http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/22/weekinreview/22land.html?th August 22, 2004 In Germany's East, a Harvest of Silence By MARK LANDLER EIPZIG, Germany - In the flush of German reunification, Chancellor Helmut Kohl declared that the former East German states would be transformed into "blossoming landscapes, where it will be worth living and working."
Germany backed up its promise with one of the greatest transfers of wealth in human history: some $1.5 trillion has flowed from west to east since 1990, propping up living standards and financing epic public works projects, among them a latticework of superhighways. But many roads lead nowhere. The landscape in eastern Germany remains barren - emptier even than during Communist times, when the planned economy supplied jobs and at least the illusion of commercial activity. Traveling through eastern Germany with a camera 15 years later offers a chance to document how tragically short a grand renovation project has fallen. Today, roughly one eastern German in five does not have a job, an unemployment rate nearly twice that for Germany as a whole. The population has dwindled by 1.6 million since 1990, to 15.1 million, as a steady stream of people, particularly young women, have gone west in search of work. The ebb tide has devastated places like Hoyerswerda, a small town that was turned into a model industrial city by the Communists. With most of its jobs gone, the town has lost nearly half of its 70,000 inhabitants. Empty apartment buildings darken the horizon like cement tombstones. Many fall to the wrecking ball, their jagged remains a hunting ground for scavengers and boys with slingshots. Children seem almost an endangered species, since the couples who would start families are precisely the ones who leave. Dresden, the proud but tattered capital of the state of Saxony, is closing 43 schools this summer because there are not enough kids to fill the classrooms. Germans, worried that the languishing east threatens to hobble the entire country, have begun a national debate over what went wrong. The answer supplied recently by a blue-ribbon commission is stark: too much money spent on bricks and mortar, not enough on people. One can see the legacy of feckless investment in Saxony, once the industrial heart of East Germany. Rust-belt cities like Chemnitz, formerly Karl Marx Stadt, are full of shuttered factories. Many were bought after 1990 by western Germans, who found they could not churn out ball bearings or grinding machinery or auto parts cheaply enough to make a go of it. In the wake of that futile gold rush, a more serious class of investors has come, putting up microchip factories in Dresden and automobile factories around Leipzig. Drawn as much by public subsidies as by patriotism, they nevertheless offer a reed of hope for an industrial renaissance. Eastern Germany's problems, however, will not be solved by yet another BMW plant. The real challenge is human: how to transform a society reared on Communism and addicted to handouts from Berlin into a vital region ready to compete with hungrier lands to the east. These days, some Ossis, as eastern Germans are not so affectionately called by western Germans, rouse themselves only to protest the government's plan to scale back unemployment checks. Former state farms lie fallow because their new owners see no economic benefit to tilling the fields. Where wheat and oats once grew, weeds and wildflowers now run riot. Helmut Kohl's promise of a blossoming landscape came true after all. But surely not as he intended. Victor Homola contributed additional reporting
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