It’s not that there are no women in this part of the world, says Günther Patt, it’s just that you have to cross the Polish border to find them. Günther is 23 and German and frytki (“chips”) is the only thing he can say in Polish. Add to that the fact that he is unemployed and overweight and it seems unlikely that Gü nther is what most single Polish girls would consider a catch, in any language.
Undaunted, he persists — and every weekend drives the 34 miles (55km) from the eastern German town of Pasewalk across the border to Szczecin to meet girls in the Luna nightclub or the Propaganda bar. He has to. For every 100 men between the ages of 18 and 30 in Pasewalk there are only 74 women. “Statistically speaking, I’m stuffed,” Günther says tragically. He’s never had a girlfriend.
Although single, Günther can comfort himself with the thought that he is not alone. All over eastern Germany young men are searching in vain for prospective girlfriends or wives. Across the region young men outnumber women on average by a quarter, with the dilapidated eastern German countryside particularly badly affected. Nowhere in Europe are there fewer young women. In a map showing population distribution among 18 to 30-year-olds across Europe — a greater ratio of women to men denoted by lighter colours, a 50-50 equilibrium denoted by grey — eastern Germany is a great black blob in a sea of healthy grey.
Pasewalk is bad, says Günther, but it could be worse. Try living down the road in the run-down towns of Ueckermünde, Torgelow and Friedland, where young men outnumber young women by 36 per cent. Since reunification 16 years ago, run-down Pasewalk, with its clumps of bored young men hanging out on grey street corners, is not such a bad place. It’s just the average town in eastern Germany.
Where are all the women? A few weeks before visiting Pasewalk, I met Wolfgang Weiss, a population geographer from the University of Greifswald. Weiss has been documenting the population disparities in eastern Germany for years but it’s only recently that anybody has bothered taking him seriously. He starts off with a speech on East German history. To understand the current situation, he says, it is crucial to know two things: first, that eastern Germany is, economically speaking, in the doldrums, with unemployment officially — that is to say extremely optimistically — hovering at the 25 per cent mark. Second, that we’re dealing to some extent with the relics of communism here and that not all the relics are bad.
Take the education of women in the former German Democratic Republic, he says. The equality of women was a central tenet of East German communist ideology and while Western governments were still ambivalent about the role of women in the workplace, in East Germany state-run crèches were being set up; in 1972 abortion and the Pill were both legalised and made free of charge. “That created a generation of women who were far more liberated than their counterparts in the West,” says Weiss. “They were more sexually liberated, equally well-educated and they were more confident in the world of work. There is a sense of entitlement that has now been passed on to their daughters.”
Where are all the women? Moving as far away as quickly as possible.
“What we have here is an historically unique phenomenon,” says Rainer Klingholz, from the Berlin Institute for Population and Development. “Economic migration has without exception always meant men. In eastern Germany it’s the women leaving for a better life. The men are staying behind” The drive from Berlin to Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the northeastern state in which German Chancellor Angela Merkel was born and Pasewalk is situated, is a desolating two-hour road trip. All around are miles and miles of flat, formerly agricultural plains, reminiscent of Lincolnshire if Lincolnshire had no crops, no people and was strewn with the stripped corpses of businesses that breathed their last several decades ago.
The spoils of communism have been looted but not demolished and the wrecked monoliths have been ambushed by weeds and litter. Modernity is here too, in places: prefabs built haphazardly and without planning permission and windfarms. Row upon row of turbines considered too unsightly for somebody’s doorstep in the West churn the eastern German air instead.
It is a drive that immediately tells you why the girls want to leave. The east is poor and depressing and without prospects — the Germans borrow from the French to describe the mood-destroying quality of the region: “Ostdeutsche Tristesse.” But a more puzzling question is this: why do the boys want to stay? Outside Pasewalk railway station we meet a group of excitable teenage girls on their way to a geography field trip. Not quite in their midst, sitting deliberately removed on a nearby bench, is a single boy, crouched lumpenly over his mobile phone, the tip of his baseball cap pushed low over his face. The girls babble eagerly about their futures — theirs is a class of 108 students only 40 of whom are boys — and tell us why the guys stay. “Boys are lazier than girls so are more likely to drop out,” speculates 18-year-old Franziska Nickelt, who intends to go on to university in Berlin to study physiotherapy.
What is happening in eastern German schools reflects a general pattern now emerging throughout the West. For reasons still not entirely understood by educators, girls do better.
