Where East German mopeds and pedigree poodles meet

The gravel crunches underfoot as you walk up the driveway to Ute Wetzel’s garage yard on the west side of Chemnitz. The trained veterinarian has been coming here almost every day for over 25 years. Located next to allotments and green spaces, the yard has more than 500 uniformly laid out garage units painted in shades of brown. Over 50 years ago, when Ute Wetzel was young and the city was still called Karl-Marx-Stadt, the site lay fallow, she says as she walks, small grey pebbles bouncing off her shoes with every step. When, in the early 1960s, plans were drawn up to build a gigantic new development with 10,000 residential units in the immediate vicinity, Heinz Foraschik, a master hairdresser well known in the neighborhood, had an idea: why not use the vacant land for garages? Anyone who wanted to buy an “automobile,” as Wetzel says, in the GDR had to be patient. “It often took 10 or 15 years before your Trabant or Wartburg would arrive.” And when it finally did, it needed a suitable place to be kept, “because you wanted to hold on to the precious item for as long as possible.” When the city approved the building plans in 1971, the garage complex next to the Chemnitz hospital became a place that still shapes the city's community today: the garage community.

Community – a feeling that can’t be taken for granted in today's Chemnitz. In no other German state are the political rifts as deep as in Saxony. This was on display recently at the opening of the Capital of Culture: Around 1,000 people from Chemnitz took to the streets to prevent supporters of the small “Free Saxony” party, which has been categorized as far right, from marching through the city. The event showed how the political fronts are increasingly diverging in Chemnitz. But is the city really as divided as these rival camps suggest at first glance? And where do those spaces still exist, in which community is lived and breathed and diversity is created – away from ideological divisions? This year's Capital of Culture is also asking how a derailed social system can be put back on a communal, democratic path – accompanied by an event organized by the Fonds Darstellende Künste, which is looking for ways to stay many in the arts. Perhaps an answer can be found in the Chemnitz garages.

Ute Wetzel unlocks the door to an office room at the side of the garage premises. Sparsely furnished, a large table fills the center of the room. Wetzel explains that she has been in charge of the organization, maintenance and resale of the garages since she became chairwoman of the garage association. She looks through the window at one of the many rows of garages, and as she recalls how the yard grew garage by garage, there’s a glint of nostalgia in her eyes: “I can tell myself that it was a nice time, back in the 70s.” What made it particularly nice was the fact that people helped each other out and stuck together. And because every single garage was the result of collective labor. If you wanted a garage, you had to pitch in and you’d only be authorized to buy one after 240 hours of work. But nobody was left alone: help was always on hand from the specialized brigades, the skilled trade groups of the planned economy system. When a delivery of sand or concrete arrived in the yard, garage founder Heinz Foraschik would sometimes leave his customers sitting in the local salon and rush over to the yard to collect the materials – an anecdote that Ute Wetzel still likes to tell today.

Five meters long, two and a half meters wide and just high enough to accommodate a GDR car. Right from the start of the construction project, the appearance of a Chemnitz-style garage was laid down in standardized building specifications from which no deviations were permitted. As identical as the doors look from the outside, however, inside everything is highly individual. It soon became clear that the garage was not just a car park, but also a workshop, hobby room and meeting place. The latter in particular developed into an essential part of Chemnitz's urban society over the years during which GDR citizens waited for their coveted vehicle: the garage as a place to come together. While the Trabant and Wartburg have long since given way to Volkswagens and Mercedes, to this day the garage yards have not lost their function as social spaces – on the contrary.

Ute Wetzel walks purposefully across her yard, greeting people sitting in front of their garages in the late afternoon light, screwdrivers and a bottle of beer in hand. As on so many evenings, Michael Kaden has arranged to meet a friend in his garage to continue working on their jointly refurbished Schwalbe – a GDR moped built in 1985. When you enter the space, it smells of paint and dust, pop music is playing in the background and a collection of tools hangs on the walls: spanners, files, hammers of all sizes. Next to it is a GDR cassette radio – “broken unfortunately,” Michael Kaden says, adding that he’ll have to repair it some time. There's even a small fridge under a workbench with jumbo-sized ketchup and mayo, and every now and then they all eat together in the garage: “It balances out the working day.” Sixty percent of his working day is spent here, says the Chemnitz native with audible pride in his voice, wiping shavings off the Schwalbe's sheet metal parts with a routine movement. The garage was “gray, dirty and ugly” when he leased it six years ago. Together with his colleague, who is a master painter by trade, Kaden, who is himself a qualified electrician, “lovingly refurbished” the floors and walls. There’s been hammering and tinkering here ever since – the realization of their childhood dream. Back then, they wouldn’t have had the time or the money; a moped cost 1,400 East German marks. In GDR times, this was an unattainable sum for a young laborer working three shifts: “You either bought a radio or a moped,” recalls Kaden. Today he has both, for him “heaven on earth.” And yet he sometimes wishes he could go back to those days – not to the politics, but the social aspects. What he misses today is the solidarity. The garage yard is an island where the spirit of community still exists, just as it used to be on campsites: “We are intimate, we are neighbors, we are friends. We help each other through the generations.”  

