Re: [Marxism] East German decline

[Nestor Gorojovsky <nmgoro@xxxxxxxxx>]

It is a hard price that the German people pays for their being the nodal 
point of European history. During the 30 Years War, vast regions saw 
their population fall to one third of their original demography.

Louis Proyect escribió:
> NY Times, June 19, 2009
> In East Germany, a Decline as Stark as a Wall
> By NICHOLAS KULISH
> 
> HOYERSWERDA, Germany — In this, the 20th year since the fall of the 
> Berlin Wall, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government is preparing for a 
> host of celebrations and commemorations leading to the November 
> anniversary. The official story of an eastern revival was reinforced by 
> President Obama’s recent visit to Dresden in all its reconstructed glory.
> 
> But outside big cities like Dresden, Leipzig or Berlin, in places like 
> this former industrial mining town, the story of decline and departure 
> has changed little in the former East Germany.
> 
> And the population decline is about to get much worse, as a result of a 
> demographic time bomb known by the innocuous-sounding name “the kink,” 
> which followed the end of Communism. The birth rate collapsed in the 
> former East Germany in those early, uncertain years so completely that 
> the drop is comparable only to times of war, according to Reiner 
> Klingholz, director of the Berlin Institute for Population and 
> Development. “For a number of years East Germans just stopped having 
> children,” Dr. Klingholz said.
> 
> The newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported recently that 
> although 14,000 young people would earn their high school diplomas this 
> year in Saxony, only 7,500 would do so next year. Since 1989, about 
> 2,000 schools have closed across the former East Germany because of a 
> scarcity of children.
> 
> So in Hoyerswerda, once a model city of Communist East Germany with the 
> highest birth rate in the country, the average age has increased, as it 
> has in many small cities, to 48 today from 35 in 1989.
> 
> Emptiness is the reigning feeling when walking through the city, which 
> has lost more than 40 percent of its residents since the fall of the 
> wall, with the population dropping below 40,000 people from more than 
> 70,000.
> 

[...]

> 
> The city government is tearing down apartment buildings to try to keep 
> up with the plunge in population. In a city that once had 21,000 
> apartments, 7,500 have been torn down and 2,000 more are scheduled for 
> demolition.
> 
> On a recent visit home from where she now lives, in the western city of 
> Karlsruhe, Judika Zirzow stood on a flat expanse of earth, ridged and 
> rutted with bulldozer tracks. The barren tract was once an apartment 
> building, one of the pillars of the former East German Wohnkomplex, or 
> housing project, not to mention the home where she grew up.
> 
> “Every time I visit my parents and I drive through Hoyerswerda, there’s 
> every time a new house that’s torn down,” said Ms. Zirzow, 24, who works 
> in a bank. “The face of Hoyerswerda is different.”
> 

This destruction of houses is probably the best image of the 
consequences of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Forcing people out of a 
place and tearing down the house is unspeakably obscene. Like capitalism.

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