Capital of Culture – Chemnitz: The city of secret mechanics

The chrome-plated handle of a Trabant car lies on a bright green shelf. Next to it: socket wrenches, pullers and other tools for car repairs, as well as measuring devices and spark plugs, but also a harmonica from the 8th pioneer meeting in Karl-Marx-Stadt in 1988 and a bundled volume of the magazine “Football Week”, or Fuwo for short. They are objects that the photographer and architect Martin Maleschka, born in 1982, collected in garages in Chemnitz. He created an installation that has been on display in the Chemnitz Vehicle Museum for several weeks. It is located in a high-rise garage built in 1928: on the outside an elegant facade in the New Objectivity style, on the inside a once ultra-modern elevator with which the cars to be parked were distributed over several floors. Maleschka has now set up several shelves in this and sorted the finds from the garages. Because he is an artist and not a car mechanic, he applied aesthetic criteria, he says. The objects on the green shelves represent “the entire color spectrum from silver to gray to anthracite,” and he has sorted all the differently colored finds – cleaning sponges, cardboard boxes, plastic containers – onto a black shelf.

The installation called “Spare Parts Warehouse” is part of the “3000 Garages” project, which in turn will be a central element of Chemnitz’s program as European Capital of Culture in 2025. The fact that garages should have something to do with culture initially caused a shake of the head and incomprehension, not least among their owners and users, says Agnieszka Kubicka-Dzieduszycka, who is the curator of “3000 Garages” and was next to Maleschka’s on the evening of the opening in a blue mechanic’s jacket Installation says: “When we arrived in the garage courtyards and asked for loans, we were met with a lot of skepticism.” Culture, however, she says, »begins wherever people meet and take care of their surroundings«. This is the case in the approximately 30,000 garages in Chemnitz, many of which are located in more than 150 large garage yards. They were often “built collectively and through our own efforts”; cohesion was often maintained over the decades until today: “This is a form of everyday culture.”

When Chemnitz presents itself as the European Capital of Culture from January 18th, there will be a variety of different events. In total there are more than 1,000, says Stefan Schmidtke, program manager of the company that organizes the Capital Year on behalf of the city. The people of Chemnitz and the world have known exactly what is planned since a show that took place at the end of October in front of press representatives from home and abroad in the Hartmann factory, the lavishly renovated last factory hall from the empire of the Chemnitz “locomotive king” Richard Hartmann, who was in the From the mid-19th century onwards, he was one of the city’s most important industrialists.

In a tour de force, Schmidtke presented two dozen central projects. One is the “Begehungen” art festival, the 2025 edition of which will bring contemporary art to the former North Thermal Power Station. Its striking, over 300 meter high chimney, which the French artist Daniel Buren decorated with seven colored lower bands in 2013, is one of the architectural dominants of the city. Smoke has stopped rising from it since the local energy supplier phased out coal early at the beginning of 2024. Now 21 international artists will deal with topics such as climate change and loss of resources in the current power plant, says co-organizer Claudia Tittel.

Another project is the “Purple Path,” which brings art installations to 38 smaller towns, primarily in the Ore Mountains. It is intended to illustrate how closely the city is intertwined with the region that was once dominated by mining. In Jahnsdorf, which has a population of just under 6,000, one of the playful, meandering “communal benches” by the Danish sculptor Jeppe Hein has been standing since last summer. Mayor Albrecht Spindler speaks of “art with everyday value”.

What the people of Chemnitz are all about in their year as the Capital of Culture can perhaps not be shown more clearly in any project than in the “3000 Garages”. On the one hand, the city wants to build bridges to its eastern neighbors Poland and the Czech Republic and present itself as a place with an Eastern European mentality: “Eastern State of Mind” is the name of one of the five program areas. Garages, says curator Kubicka-Dzieduszycka, are a phenomenon of the once socialist world: “In the West, no one had to wait ten years for a car and then worry about how to park it in a well-protected place and where to maintain and repair it.”

In addition, Chemnitz presents itself to its visitors as a city of “doers,” tinkerers and hobbyists. Even in the times of Richard Hartmann, Chemnitz, which was also called “Saxon Manchester,” was considered a hotbed of ingenuity and hard work. In the GDR, the city, which at times had more than 300,000 inhabitants and was called Karl-Marx-Stadt from 1953 to 1990, was the center of mechanical engineering and the textile industry. The mechanic spirit and the do-it-yourself mentality still live on today in the garages, where people no longer just work on mopeds and cars.

