The census shows that the number of young adults has plummeted almost everywhere in eastern Germany. In the west, their numbers are increasing – except in some rural areas.
“You can already tell that young people are missing,” says Gabi Lubahn. She is the chairwoman of the cultural association in Kargow – a village in the Mecklenburg Lake District. The association wants to boost village life. But there are hardly any young people who want to get involved, says Lubahn.
According to the last major census, the 2011 census, there were around 61,000 young adults aged 19 to 39 in the Mecklenburgische Seenplatte district. Eleven years later, according to the 2022 census, there are only 45,000, a decrease of 26 percent. Overall, the population here has also shrunk by eight percent – contrary to the trend: the German population as a whole has grown by more than two million since 2011.
Clear east-west border
The Mecklenburg Lake District is in some ways typical of all of East Germany: In rural areas, the number of young adults is falling everywhere – but not in large cities such as Berlin, Erfurt, Leipzig and Magdeburg. And the development has clear contours: in the west there are also districts where there are fewer young people, but the decline is nowhere near as widespread or as drastic as within the former GDR borders. Where there are fewer young people in West Germany – in some districts in Bavaria, Hesse and Lower Saxony – their numbers have shrunk by 5 to 10 percent. In the east, they have often fallen by 20 to 30 percent.
Fewer young adults means that there are fewer educational opportunities and fewer jobs. Those who are planning a career or a family are more likely to see their future elsewhere. It also means that there are fewer people who take on important roles in society, fewer young people for clubs and organizations, fewer taxpayers and fewer people who have children. A vicious circle.
Whether in the East or the West, most young adults live in cities. In Rostock, Jena, Dresden and Leipzig, the proportion is similar to that in Munich, Stuttgart or Düsseldorf. But in rural areas of East Germany, often less than 20 percent of the population is between 19 and 39 years old.
Not necessarily a city-country problem
In the west of the country, however, there are growth regions even in rural areas. In the Oldenburg district in Lower Saxony, for example, the number of young adults grew from 26,000 to more than 29,000 between 2011 and 2022.
One of them is Miguel Bebensee, 27 years old. He grew up in the district of Oldenburg, studied there and still lives here. “The district is well located, you can get to Oldenburg and Bremen quickly, and there is also a lot of nature,” he says.
In 2019, he founded an IT company. During this time, he was able to learn a lot from other entrepreneurs in the region. In his industry, he can now actually work from anywhere, “with his laptop from the beach or something.” But he wants to stay: “I’ve built up a lot of good contacts here, and I’ll continue to use them.”
Young people move for career and quality of life
Young adults are often more mobile than other population groups; they have young families or no families, they look for training places or change their place of residence to start a career. Job prospects play an important role, says labor market researcher Cornelius Peters. But there are also so-called soft factors that make places attractive: “After training or studying, many people initially move to large cities that have a wide range of cultural offerings, are attractive to tourists and have good infrastructure,” says Peters.
Their migration movements are therefore an economic indicator that combines many aspects of a place: Where can you get a good education? Where are the job opportunities good? Where are the cost of living low? Where are there attractive leisure activities? Where do people want to raise their children? Where many young adults move to, there is usually an attractive combination of many of these factors.
And what about the young adults who live in the rural east? They feel that they are in the minority, says sociologist Julia Gabler from Lusatia in Saxony. She has researched what could motivate young women to stay in rural regions in the east. “When companies settle there, we have to think about creating the appropriate infrastructure, such as enough kindergarten places,” she says. This is actually known, it just needs to be implemented. Economic success in rural eastern Germany can only be achieved if social factors are also taken into account.
Rapid decline in birth rates after reunification
But it is not just economic reasons or a lack of infrastructure: how the population structure in a place changes is also related to birth rates – not only the current ones, but also how many children people had many years ago.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990, the birth rate in the eastern federal states fell sharply. As a result, the number of children and young people halved between 1990 and 2011, when the last census was conducted.
In 2011, most young adults were born before the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the birth rate in the GDR was higher than in the Federal Republic. The generations with the lowest birth rates in the early 1990s are now young adults. The fact that there are now fewer young adults in the East is not only due to emigration, but also to the fact that people had fewer children 30 years ago.
Trend reversal in sight in the East
In the coming decades, this could be partially reversed: In the east, more children have been born again for some time. Birth rates in the east and west have equalized over the past decade, and the number of children in eastern Germany increased between 2011 and 2022. And more people are moving to the eastern German countryside again, so that the ratio has been reversed: more are coming than leaving.
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NDR Info | Current | 26.06.2024 | 07:40 a.m.