The large-scale destruction of apartment houses in Hoyerswerda-Neustadt, the German Democratic Republic’s former second socialist model city, is in many ways what its citizens have called it: senseless (sinnlos), unfathomable (unfassbar), and utterly mad (verrückt). For some, it seemed as if Neustadt’s built environment was nothing but a colossal sacrifice to capitalism, callously offered on the altar of German reunification. How else to make sense of the ravenous demolition of perfectly intact and liveable houses at a rate matter-of-factly described as “unprecedented in peacetime” (beispiellos in Friedenszeiten). And fair enough: normally, this relentless, piercing, dusty deconstruction of countless apartment blocks is only imaginable in the context of war. Calling it a form of “unbuilding” downplays these attributions as well as the effects it had on Hoyerswerda’s inhabitants.

But what if we take the official administrative term Rückbau (back-building) seriously? What if we don’t see Neustadt’s destruction as a ruthless attack on the material remains of a former Cold War enemy, but as that what it actually and also was: a methodic, rational, meticulously planned, administered, and executed state project—a project that was part of, and resulted in, a more general redistribution of people and materials following the GDR’s wholesale transition from one political economy (socialism) to another (capitalism).

In the end, mostly West German officials were simply tasked with facilitating capitalism’s unfolding in the East. Describing this as back- rather than un-building, however, is a bureaucratic euphemism. The almost complete dismantling of several of the city’s living districts (Wohnkomplexe) surmounts to a form of “unmaking,” in Caroline Humphrey’s (2002) terms, that affects not just the socio-cultural traces of socialism, but its material and infrastructural remains.  A focus on redistribution, as a mode of unbuilding, helps to forefront the sociomaterial effects of this slowly unfolding realignment of capital, labor, infrastructures and futures in the postsocialist realm and era.

In that perspective, Hoyerswerda-Neustadt’s post-reunification housing excess constituted an obstacle to the functioning of a market logic that demanded a certain kind of state intervention, similar to what Stephen Collier (2011) so comprehensively described for post-Soviet urban politics in Russia. Major efforts were necessary for making something like capitalism happen in a context, literally, not built for it. State, citizens and apartment houses (together with their relevant infrastructures) were intricately involved in a massive project not of destruction, but of socio-material redistribution: people and buildings had to be spatially (and I hasten to add: temporally) relocated in the by then reunified national space and economy. Over an extended period, they all had to find their rightful place in the new political economy.

Indeed, many of Hoyerswerda’s citizens joined the more than one million East Germans who in the decades after reunification “followed the work” (zogen der Arbeit hinterher), as a local idiom had it, and moved to the West for employment. Their former houses followed suit: not needed in one place (Hoyerswerda), their material constituents became building material for projects elsewhere and of a different era. Concrete rubble is surprisingly valuable, and particular flows of capital decided to where the material remains of Hoyerswerda’s apartment houses would be allocated. Old windows and doors were initially sold further east, to other post-socialist housing contexts in financially less potent states. Importantly, this redistribution is in equal measures market- and state-led, and it cost millions.

The program to facilitate this enormous undertaking is the infamous Urban Regeneration East (Stadtumbau Ost) program. It funded the demolition of thousands of former socialist apartment houses all over East Germany. Its history has been told elsewhere (e.g., Bernt 2009), but in a nutshell the story unfolds thus: The GDR’s successful post–World War II construction of millions of prefabricated apartment blocks was nominally funded through “credits” by the GDR’s people-owned (volkseigene) State Bank (Staatsbank). However, in the wake of the privatization of the GDR’s economy, including its banking sector, these credits were privatized and became—for the first time—actual (capitalist) debts.

Faced with an increasingly less attractive housing stock, high renovation costs, and severe outmigration, the formerly equally people-owned communal and cooperative landlords (the two main owners of the East German housing stock) pleaded for help from the federal government. The Stadtumbau Ost program promised to “clear” the East German housing market (den Wohnungsmarkt bereinigen). It connected funds for demolition to funds for paying off these debts. German taxpayers, for that matter, paid off artificial debts tied to houses thus readied for unbuilding—to the benefit of the private banks owning these debts. A different, but related kind of redistribution.

In Neustadt, unbuilding unfolded orderly. Each (un)building site featured an official (un)building sign [see Figure 2] the size of a billboard that informed interested passersby about contractors, funders, and involved companies, the (un)building project’s start and end dates, etc. Under project description, these signs would not say “construction” [Bau] of a certain edifice, but “demolition” [Abbruch]. There is no shame in unbuilding here. And perhaps rightly so?

Embracing unbuilding, I cannot but ask: What would Hoyerswerda-Neustadt look like now, thirty-five years after reunification, without this form of state intervention? If Stadtumbau Ost had not funded the demolition of almost half of its cityscape, would a sea of slowly decaying, empty ruins feel worse? Asking these questions does not mean endorsing a process that many of my friends in the city have experienced as devastating and cruel. In contrast, it rather draws attention to the fact that what happened in Neustadt was not an economic necessity, but the outcome of a project of redistribution, a form of large-scale unbuilding that was based on political decisions which could, crucially, have been otherwise.