Short abstract

Dresden in East Germany is home to one of Europe’s largest semiconductor clusters. This paper reads “Silicon Saxony” as a memory project that turns socialist microelectronics into a usable past while disavowing rupture, devaluation, and lost futures that still shape the region.

Long abstract

Dresden, in East Germany, is today promoted as “Silicon Saxony,” one of Europe’s leading semiconductor regions. The phrase signals dynamism and technological promise, but it also performs historical work. In policy discourse and cluster branding, the region’s socialist microelectronics industry is recast as a precursor to chip success. The East German past is not simply rejected; it is selectively folded into a teleology of innovation.

This paper asks what such stories leave behind. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic as well as discourse-analytic material, I examine Silicon Saxony not only as an industrial cluster but as a memory project that shapes how the past becomes available to the present. Official narratives turn a fractured post-socialist history into a coherent account of continuity. Yet they remain haunted by what they cannot fully absorb: the collapse of industrial worlds after 1989 and the devaluation of socialist expertise, both bound up with attachments to futures that never arrived.

A hauntological approach makes these tensions legible. It shifts attention from innovation’s promises to its temporal politics by asking how regions are assembled through selective remembrance as much as through future-oriented visions. Innovation residues, in this sense, are not only material leftovers. They also persist as affective and political traces within stories about progress and worth. Thinking with such residues helps disrupt the apparent coherence of innovation societies and opens space to reassemble them around lost futures and unresolved claims to recognition in the region today.