The train from Berlin cuts swiftly across the forests and the flat, brown fields of the north-eastern German plains, past a deer in a stand of birch trees, a heron by a shimmering lake, a group of waving, Lycra-clad cyclists. A handful of passengers alight at Anklam, a small town near the Polish border, and the train disappears towards the nearby Baltic coast.
Anklam is, at least according to recent local press reports, the worst place in Germany. It is here, supposedly, that all the problems afflicting Europe’s biggest nation and its most powerful economy are most grave. A third of the town’s 16 000 people are unemployed, thousands live in poverty, crime is reportedly rampant and the billions spent on job creation schemes since East and West Germany were reunified 15 years ago have been wasted.
The lead story in the town’s newspaper sums it up. Alexander Preibs (22), a student, tells the Anklamer Zeitung he is going to New Zealand because ”it’s as far away from here as I can get”.
Yet all is not as it seems. Anklam presents a paradox, not least to its people.
”We are just a normal town with normal people and normal problems,” said Marlies Janeck (75), before listing all the social problems caused by endemic alcoholism.
A few streets away, Martina Ebhart called the queues that form outside her soup kitchen a ”shameful stain” on the face of ”rich Germany” — then added, ”but people are not unhappy or frustrated”.
As Germany heads for a bitter general election in two weeks, the same contradictions, indecision and uncertainty are to be found across the country. Though the standard of living for most of the 80-million-plus population remains extraordinarily high, particularly in wealthy southern states such as Bavaria, no one feels comfortable. The economy is still hugely powerful, with highly competitive German companies exporting more than any other European nation, but there are five million unemployed.
Incidents such as the murder last week of a seven-year-old by a drugged-up teenager and the alleged rape of a fan by a television presenter spark a frenzy of self-loathing in the press, but the everyday reality does not seem so bad.
”To tell the truth, there is no huge problem. Life is pretty comfortable,” said Christoph Schlingensief, a leading avant-garde film director chatting in a café in a fashionable area of Berlin. ”But the Germans have convinced themselves this is the biggest problem in the world. Everyone feels unstable and insecure and fearful, but no one wants to talk about it. It’s like the whole country is constipated.”
The complexity of German politics reflects the febrile cultural and social landscape. Gerhard Schröder, the incumbent Social Democrat Chancellor, called the election early to trip up his conservative opponents, a coalition dominated by the Christian Democrats, led by Angela Merkel. That now looks like a miscalculation, as Merkel, an uncharismatic 51-year-old former scientist, looks set to win by a significant margin.
Schröder owes his troubles to a further paradox: that even though Germans largely support reform, change is still deeply unpopular. The Social Democrats’ decline in popularity, both in the east and in their heartlands of the industrial Rhineland and northern German port cities, began when Schröder ignored the wishes of many in his own party and started hacking at the generous unemployment payments that have helped to cripple the economy, along with the burden of reconstructing the east.
Attempts to win back voters with populist anti-Americanism failed to excite an electorate that is interested exclusively in job creation.
The insecurity has benefited smaller parties too. Though the far right is utterly marginal, the far left has made a comeback, particularly in the east, where many people in places such as Anklam resent the economic and political dominance of the West — though they are happy to accept subsidies worth â,¬100-billion each year and yearn for the certainties of bygone days.
Peter Ritter, a 46-year-old former officer in the East German army and the local candidate for the PDS, the reincarnated party of the former ruling Communists, spent last week pressing the flesh in Anklam’s main square, greeting voters from a caravan parked beside a sausage stall and behind a rack of cheap clothes.
Polls show that his party, in an alliance with another hard-left group led by former finance minister Oskar Lafontaine, is set to win more than a third of the eastern vote, though only 10% overall.
”Communism itself failed, but that does not mean the whole idea was wrong,” Ritter said. ”We don’t want to turn the clock back, but people are really struggling. We want higher taxes to fund job-creation schemes and protection from globalisation.”
Merkel and her party have exploited the sense of malaise most effectively. Their programme presses most of the right buttons. Merkel addressed a rally last Thursday in relatively wealthy Potsdam, on the outskirts of Berlin. Despite being heckled, she appeared to impress many of those standing in the evening sun or drinking at cafés in the square.
She cited the London bombings in July as evidence of why more surveillance cameras were needed on German streets, took a hard line against Turkish membership of the European Union, spoke of ”helping victims of crime before helping the criminals” and said ”foreigners should not be allowed to come here to preach against the way of life of their hosts”.
She impressed Johann Jurgen (57), a teacher.
”Merkel tells it straight,” he said. ”She is clear-eyed. I’ve got nothing against the immigrants, but they are a problem and need more integration.”
Merkel’s most controversial proposals are tax reforms targeting the way the social-security system is funded. These, she says, would help to rebuild the economy.
”This is a chance to step forward,” said Holger Schaefer, of the Cologne Institute for Economic Studies. ”Margaret Thatcher’s reforms were controversial. We are seeing the same thing here, just 20 years later.”
But some doubt whether tax reforms are enough. Dr Heinz Bude, a political analyst in Berlin, believes the swing to Merkel is born of a desperate, but forlorn, hope for a miracle.
”People are dreaming of everything being good again. Schröder hasn’t done it, so people are hoping maybe someone else can, despite all the evidence to the contrary,” he said. ”They are voting for a dream.”
Schlingensief, the film director, feels the nation has lost its direction.
”For the first half of the 20th century, the aim was to dominate Europe, then to rebuild, then to make a success of unification,” he said. ”Now the music has stopped and no one is quite sure where to sit down.” — Guardian Unlimited Â