Franziska’s friend, Juliana Schlett, has universities in Munich or London in mind. “I have to leave the east because, unless you count the army, there are no jobs for us here,” she said. As for her romantic prospects . . . “I like Englishmen best although Polish men can be very charming,” says 18-year-old Ana. “The boys here are alcoholics and dropouts. If you look it up on the internet you’ll see that the crime rate here is twice as high as the national average; that’ll be mostly men on benefits.”
Ana is mastering Polish as well as English at school — affluent Poles from over the border are beginning to snap up property in “bargain” eastern Germany. Doubtless Ana will be one of the hundreds of women who ends up hitching her wagon to a west German or a foreigner. Should she have any children, they won’t grow up here.
By contrast “Norm” — the sullen 18-year-old on the bench — left school last year and now he works part-time as a welder. Whatever the future has in store for Norm, he is adamant that it will take place in Pasewalk.
Norm had one overriding reason for not wanting to leave the region and we were to hear it again and again from many young eastern German men. From Risse and Hein, two twentysomething butcher’s apprentices, from Marc, who works part-time in a sausage stand . . . given the all-enveloping atmosphere of postunification hopelessness here it seems a trivial rationalisation: that very masculine concept, “my mates”. “My friends live here,” Norm mumbles into his jacket.
What will happen to Norm? To Risse, Hein and Marc? The official unemployment figure is 25 per cent but it’s thought to be closer to 60 per cent, with generations of households incapable of being integrated into the workforce, having worked only nominally under communism and now subsisting on benefits. Many of eastern Germany’s unemployed are mopped up through dead-end government retraining schemes or so-called “one-Euro jobs”.
On the day that we visited Pasewalk’s job centre there were eight jobs up for grabs: four dishwashing jobs, or variants thereof, in Berlin; two temporary construction jobs, also in Berlin; a bankteller’s job in Hamburg, and the chance to join European Shipping in Norway.
Tanja Wolpert, a marketing executive whom I met in Hamburg, laughs at the thought of ever returning home to the east. “Literally impossible,” she said. “No job, no shops, no decent men. It would be a small suicide.”
It is likely that Norm will spend a good proportion of his adult life living off the state. He may grow disgruntled and listless, especially when he reads about Germany’s newly flourishing economy. Where is the famous trickle-down effect? And without a job Norm may have even more difficulty finding a wife.
How will it affect him? Perhaps in the same way it affected an out-of-control-looking skinhead I met in Pasewalk’s discount supermarket, Netto. “Who needs wives?” he bellowed rhetorically across the aisles. “I have a girl I f***. She likes it,” he said and laughed in a way that forced the two skin-head stooges beside him to explode with sycophantic mirth.
Up until that point it hadn’t seemed possible to come across even less of a prospect than Günther Patt, but here he was, pushing a trolley full of beer. A drunken skinhead in an SS-jacket with a swastika tattooed on his neck, the word Hass (German for “hate”) etched into the knuckles of his right hand. He no doubt considered himself a real original, but in fact he couldn’t have been a more textbook product of his environment.
Bernard Nauck, a sociologist at Chemnitz University, has warned that the absence of women in the east will soon lead to “considerable unrest” and that a “male underclass” is evolving. Last year 10 per cent of Pasewalk voted for the NPD, the increasingly popular far-right German Party with neo-Nazi elements that swept unexpectedly into the State parliament last September. In other areas that figure is as high as 30 per cent.
Some sociologists argue that a lack of women — the impossibility of finding a wife — makes men more aggressive and keener on military activism. Until now the rise of the far Right in Germany has been blamed on a combination of poverty and deprivation. Now there is talk of “biopolitics”. Is a lack of women exacerbating the right-wing resurgence? Here’s a philosophical question that population experts like to ask: are there too few women in eastern Germany or too many men? Sociologists want to treat the problem depending on what they think it is. Politicians prefer to take the view that there isn’t a problem.
“An acute and chronic lack of women is something most people associate with places like China or India where either the one-child policy, or poverty, had a profound effect on its female population,” says Weiss. “But this is a situation which is going on here, right in the heart of the West. Because it’s not something anybody’s had to contend with before, it’s very hard to know what to do.”
In 1990 Pasewalk’s population was 16,000. Since then it has shrunk by 23 per cent: the women are moving away and the diminishing birth rate is forcing schools to close. Wages, if you can get hold of any, are around 30 per cent lower than what you’d get in the West. Even less reason to stick around.
Some names have been changed.
