The New Europe: Wroclaw and Cottbus
May. 20th, 2003 07:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldMore from the Globe and Mail on the new Europe, following from the previous article from Lithuania:
One country, two views of history
For Poland's young, waxing nostalgic for the bad old days of communism is a fad, DOUG SAUNDERS finds; not so for the older generation
By DOUG SAUNDERS
Monday, May 19, 2003 - Page A8
WROCLAW, POLAND -- Europe's most dramatic division these days may not be between the "old" west and the "new" east. A far more painful fissure lies between generations and livelihoods, the kind one can find in a visit to Eva and Zdzislawa, two Polish women who live only a few kilometres apart but represent deeply polarized visions of the continent's future.
On this sunny afternoon, Eva Kawulok has decided to stay away from her university campus and go downtown for a meeting in a dark, smoky room filled with the images and slogans of communism.
On the walls, socialist realist paintings show revolutionary workers and peasants struggling against capitalism. There is a red banner: "Western imperialists want you to enjoy Coca-Cola." But it is all very foreign to Ms. Kawulok.
At 22, she is part of the first generation of Poles who have no adult memories of the 40 stark years before Poland became the first Eastern European nation to abandon communism in 1989.
This café, named PRL or "Polish Democratic Republic" after the country's name in those days, is part of a wave of campy nostalgia that young Poles, like most Eastern Europeans, are expressing for the bad old days.
It is an aesthetic fad, like That 70s Show in the West, among people for whom communism is more a joke than a menace. The waitresses wear shapeless blue polyester uniforms, and the mood among the beer-drinking patrons is exuberant.
"I find it really very amazing and funny to imagine that everyone lived like this for so long," she says, flipping through a scrapbook of Communist memos and posters near the bar.
Her parents, doctors, lived in a minimal apartment building on a state salary in those days, and this city, now attractive and colourful, was a monotone of grey concrete.
Less than 50 kilometres south, a very different sort of nostalgia for Communist times is being expressed by Zdzislawa Zmuda.
At 44, she is dressed in the modern-day peasant's uniform of a cotton print top, Lycra tights and thick rubber boots. She has been up since dawn, tending to the animals and weeding her beet field on her hands and knees.
There is nothing ironic to her about her warm memories of the system of collective agriculture that governed her thin strip of farmland and her ramshackle village from the end of the Second World War until the 1990s.
"When I was young, life was happy, people were together. Farmers like me were treated like important people."
With her youngest daughter, Asia, 16, she walks across the debris-strewn yard from the barn to the feed shed. The village of perhaps 40 people is little more than a collection of cinder-block houses and barns amid hand-worked fields.
"We have three cows, the highest number in the village, but you can't sell milk any more, because the price is too low, so we make cheese and sell it to our neighbours," she says, her brow furrowing with worry.
"If we join Europe and the Germans start running things, I won't be able to sell anything and I don't know what I'll do. I'm very frightened."
Mrs. Zmuda may be Europe's biggest problem. While Western European countries have modern, industrial food-supply systems, millions of subsistence-level peasant farmers populate the 10 former Communist nations about to join the European Union.
Poland is one of the most agricultural nations on the continent; more than a third of its 38 million people live on the land.
In France, less than 5 per cent of the population works in agriculture.
In the next few years, Eastern Europe's more productive farms will become far more prosperous, but millions of peasant farmers like Mrs. Zmuda will have to find a new living. Her husband already works five days a week at a bakery in a nearby town, earning the equivalent of $300 a month.
Their oldest daughter has moved to Wroclaw, where she attends university. Their other two girls, who will help with this fall's harvest, have no intention of staying on the farm.
The family's main crop of wheat -- they expect to harvest five tonnes -- is worth only $100 a tonne, down from $200 a few years ago. Once Poland joins the EU and adopts its rigid standards for agriculture production, the government-set price is likely to decline further.
"We are living day by day," Mrs. Zmuda says as she carries a bucket of water to the barn.
"We have to pay everything -- gas, water -- we are living day by day and that's it. I once thought I could sell my crops and save money for a better house, but that's impossible now; that will never happen again."
