Germany grappling with massive internal migration after reunification

BERLIN

Germany is coping with a massive domestic migration more than three decades after its reunification, a top government official said on Wednesday.

“The biggest challenge is the question of emigration. A generation is basically gone. Every year this challenge gets worse,” Carsten Schneider, the government’s commissioner on East German affairs, told journalists in Berlin, as he presented the annual report on the state of unification.

Since Germany’s reunification, around 4 million East Germans moved to the western part of the country between 1991 and 2017, triggering a demographic crisis, according to the 2023 report on the state of unification.

The data also showed that the 2.8 million moves from the West to the East were not enough to stop the decline in many places.

While 22% of the total population lived in the eastern German states in 1995, only 19% lived there in 2021, it added.

Most of those emigrating from the East to the West are young people aged between 18 and 29.

The severity of the emigration’s impact on the East is most apparent when one takes a closer look at the administrative districts and cities in the region.

Nearly every district lost people to the West between 1991 and 2017. Not only did states in eastern Germany lost tax revenues as a result of this development but in many places the social infrastructure also collapsed, like schools, hospitals, sports facilities, and cultural institutions all had to shut down.