Germany Looks East
SHANOR, DONALD R.
A Partner in Poland Germany Looks East By Donald R. Shanor Görlitz In the 15 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, democracy and capitalism have brought as many dilemmas as benefits...
...More good news comes from "Silicon Saxony," where new money is being injected in the high-tech sector...
...PKN Orlen, Poland's largest oil company, which has ties to Russia's oil riches, recently bought nearly 150 gas stations in Germany, bringing its total to 500...
...THE SURPRISE up tum in eastern Germany's sluggish economy is one of several developments indicating that Apfel's nationalist reading of the public's mood is wrong...
...Their speeches proclaimed that the U.S...
...This is good news for the Viadrina Consulting Group, a lively student organization at the university that contacts Westerners at trade and job fairs to provide assessments of the opportunities and risks of doing business in the transborder region...
...In Zgorzelec, there are so many churchgoers that masses are held hourly all morning on Sundays, with 500 or more packed in...
...Housing left empty in Görlitz because of the lack of jobs is being occupied by new Polish tenants, and trade in the border region, already at an annual $2 billion, is rising steeply...
...The cut in unemployment payments called for by Chancellor Gerhard Schroder's economic reform plan was a target of both sides' ire...
...In one inner-city election district in Dresden, four voters chose the neoNazis and ex-Communists for every one who backed the Socialists...
...Californiabased Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is building a $2.4 billion factory in Dresden that will more than double the capacity of the plant it established there nearly a decade ago...
...Foreign investors choose Dresden both for its location near the gateways to the east and its skilled labor force, a holdover from Communist-era research and development institutes...
...But by looking farther east rather than west, the Oder-Neisse region bordering Poland may be eluding the economic malaise that figured prominently at the polling booths...
...The SPD edged out the neo-Nazis by less than 1 per cent in Saxony...
...In Görlitz and Frankfurt on the Oder, skinheads are a visible presence, staging antiforeigner rallies featuring loud rock groups...
...One third of its students are Poles, and recruiters from major German, Polish and international companies are competing for Viadrina's bilingual graduates, who look forward to managing the region's expanding trade...
...NPD leader Holger Apfel, lauding his side's showing, declared, "This is a great day for all Germans who still want to be Germans...
...Barbara's and St...
...Stiffer enforcement has kept the annual total at about 750 over the last few years...
...When Schroder's Cabinet presented its annual report on the state of German unity in October, it concluded that despite all the gloomy predictions, the economic gap between its eastern and western spheres has begun to close: "With the exception of the building sector, slowly but surely eastern Germany is managing to catch up economically...
...Paul's, towers over the Neisse river...
...Another is symbolized by the new footbridge across the Neisse River, connecting Görlitz to its Polish neighbor Zgorzelec...
...But as the September elections showed, Germany's new economic and political union with Eastern Europe has hardly pleased everyone...
...The pattern of prosperity that followed EU expansion in the West seems to be recurring in Poland, with revitalizing spillover effects in eastern Germany...
...Many of the more than 200 neo-Nazi sites are based abroad, including some in the U.S., and lie outside the reach of German laws against Nazi propaganda...
...As joint ventures take root along the border, with EU subsidies boosting Poland, manufacturing and transport expansion is spreading in both directions from the Oder-Neisse...
...Schröder is counting on the new EU members to energize his country's economy...
...We have to grab the opportunity...
...Germany is Poland's most important trading partner, and Poland ranks third among Germany's partners...
...Since the treaties and assurances from Berlin, they're finally beginning to believe they belong here...
...Polish companies with deep roots in the region receive EU subsidies to modernize...
...Germany "will probably profit most from [EU] enlargement," he told the Bundestag this past spring...
...The EU estimates that close to a quarter million workers per year will move west from those countries—most to take jobs Germans turn down in favor of comfortable unemployment benefits...
...The Germans have a long history of resentment against the Poles and see very little in their interest to make the effort to learn the language or have closer relations...
...The conservatives lost so many votes there that Christian Democratic Governor Georg Milbradt was forced to form a minority coalition...
...Eastern Germany's radical Right gets its message out in the form of splashy Web sites...
