By Tina Bellon
BERLIN (Reuters) - Quitzdorf am See offers charming forest, heath and lakeside scenery, but shares a problem with other such communities in rural eastern Germany: many of its young women have gone.
A quarter century after Germany reunited, a general exodus from the former communist East is finally slowing and some cities are attracting new blood.
However, the countryside is losing women, creating a demographic imbalance that is most acute among the young. In many affected communities only around 40 percent of residents in the 18-29 age group are female and in Quitzdorf, the figure is just 27 percent.
Quitzdorf, which lies close to the Polish border, is popular with visitors who sail, windsurf or fish on its lake. But skilled, ambitious young women are heading out of Quitzdorf and places like it in search of jobs with good prospects, leaving behind a body of often demoralised young men with fewer educational qualifications.
"This is not just a demographic problem, but rather a cultural, social and economic disaster, blocking potential for development desperately needed to solve eastern Germany's economic problems and lack of innovation," said Professor Raj Kollmorgen, a sociologist who is studying the phenomenon.
Saturday marks the 25th anniversary of the union of the two German states, separated throughout the Cold War and for 21 years by a wall.
Back in 1990, then Chancellor Helmut Kohl promised "flourishing landscapes" for the former communist east but many of its enterprises soon collapsed under the new market economy, prompting citizens to seek work in the west.
Between 1991 and 2013, 3.3 million easterners went west, while 2.1 million moved the other way, the Federal Statistics Office reports. Net migration from the east remains stubbornly negative, although it has slowed in the last two years and some cities such as Leipzig have reported population gains.
Behind the overall figures, the female brain drain from the countryside continues unabated.
One example is 26-year-old Jennifer Walter. Born in the small village of Schoenfeld in northeastern Germany, she originally moved to Cologne to study business management.
"I soon realised that even after finishing university there were no opportunities for me back home, I could never earn as much and work in the field I want," said Walter, who found employment at a small consultancy.
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GRAPHICS:
Population growth, age structure, unemployment:
http://link.reuters.com/nam75w
Migration background:
http://link.reuters.com/gym75w
Religion, family:
http://link.reuters.com/fym75w
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A SELECTIVE PROCESS OF EMIGRATION
In recent decades, girls have outperformed boys at school in a number of European countries. In eastern Germany,
significantly more women than men pass the "Abitur" exam which allows university entry, and the gender gap is wider than in western Germany.
Worried local authorities have tasked Zittau/Goerlitz College in the eastern state of Saxony with investigating the reasons behind the exodus of women.
"We are now talking about a selective process of emigration, with the so-called top performers leaving," said Kollmorgen, who leads the research project. "Young women on average are better educated than their male peers and more ambitious to seek their luck elsewhere."
Steffen Kroehnert, author of another study on the trend at the Berlin Institute for Population and Development, said the east was affected much more than other deprived regions.
"The deficit of women in eastern Germany is unprecedented in Europe. Even in regions around the Arctic circle in the north of Sweden and Finland - areas which are particularly suffering from a flight of young women from the countryside - numbers do not even touch those of eastern Germany," he said.
After 25 years, unemployment across the east is on average four percentage points higher than in the West. In the state of Saxony-Anhalt, the rate is 16.7 percent, two and a half times more than the German average of 6.7 percent in 2014.
Wages in the east lag those in the west by a third and local social workers describe a culture of emigration in poorer communities, with parents, teachers and friends encouraging young women to leave if they want to achieve something in life.
"Young people in the east have two ways to cope with the difficult situation on the labour market: they either give up all hope, displayed by the high rate of male students without any school diploma, or they increasingly invest in their education," said Tim Leibert from the Leibniz-Institute, who focuses on demographic change and the exodus of young women.
Professionals worry about those left behind. "We have a whole generation of young men without any ambition or prospects and there certainly is the question of what keeps these communities together once all the young women have gone," said Ingrid Loeben, a social worker from the eastern state of Brandenburg.
In the west, which remains socially relatively conservative, many women from the countryside return to their villages once they turn 30. Women from the east rarely move back home, instead remaining in the west or one of the growing eastern cities.
But not everyone can imagine life away from home for good. For 21-year-old Ida Lauterbach, who moved from the small village of Oberboesa in Thuringia to the affluent southwestern city of Ulm, cultural differences are too great to be overcome.
"I decided that higher wages and better job prospects aren't as important as my home region, which is why I will return as soon as the possibility arises," she said.
(editing by David Stamp) OLGBWORLD Reuters UK Online Report World News 20151002T152826+0000