This year Chemnitz is Europe’s Capital of Culture, which is both a challenge and an opportunity for the city. The reactions in the garage community were therefore correspondingly ambivalent when the “3000 Garages” art project was launched. The idea: an exchange between the Capital of Culture program and the garage users. Initially, there was a lot of skepticism, says Ute Wetzel: “Chemnitz, garage, culture – what's the point?” many opponents of the project asked themselves. But when the barrier in front of the driveway of the garage yard opened on April 5 this year for a launch event for the “3000 Garages” project, the initial doubts gave way to a buoyant euphoria: “It was an incredibly beautiful day,” says Michael Kaden. Around 300 people gathered, representatives of the former cultural capitals met Chemnitz residents from the neighborhood who also wanted to see what actually happens in these garages. “You can always strike up a conversation in the East,” says Michael Kaden with a wink, patting his mechanic friend on the shoulder companionably.

Ute Wetzel's garage yard might be the largest in Chemnitz, but it’s by no means the only one. Two kilometers south toward the city center lies another of the 156 garage colonies that keep popping up in the jagged cityscape. The Theaterstraße garage yard is located in a gap between the four-lane traffic axis and the Chemnitz River and is the venue for the “3000 Garages” exhibition, which is being held from May 24 to October 3 as part of the Capital of Culture year. You can already see over the fence that there’s work being done in there. However, the work isn’t on a collector's item from the GDR era, but on an art object. The artist Cosima Terrasse opens the gate to the garage yard wearing a blue overall, as if she has come straight from the workshop. The courtyard smells of filter coffee, which Cosima Terrasse and her team drink from paper cups, and bales of straw, on which you can sit and watch a short film introduction in one of the six garages. It’s the week before the opening of the walk-in installation with the enigmatic name “Fischelant,” a mysterious car-like creature somewhere between a motor vehicle and an art machine that, according to the program, promises to “turn shit into gold.” Created through joint invention and experimentation with the garage owners, the installation alludes to the everyday improvisational GDR mentality of still being able to conjure up something valuable from supposed scrap metal: clever, cunning and manoeuvrable, “Fischelant,” as the Saxon word onomatopoeically expresses.

Cultural scientist Ann-Kathrin Ntokalou has been in charge of the project from day one, moving from Munich, where she had studied, to Chemnitz. It took a whole two years of preparation and numerous introductory talks with the garage community before the “3000 Garages” concept for the Capital of Culture was actually brought to life in the form of exhibitions, concerts and installations. However, this wasn’t something that could be taken for granted: “Garage yards are very private spaces,” says Ann-Kathrin Ntokalou, making a sweeping gesture toward the garages. Gaining the interest and, above all, the trust of the owners took time at the beginning, especially with older people. Many had feared that the “3000 Garages” concept was just a means of attracting an external art project to Chemnitz that would ultimately leave the garage users out in the cold. A justified reservation, says Ntokalou: “That's why we definitely didn't want our project to end up as a space ship that simply takes off again when the Capital of Culture year is over.” Through jointly organized events such as garage concerts or open-air cinemas, the initial skepticism turned into curiosity and a feeling of solidarity. Ntokalou and her team of curators provided the infrastructure, while the garage owners provided the yard and drinks: “And then suddenly there were women in Versace dresses with breeding poodles and old motorbike mechanics together at the same event.”

“When we arrived in Chemnitz, we were three women in an old Mazda with a Polish license plate,” says Ann-Kathrin Ntokalou, recalling the early days of the joint project between the curators of “3000 Garages.” Back then, they were standing in front of a lowered barrier in the driveway of Ute Wetzel's garage yard, their car trunk full of ideas. Today, they are networked with the garage community via the “garage phone,” one call is enough to help each other, exchange contacts and stories: “It's a process that can't be reversed.” A process that reminds us how democracy can take place outside of parliaments and shows how cultural work can not only open the barrier in front of the garage yard, but also between social classes. Perhaps here, in the Chemnitz garage yards, it’s not just being discussed, but lived – the art of staying many.