...Peter and St...
...the citieshave also been the scene of Polish nationalist protests...
...Zgorzelec's St...
...The Poles need the Germans and are willing to be friendly with them," a Lutheran pastor said...
...Its main campus is in Frankfurt, a few minutes from the river...
...When the 1989 reunification brought democracy to eastern Germans for the first time in more than half a century, few realized how quickly freedom could be abused...
...Although the political culture has thrived, openness has given voice to extremists of the Right and the Left, most recently in the September state elections that raised the profiles of former Communists and of neo-Nazis...
...In Görlitz and Zgorzelec, people of good will on both sides of the border are starting to see the fruits of their years of preaching understanding...
...But once Poland entered the EU, more and more of its citizens began crossing the border to work and live in the West, while Germans have been buying farms that passed into Polish ownership when the frontiers shifted after the War...
...All this may change, perhaps when trade links are further strengthened...
...These next five years are our moment," a Polish trade official said...
...The progress, however, has not come without complications...
...The span is the first built to link the two cities since 1957, when two of the seven crossings destroyed during World War II were restored...
...Some have already taken jobs in the new special economic zones in western Poland...
...Total trade between the two nations stands at $38 billion...
...With farm fields open for construction, and cheap skilled labor at hand, it is a scale model of what is to come in the German-Polish relationship, and how both nations will benefit from the change...
...Companies like France's Michelin use Polish tax credits to carve out their enterprises...
...All foreigners out—German genes have to be protected," they proclaim...
...The Socialist-Christian Democratic coalition survived in Brandenburg, but the former Communists overtook the CDU for second place in the Legislature...
...A backlash against closer relations with Poland fueled the advances of Right-wing and former Communist parties in the September elections in the German border states of Saxony and Brandenburg...
...In two crucial cities especially—Görlitz, Germany's easternmost, and Frankfurt on the Oder, astride the Moscow-Paris highway—trade is surging and special economic zones have begun to realize their potential...
...is using globalization to dominate Germany, and that Poles are undercutting German wages in border businesses built on property seized from Germans at the end of the World War II...
...All of its members are bilingual in Polish and German, and many already have jobs lined up with international companies that set up shop nearby...
...Peter and St...
...They compose the student body of the Viadrina University, founded in 1991 by the state of Brandenburg and headed for its first decade by Weiler, a German-born Stanford professor...
...Paul's Sunday congregations to fewer than a hundred...
...a new mid-career center, the Collegium Polonicum, and some of its dormitories are located on the other side in Slubice...
...Along the Polish border, resentment has festered over territory lost by Germany nearly 60 years ago...
...Thousands of eastern Germans have expressed their rage over open borders not only at the ballot box and in demonstrations, but through violence...
...Joseph's churches, set amid prefabricated concrete housing, resemble industrial buildings...
...Voters' resistance to the plan, named Hartz IV after the Volkswagen executive who drafted it as part of a strategy to make Germany more competitive in Europe, was a serious blow to Schroder's Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the conservative Christian Democratic Party (CDU) in Saxony and Brandenburg...
...German trade with Eastern Europe has already doubled over the past decade, and now nearly matches trade with the U.S...
...When a serious border crime occurs, Polish priests and German pastors are in instant communication...
...The government, too, plays a role in attracting enterprise...
...many on the far Right believe it must be restored...
...In five years' time we will have Ukraine and Russia to compete withaswell...
...it will add 1,000 jobs on the site, and another 4,000 among suppliers...
...The days when gangs of young men in black jackets roamed the dark streets of the border cities looking for victims are past, but individual attacks against foreigners have not stopped...
...The neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD) and the slightly more moderate German People's Union campaigned on a platform of antiforeigner, antiglobalist rhetoric summed up by a ubiquitous election poster: "Seal the Border...
...Though the election was focused on the cut in benefits, it also gave the neoNazis a chance to bash—in one neat argument—the Poles, the United States, NATO, and the EU...
...Production in eastern German industry grew an average 5.5 percent per year over the last decade and reached 74.6 per cent of the western German standard, with the engineering, automobile, food, and electrical industries leading the way...
