Unveiling the emotional and social consequences of deindustrialisation: The case of East Germany’s shipbuilding industry

This article examines the emotional and social consequences of deindustrialisation through oral history interviews with former workers from East Germany’s shipbuilding industry. It reveals how the transition to a market economy after 1990 not only let to job losses but also fractured workplace relations, disrupted community attachments, and introduced new forms of spatial displacement and uncertainty. Drawing on emotional geographies, labour geography, and memory studies, the analysis explores how workers experienced, made sense of, and remembered these transformations. It further argues that memory acts as a form of agency through which workers reassert meaning, identity, and value in the face of structural change. Narratives of pride, dispossession, and fractured bonds show that industrial decline is not merely an economic shift but a deeply affective, contested, and ongoing process. The article contributes to more nuanced understandings of post-industrial transformation by centring its emotional, spatial, and temporal dimensions.