The early years after reunification were golden ones, he recalls. He estimates that Templin and its surroundings received more than $150 million for infrastructure -- a water filtration plant, renovation of public housing, new roads. "The money flowed," he says. "You only needed ideas."
Under the old order, the giant state trade union association built two mammoth hotels for its members. The Friederich Engels, named for the communist theorist, went up on the outskirts of town. The Allende, honoring the assassinated socialist president of Chile, was built outside the old city walls. In their heyday, these behemoths took in thousands upon thousands of guests each year. After the revolution, Schoeneich says, he knew that maintaining them would be daunting.
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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Klaus Bubl, who had been managing director of both hotels under communist rule, was the first to try. In 1991 he and a partner won a one-year contract to operate them under public ownership. But the state soon decided to unload the properties.
The Allende went to a Swiss businessman who failed to secure private financing and wound up in court in a dispute that Schoeneich says is still unresolved. A Dutch company backed by the Bank of Thailand bought the Engels, which it renamed the Ferienhotel.
Before it went bankrupt five years ago, the company managed to renovate two of the hotel's three wings. Instead of 700 rooms, it now has 409 under new management that offers package deals to families and tour companies -- in this, the off season, a two-day weekend costs just $120 per person, including breakfast, dinner and recreation.
Hotel manager Jonas Avendano says he manages a 50 percent occupancy rate, the highest in the region. In recent years he's added bowling alleys, a sauna and the region's largest indoor pool. But instead of 689 employees under the old days, the hotel is down to 80 in peak summer months and 40 in the winter.
To help keep the local tourist industry afloat, Templin secured more than $40 million in public funds to drill down about 1,600 yards to thermal underground waters, then built a state-of-the-art spa over them. Public money also helped fund Europe's second-largest go-cart track. Farther up the road, officials sold the old state youth camp to a Bavarian company that opened Silver Lake City, a Wild West fantasyland.
"We really wanted to get something for everyone to get every possible kind of tourist," says Schoeneich. "Now you can go to the spa in the morning and tango at night."
At first it seemed to work -- on opening day four years ago the spa took in 1,500 customers. But the clientele has dropped steadily each year -- from 405,000 then to 340,000 in 2003. One problem is that other communities have followed suit -- there are now at least a half-dozen spas in the region drawing on the same limited pools of customers.
The Allende was not the only landmark to fail. A few blocks away sits a whitewashed, single-story factory complex. Once, it was a state-owned clothing factory and famed maker of the "wisent" -- trademark East German blue jeans. Christiane Nimes worked there for 18 years, sewing pockets onto the jeans. It was painfully boring but steady work, she recalls.
In those days, the plant had some 450 employees, many of whom seemed to spend their days drinking coffee and playing cards. After the wall came down, the German government sold it off to Brandtex, a Danish firm. It modernized the factory but cut the staff to less than 90. Nimes was one of the last to go. A few years later, Brandtex closed the plant, moving its operations to Poland and Bulgaria.
Every once in a while, says shop manager Angela Moeller, someone comes in asking for a pair of the long-gone wisents. But business is fading. Even the $5 blouses and pants flapping in the October breeze on a rack outside the front door go unsold. "We have fewer and fewer customers," she says. "People just can't afford to spend."
Wanted: 'Real Jobs'
The curtains are drawn in the small conference room on the ground floor of Red Cross regional headquarters. Nine women and three men sit expressionlessly as Diethard Deibel, regional director, explains how the new workfare system will operate. No one touches the cookies and fruit set before them on thin paper plates.
The Red Cross will receive state money to employ people for a variety of tasks, he tells them -- administering medication to house-bound patients, reading to them, shoveling their sidewalks and driveways in winter, transporting handicapped children. The pay is meager, about $1.40 per hour. But the state can require unemployment recipients to work at least 20 hours each week or forfeit their benefits. "It's up to you to seize this opportunity," says Deibel.
One man interjects. "Real jobs would have been even better," he tells Deibel.
The government's controversial new austerity program, known as Hartz IV, is designed to reduce the size and scope of the Germany's extensive welfare state, compel people back into the workforce for minimal salaries, and pump fresh blood into a sclerotic economy. But critics say it will not help the east, where the problem isn't that people on welfare don't want to work but rather that few vacant jobs exist.
Sigrid Bauer, 52, is a part-time janitor at a local school. She earns about $200 a month from her job, which supplements the $620 she receives in welfare payments. When Hartz IV takes effect in January, she estimates, her monthly income will be reduced by about a third. "The television and the telephone will have to go," she says.
Last summer, Bauer helped organize protests every Monday against Hartz IV that echoed the old freedom marches that helped bring down the communists. The demonstrations have ceased for now, but every Monday a half dozen or so of her neighbors meet in her living room for a self-help discussion that ranges from babysitting needs to politics.
Everyone, it seems, has a hard luck story that involves job layoffs and reduced unemployment benefits. Michael Kuc, 45, an unemployed dairy worker, says his benefits are about to be cut despite the fact he is partially disabled. No one believes in the bright shining promises of the West. "It doesn't help that there are all these wonderful things on the shelves to buy when we can't even afford to buy yogurt," says Bauer.
So, a visitor asks, do you miss the communists? There is a moment's hesitation, a few rueful smiles. Then there is an emphatic chorus: Yes, we do.
