Where students once danced

Abstract

This thesis examines how semi-public youth space in the GDR was materially organized through planning, access, spatial routines, labour, and repeated use. Its central case study is the Dicker Turm in Görlitz, a medieval tower gradually transformed into a student club through structural repair, institutional handover, technical adaptation, and sustained student work. Rather than treating youth clubs either as instruments of control or as islands of freedom, the thesis argues that they were negotiated spaces in which official order and everyday practice never fully coincided. Görlitz provides a particularly sharp setting for this question because educational life, organized leisure, border urbanity, and adaptable existing structures overlapped there. Methodologically, the study combines archival building files, technical documents, newspaper articles, retrospective press coverage, an interview conducted by the author, and selected Facebook posts. Read together, these fragmentary sources make it possible to reconstruct the Dicker Turm not simply as a planned setting, but as a lived and remembered space. The thesis argues that the club became historically significant not only because of what it was meant to be, but because of how it was institutionally produced, materially constrained, socially sustained, and later remembered. In doing so, it contributes to architectural history by showing how semi-public spaces become historically legible through thresholds, routines, material constraint, and repeated use.