As monuments go, the floating chapel in the Störmthaler See, outside Leipzig in central Germany, is unusual not only because of its construction but because of what it commemorates.
The simple aluminium plaques on its floor – and the bare hillsides in the distance – are reminders of the forced removals of people and the destruction of centuries-old villages by the communist East German regime. The villages were bulldozed to allow the rapacious march of opencast coal mining. The lignite, or brown coal, extracted around Leipzig provided electricity and petrol for the state. The environment was devastated, with huge pits scarring the landscape and billowing smoke pollution added to the toxic soup of chemicals being spewed across the countryside by a government that cared little for anything other than advancing the socialist international revolution of its Soviet masters.
Our tour guide, Gitta, who has brought us to see the “active leisure” side of Leipzig, is pulled in to explaining what it was like in the years before 1989, before the Berlin Wall came down.
So bad was the pollution that many people in villages nearby developed cancer and lung diseases, she says. “It was not something anyone talked about. You could not. Everybody was listening…”
As a tour guide in East Germany, she recalls, “we were told to talk about our wonderful industries and our progress in making a socialist state”.
Yet now, a mere 22 years after the two Germanies again became one, the very lake on which the chapel floats is testament to the enormous strides the country has made in repairing the damage.
Lake Störmthal is one of several lakes that have been created by flooding the old opencast mine pits… and which are set to transform the area around Leipzig into a tourist and watersport mecca. The lakes link to canals and rivers and offer sailing, canoeing, white-water rafting (in a state- of-the-art artificial river), as well as a growing number of accommodation options… and have created many new jobs.
Rudiger, who operates a tour company that takes guests on trips on Lake Störmthal on an amphibious landing craft, says: “This is the way we would like to do things, to heal the scars of the past and to remember, but at the same time to look to the future.”
That past and the future sit comfortably together in and around Leipzig, one of the biggest cities in the former German Democratic Republic. And, though they may not forget, the Germans – as is their nature – have moved on.
During my visit to this part of Germany, for the annual German Tourism Market hosted by the country’s National Tourist Board, I cannot avoid the politics of the past, or the present.
In the media in the English-speaking world, there are dire predictions that the collapse of the euro zone is imminent, given Greece’s meltdown and its threats about withdrawing from the EU.
In and around Leipzig and four other towns I visit during my nine days in Germany, I find little concern about that possibility. Germany is the strongest economy in Europe. It’s also still attractive to tourists, says German National Tourist Board chief Petra Hedofer, adding that visitor numbers to Germany will be up just under 5 percent compared with last year. Unemployment is at less than 3 percent and the German economy is growing.
Germany’s taxpayer euros have been helping to prop up countries like Greece. The Germans I speak to who would talk about the “crisis” (and many won’t) make the point that a Greek withdrawal might cost the union something like e180 billion, but that is small change compared with the estimated e1.9 trillion that have been spent on the process of reuniting the two parts of the country.
A cynical Canadian journalist remarks that Germans have been “paying the rent for years” for countries like Greece and Italy, where, he says, “they have turned tax evasion into an Olympic sport…”
The Germans have little sympathy for supposed European hard-luck stories, given their uphill struggle since 1945 to revive a country that was reduced to rubble after the end of World War II.
Recover the Federal Republic of Germany did, despite also having to pay huge reparations for the two world wars.
When the Iron Curtain came down in late 1989 and early 1990, the people of both east and west faced immense challenges.
Our guide Birgit recalls she lost her job in the construction industry, which is one of many on the former East German side that collapsed because they could not compete in the open market. Hundreds of thousands of jobs were lost in the eastern parts and the scale of the reconstruction needed was daunting.
The signs of that past are everywhere, although they will become harder to find as the country continues to complete reunification. Already it is almost impossible to see the divide any more.
In the centre of Leipzig, on the edge of the Augustusplatz, is a futuristic steel, concrete and glass building that is part of the University of Leipzig. Its façade is shaped like a cathedral, another monument to the brutality of the communists, for it was on this spot that they dynamited the 700-year-old Paulinerkirche in 1968, to make way for “development”.
At the old headquarters of the Stasi (the secret police), one can wander through a chilling museum that preserves the offices and methods of an organisation that ran one of the world’s most effective informer networks. At its height, about one in eight East Germans was providing information on family and friends to the Stasi.
Birgit describes how she obtained her own Stasi file in the mid-1990s under freedom of information legislation. She was shocked, and saddened, to find that the Stasi was watching her after she met an American student in the 1970s when they were both volunteers on earthquake relief. The person who sold her out was her best friend’s husband. Some years later, her friend committed suicide, says Birgit.
Ask her, though, whether, reunification was worth it and she looks at you with incomprehension. “It was tough, yes. I had to learn another job – to be a tour guide – and many people also lost their jobs. But look at this place now. It is beautiful. And it is a country where people have freedom they never did before.”
It was in Leipzig, where the “peaceful revolution” against communism began in late 1989, as a regular prayer session at the Nikolaikirche in the old town grew into more than 70 000 people taking to the streets to demand change. The critical thing about the Leipzig demonstrations was that the regime realised, for the first time, that it could not cope and that it would not order troops and police to fire on its own people.
Birgit was there on that day of the 70 000. “It is difficult to describe the feeling, but we knew that day that we had won… It was only a matter for time before they had to give in.”
Today, in the museums are the reminders of the past. But in and around Leipzig are plenty of signs of a confident nation moving forward.
The Porsche factory outside the city was set up in the 2000s to allow for assembly of first the Cayenne SUV and later the Panamera sports saloon. The factory was set up to take advantage of improved road, rail and air communication that had flowed from the reconstruction in eastern Germany, and was a normal business decision, say people at Porsche. There was no government subsidy.
BMW has followed suit and other multinational companies have established operations in and around Leipzig, including courier company DHL.
After strolling the concourse of the Leipzig main train station (the largest in Germany), I stand at a traffic light and my eye is caught by the slow progress of a small Trabant car, the kind that was ubiquitous in East Germany, but is rarely seen these days. It is a tin-can rattle trap (though you still had to wait up to 17 years if you wanted one)… a relic of a bygone age. Then I notice a shiny new Porsche Cayenne accelerating away on the other side of the road.
The past really is another country.