There has been a lot of understandable anguish about the election results in the German Länder Thüringen and Sachsen on Sunday.
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Eibau
Land: Sachsen
Population: 4500
Visit: 9 Jun 2023The line from Eibau to Seifhennersdorf has been out of action for more than a decade - a bush grows through the tracks. Eibau is connected to Dresden still, but the station was very, very quiet when I was there.
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Fohrde
Land: Brandenburg
Population: 1400
Visit: 11 Mar 2024An impeccable modern train, a rebuilt and disabled-accessible station, but no people. And very little life along the route I cycled towards Brandenburg (Havel)
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Kodersdorf
Land: Sachsen
Population: 2300
Visited: 3 Aug 2024 (having visited previously in 2023)The old railway station is charming, but run down and up for sale, and demand so low it is now a request stop
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Hirschfelde
Land: Sachsen
Population: 1500
Visited: 3 Aug 2024The old power station at Hirschfelde, north of Zittau. This was once a museum, but even that closed due to low demand. The town square is eerily quiet, with many abandoned shops.
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Holzhau
Land: Sachsen
Population: 500
Visited: 4 Aug 2024The tiny railbus waits at the Holzhau terminus. Despite it running hourly there were so few people on a summer weekend the passenger numbers only just reached double figures when I took it.
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Wriezen
Land: Brandenburg
Population: 7200
Visited: 21 Aug 2024Despite it being a warm sunny evening, the town centre was deserted by 7pm. Many shops are empty. The railway line towards Berlin (Wriezener Bahn) stands derelict.
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Marienberg
Land: Sachsen
Population: 16600
Visited: 28 Aug 2024Trying to get here by public transport was a bit of a mess, as the railway line has been left to fall into disrepair. Better connections for towns like this could help bring the life back.
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Deutschkatharinenberg
Land: Sachsen
Population: 120
Visited: 28 Aug 2024It is more about the border than the place here - the road to Hora Svaté Kateřiny is calm, and everything is orderly. Just as it is the whole way down the valley from Deutschneudorf to Olbernhau in the Erzgebirge.
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Linthe
Land: Brandenburg
Population: 900
Visited: 31 Aug 2024This anti-Green, pro-Russian poster next to a electric car charging point greeted my arrival in Linthe - by bike. I was the only customer at the cafe-guest house in the village.
/ends
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Niels Chr. Nielsenreplied to Jon Worth last edited by
@jon A lot of East German people seem to be very friendly to Russia, even after having been brutally "liberated" by them and exposed to some 40 years of "socialism", which left them with a rundown and heavily polluted country?
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@jon Well, that bit I can explain. Shortly before the fall of the Wall, Frankfurt was "boomtown" of the DDR. That's why a lot of the street layout, the infrastructure seems to big. A city with shoes it cannot fill anymore.
I grew up as mostly a teen in the city throughout the 90s and sometimes I wonder if constantly feeling lost was brought upon by this mismatch.
But yeah. These places are quiet and empty most of the time. There certainly is no mass migration of foreigners there.
But it also fosters this feeling of being 'forgotten'. And by now, the city is not only too large in a way, but all the shiny new stuff from 30 years ago is now 30 years old and rarely gets renewed because there is no money.
Which leads to the weird effect that the failure of late stage capitalism is visible. Contrary to general belief, most places that look dilapidated in Frankfurt are the remnants of the early 90s.
I could rant about that town forever...sorry.
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There is a lot of misinformation floating around.
Another factor might be a sort of fear or submissiveness which was „learnt“ by older generations (and now is brought back as a result of Ru behaviour, bragging and propaganda) while not enough trust was built in NATO, etc.
Importantly, I don‘t think it‘s a mayority at all, rather a louder minority. And many young / educated have left the rural regions.
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GreenSkyOverMe (Monika)replied to Niels Chr. Nielsen last edited by
@nichni You mean the terrible terrible 40 years when everybody had a job, nobody was homeless, rent and bread were cheap and daycare/preschool/kindergarten/after school care were free and guaranteed? Before the reunification when the entire economy collapsed and half the population became unemployed, rent went up by a factor of 10 while wages didn’t and we became free to travel but many didn’t have the money for it?
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@jon The total emptiness of so much land surrounding the largest city of the European Union is still a baffling concept to me, considering most of the old West-Germany is so polycentric with a lot of medium-sized cities.
I do have to say, the emptiness and dying towns is also a phenomenon in the most western part of Rheinland-Pfalz, but it maybe doesn't feel so much as a time warp as on the pictures here. Maybe it is because the buildings in the west are generally newer then in the east, where so many old buildings remained because the regime was much more interested in building large new living quarters then renovating or replacing the old.
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@jon
From my experience trying to repair the damage wrought by Soviet/Communist incompetence has four prongs.
1. job creation to stop or slow the exodus of young people to cities
2. improved more flexible vocational education to train workers for the jobs that are being created
then, but soon
3. improved public transportation to meet the needs of new businesses and workers and their families that (hopefully) are moving in
4. creation of low cost housing for families -
@jon Do you know how well Die PARTEI did there?
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Niels Chr. Nielsen last edited by
@nichni Most of the people in modern Formerly Eastern Germany are people whose parents made a decision to not move to Formerly West Germany a generation ago, within a few years of the Wall coming down. And for various reasons, of which the concentration of bad kind of small-town culture is one but not the only one, these Hero's Stories often don't have the people who left coming back and staying back, as has happened in some other formerly Eastern Block parts.
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@poupou Except by the people who worked for the Apparatus.
And remember — East Germany had a ridiculously high rate of government to bureaucrats by the time the Wall came down. A lot of the jobs were sinecure jobs for political patronage, which meant, people whose standard of living dropped sharply once the Unification started to normalise the local buraucracy.
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@kmetz The important difference is, in some places, when young ones leave, they see the world, learn stuff, and in ten or fifteen years, come back to raise businesses and incorporate children, that sort of thing. And in some places, the dominant culture doesn't favour people who have seen the world and learnt fancy stuff to come back and mess with the local politics with their New Ideas(tm). This is how a big part of the USA's "flyover country" works. Unfortunately, this might also have ended up being a major pattern for the Formerly East Germany (well, outside the Berlin metropolitan area, anyway).