Mrs. Zmuda, who has never been to the city, does not understand why anyone would want to join the European Union. "On TV they say most people are for joining Europe. I don't understand it. I've never met anybody who thinks this. I don't know where they get these views from. Why would anyone want to make it harder to have a farm?"
Back in the city, Eva Kawulok is returning with her boyfriend from tennis class, dressed in capri pants and a sweater. Like most of Poland's urban majority, she has never spoken to a farmer, though she knows quite a lot about the political clout of the peasants.
"I don't understand why they think this way," she says, her friends nodding in agreement. "The Polish countryside is quite lazy, inefficient. But they don't want to do anything about it, and they seem to think that the EU is coming in as a colonial occupying power."
Her worries are the worries of university students everywhere: how to keep up with rent payments on her shared apartment and how to get a summer job when the official unemployment rate has reached 19 per cent.
Like many Poles of her generation, Ms. Kawulok looks outward, to Western Europe, where thousands of Eastern Europeans occupy the lower ranks of the service industry. She has already worked a summer waiting tables in London, and hopes to find her way in the more robust economies west of the Oder River.
"So maybe we leave Poland," she says.
"But maybe not for a long time. Young people don't want to immigrate; they just want to get some experience somewhere else. We feel very strongly about Poland, and we want to come back."
And Barren city an ominous warning to rest of EU
Cottbus, Germany, is a victim of 'shrinkage,' a crisis of depopulation now afflicting all of Europe, DOUG SAUNDERS discovers
By DOUG SAUNDERS
Tuesday, May 20, 2003 - Page A11
At first glance, Cottbus looks like an orderly and prosperous old German city, with cobblestone streets and brightly painted 18th-century buildings along a winding stretch of the river Spree.
As you stroll through the city's squares and laneways, though, something begins to feel amiss. There are surprisingly few cafés, and a lot of the buildings, while bright and neat, seem unoccupied. You begin to wonder where all the people are.
You're not going to find them. Cottbus, two hours south of Berlin in what used to be East Germany, is a dramatic victim of a phenomenon the Germans call "shrinkage," a crisis of depopulation rooted in declining birth rates that is now afflicting all of Europe. The city's population has dropped dramatically, to little more than 100,000 today from 130,000 a decade ago, and it is losing 7 per cent of its residents every year. The city is engaged in an expensive, long-term struggle to appear normal as its apartments and streets empty out.
"Even at the most busy times, there are not as many people here as you would expect to see in a city," said Andreas Berthold, who works at a clothing shop in Cottbus's quaint but almost deserted historic centre. "The fake city," as he calls it, is maintained by the government at a cost of millions. Most of Cottbus's residents live in a wasteland of half-empty concrete apartment blocks on the outskirts of town. The buildings are covered in graffiti and interspersed with stretches of empty fields and abandoned businesses.
To keep swaths from becoming ghost towns, the Cottbus city government has been forced to go against every politician's and planner's instinct and spend tax dollars to reduce infrastructure. More than 5,000 apartment units are being taken apart piece by piece -- some of them to be replaced by single-family houses -- and the city is struggling to find a way to reduce the size of its sanitation and water systems, whose underused pipes often carry unmoving, stagnant water.
"I want to get out of here as soon as I'm old enough," said Hans-Peter Klemke, 17, who was skateboarding in a crumbling concrete courtyard in front of an apartment building in Madlow, a sprawling and sparsely populated 1960s development on the outskirts of town.
The city is trying to persuade all the residents of Madlow to move to Sandow, a slightly less dismal complex closer to the centre of town so the remains of Madlow can be demolished. Mr. Klemke was wearing a black T-shirt showing a book crushing a swastika -- a challenge, he said, to the neo-Nazi gangs that prowl Madlow's barren streets.
The depopulation crisis is threatening to wreak havoc on the European Union as it expands to the Russian border over the next several months. The reduced population does not provide enough tax revenues to pay pensions for the aging, leading to crises such as the one-day general strike in France last week. The Eastern European states have suffered the most acute population drop, with Bulgaria's population falling by two million over the past 10 years.
