[LINK] "In East Germany, a Decline as Stark as a Wall"

[rfmcdonald]

Nicholas Kulish's article in The New York Times, "In East Germany, a Decline as Stark as a Wall", talked about the area that was once East Germany and is now the New Länder has been experiencing sustained relative decline.

[O]utside big cities like Dresden, Leipzig or Berlin, [. . .] the story of decline and departure has changed little in the former East Germany.

Not far beyond the few thriving urban centers, traffic is often spare on the freshly paved highways, and at night in parts of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania in the northern part of the country, there is hardly a light to be seen to either side of the autobahns.

In a popular song a few years back, the performer Rainald Grebe described a feeling of solitude by singing, “I feel so empty today, I feel Brandenburg,” referring to the former East German state that surrounds Berlin.

Newspapers track the return of wolf packs to Saxony along the Polish border on the one hand, and the continued migration of the young and the educated to the greater opportunities in the west on the other.

The demographics are also quite dire.

Unemployment in the former East Germany remains double what it is in the west, and in some regions the number of women between the ages of 20 and 30 has dropped by more than 30 percent. In all, roughly 1.7 million people have left the former East Germany since the fall of the Berlin Wall, around 12 percent of the population, a continuing process even in the few years before the economic crisis began to bite.

And the population decline is about to get much worse, as a result of a demographic time bomb known by the innocuous-sounding name “the kink,” which followed the end of Communism. The birth rate collapsed in the former East Germany in those early, uncertain years so completely that the drop is comparable only to times of war, according to Reiner Klingholz, director of the Berlin Institute for Population and Development. “For a number of years East Germans just stopped having children,” Dr. Klingholz said.

In the end of the article, Kulish recounts the story of Hoyerswerda, once a town among the most prosperous in East Germany, now a depopulating district with a population that has fallen by half and the ongoing destruction of unused buildings, the young leaving.