I’m here in former East Germany.
And I’m looking for … people.
I’m at the main train station…
Downtown
Everything is grafittied. Broken windows.
It’s all boarded up.There’s no one living
here!
At least, compared with how it used to be.
30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall
Eastern Germany’s population is still shrinking.
In fact, the region has lost nearly 2 million
people since 1989.
And many small towns across the former GDR
are starting to fade away.
This city is one of them.
Eisenhüttentadt
This is Eisenhüttenstadt, this is my home
town.
Alexander Klotzovski is a real estate agent
and is active in regional politics. He agreed
to show me around his city – what’s left
of it.
Restaurants that are closing, a coffee shop
that was closing.
Around 25 thousand people live here in the
city of Eisenhüttenstadt. That though is
less than half of what it was before the fall
of the wall.
I’m afraid that we will be a ghost town
in twenty years.
It’s not a ghost town yet. But you can still
feel the ghosts of the former GDR.
What are we looking at here?
Here there were apartments. And now here is
nothing, because so many people left Eisenhüttenstadt.
Because people left the city and we didn’t
need it. It’s sad, but that’s the story
of a city after 1990.
There's hardly any European country or region
which is as de-populated as East Germany.
Six out of 10 industrial jobs got lost after
reunification. So a lot of people left the
East. But almost all migration goes to the
West. Basically nobody is going to East Germany.
Here’s how bad it’s gotten. Overall, the
population in the east has dipped to the same
level as the year 1905!
While in the west, it’s more than doubled.
Recently, migration between east and west
has finally stabilized. But that doesn’t
change the fact that cities across the east
are getting smaller and older. In fact, only
5 cities are predicted to maintain or increase
their working age populations.
I’m afraid of the future. I want to live
here. I want to plan my future here. But if
there is no future for the city, then I have
to leave.
So, what does this mean for Germany as a whole?
We are the forgotten ones. The people here
don’t get the same pension. They don’t
get the same money for the same work. And
the people see it in the newspaper, in statistics.
The far-right AfD party has seen some of its
biggest success in parts of the east where
population has decreased the most.
In these kinds of cities there is no social
cohesion, no glue which holds the society
together. So the far-right scored there very
well. And they used nostalgia. They used xenophobia.
This is something that meets the depression
or the disappointment there very well.
