Little Cheer on German Border

The German government is responding with a campaign of advertisements to be shown in movie theaters this week in which prominent Germans speak up for expansion.

"Frankfurt has slept through a lot of its opportunities," said Reinhold Petzold, a business consultant whose company tries to link German and Polish businesses. He says it's time for residents to stop fretting and find ways to take advantage of the changes. People are "expecting something but they don't know what," he said.

On the other side of the Oder River, Poles have their own fears: that powerful German companies will run smaller Polish firms out of business, and that Germans will buy up huge tracts of land ceded to Poland after World War II.

At the same time, the 19,000 residents of Slubice -- who live across from a city that despite its economic travails is far wealthier -- are energetically taking advantage of integration.

"Many people in Slubice make their living from the Germans," said Tomasz Stefanski, art director at the town's cultural center. "All the stores, all the bars, everything opened in the early 1990s for the Germans."

Enterprising Slubice shopkeepers compete directly with their Frankfurt counterparts, advertising to encourage Germans to make the brief walk or drive across the river. Payment in euros is gladly accepted. Low-cost nightclubs cater to Frankfurt's youth. Polish home improvement stores sell entire kitchens to German customers.

Yet along Frankfurt's commercial main drag, there are hardly any Polish-language signs. Employees of a travel agency and a nearby chic clothing shop a few steps from the bridge just shrugged when asked how they draw business from the Polish side. If Poles come in, the employees said, they are served like anyone else. None of them said they had tried to learn Polish.

Cooperative enterprises among Frankfurt and Slubice businesses are rare, said Alina Traethner, an official at the Frankfurt Chamber of Commerce. Alina noted that a German car repair shop could farm out labor-intensive jobs such as body work to a partner across the river, but said she was not aware of any such endeavor.

Hovering over the German-Polish relationship is a bitter history. Slubice was part of a huge swath of land that Germany was forced to cede to Poland after World War II, when the border was moved west to the Oder River. Before that, Slubice was Frankfurt's eastern suburb, populated by Germans. After the war, they were expelled across the river. Poles moved into the vacated houses.

Today, some German residents of Frankfurt associate Poles with car theft and crime. From time to time in recent years, neo-Nazis have harassed Polish students, to the point that some Poles avoid speaking their language on the street at night. Some Poles view German visitors through old stereotypes. But people here deny that history is what prevents full unity of the two communities.

On both sides, "the younger generation is not very interested and doesn't even know the history of the border line," said Felix Ackermann, a Polish doctoral student in Slubice. Political leaders old enough to remember have agreed not to discuss it, but instead to look forward, he said.

During the Communist era, Frankfurt built respectable affluence as one of the Soviet Bloc's biggest producers of computer chips. The chip plants employed 8,000 people. But with the fall of communism and the country's reunification, firms in the former West Germany began moving thousands of jobs to low-cost former Eastern Bloc countries such as the Czech Republic, rather than to Germany's east. In Frankfurt, many jobs were lost in the transition; the chip plants closed, their Cold War-era products deemed unsuited for the high-tech world market.

After a decade of residents facing chronic unemployment and declining living standards, hope came alive in 2001 when a team of investors, including U.S. chip giant Intel Corp., proposed to build a $1.3 billion plant that would employ 1,000 to 1,200 people and create many other support jobs. Construction teams erected a building the size of a large sports arena. Access roads and water lines were prepared, and employee training programs began.

But last November, amid weakness in the world chip market and disputes over government loan guarantees, the project collapsed. The building now sits vacant and windblown.

"I just had this feeling" the project would fail, said Everth Nabet, 49, an engineer who was laid off by the old chip plant in 1993 and has not found work since. "And if it did come through," he said, "I would turn out to be too old." Nabet and his wife, Marlies, said they would just wait to see what comes.

Others aren't so patient. "It would be nice to stay," said Ricarda Haupt, 24, a law student who said she saw no prospects for work here after graduation. "But it's necessary to prepare mentally to leave." She said that two-thirds of her high school class had moved away, and that soon, she would join the exodus.