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Starting to destroy the state economy of the GDR in 1989 and making room for runaway capitalist nation (re)building, East Germany’s transformation managers created perfect examples of ideologies such as “creative destruction” and “disruption.” In doing so, they provided the ideal situation for capitalist players including, most recently, Tesla, Amazon, Google, and Red Bull. However, hailing disruptive conditions as the necessary basis for seminal innovation, they are in fact ignoring legal frameworks, bureaucratic procedures, workers’ rights, etc. This radicalization of excessive and exploitative economies in “the East” is possible last but not least because the media discourse suspends the region between “backwardness” and “avantgarde” – the stigma of a dark past and the promise of a bright future. In his “Black Box East” video talk Political scientist and curator Stefan Kausch shows: by constructing “the East” as such an ambivalent normality class, the interests of capital can be served quasi at will.
