Merkel's eastern region suffers two decades on

BERLIN - The bit of rural ex-communist hinterland in which German Chancellor Angela Merkel grew up has undergone an imaginative makeover since the 55-year-old pastor's daughter embarked on her political career.

Merkel, now one of the world's most powerful leaders, will today address the US Congress in a symbolic speech marking two decades since the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

Back in her former German Democratic Republic, the landscape has seen remarkable changes since 1989. Huge swaths of its industry have shut down or been gutted by what many still consider to be capitalist West Germany's wholesale annexation of the region.

With pockets of unemployment at 50 per cent in some areas, nearly two million of the former communist state's 17 million inhabitants have upped sticks and gone west in search of work.

The Chancellor's home town, Templin, which is also one of the region's main urban centres, has been rebranded "The Pearl of the Uckermark" and uses every Chancellor association it possesses to attract visitors.

In the 20 years since the collapse of the GDR, Templin's inhabitants have experienced massive and far-reaching changes. Templin is a microcosm; it shares the fate of much of former East Germany. It is like hundreds of other towns in the once collectively farmed rural regions of north-eastern Germany.

Under communism the Uckermark was home to one of the largest battery pig farms in East Germany, with 300,000 animals. The complex was shut down after reunification, throwing hundreds out of work.

The same applied to the region's Wisent jeans factory - which produced clothing that few young East Germans wanted to be seen dead in at the time, preferring Levi's smuggled in from the West. Wisent closed not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now, there is a large Levi's shop in the centre.

These days Templin is a carefully renovated walled market town of 13,000 inhabitants which is trying to carve out a future in tourism. Sabine Hetrich, who runs the tourist office from its perfectly restored, pink-painted, 18th-century town hall, says that the Merkel factor has put the town on the map. "We get lots of people dropping in here and asking about the Chancellor," she says. "Most of them are foreigners or West Germans."

It has a saw mill and a lumber industry, but unemployment still stands at around 20 per cent as a result of the mass lay-offs that followed reunification.

The region is proud of its crystal-clear lakes and extensive forests, and has built a network of special "bicycle autobahns" and wellness hotels. Other attractions are large thermal baths and an "Eldorado" cowboy theme park.

For Templin, such developments are new. When Angela Merkel, then 3-year-old Angela Kasner, and her Protestant pastor father and mother arrived from capitalist Hamburg in 1957, much of the small East German town was a bombed-out ruin with streets made out of compressed sand. There were no cars.

At that time there was no Berlin Wall, but people in the Uckermark were already beginning to flee to the West.

Inside the Kasner home, it was possible to play Monopoly and read Western newspapers that were brought in under Protestant church protection.

East Germany's despised Stasi secret police was able to detect that the family watched Western television by the way in which the aerial on the roof of their two-storey house in the Waldhof complex, was pointing. But its agents were unable to exert much influence.

The young Angela Kasner not only joined the Communist Free German Youth movement - which some critics still describe as the socialist answer to the Hitler Youth - but she also learned Russian, the language of East Germany's ultimate rulers.

Erika Benn, the 69-year-old Templin schoolteacher who taught Angela Kasner Russian at the Waldschule school only a stone's throw from home, said that the German Chancellor was a star pupil who even attended extra Russian lessons in her home on Sunday mornings.

"Angela was incredibly industrious," Benn said. "She used to learn vocabulary at the bus stop. She made no mistakes, she was reserved but not shy. I have never had such a gifted pupil since," she added.

Like millions of East Germans Angela Kasner found a niche which enabled her to survive communism. After Templin, she went to Leipzig to study chemistry and then to Berlin where she lived for a while as a squatter.

When the Wall fell, she was able to seize the opportunities that capitalism presented as they arose. Her political career began only weeks after the Wall fell, when Germany's "reunification" Chancellor Helmut Kohl, saw her political use in the fact that she was both a woman and an East German.

He made her the country's first woman environment minister. The rest is history.

- INDEPENDENT