Across Europe, people fear their cities will become like Cottbus. So scholars from all the continent are coming here to study its depopulation. In three weeks, Cottbus will play host to a conference of architects and planners titled Public Space in the Time of Shrinkage. Two weeks ago, a similar conference of civic administrators was held in a nearby town, attracting people from a half-dozen countries.
"Unfortunately, we have become experts in this subject," said Riklef Rambow, the University of Cottbus professor who is organizing next month's conference from his office in the university's Faculty of Architecture building, a depressing grey concrete structure covered in graffiti.
"Nobody really knows what is the most sensible thing to do about it. Until three or four years ago, it was not even possible to admit that cities are shrinking. Now at least some people are starting to get creative."
Cottbus has led the way in coming up with strategies for handling shrinkage. After all, it got a head start: It was the victim of an earlier depopulation, when millions of former East Germans moved westward after the country was reunified in 1989.
But the current wave of shrinkage is rooted in a phenomenon that is depopulating cities and nations across Europe: People aren't having babies.
Germany's fertility rate is 1.34 children per woman, far below the two needed to maintain a stable population without immigration. It is the second-lowest reproduction rate of Western European nations, beaten only by the Italians, with 1.23 children per woman.
Across the European Union, the average is 1.47, and no major country has a rate higher than 1.9. Immigrants help, and Germany has pursued one of the continent's more open immigration policies, but there just aren't enough people to make up for the shrinkage. And the immigrants tend to move to major centres, such as Berlin, leaving places like Cottbus denuded.
According to a report released last month by the United Nations, the European population crisis is becoming acute: During the next 14 years, the population of the 14 current EU states is projected to decline to 600 million from 725 million. While that is unique to Europe today, many demographers predict that the whole world will face a crisis of depopulation within two or three generations.
The effects are devastating. Because fiscal growth relies on population growth, shrinkage leads to economic depression. In fact, many economists attribute Germany's current economic malaise to its population shrinkage.
In response, Germany is spending the equivalent of $5.25-billion on initiatives to boost the birth rate, in addition to the monthly payments of $225 per child that it offers mothers until their children are 18.
One country, two views of history
For Poland's young, waxing nostalgic for the bad old days of communism is a fad, DOUG SAUNDERS finds; not so for the older generation
By DOUG SAUNDERS
Monday, May 19, 2003 - Page A8
WROCLAW, POLAND -- Europe's most dramatic division these days may not be between the "old" west and the "new" east. A far more painful fissure lies between generations and livelihoods, the kind one can find in a visit to Eva and Zdzislawa, two Polish women who live only a few kilometres apart but represent deeply polarized visions of the continent's future.
On this sunny afternoon, Eva Kawulok has decided to stay away from her university campus and go downtown for a meeting in a dark, smoky room filled with the images and slogans of communism.
On the walls, socialist realist paintings show revolutionary workers and peasants struggling against capitalism. There is a red banner: "Western imperialists want you to enjoy Coca-Cola." But it is all very foreign to Ms. Kawulok.
At 22, she is part of the first generation of Poles who have no adult memories of the 40 stark years before Poland became the first Eastern European nation to abandon communism in 1989.
This café, named PRL or "Polish Democratic Republic" after the country's name in those days, is part of a wave of campy nostalgia that young Poles, like most Eastern Europeans, are expressing for the bad old days.
It is an aesthetic fad, like That 70s Show in the West, among people for whom communism is more a joke than a menace. The waitresses wear shapeless blue polyester uniforms, and the mood among the beer-drinking patrons is exuberant.
"I find it really very amazing and funny to imagine that everyone lived like this for so long," she says, flipping through a scrapbook of Communist memos and posters near the bar.
Her parents, doctors, lived in a minimal apartment building on a state salary in those days, and this city, now attractive and colourful, was a monotone of grey concrete.
Less than 50 kilometres south, a very different sort of nostalgia for Communist times is being expressed by Zdzislawa Zmuda.
At 44, she is dressed in the modern-day peasant's uniform of a cotton print top, Lycra tights and thick rubber boots. She has been up since dawn, tending to the animals and weeding her beet field on her hands and knees.
