On the eve of the 25^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the subsequent reunification of Germany, there is still a striking difference between the western side of the country and the east.

I’ve just made consecutive trips, one to Görlitz, right over the far eastern corner, where Germany bumps up against Poland and the Czech Republic. And one to the Rhine/Main region, the heart of the busiest, most commercially-thrusting district of Germany. And what a contrast; the former rural, rustic, comparatively empty, occasionally derelict. The latter a heaving, bustling, rat-race – with traffic jams and overcrowded trains.

It was the Görlitz trip that was the more interesting. The train journey across from Dresden was largely rural, although it had clearly once been far less so; trackside factories and freight yards had virtually disappeared under new undergrowth. There seemed to be a lot of Schrebergärten, those glorified garden kingdoms where everyone has his own little country cottage cum garden shed.

The train itself was short, whilst the stations had clearly been built for something far larger. At Görlitz it barely occupied a third of platform 11 – and platforms 1 to 10 were empty. Outside, the town’s main street – Berlinerstrasse – looked like a Sunday morning, although it was a Wednesday afternoon. The population here has shrunk from 90,000 before reunification, to 56,000 today, and the elderly had that resting facial expression that exudes disapproval, one that can be all too common in Germany. It wasn’t until I’d been in the town a day or so that I began to meet the younger, more thrusting citizens who were making things happen, and they were mainly outsiders, from other parts of Germany.

Görlitz is particularly interesting for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it is beautifully preserved and restored, with some 4,000 listed buildings in Gothic and Renaissance style, which has made it a mecca for film directors (the Book Thief and Grand Budapest Hotel about to be released). And secondly it incorporates the Polish town of Zgorzelec on the other side of the river, into one ‘Europstadt’. Before the war, of course, this was all one place, in the province of Silesia, but the border was moved.

Interestingly, the outlook on life on either side is rather different. The German mayor has acknowledged that Görlitz has had a very difficult last 25 years; the Polish mayor says it has been a boom time for his burgeoning town, benefiting from the proximity of a far richer neighbour.

So it is all a matter of perspective. Certainly wages are less in Görlitz – 25 percent less than the German average – but so are prices; I struggled to find a main dish for more than €10 in the restaurants, and the market was full of Poles, selling economy fruit and vegetables.

All in all it was a fascinating place to visit, although maybe not such an easy place to live.

www.goerlitz.de/en/

The Saxon town of Görlitz sits in the far corner of eastern Germany, where it bumps up against Poland and the Czech Republic. It has always been a pretty place, but its beauty has been little recognised in the wider world – until now.

For Görlitz has recently been discovered by Hollywood. It played the part of war-time Italy in Inglourious Basterds, of 1950s Heidelberg in The Reader and of 19^th century Paris in Around the World in 80 Days. And it is about to feature in two big new releases: The Book Thief and Grand Budapest Hotel.

It is high time its luck changed. Unemployment has been a problem, as has the resulting depopulation. In the years since reunification, a flourishing town of 90,000 inhabitants has been reduced to around 56,000, and wages here are 25 percent less than the German average. But then costs are low, too.

The reason for its filmic success becomes apparent as soon as you enter the old town. Tarmac turns to cobbles, the roofline is broken by towers and spires, and people are wandering around, open mouthed, at the array of immaculate Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque architecture. There are some 4,000 listed buildings densely packed into the squares and streets of old Görlitz, creating what is almost an integrated work of art, a sort of Prague without the crowds.

Why here?

It’s all down to the Romans and their trade routes. The Via Regia, a key east-west route, crossed the River Neisse at Görlitz, and that trade route intersected with another north-south route from the Baltic Sea to Bohemia. So market squares were busy at this crossroads back in the 13^th century, peaking in a 16^th century Golden Age.

New transport links and changing politics eventually pulled the plug on all that prosperity. The ensuing decline may not have been good for trade, but a few centuries of economic standstill have had a fossilising effect, helped by a complete lack of war damage; Görlitz was never on anyone’s front line.

In fact its biggest threat came in the 1980s, when the GDR government built a new town complete with proper bathrooms and central heating. The old quarter became a ghost town, and one that had a huge maintenance bill, so the government wanted to pull it down. Reunification, then, came just in time.

There are still glimpses of the bad old days, with occasional skeletal buildings standing hollow-eyed and waiting for benefactors with cash. And then there’s still the historic frisson of crossing the bridge into Poland on the other side of the river (once also German, when all of this was Silesia) which is actually as easy as pie.

Not that Zgorzelec – as the Polish part of the self-styled ‘Europastat Görlitz’  is called – has much of the grace of its German bedfellow. The best thing you can do, having crossed the bridge, is to turn to admire the skyline, and then walk back again.

http://www.goerlitz.de/en/