Go West, Young Woman

HAMBURG, Germany —  They closed the cinema and then the disco. The tractors grew scarce and the men grew moody. Claudia Mantzsch’s east German hometown seemed to shrink. She wanted to stay but was laid off two weeks after getting her first job. Her boss offered some advice: Flee this place, or become a nurse for the elderly.

She looked around Grimmen, a wrinkle in the fields about 175 miles north of Berlin. The only buzz came from the gas station lights down the street from the medieval town hall. She packed and headed west four years ago.

“I knew there wouldn’t be any more jobs in the east,” said Mantzsch, a 24-year-old office manager in Hamburg. “It’s sad. When the Wall fell and communism ended, there were 17,000 people in my town. Ten thousand are left.”

Facing life in a region with unemployment rates as high as 30%, east German women are starting anew in cities such as Cologne, Munich and Hamburg in the west. Some leave behind parents, others husbands. The women aren’t always thrilled with cosmopolitan life, and they’re occasionally stereotyped as communism’s abandoned handmaidens. But they are not deterred, and, ironically, they say communism emancipated them for a future they never imagined.

“Women under socialism were raised to be independent,” said Silke Schluessler, 34, who works in Hamburg and travels 125 miles on weekends to visit her husband on the eastern Baltic Sea. “You learned you had to earn your own money. You raised children and you had a job. Everybody worked. This wasn’t so in the west. When we come here, we know we can handle it.”

Dating, however, is an odd game of cultural permutations, some single women concede.

“Men from the east are tougher than men from the west,” said Kristina Sass, a 26-year-old real estate manager who left the eastern hamlet of Greifswald. “I’m seeing a Hamburg man now. He likes my independence and how I quickly got my apartment and my car. It’s a kind of cliche. Western men are softer. You never hear a loud word from them. Even the construction workers in the west don’t whistle.”

The migration of women is part of an unsettling demographic trend. For every 100 men in east Germany ages 18 to 29, there are 89 women. That ratio drops to 76 per 100 in one eastern enclave. Fewer women mean fewer children -- Germany already has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world. The scenario is particularly troubling for the east, where villages are dying and, in 15 years, 36% of the population in some areas will be 60 and older.

“How can you boost the economy of the east when you have so many people over the age of 50?” asked Steffen Kroehnert, a researcher with the Berlin Institute, a foundation that studies global population trends. “No business will open a factory if there’s no young people around. This is a big problem.”

For thousands of women, the bigger problem by the late 1990s was staying in a region that offered little more than nostalgia. The scant work available went mostly to men. And many of the men couldn’t adapt to the new era, even though the slogans of a socialist utopia and a workers’ paradise dried up long ago. Young professional men did migrate, but hundreds of thousands of blue-collar workers, unskilled and cradled for decades by obsolete communist companies, were reluctant to look west.

“East German women are more adaptable than their men. Men are more of the mentality that Klaus won’t leave unless Olaf goes too,” said Volker Jennerjahn, who runs a website that tries to persuade those who left the east to return. “Women know it doesn’t make much sense to marry an east German, and in many east German towns a man has almost no statistical chance of finding a wife. The women are gone.”

That fact echoes through Tilo Koch’s life. “You can tell there’s a women shortage when you go to parties,” said the 37-year-old car dealer from the eastern town of Falkenberg. “Relationships are shaky because, with so few women, men are chatting up all the women they can get a hold of, including those already in relationships. Most young women left in the east are in need of money. It’s hard to find someone.”

When the Cold War ended, women such as Schluessler intended to stay in the east. She and her parents bought a farmhouse in the northern state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania and turned it into a carpentry shop.

“We went through awful, awful years,” said Schluessler, who now works in an insurance office of a Hamburg-based supermarket chain. “We worked 12 hours a day and couldn’t stop from going broke. Our customers couldn’t pay.”

With limited opportunities, the family scattered to find employment. Her husband headed north and took a computer job near the Baltic Sea. Her mother moved to Switzerland to work in the tourist industry. Her father headed northeast, to Rostock, and taught school. She and her sister drove west.