In addition, the garages also symbolize the transformation that has taken place in the city with brutal force and is still taking place today. With the end of the GDR, the previously dominant industries largely collapsed and thousands of jobs were lost. Formerly large companies such as VEB Wirkmaschinenbau with its striking clock tower remain chicly renovated properties in which there are conference centers, exhibition rooms and coffee roasters, but hardly any jobs. The automotive industry is one of the dominant sectors today, but it is also facing drastic changes. The VW engine plant fears for its continued existence in view of the group’s clear-cutting plans and the departure from the combustion engine. The garages are also undergoing change, says curator Kubicka-Dzieduszycka. In view of increasingly thicker cars, they are no longer suitable as a place to park mobile vehicles. In many places, new uses were therefore considered. In Eastern Europe, garages now house hair salons or fitness studios. But change is also in full swing in Chemnitz.

Of course, what exactly goes on behind the garage doors is largely unknown, and that leads to the center of Chemnitz’s Capital of Culture plans. The city has coined the motto “C the Unseen” for this purpose. On the one hand, “C” is the abbreviation of the city’s name, which is known from vehicle license plates. Pronounced in English, it becomes “see”, i.e. “to see”. The slogan essentially invites you to discover the previously undiscovered, unexpected or hidden.

Chemnitz itself is also relatively undiscovered so far. Although there are attractions in the city such as the internationally renowned municipal art collections or the unique “Petrified Forest” with 290 million year old tree trunks, it is still considered an insider tip at best. Saxony is the most popular German state for cultural tourism, explained the responsible Saxon minister Barbara Klepsch (CDU) in the Hartmann factory. So far, cultural tourists in the Free State have predominantly flocked to Dresden, Leipzig or Görlitz. Quite a few of the journalists who traveled to the program presentation were also in the city for the first time.

»Culture begins wherever people meet and take care of their surroundings.«

Agnieszka Kubicka-DzieduszyckaCurator

Of course, Chemnitz doesn’t just have a reputation as a “gray mouse” among outsiders. The city also tends to hide its light under a bushel and sell itself short. When in 2020 it became the fourth German city since the concept was “invented” almost 40 years ago to be awarded the European Capital of Culture, it amazed many of the locals who like to look with envy at the baroque splendor of the state capital Dresden and for their own city far less worth seeing. Its historic center was actually largely destroyed in Allied air raids in March 1945. However, the socialist inner city development of the 1970s around the Karl Marx Monument and the former Hotel Kongress is now seen as a testament to East Modernism that is worth seeing; There are also other attractions such as the Art Nouveau villa of the hosiery manufacturer Herbert Eugen Esche, built by Henry van de Velde, or the Schocken department store designed by Erich Mendelssohn, which today houses the “smac” archeology museum.

However, many people in Chemnitz are not particularly proud of this. The fact that some people even shamefully hide their origin is due not least to 2018. The year has become a code for right-wing demonstrations and xenophobic riots that took place in the city after the violent death of a city festival visitor. The days-long, sometimes violent demonstrations helped Chemnitz make international headlines and unwanted notoriety. Because the city was also one of the refuges of the terrorist trio National Socialist Underground (NSU) for years, it is considered by many to be a right-wing stronghold. In the city council, which was elected in June 2024, the AfD and Free Saxony, each of which is classified as right-wing extremist, together make up almost a third of the representatives. This year there are announcements from the right-wing extremist scene that they will disrupt the Capital of Culture year. Committed citizens like the musician Sabine Kühnrich find this an “unbearable idea.” She is one of the initiators of a “democracy base” as part of the Capital of Culture and would like to see “creative counter-strategies and a colorful cityscape”.

Mayor Sven Schulze also hopes that Chemnitz will present itself in a colorful, surprising and creative way, transforming it from an ugly duckling into an attractive swan in the eyes of many visitors. “We want to show that we don’t have to hide,” says the SPD politician and is looking forward to “people finding their way here who would otherwise never have come.” The organizers of the Capital of Culture are expecting two million visitors. But the locals also need to be convinced. They want to show themselves as a “city and region that we ourselves look at with pride and others look at with respect,” says the town hall boss.

Some people in Chemnitz are already developing pride, observes Agnieszka Kubicka-Dzieduszycka. She and her employees not only collected loans for Martin Maleschka’s installation in the garage courtyards, but also organized readings, film screenings and concerts. For next year they are planning, among other things, an exhibition with photographs by Maria Sturm as well as a “garage course” and other concerts. All of this has also increased the self-confidence of the garage owners. “Some of the older gentlemen now come to me and say: We are a cultural asset,” says the curator and laughs: “That shows that we are on the right track.”