...It is a national problem, but it is felt most acutely nearthe Polish border: With only a fifth of the nation's population, eastern Germany is home to two-thirds of the nation's Right-wing extremists...
...It has been denounced in regular Monday night demonstrations across eastern Germany designed to recall the weekly protests that brought down the Communists in 1989...
...The PolishGerman Via Regia club, named after the ancient royal east-west trade route that ran through Görlitz, presented bouquets of flowers to the first Poles to cross when the border reopened in 1991...
...Germany is the number one exporter to the new member states...
...Private groups and state human rights offices have been opposing the extremists...
...Decades of Polish-German hostility are gradually melting into partnership, if not yet friendship, between the neighbors...
...But others in the church concede that the cause does not attract the popular support that rose up against Communism...
...Their message of resentment was echoed on the Left by ex-Communists, and even by some mainstream politicians who criticized EU subsidies for Poland and other new members that, they claimed, came from the pockets of German taxpayers in greater need themselves...
...A trade group has projected that Eastern Europe's EU membership will generate 500,000 new jobs in Germany overthe next decade...
...A Partner in Poland Germany Looks East By Donald R. Shanor Görlitz In the 15 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, democracy and capitalism have brought as many dilemmas as benefits to what was called East Germany...
...Peace across borders is as important a cause as peace across Germany was in the 1980s," says a Lutheran pastor in Görlitz who is a veteran of the church peace movement that brought down Communism...
...We have the other new accession countries to compete with, but we have the biggest domestic market...
...It was a $1 billion joint venture between Motorola and Germany's Siement that gave Saxony its biggest lift in the 1990s, delivering 2,500 jobs in its chip plant and four times as many among suppliers...
...Transition period restrictions will slow the tide initially, but eventually there will be no limits on Easterners looking for work at German construction sites or on Westerners buying cheap Polish farmland...
...Hatreds long kept in check by the police state began to boil over in the form of assaults on Poles and other foreigners, and vandalism against synagogues and Roma (Gypsy) property...
...For decades, most travel between the two Communist countries was banned...
...In Frankfurt and its Polish neighbor, Slubice, 5,000 young people are preparing for what their former rector, Hans Weiler, calls "a Europe that doesn't end at the Oder...
...Slubice's zone is a short drive from the university...
...Despite the xenophobic cries that can still be heard, the signs point to an era of cooperation and growth rather than strife on both sides of the Oder-Neisse border...
...Glory and honor to the Waffen SS...
...That traffic is creating the type of mixed border zone common along most international frontiers—but long absent on the Oder and Neisse—where people of neighboring nations trade, work and socialize...
...One member, a retired history professor, sees a growing confidence in Poles' attitudes toward Germans since their partnerships in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the EU: "For years, they worried about the Germans getting their old territories back...
...A German economic think tank predicts that the Eastern European additions to the EU will increase German growth by half a percentage point in each of the next two y ears...
...AMD has received more than $500,000 in subsidies...
...Donald R. Shanor, a previous New Leader contributor, is the author, with Constance C. Shanor, of After the Russians: Eastern Europe Joins the West...
...Violent hate crimes increased from 200 in 1989 to 850 a decade later...
...These factories fill the growing demand for electronic components across Eastern Europe and Russia for computers, automobiles, telecommunications, and industry...
...But Polish churches are booming while German churches are faltering...
...Churches—Lutheran in Görlitz, Roman Catholic across the river—have also played an active role in soothing ethnic tensions...
...Population loss has reduced St...
...Görlitz' magnificent Gothic cathedral, St...
...Similarly, while high-tech entrepreneurship has flourished under a free market system, those gains have been offset by losses ofjobs andpopulation, demoralization, and a sagging economy that has become a drain on the whole nation's finances...
...Boston Consulting Group recommends Poland over China to Western companies outsourcing the manufacturing of car parts, appliances and steel, because of its proximity to other EU markets...
...Poland's accession to the European Union (EU) in May has made possible a level of cooperation with eastern Germany unseen under Communism and only promised, not delivered, during the early years of democracy...
Vol. 87 • November 2004 • No. 6
