Posted on 04/08/2007 5:54:29 PM PDT by blam
E German towns 'left to poverty'
By Harry de Quetteville in Hoyerswerda
Last Updated: 1:10am BST 09/04/2007
After two decades of promises to revitalise its former communist east, Germany has abandoned swathes of the ex-GDR to poverty and depopulation, a scathing new report has revealed.
The trend, which has seen hundreds of thousands flee westwards from the neglect, is so bad that the old communist east is now studded with "ghost towns", it says.
The report, released late last month and called the Future Atlas 2007, is the most detailed examination of 439 towns and regions in Germany, and shatters the pledges made almost 20 years ago.
It reveals that investment worth hundreds of billions of pounds in selected eastern "hotspots" such as Dresden and Potsdam has helped resuscitate their once downtrodden economies.
But beyond these much publicised symbols of success, it says, is an economic desert where the concrete tenement blocks of communist times endure, but the communities, industries and jobs do not.
"The state has focused on economic clusters like Dresden in the east," said Peter Kaiser, the report's author. "But elsewhere people are running away.
"It's like the American Midwest after the gold rush. These are becoming ghost cities."
The town of Hoyerswerda, once a hub of East German industry with its highest birth rate, is at the bottom of the report's chart.
From a population high of 72,000 people, drawn 30 years ago to its coal mining, its power plant and glass factories, there remain only 40,000 today.
The vast majority, according to Peter Kaiser, have left in the last 10 years.
For those who remain in Hoyerswerda, the prospects are grim. Unemployment is well over double the national average.
On a Friday morning, its local mall was filled with working-age men and women.
"The work market is a disaster here," said Rene Bohm, 20, a sales assistant at a shoe shop.
"Young people like me don't stay, they leave. I'm saving up a bit and then I'll go too."
In a country renowned for its road network, Hoyerswerda is marooned from motorways. The 40 miles down the slow road to Dresden, the regional capital, takes more than an hour to drive. The economic gap is far wider.
The city once levelled by a single night's Allied bombing in 1945 is now a tribute to the regenerational power of money and political will.
Blindingly gilded statues glimmer as glistening trams swish silently by.
Tourists fill the city's many five star hotels before heading to its world class art galleries and opera house.
"We have islands of success in the east, like Dresden," said Peter Kaiser.
"But we have to face the fact that towns like Hoyerswerda have really very low future prospects. They might just disappear."
In the mid ‘80s the CIA said the DDR’s economy was as strong as West Germany’s.
None for you.
; )
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