Like many Europeans, you too have probably daydreamed about picturesque Italian villages where you can buy a house for just a couple of New Zealand dollars. Italian village authorities have been offering up properties for as little as one euro in order to keep their towns alive as youngsters move to big cities and the elderly have nobody to leave their rustic homes to.
Facing the same sorts of issues, small towns in France and Croatia have launched similar schemes. And now the Germans are trying to get on the act, too.
Well, sort of. In typical German style, it’s not quite as wildly romantic as a one-euro shanty on a French mountainside. Instead, municipalities in rapidly depopulating former East Germany are promoting what they call Probewohnen, or “trial residency”. Hundreds have applied for an apartment, at no or minimal cost, for several weeks. The idea is that they get a taste of life in the East and then potentially decide to stay.
Goerlitz, a town on the border with Poland, has had a scheme like this in various forms since 2015. Other towns have caught on more recently. Last year Guben, population 16,000, started its own version – besides an apartment, the city will even give you a bicycle to get around on. Later this summer, Eisenhuettenstadt, population 24,000, will welcome its first trial residents.
Other East German cities, including Frankfurt an der Oder, Wittenberge, Dessau-Rosslau and Eberswalde, have also flirted with temporary tenants.
Tangible results are hard to come by. Surveys by the Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Development suggest 47% of the temporary residents in Goerlitz “could imagine moving there”. Nobody seems to know if they ever actually did. In Guben, around 13 families out of 48 have stayed.
In Frankfurt an der Oder, six tenants out of 20 signed permanent rental contracts.
Some folk do love the idea. As one wannabe Goerlitz-er, interviewed by the Liebniz Institute, explained, “I like Goerlitz a lot because it’s still a city – but without those big city problems.”
On the other hand, those crumbling Italian and French villages do conjure up bucolic, olive oil-drenched visions: baguettes for breakfast, quaint locals, romantic misunderstandings and sun-sweetened tomatoes, with lashings of red wine, for lunch.
Eisenhüttenstadt, built in the 1950s as a model socialist city and once called Stalinstadt, offers a greying collection of Soviet-era prefab apartment blocks in a park-like setting. Good times for fans of Brutalist architecture. But would you really want to live there?
There’s something even worse lurking in former East Germany. It’s here that the country’s far-right party, Alternative for Germany or AfD, is particularly popular. The AfD, with its xenophobic policies, got at least a third of all votes in these areas in the last federal elections. In Goerlitz, the AfD – chapters of which are under observation by domestic spy agencies for their extremist tendencies – got almost 49%.
Germany is already having problems attracting people to fill labour shortages caused by its ageing population. Around 400,000 people annually are needed here to remedy those. But at the same time, the most recent research by the Institute for Employment Research at Germany’s Federal Employment Agency shows that one in four immigrants is considering leaving town.
Two-thirds of around 50,000 immigrants polled said they had experienced discrimination, especially in interactions with authorities, police and at the workplace. Another third said they’d never felt welcome in Germany. And then, they add, there’s the stifling bureaucracy, the high taxes and huge health insurance bills. Can a free bike and two rent-free weeks combat all that? Seems unlikely.
Cathrin Schaer is a freelance journalist living in Berlin.
