Despite growing satisfaction with the fruits of unity, fissures remain in German society
FERGUS PYLE would have been highly amused. In 1994 the late, former Irish TimesGerman correspondent visited the eastern industrial city of Eisenhüttenstadt – literal translation: Ironworks Town. He described in depressing detail the struggling steel mill and the exodus of people to the west. The "harsh contours" of four decades of socialism had, he wrote, "barely been dented by the hesitant signs of new prosperity".
“Eisenhüttenstadt,” he surmised, “is not a place where tourists go.”
It was a surprise, then, to receive recently a brochure offering tours of this same city. Founded half a century ago to house workers of the nearby steel mill, the Brandenburg tourist authority is selling it as “a classic example of socialist settlements”.
When Germany celebrates 20 years of unification and Eisenhüttenstadt is a good example of the country’s positive transformation.
Today, tour buses glide daily down gleaming streets, past bright yellow and white facades which, two decades ago, were grey, crumbling and seemed, like the city itself, to be beyond rescue.
“This is the only German city founded since the war, which makes it very interesting from an architecture and planning point of view,” says Peggy zur Nieden in the tourist office.
“It’s nice to see the growing interest.”
Mayor Dagmar Püschel says that crucial to the town’s survival was retaining the steel mills. New owners ArcelorMittal employ only half the 12,000 who once worked here but new factories have come – including Europe’s largest corrugated cardboard plant.
“The steelworks are the spine of the city, I don’t want to think what would have happened here if they had gone,” says Ms Püschel.
The town’s jobless rate of 10 per cent – three points above the national average – while dramatic population loss, more than 20,000 people, or a third of the population left after 1990, is finally slowing.
“Yesterday I had my first reception for new residents and among them there were many returnees with families,” says the mayor. “The challenge now is to work on the attitude in people’s minds over the last 20 years that, if you want to do something with your life, you have to move away.”
With the shocks of the early 1990s fading it feels as though German unification has reached, finally, an emotional turning point.
Surveys confirm a growing satisfaction with the new Germany, with 55 per cent of Germans seeing the unification as a reason for joy. Two-thirds say the divided country is growing together and almost the same number (64 per cent) say there’s no point, 20 years on, labouring on about old east-west differences.
When the Berlin Wall tumbled on November 9th, 1989, most people assumed Germany East and West would co-exist for some time to come. It soon became clear, however, that many, if not all, East Germans wanted the Deutschmark and, with it, the whole West German package.
After four months of negotiations, the four second World War Allies agreed to a deal to unite the two Germanys as one sovereign state in the September 1990 “2+4 agreement”.
“In this case two plus four equals five,” jokes then West German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, still sprightly at 83. He says the “mutual trust on all sides” was as important at the talks as the treaty details, including Allied troop withdrawal, recognising Poland’s western border, and Germany remaining free of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.
Amid this year’s blizzard of unification facts and figures, a clear correlation emerges between age and attitudes to unification.
Some 82 per cent of 18-29-year-olds in the former east quizzed by Super Illu magazine said they were “happy” to live in a united Germany, a figure that falls to 71 per cent among the over-50s. Talk to people as old – or young – as the united Germany, and it’s clear that regional differences play more of a role for them than “east-west”.
“Of course all that’s still there for people my age, but increasingly less so,” says Joanna Darmstadt, born 20 years ago in Hamburg but living now in the eastern city of Rostock. “Most circles of friends are mixed and, in that sense, it’s immaterial where one comes from.”
Youth magazine Spiesserfound that 63 per cent of those born after 1990 would have no problem moving to the former "other" Germany for a university place or a job.
“Ten years ago it was easy to tell where students came from, mostly by their choice of words, now it’s nearly impossible,” admits Prof Günther Heydemann of Leipzig University, an expert in eastern Germany’s transformation process.
It’s not all good news: in many eastern regions the jobless rate is stuck stubbornly at twice the national average of 7 per cent – or worse. Since 1990 over one million former easterners – 11 per cent of East Germany’s population – have left, raising concerns for the future of many smaller towns and villages. And then there’s the ongoing cost – €1.7 trillion and counting – financed by the “solidarity surcharge” of 5.5 per cent of each employee’s income tax.
Many western Germans resent that they are still paying this supposedly temporary surcharge and say that it’s time for much-needed infrastructure investment in their own cities. Some easterners, meanwhile, resent that they still earn less than westerners for doing the same work even though the east-west cost of living is nearing parity.
“The unification costs are higher and the process longer than anticipated because inefficiencies in the east were worse than anyone knew,” says Prof Heydemann, forecasting another 20 years of transfers.
“No modern state has ever undertaken such a project. Italy hasn’t closed the north-south gap in 600 years.”
One worrying development ahead of tomorrow's anniversary was a claim by Der Spiegelmagazine this week that the Deutschmark was "sacrificed" for German unification.
The magazine bases its claim on German minutes it has seen of a meeting in late 1989 in which Der Spiegelsays that French president François Mitterand made his blessing for unification conditional on Bonn agreeing to the single currency.
“If . . . Germany begins flexing its muscles within the overall European project, it will find that fellow member states in the (EEC) will be less friends than partners with their own reflexes,” said Mr Mitterand, according to the minutes, adding that Germany faced a “very important choice” at the upcoming Strasbourg summit.
Hans-Dietrich Genscher reportedly responded: “What we need to do in Strasbourg is to decide on the inter-governmental conference to prepare for economic and monetary union.”
Leading German officials admit they abandoned along the way the goal of political union preceding monetary union, but deny a direct unification-euro deal. That’s a position confirmed by former Mitterand adviser Hubert Védrine. “Kohl said continually that the unity of Europe and the unity of Germany were two sides of the same medal,” he said on German radio yesterday, “but was there a deal on the euro? No.”
The article in Der Spiegel– a regular home to negative unification stories – juxtaposes unification and the euro at a time of widespread German concern over the single currency. Intentionally or not, it could well fan further resentment here over having to foot the bill for economic profligacy in Greece and Ireland.