Eastern Germany's female brain drain

Radio Netherlands ^ | September 12 2007 | Laurens Boven

[knighthawk]

Eighteen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germany is still a divided country. Many Germans from the east are choosing to live a better existence in the west of the country. That applies especially to young, well-educated women, with the result that the population in the former East Germany is not only shrinking, but is becoming unbalanced. "I want to leave. In the west of Germany, the prospects are better"

says a new student at the University of Frankfurt on Oder. Her opinion is shared by other students who are registering here in September to begin a new academic year.

"I'll go where the work is. Most of my friends have already left,"

says one of them.

One and a half million people have already left the former GDR since the fall of the Wall in 1989. That's about ten per cent of the population. And there's no sign of an end to the emigration. The unemployment rate in the east of Germany is still twice as high as in the west. Jobs are difficult to find in industry or in the service sector. So the consequence is a brain drain.

Traditional career choices

The Institute for Population Research in Berlin has established that there's a shortage of women in a large part of the former GDR. In some areas, there are less than 80 women to every 100 men. It's remarkable that so many more women than men are leaving, and it's explained by the higher education level attained by the women. In the east, both men and women are still making traditional career choices. Steffen Kröhnert, a researcher at the Berlin Institute, explains:

"In the east of Germany, a job in production is still considered more fitting for a man than a job behind a desk."

In the GDR. women worked mostly in the service sector.

"Eighteen years since reunification, this role pattern is still to be found in the school careers of young people,"

says Kröhnert. The exodus is having major consequences for the east of Germany. The composition of the population has become unbalanced. Too many old people, too few young. The Institute for Population Research has calculated that between 1995 and 2005, in terms of demographics 100,000 too few babies were born.

Unattractive social structure

The social structure is therefore too unattractive to encourage young people to remain. The fact that more women are leaving means that there are groups of young men left behind who can neither find a job, nor a wife. Kröhnert:

"That's accompanied by frustration. We've noticed that in areas with a large surplus of males, support for political parties of the extreme-right is large. These factions speak out for the traditional role patterns of men and women."

Of course, things are happening to try and stop the downward spiral. At the University of Frankfurt on Oder there's a project designed to keep young women in the area: Mentoring for Women. The project leader is 28-year-old Bettina Gebhardt, who matches young women with a mentor (women or men with roots in the local economy). The aim is to give the young women a picture of the opportunities in the area, and to show companies what talent there is in the university.

A drop in the ocean

Gerbhardt has dealt with about a hundred students in the past couple of years. She admits that it's just a drop in the ocean:

"We can only do a small amount. Our program is too small, and we don't have enough resources."

Gebhardt doesn't see any short-term solution. In the end, it's more a question of creating jobs in which this group of young women will have something to give. That's an important task for the politicians.

[knighthawk]

Europe-list

If people want on or off this list, please let me know.

[capt. norm]

I hate the term "brain drain".

It reminds me too much of a Frankenstein plumbing installation to deal with brains that were "Abbey Normal".

[Atlantic Bridge]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1859078/posts

I wrote the following answer to the link above. It might also be suitable to your discussion here:

“It is one of the biggest ironies in history that Honeckers self declared anti-fascist “German-Democratic-Republic” (DDR) is decomposing into brainless unemployed young nazis that loose themselves in a orgy of auto-erotic. The loosers of the millennium. Human trash.

Americans always think that we Germans have a problem with our muslims. BUT... ...in fact they are really irrelevant. Most of them are decent and hardworking people. Our real nightmare is the east of your country and the burden of the senseless reunification. 45 cent of every euro that is spent in eastern Germany today was earned by the west-German taxpayers. West Germans have to feed a army of 16 million scroungers.

The problem is, that the east Germans never understood the miracle of democracy. Free economy is also a mystery to them. They stick to the idea that the gouvernment has to solve all their problems and that the differences between people should be minimal. Personally I feel that the reunification (not the freedom of east Germany - do not get me wrong) was a tragedy for us West-Germans, because the east simply does not go with us. Those people feel, think and act completely different in a strange way. The values of the populace of the eastern part of Germany does not have anything to do with the ideas of west Germany. It is not only the nazi NPD, east Germans vote for, it is also the notorious PDS, the former SED of Honecker that simply changed its name. They made i.e. 25% in the state “Sachsen-Anhalt” in 2006 while the NPD made 7% in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern recently.

The reason why this cancer of male lunatics is growing that much is quite simple. East Germany is a godless society that is being dominated by females. You might say that this has nothing to do why girls escape the scene but there is a coherence:

First problem: Due to a feminized vision of roles that was born in the communist time, stable families have no value anymore. The divorce rate in eastern Germany is and was breathtaking. Mothers are accustomed to a state that is taking over their duties. Their own “self-realisation” is far more important to them than their own kids. They want to work and leave the limits of a family life behind. Therefore they give their kids into the still existing day-care system of the old communist state.

Second problem: This day-care system is operated by women only. Boys need male attachment figures to develop their own personality. Women and mothers alone are not able to bring up boys alone. While in the west this is done by the fathers of the still existing family structures in the east of Germany boys are trapped in a female world that does not meet their needs.

The quintessence of this system are either girly sissys or young agressive males that never found their limits. Since they are busy to find their own personality they do not spend a suitable time in learning and developing. The outcome are those idiots they talk about in the article above. It is no wonder that they are not interesting to young women anymore.

There is no solution to this problem. The mayority in east Germany has no Christian values, they have no relation to stable families and they do not appreciate freedom. I am quite sure that large parts of the east in Germany will turn into a lonley steppe in the next 20 years.

What has to be done is to obtain conservtive values in the west of the country. Our church has to gain more influence again. The family structures have to be maintained. While the German east in already toasted I see some light in the western part.

Many conservatives in America might find it strange, but Angela Merkel is not committed to those values. She wants to introduce the GDR system of upbringing to western Germany to get more women into work. Her family minister von der Leyen wants to establish a state runned (and controlled) daycare system. They think it is the bright future but they are simply repeating some fundamental faults.

Interestingly Poland does not seem to have such fundamental problems with its youngsters although there is also a breathtaking decline in population (due to immigration to western Europe and a low fertillity rate of only 1.26 kids/woman), while the situation in the Czech republic, the Balic countries and last but not least Russia is even worse than in eastern Germany. Although their gouvernment is socialist the Poles benefit from the strong catholic church and its value system. Nevertheless even Poland will be deserted within a few decades and the Kaczynski brothers will rule over a elderly home. One of the biggest waves of emigration towards the European west has just started.