TEMPLIN, Germany -- An autumn wind is knifing through the cobbled alleyways of this picture-postcard town, and so Christiane Nimes pulls her blue denim jacket a little tighter around her shoulders. Then she resumes raking the hard ground outside the concrete ruins of the Salvador Allende Hotel.
In the days of communist rule, the Allende boasted more than 300 constantly occupied rooms, a staff of several hundred workers and an annual May Day party that was the high point of the admittedly modest social calendar of Templin, located in the heart of the former East Germany 50 miles northeast of Berlin.
Under communism, the Salvador Allende Hotel had several hundred employees. Now the building is at the mercy of vandals and graffiti artists.
(Glenn Frankel -- The Washington Post)
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Then the Berlin Wall fell, east and west were reunited, a Swiss investor came and went leaving a lawsuit and a trail of creditors, and the hotel eventually was abandoned to graffiti artists, vandals and waist-high weeds.
Nimes, 47, who wraps her long brown hair in a tight bun while she works, is one of a handful of people hired under a public labor program to pick up the litter and tend to the weeds. It's the latest in a series of make-work jobs she's held over the past decade. She doesn't mind working hard, she says, but she resents being forced to do a job with no purpose and no future.
"They've never offered me a real job," she says of the state-run labor agency that provides her monthly stipend. The same is true of virtually all her neighbors in the anonymous apartment block where she lives. "Everybody I know is unemployed," she says matter-of-factly.
Fifteen years after the wall fell, many people throughout the former East Germany feel shortchanged and aggrieved. Unemployment officially hovers at 20 percent -- about twice the level in western Germany -- and pushes 30 percent in communities such as Templin. Those with the means and mobility head west for better opportunities. A special report commissioned by the federal government concluded that an infusion of $1.5 trillion in public funds since 1990 has failed to replace the decrepit industrial network that collapsed when communism fell.
The hopes of that era have been replaced by seething resentment and an eerie nostalgia for the past. In recent local elections, radical nationalist parties made inroads at the expense of the mainstream.
At the same time, many western Germans blame the east for dragging down Germany's lumbering economic recovery. Polls show sizable minorities on both sides who wish the wall had never come down.
When German President Horst Koehler told a newsmagazine last month that it was no longer realistic to expect that the country's six eastern states would ever enjoy the same living standards as the west, people here say he was only confirming what they already know. "We have no one to rely on but ourselves," is how Christiane Nimes puts it.
The Golden Years
For the people of Templin, population 15,000, the past was truly another country: the German Democratic Republic, as East Germany was officially called, a communist land of universal health care, low-cost housing and -- perhaps most important -- full employment. Never mind, critics note, that the health care was of low quality, that the apartments had leaky roofs, paper-thin walls, cracked windows and broken furnaces, or that full employment was achieved through rampant featherbedding. And never mind the Stasi -- the secret police who kept a repressive eye on everyone.
Ulrich Schoeneich's fondest memory is of the Monday evening demonstrations 15 years ago. Templin's energetic mayor recalls 5,000 protesters marching from a local church to the squat, brown prefab concrete headquarters of the Stasi, lighting candles and setting them atop the wall, serenading the security policemen barricaded inside with "We Shall Overcome."
But Cindy Bischoff, an ex-postal worker and mother of three who lost her job in 1997, cherishes a different memory. It was the annual May Day parade, which began with sports clubs, trade unions and youth groups gathering at the old market square and marching to the Allende for an all-night party. "It was especially nice for young people," she recalls fondly.
Templin was never your standard-issue Soviet bloc town. Five crystal-blue freshwater lakes converge here like the fingers of a hand. The forests are thick with pine trees and wildlife. The old city rests within a 14th-century wall, overseen by an austere 17th-century church tower and an 18th-century town hall.
During the communist era, these architectural jewels were preserved under a thick layer of coal dust, according to Mayor Schoeneich. "It was really a gray city," he says. "There was always a sour coal smell. The roofs in the GDR were painted red or blue, but the color was weak and after a few years they would all look the same."
