When social science and the arts join together to search for social capital in European societies that are in the midst of fundamental change, then the situation must be serious. Today, identifying what factors continue to hold society together and what strategies might lead us out of the current situation are challenging problems. What is at the heart of shrinking, fragmented, exclusionary societies; what constitutes their capital for the future? Conventional explanations and images of social change must be reexamined. In the light of far-reaching and fast-paced social transformations, artists and researchers entered into a dialog in this project to explore — with each other and with society — what will survive and how.

In successful societies, social capital can be found in networks of trust and in common values. It has been argued that this “soft capital” precedes material wealth. Where it is lacking, it must be “produced”. The concept of “survival” belongs, so it seems, to the world of developing or less modern countries. But in times of change, values, just like hard currency, are devalued; corporations disappear and so do civic networks, and people and their communities must readjust, shifting into a survival mode. In this context, survival refers to a complex of practical schemes that includes reducing expectations, regaining skills, and self-organizing ways of living.

In September 2007, ethnologist and sociologists, performing artists and playwrights began exploring the process of rapid social change in Wittenberge within the framework of the joint project “‘Social Capital’ in the Transformation of European Societies: Communities, Families, Generations”.

The three-year collaboration brought together scholars from the Institute for European Ethnology, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin; the Department of Sociology, Universität Kassel; the Hamburg Institute for Social Research; the Brandenburg-Berlin Institute for Social Science Studies; and the Thuenen Institut für Regionalentwicklung Bollewick with theater professionals from the Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin. The project was funded in part by a grant from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, as part of the ministry’s program “Geisteswissenschaften im öffentlichen Dialog” [Humanities in Dialog with the Public].

Wittenberge — a town in Brandenburg with about twenty thousand inhabitants, half way along the train line that connects Hamburg and Berlin — today represents part of the European experience of social change that is marked by deindustrialization, depopulation, and fragmentation.

The fieldwork conducted by researchers as well as the investigations carried out by artists in Wittenberge were guided by their search for social capital. Trust, the family, community, charisma, and subsistence are the empirical concepts that formed the foundation for these various undertakings. The joint project aimed to find social capital where its existence is disputed in the current crisis and to observe the transformations of social capital while we are in the midst of and part of the current changes.

One perspective adopted in the project centered on investigations and field work that aimed to identify the practices people use to get by. A second major aim was to initiate and maintain a dialog with the public. Plays, performances, and readings that explored the paradigmatic aspects of social change were part of a public dialog that endeavored to create clarity in a situation perceived as complex and inscrutable. Public discussion about the impacts of change is an element of the potential that was explored here. By linking analysis from the social sciences and artistic performance, a conversation about social transformations could emerge that created friction and room for reflection from a distance. When the public speaks, the threads of social narrative — which have no impact in a fragmented society — can be renewed.