“The only one home was the dog,” she said. “It’s not only the economy of the east -- the whole infrastructure is falling apart. All the houses are inhabited by old people. The only shops are the undertaker, the pharmacist and the doctors, and even the doctors are leaving.

“It wasn’t better during communism, but it was secure. That’s not so today. I can handle capitalism. I need to work, but that means I can’t live with my family. I can’t live where I want to live.”

On a recent rainy afternoon in Hamburg, women recounted similar stories. Some were children when communism tumbled and lives suddenly changed. Others were young women at the time, straddling two worlds and wondering where to step. They watched the farmlands dwindle and the coal, steel and chemical industries collapse. They saw men get bitter.

Now, they say, they earn decent money but in a culture that’s colder and more egocentric than the one they knew before.

Their journeys are part of a wider narrative about the staggering toll of German reunification. Poor political decisions, bloated state-owned companies, overburdened job retraining programs and no overarching plan to merge east and west have hindered Germany since 1989. The problems have intensified in recent years as the nation’s economy has sagged, its debt has risen and Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has undertaken a series of economic and social reforms that are cutting unemployment, pension, healthcare and other benefits.

“What’s happening in the east is similar to the late 1800s when about 200,000 people left Mecklenburg to find jobs in America,” Jennerjahn said. “Otto von Bismarck was chancellor at the time and worried he wouldn’t have enough men to build an army. He came up with economic plans to keep people here, and that’s what we need now.”

An idealist caught in pragmatic times, Jennerjahn said his Mecklenburg region, known for “farming and a bit of shipbuilding,” lost 10% of its 1.7 million people last year. “Our research shows us they want to return,” he said. “They’re wedded to this land. We need more government subsidies. Our best chances might be tourism.”

Since 1990, more than 1.5 million men and women have left he east. Many have college and technical school degrees, and their departure has left a dearth of badly needed expertise.

At the same time, the expansion of the European Union is expected to put even more pressure on the east as workers, companies and goods from Poland, which joined the EU in May, flow more easily across the border to undercut German wages and prices.

“Poles have always done seasonal work in east Germany, but there will be more coming, and they’ll work for half the price,” said Mantzsch, the young woman who left Grimmen after being laid off. “East Germans are shopping in Poland more now. It’s putting our people out of work. This is all killing the last remnants of our economy.”

Martina Rueping is three months pregnant. She moved from the village of Uelitz to Hamburg in 2000 and works as a controller for an international shipping company. Three of the five people in her office are from east Germany. Her husband, a computer programmer, followed her in 2003.

Rueping is worried about balancing job and baby. Compared with the former communist east, which provided state-funded day care and kindergartens so that women could work, the child-care network in the west is not as comprehensive. Forty percent of German women with university degrees don’t have children, according to federal statistics.

“I was 14 when the Wall fell and possibilities opened for me,” Rueping said. “The question was not to stay, but where to go -- Berlin or Hamburg. But women are less independent here. They’re forced to make more choices. In the east, you could have a family and a job. I can’t even find a kindergarten here. It’s a question of culture. We grew up differently.

“I’m determined to show them you can do both.”

Rueping’s friend Mirjam Stein added: “West Germany is less interested in family life. People aren’t as friendly here. There’s no eye contact.”

Stein was raised in Kroepelin, a town near the Baltic. She has a degree in business law and works for the Ernst & Young accounting firm. She’s mostly happy in the west and doesn’t lament the demise of communism. “Opinions had to be hidden in the east,” she said. “People would watch you, saying: ‘Oh, you got chocolate from West Germany. Be careful.’ ”

But even as politics may have evolved, she added, men -- whether from the east or west -- remain maddeningly the same.

“In general, men in the east aren’t ambitious enough. They’re afraid and timid of change,” she said. “But I’m a typical east German girl, and that doesn’t work with a Hamburg boy. I have my own opinions and my own life. East German men grew up with us and understand this. West German men like to meet girls from the east because it’s something different. But after a while, I think we threaten them.”

Stein’s boyfriend is from the east.

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Petra Falkenberg in The Times’ Berlin Bureau contributed to this report.