THE WINNERS

Hans Aichinger leads the way ever upwards from the bowels of Leipzig’s old cotton spinnery until he reaches a hole in the scrappy masonry.

“When the communists went the factory went bust and some building workers banged a hole in this sealed-up wall,” says the painter, 50 and by now somewhat breathless. “The brickwork broke away and I felt a gust of fetid 40-year-old air being exhaled. It was like being assaulted by the accumulated halitosis of the German Democratic Republic.”

Through the hole and beyond the wall, Mr Aichinger, now a celebrated artist, set up his atelier. Here, out of the industrial wreckage of communism he and the other artists who came to colonise Die Spinnerei became the big winners of reunification. Their art has been called “the hottest thing on Earth” by the curator of New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Times Archive, 1961: Communists seal the Berlin border

Tanks and troops employed to hold refugees back, but hundreds still filter through the barricades

• Topic: Berlin Wall

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The spinnery was built when the city was in the first blossom of the industrial revolution. Leipzig suddenly grew from 100,000 inhabitants in 1870 to 400,000 in 1900 as factories sucked in workers from across Saxony. Huge, ornate buildings, commissioned by banks and city elders, were put so solidly in place that they survived wartime bombing.

After the war the communists pumped subsidies into the spinnery and a dozen other factories. Unemployment in Leipzig is still at 14.1 per cent but that is down from 23 per cent three years ago and is below the average for the East. BMW and Porsche have opened factories and seem set to stay despite the current crisis.

The city is starting to buck the eastern trend. Since 1989 more than million Easterners (the German Democratic Republic had 17 million inhabitants) have moved westwards in search of work. Every ten minutes, according to a recent calculation, an east German moves out of the region.

Many communities have shrivelled and Leipzig has lost tens of thousands of well-educated workers. It is stemming the haemorrhage with incentives for young couples, the building of a new university complex and strenuous attempts to hook western investment. It brands itself as a destination for classical music lovers — Johann Sebastian Bach worked here for years — as a trade fair centre.

“The strength of Leipzig has been its ability to incorporate the new and the foreign,” says Gerd Harry Lybke, a gallery owner who has done most to bring the city’s artists on to the international market. Their paintings, which often draw on the tradition of the “Socialist Realist” artwork of the 1950s, have become a magnet for collectors. At the top of the range Leipzig School paintings have been going for hundreds of thousands of euros.

In Mr Aichinger’s spinnery atelier just about everybody considers himself a winner. Collectors now fly in to Leipzig’s on private jets, and come to Der Spinnerei and take their pick.

“I think what they like is the quality of the workmanship, of the drawing and the painting — that is what we all learnt at art academy in the supposedly bad old days,” says Mr Aichinger.

THE LOSERS

The end of communism was followed by the start of the dole queue. The 1990s were a terrible shock to the city. “Job gone, wife gone, rental debts, house gone ... that was the cycle and it went very fast,” says Christoph Koest, who runs the Leipzig Oasis, a shelter for down-and-outs.

“What we had to fight against at first was the infantilism. Grown men would come in and say ‘Look after me! Give me a winter coat!’. That came from living for so long in a paternalistic system.”

Now, the shelter, housed in a communist-era food shop, using bits and pieces from an old hospital kitchen is still full, and by most definitions the visitors are unification losers. At a table of cake-eating men — two on disability pensions, one on a strained old-age pension, three jobless, one homeless — the mood is different. Unusually for a hostel, they don’t hide their faces.

Their spokesman, Karsten Degner, 35, dropped out of school years ago but has used his dole time to teach himself a remarkably sophisticated English full of biblical cadences.

“I have been taking the New English Bible and comparing it verse by verse with the German equivalent,” he says, “I look everything up in the dictionary and spend the day memorising new words.

Mr Koest says that his visitors insist on paying contributions for warm meals and clothing. “And they’ve started a collection for destitute street kids in Brazil — they’re living in hard times but they’re not sorry for themselves any more.” That is a different kind of revolution in a society which has been mocked by the unsympathetic West for its endless moaning.

The destruction of the Berlin Wall wrecked the city’s industry, leaving it with derelict districts, tens of thousands on the dole and a sense of hopelessness.

Was this where the 1989 protest marches were supposed to lead? “People say the unemployment came when the system imploded,” says Christian Führer, a Protestant vicar and one of the leaders of the Leipzig uprising. “Not true — how much real work was done in the old system?

“As for the beggars, they were invisible in East Germany only because they would have been jailed for ‘asocial activity’.”

The Leipzig sociologist Peter Förster was engaged by the Communist leadership in 1987 to conduct a secret investigation into why East German youth was so dissatisfied with the regime. The result was a long-term study of 1,500 children born in 1972-73 that survived the end of the regime and continues today. For the first time since 1989 the sociologists have found a majority who consider themselves winners from unity — 54 per cent — and a large majority stress that they do not want a return to the old system.

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