There is nothing ironic to her about her warm memories of the system of collective agriculture that governed her thin strip of farmland and her ramshackle village from the end of the Second World War until the 1990s.
"When I was young, life was happy, people were together. Farmers like me were treated like important people."
With her youngest daughter, Asia, 16, she walks across the debris-strewn yard from the barn to the feed shed. The village of perhaps 40 people is little more than a collection of cinder-block houses and barns amid hand-worked fields.
"We have three cows, the highest number in the village, but you can't sell milk any more, because the price is too low, so we make cheese and sell it to our neighbours," she says, her brow furrowing with worry.
"If we join Europe and the Germans start running things, I won't be able to sell anything and I don't know what I'll do. I'm very frightened."
Mrs. Zmuda may be Europe's biggest problem. While Western European countries have modern, industrial food-supply systems, millions of subsistence-level peasant farmers populate the 10 former Communist nations about to join the European Union.
Poland is one of the most agricultural nations on the continent; more than a third of its 38 million people live on the land.
In France, less than 5 per cent of the population works in agriculture.
In the next few years, Eastern Europe's more productive farms will become far more prosperous, but millions of peasant farmers like Mrs. Zmuda will have to find a new living. Her husband already works five days a week at a bakery in a nearby town, earning the equivalent of $300 a month.
Their oldest daughter has moved to Wroclaw, where she attends university. Their other two girls, who will help with this fall's harvest, have no intention of staying on the farm.
The family's main crop of wheat -- they expect to harvest five tonnes -- is worth only $100 a tonne, down from $200 a few years ago. Once Poland joins the EU and adopts its rigid standards for agriculture production, the government-set price is likely to decline further.
"We are living day by day," Mrs. Zmuda says as she carries a bucket of water to the barn.
"We have to pay everything -- gas, water -- we are living day by day and that's it. I once thought I could sell my crops and save money for a better house, but that's impossible now; that will never happen again."
Mrs. Zmuda, who has never been to the city, does not understand why anyone would want to join the European Union. "On TV they say most people are for joining Europe. I don't understand it. I've never met anybody who thinks this. I don't know where they get these views from. Why would anyone want to make it harder to have a farm?"
Back in the city, Eva Kawulok is returning with her boyfriend from tennis class, dressed in capri pants and a sweater. Like most of Poland's urban majority, she has never spoken to a farmer, though she knows quite a lot about the political clout of the peasants.
"I don't understand why they think this way," she says, her friends nodding in agreement. "The Polish countryside is quite lazy, inefficient. But they don't want to do anything about it, and they seem to think that the EU is coming in as a colonial occupying power."
Her worries are the worries of university students everywhere: how to keep up with rent payments on her shared apartment and how to get a summer job when the official unemployment rate has reached 19 per cent.
Like many Poles of her generation, Ms. Kawulok looks outward, to Western Europe, where thousands of Eastern Europeans occupy the lower ranks of the service industry. She has already worked a summer waiting tables in London, and hopes to find her way in the more robust economies west of the Oder River.
"So maybe we leave Poland," she says.
"But maybe not for a long time. Young people don't want to immigrate; they just want to get some experience somewhere else. We feel very strongly about Poland, and we want to come back."
And Barren city an ominous warning to rest of EU
Cottbus, Germany, is a victim of 'shrinkage,' a crisis of depopulation now afflicting all of Europe, DOUG SAUNDERS discovers
By DOUG SAUNDERS
Tuesday, May 20, 2003 - Page A11
At first glance, Cottbus looks like an orderly and prosperous old German city, with cobblestone streets and brightly painted 18th-century buildings along a winding stretch of the river Spree.
As you stroll through the city's squares and laneways, though, something begins to feel amiss. There are surprisingly few cafés, and a lot of the buildings, while bright and neat, seem unoccupied. You begin to wonder where all the people are.
