Germany's demographic disaster

Early on 13 August 1961, Berliners woke up to find their city divided. The East German regime was building the Berlin Wall in a desperate attempt to stop its people from leaving. Around 2.5 million had already done just that, since the foundation of the two German states in 1949. When the Wall fell peacefully in 1989, the exodus wasn’t supposed to resume. But it did, and on a devastating scale. Sixty-five years on from when the wall went up, Germany’s eastern regions are trapped in a depopulation spiral. Nearly a quarter of former East Germans have moved west or abroad since German reunification. Most are young, well-educated and female. That’s left behind a region that is now Germany’s oldest, with its birth rate among the lowest, and with many of its communities watching schools, playgro