiday destination – and it probably always will be. Even for a weekend city break, it is quite a stretch. If you are keen on modern art or modernist architecture, there are various sights of interest scattered around the city, but fewer than you will find in Leipzig, an hour away.
If you are curious about what went on behind the Iron Curtain, a walk around the city centre is an intriguing cautionary tale – this is what happens when urban planners sweep away centuries of history and impose a new ideology upon a defeated, powerless populace. For students of history or sociology, it is fascinating – but even if you are fascinated by East Germany, there are several other cities you should see before coming here (such as Dresden, Leipzig, Weimar and Potsdam).
So why is this unprepossessing place set to be European Capital of Culture? It is because this EU scheme is about boosting struggling regions and conurbations, not highlighting cultural hotspots which are already on the map.
Sometimes, this initiative can transform an ailing city’s reputation. It worked for Glasgow and Liverpool, but these are two great metropolises, in spite of all their problems. Chemnitz is more like Coventry or Croydon.
After all that it has been through, I hope its year as Capital of Culture gives Chemnitz a boost, but prospective visitors need to know that this place is still a work in progress rather than a finished product. If you want to know what became of Karl-Marx-Stadt, it is well worth a brief visit – but I would recommend that you stay in Dresden or Leipzig and do it as a day trip.
On the green edge of town where few bombs fell, some of old Chemnitz survives: grand old villas with leafy gardens, relics of a vanquished age. It is poignant and rather eerie wandering along these graceful avenues, thinking what a pleasant, prosperous place this used to be before the catastrophes of Nazism and communism, the Holocaust, the two world wars…
Will Chemnitz ever be beautiful again? I doubt it. Too much has been lost, and much of what has replaced it is bland and anodyne. Yet among the people I met here I found a sense of local pride and discreet optimism that is often missing in more touristic destinations. Last time I came here, the spectre of Marx loomed large over Chemnitz. Now he seems like a harmless curio, the quaint souvenir of a brutal philosophy which condemned a generation to serfdom.
Chemnitz has weathered the worst of times, a century of calamities, and come out smiling – and that, in its own small way, is inspiring.