With youth jobless rates at 50% back home, graduates are heading for Berlin – but still grumble about the weather
When Dacil Granados turned up in Berlin a year ago and walked into her first German class, she was amazed to find almost all her classmates were fellow Spaniards. "They were all engineers, apart from an architect and myself," says the art historian. "All here, most rather reluctantly, for the same reason – to work."
Granados, 36, has just begun a job as an art history guide at one of Berlin's top tourist sites, the Pergamon Museum, ending a lengthy period of joblessness that started when she was made redundant from her job as a curator at a gallery of Catalan art in Madrid in December 2011. The Gran Canaria native is one of the estimated 80,000 young southern Europeans who are now arriving in Germany every year and who have been turning up in increasing numbers ever since the economic crisis began.
The Greek rate of youth unemployment now stands at more than 60%, Spain's is more than 50% and Italy and Portugal are at 40%. Germany, with its shortage of skilled workers, the highest employment level it has known for almost 25 years, and an ageing population, has become a magnet for this section of European society.
From Lisbon to Madrid, the Goethe Institute, the body representing Germany's cultural interests abroad, has reported a record uptake in its language classes, as growing numbers decide to learn German to set them up for the workplace. It is scrambling to find teachers to meet the demand.
Meanwhile, the job sections of advertisement websites are inundated with Spaniards, Portuguese and Italians offering to do everything from washing up to au pair jobs, often for just a few hundred euros a month.
In the first half of 2012, the number of emigrants from Spain to Germany was up on the same period of the previous year by 53%. Among Greeks the figure was 78% higher.
Germany's International Placement Service (ZAV), which is responsible for recruiting foreign workers to fill the gaps in the country's job market, is feverishly scouring southern Europe for skilled workers such as engineers and scientists, nurses and care workers.
"It's a huge sea-change, when you consider that just seven years ago German workers were being sent to work in Spain's then booming economy," Thomas Liebig, a migration expert with the OECD, told Die Zeit, referring to the time, not all that long ago, when it was Germany which was considered to be the sick man of Europe.
The ZAV and other recruitment agencies habitually deploy what they call lotse, or pilots, on assignments to southern Europe in the hope that they will bring back new labour, as well as those willing to take up a place in Germany's coveted apprenticeship system.
The agencies' recruitment drives often have the air of charm offensives about them, involving a map of Germany that is projected onto the wall, as well as a beginner's guide to life in a country many young southern Europeans have never even considered visiting, let alone working in, including how many breweries it has (1,300) and how many different types of bread (500), as well as reports about the weather, which is probably one of the hardest points about selling Germany to Iberians and Greeks.
"I certainly had never considered working in Germany before the crisis, and I knew very little about it," Juanjo Pujol, 28, told the Observer. "I grew up on Mallorca, surrounded by German holidaymakers, but I never thought that I'd find myself living among them in Germany."
He had always been told by his doctor and nurse parents that if he were to work hard at school and in his studies he would be set up for life. "But the opposite proved to be the case," he says.
After finishing his degree in environmental science, he got a short-term job reorganising a recycling plant after the introduction of a new EU waste directive. But after that he found himself unemployed and unable to find any work. "Rather than have to live on my parents' charity, I decided to come to Berlin."
He is now working as a babysitter and a bartender. "I don't mind the food – I'm vegan and it's easier to be vegan in Germany than Spain, but the weather? The weather – especially the long dark winter – it sucks," he says.
While they can't do much about their weather, it is widely agreed that Germans need to work on their hospitality. Many southern Europeans, used to family-oriented lifestyles, complain about the lack of warmth, the fact that, particularly in smalltown Germany, it is hard to socialise with people after work, and about a general sense of hostility over widespread perceptions that southern Europeans have brought the problems on themselves.
"I've seen the look some people give me when I'm in a group speaking Spanish and I know what they're thinking about us: that we're after their charity, that we got ourselves in this mess," says Granados.
It is one of the reasons why Spaniards in particular often stay for a short time – 70% of Spaniards who emigrate to Germany stay for less than a year, according to official statistics.
Economic experts have warned that Germany will suffer if it doesn't work to improve its sociability skills towards the newcomers.
For years Germany's gastarbeiter or guestworkers were seen as just that – guests, who would go home, even after they had been in Germany for several decades. Only recently has that mentality begun to change.
"Lately the word willkommenskultur [welcome culture] has become very fashionable," says Liebig. "A change in attitude is taking place in which a work migrant is no longer seen first and foremost as a potential problem. This could be a chance for Germany."
In an effort to show it takes the new workers seriously, the German government has put €140m into a fund to help with everything from language classes, to supporting newcomers with bureaucracy, finding accommodation, travel and relocation costs.
Rafael Santamarta could have moved back to Spain at least three time since relocating to Germany when the crisis broke in 2008, but has chosen not to. "I have been approached by three Spanish headhunters," says the 30-year old project manager for a Berlin-based social games company, Wooga. "But I have much more trust for the German system right now, where I'm treated with respect, paid properly, and work the hours I'm contracted to work for. Whereas in Spain none of that was the case."
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