You're not going to find them. Cottbus, two hours south of Berlin in what used to be East Germany, is a dramatic victim of a phenomenon the Germans call "shrinkage," a crisis of depopulation rooted in declining birth rates that is now afflicting all of Europe. The city's population has dropped dramatically, to little more than 100,000 today from 130,000 a decade ago, and it is losing 7 per cent of its residents every year. The city is engaged in an expensive, long-term struggle to appear normal as its apartments and streets empty out.
"Even at the most busy times, there are not as many people here as you would expect to see in a city," said Andreas Berthold, who works at a clothing shop in Cottbus's quaint but almost deserted historic centre. "The fake city," as he calls it, is maintained by the government at a cost of millions. Most of Cottbus's residents live in a wasteland of half-empty concrete apartment blocks on the outskirts of town. The buildings are covered in graffiti and interspersed with stretches of empty fields and abandoned businesses.
To keep swaths from becoming ghost towns, the Cottbus city government has been forced to go against every politician's and planner's instinct and spend tax dollars to reduce infrastructure. More than 5,000 apartment units are being taken apart piece by piece -- some of them to be replaced by single-family houses -- and the city is struggling to find a way to reduce the size of its sanitation and water systems, whose underused pipes often carry unmoving, stagnant water.
"I want to get out of here as soon as I'm old enough," said Hans-Peter Klemke, 17, who was skateboarding in a crumbling concrete courtyard in front of an apartment building in Madlow, a sprawling and sparsely populated 1960s development on the outskirts of town.
The city is trying to persuade all the residents of Madlow to move to Sandow, a slightly less dismal complex closer to the centre of town so the remains of Madlow can be demolished. Mr. Klemke was wearing a black T-shirt showing a book crushing a swastika -- a challenge, he said, to the neo-Nazi gangs that prowl Madlow's barren streets.
The depopulation crisis is threatening to wreak havoc on the European Union as it expands to the Russian border over the next several months. The reduced population does not provide enough tax revenues to pay pensions for the aging, leading to crises such as the one-day general strike in France last week. The Eastern European states have suffered the most acute population drop, with Bulgaria's population falling by two million over the past 10 years.
Across Europe, people fear their cities will become like Cottbus. So scholars from all the continent are coming here to study its depopulation. In three weeks, Cottbus will play host to a conference of architects and planners titled Public Space in the Time of Shrinkage. Two weeks ago, a similar conference of civic administrators was held in a nearby town, attracting people from a half-dozen countries.
"Unfortunately, we have become experts in this subject," said Riklef Rambow, the University of Cottbus professor who is organizing next month's conference from his office in the university's Faculty of Architecture building, a depressing grey concrete structure covered in graffiti.
"Nobody really knows what is the most sensible thing to do about it. Until three or four years ago, it was not even possible to admit that cities are shrinking. Now at least some people are starting to get creative."
Cottbus has led the way in coming up with strategies for handling shrinkage. After all, it got a head start: It was the victim of an earlier depopulation, when millions of former East Germans moved westward after the country was reunified in 1989.
But the current wave of shrinkage is rooted in a phenomenon that is depopulating cities and nations across Europe: People aren't having babies.
Germany's fertility rate is 1.34 children per woman, far below the two needed to maintain a stable population without immigration. It is the second-lowest reproduction rate of Western European nations, beaten only by the Italians, with 1.23 children per woman.
Across the European Union, the average is 1.47, and no major country has a rate higher than 1.9. Immigrants help, and Germany has pursued one of the continent's more open immigration policies, but there just aren't enough people to make up for the shrinkage. And the immigrants tend to move to major centres, such as Berlin, leaving places like Cottbus denuded.
According to a report released last month by the United Nations, the European population crisis is becoming acute: During the next 14 years, the population of the 14 current EU states is projected to decline to 600 million from 725 million. While that is unique to Europe today, many demographers predict that the whole world will face a crisis of depopulation within two or three generations.
The effects are devastating. Because fiscal growth relies on population growth, shrinkage leads to economic depression. In fact, many economists attribute Germany's current economic malaise to its population shrinkage.
In response, Germany is spending the equivalent of $5.25-billion on initiatives to boost the birth rate, in addition to the monthly payments of $225 per child that it offers mothers until their children are 18.
