EISENHÜTTENSTADT, Germany — Back behind the Iron Curtain, when this town 75 miles southeast of Berlin was called Stalinstadt, it was meant to be a blueprint for utopian life in Communist East Germany — a model socialist city built around a steelworks.
Today, East Germany is no longer its own country and, despite the gaps slowly closing, residents of the region lag behind the West in virtually every category, including life expectancy, wealth, employment and population.
So, as Germany celebrates the 35th anniversary of reunification on Friday, Eisenhüttenstadt — “Ironworks City” — has become a different kind of model: one of several towns experimenting with a strategy to repopulate and attract skilled workers called Probewohnen, or trial living.
