First impressions are deceptive

Our first visit was in spring 1994, four and a half years after Germany was re-united. It was a gloomy wet day and driving was made difficult by having constantly to dodge enormous potholes and negotiate long and complicated diversions round numerous road works, which were trying to make good the neglect of forty years’ misrule. The countryside was almost bare of trees except in the far distance and the sky was wide, immense and stormy, with great dark banks of cloud and the occasional shimmer of yellow-green sunlight. We came along a high ridge and as the road began to descend we could see the outline of a town lying in the bowl of the valley, the silhouettes of several spires visible against the fields beyond. Coming closer we noticed walls with towers at intervals and a wide ditch between the walls and an outer rampart. We drove round the walls several times before we found our way in through a narrow street of leaning half-timbered houses and onto a wide open space with a grimy Gothic church at one end and a rather ugly modern seven-storey hotel at the other. The remaining two long sides of the space were lined with very old houses, their roofs steeply pitched and their facades mostly in need of paint.

We were accustomed to the beautifully maintained centres of West German cities such as Freiburg-im-Breisgau or Limburg-an-der-Lahn, with their beams freshly picked out in black or red, their plaster spotlessly painted and windows glowing with geraniums. Mühlhausen looked like all the other sadly neglected places we had passed since leaving the West. We stared disapprovingly at the many derelict and crumbling houses and the muddy alleyways behind them. No pretty holiday snapshots to be had here. We had a quick meal in the first restaurant we found and drove away in search of more attractive places. In other words, we behaved like typical western tourists blinded by our preconceived notions.

In 1996 some of the family moved to Mühlhausen to take up work there, which meant that we began to look behind the façade of neglect. In fact we soon learnt to value the lack of architectural interference in the almost undisturbed mediaeval townscape and to understand how different the economic development of East German cities had been. Around the time of re-unification the city had lost population and industry so that there was little money for rebuilding. Even before that its position on the far western edge of the German Democratic Republic, cut off from its former trade routes, had been a handicap to economic recovery after World War II. After 1961 the Iron Curtain along the border with the West went right through roads and railway lines. Fortunately the city had suffered little damage to buildings during the war but the military effort had drained its resources, and the Russian occupation had still further depleted them.

By 1990, nonetheless, Mühlhausen had flourishing textile and engineering industries as well as potash mining, all of which were then bankrupted by the process of re-unification. The task of renovating the ancient city centre, not to mention the areas beyond the walls, was financially overwhelming. We noticed that nearly every street contained empty, abandoned houses, even whole rows of buildings, which had evidently not been lived in for quite some time. The reason for this, we understood, was that strict rent controls had made it uneconomical for landlords to renovate privately owned properties so that people had moved out of the crumbling half-timbered dwellings in the historic inner city into modern, pre-fabricated blocks of flats provided by state-run enterprises beyond the city walls. The situation was not unlike that in Britain up to the 1980s, and some of us remember the scandal of "Rachmanism" in London. As the economic state of East Germany rapidly deteriorated after the opening of the frontiers in 1989 many, particularly young people, simply upped and left for a better life in the West. It is not hard to imagine how depressing it was for the remaining inhabitants to be deserted in this way, whatever the understandable reasons. Our first impression of the city on a miserable wet day should have brought that home to us. Those muddy cobbled streets, drab cracking facades and sagging roof-tiles told a tale we were too blinkered to understand.