With elderly in homes from Hungary to Thailand as cost is too high at home, Germans divided over practice of 'oma export'
Hannelore Könnemann is delighted with her new retirement home, a three-room apartment in which she has managed to fit some of her favourite pieces of baroque furniture. "The first night I arrived I lay in bed saying 'thank God! I'm safe!'" said the 78-year-old former boutique owner. The best thing about it, she says, is that she was able to bring her great Dane, Julio.
But the most bizarre aspect of it is that she's living not in her native Gelsenkirchen in western Germany, but some 760 miles (1220 km) away on the banks of Lake Balaton in Hungary. Konnemann has been a resident for the past two months in SeniorCare Pflegeheim Balaton, and pays €2,100 (£1,725) a month for her apartment, meals and medical care included, which would cost her at least a third more in Germany.
"And for that, daily fitness classes, twice-monthly house visits from a hairdresser and a fish pedicure are all thrown in," she said. She is one of an increasing number of Germans who are moving to overseas retirement homes. She is possibly, one of the lucky ones, having chosen to live abroad. "I've always been adventurous, and I have learnt some Hungarian," she said.
Many elderly people have been forced to move miles away from home to foreign shores, simply to offset the costs of care homes in Germany which have spiralled. One of Könnemann's neighbour Ilse Puderbach, 84, pays €1,500 a month to live at SeniorCare, less than half of what she'd have had to pay in Germay. "At least there's a bit of life here," she said, describing the gym classes and the folk singing sessions. "But it's not what I'd have chosen."
Her son Udo said the family was forced to make the decision to take Ilse hundreds of miles from her home, saying the state would have demanded his contribution to the costs of her care in Germany, which he says as a small businessman he could have ill afforded. "I got the idea from a magazine article," he says, which gave him the contact details to Wohnen-Im-Alter (living in old age), Germany's largest internet portal for age-related services.
"For me it came down not so much as to where but how – here someone comes to check up on my mother every hour at least, and they all speak German and have more time for her than they would in Germany," he said. He too mentions the perks – a massage whenever she wants, regular haircuts, and manicures.
Such stories have flooded the German media in recent months following the revelations that thousands of Germans are being sent to live in overseas nursing homes. News of the practice has stoked much anger to the extent that comparisons have been drawn with the often brutal expulsion of ethnic Germans from parts of what is now Poland and the Czech Republic, after the second world war.
Ulrike Mascher, president of the VdK, a socio-political advocacy organisation founded in 1917 to give assistance to German veterans of the first world war, and a vociferous critic of the overseas transfer of the elderly, said: "I'd have my difficulties living in a country where I couldn't speak the language in my old age". She said the local folk songs with which the residents were regularly serenaded, "may well be very pretty, but the fact remains, they are not my folk songs".
The common thread running through most of the thousands of column inches of angry commentary which have been dedicated to the practice, is how can Germany take such a pragmatic and cold approach to the provision of its elderly? Nicknaming the trend "oma export" ("granny export"), Heribert Prantl of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, wrote of his shame that "a country that is capable of building the best machines in the world has not yet been able to develop a proper and intelligent care concept when in a generation from now every 15th German will be in need of care". He added that Germans, who prided themselves in being Exportweltmeisters (great exporters), had extended the practice to everything that it was useful to be rid of. "Rubbish is exported, atomic waste, old medicines … are deposited wherever it is cheapest to dispose of them … and now we're exporting our infirm and elderly. Gerontological colonialism sounds like something invented in a madhouse, but it's for real. Will we also start exporting our children when the kindergartens become too expensive?" he asked, in an excoriating editorial.
But Jan Rycl, a strategy and human resources adviser who is leading a project to open a 200-bed care home for German clients in Prosecnice, about 20 miles outside Prague, by next autumn, calls oma export descriptions irresponsible, saying it was simply a fact that there was huge demand for cheaper and high quality care. "We've had extensive enquiries from people all over Germany," he said.
"Their main motivation for wanting to move in with us are financial reasons. You cannot assume this is an easy decision for anyone to make, especially not the relatives, who feel guilty, but it is one we will all be confronted with at some point." Costs at his care home, a converted sanatorium, will be between 30 and 50% cheaper than in Germany, he says, largely due to lower labour costs.
That was the main reason that the Swiss nurse Anita Somaini was able to open a nursing and rehabilitation centre on the Thai island of Phuket, called Baan Tschuai Duu Laa (House of Help and Care), specialising in the care of people suffering from dementia and Alzheimers. "Nurses here cost between €350 – €500," she said. "So we're able to provide 24 hours a day one-on-one care with three nurses for each guest. That would just not be possible in Europe."
One of her patients, a 52 year-old Munich banker called Georg, who did not want to give his surname, appears to be an example of how living in an overseas care home can be the right choice for some. He came to live at the home almost a year ago after suffering a serious brain injury following a fall down the stars of his cellar. "I got quite aggressive in my German care home – I didn't like the way they treated me, but here, I have my peace and quiet, a shop where I can buy my cigarettes, I can literally roll into the swimming pool which is right outside my window which looks out onto a lush garden and I can Skype with my family in Munich every day."
A family member comes to visit once every few months, his brother Peter said. "He is genuinely happier here. When we speak to him on Skype we can make sure he's being taken care of and he's also saving around €1,000 a month," he said.
At the Pflegeheim Haus Koroneos in the north of Athens, the Guardian finds 85-year old Edeltraut Papaeleopoulus, who bemoans the fact that she is not living in a retirement home in Germany. "I got stuck in Greece after the war," she said. "I and my German mother were in Alexandria and on our way back to Germany but because I had a piano we had to go via Athens. I met my husband here and have never managed to leave."
She is sharing the home in the district of Ambelokipi, with seven other Germans who have advanced dementia. "We sing German songs, have coffee and cake together every Thursday, and talk about what happened 80 years ago". She had intended to retire in Germany, "having heard about the marvellous facilities there," bur her pension has been cut twice by the bankrupt Greek state, and another cut is expected in January, dashing such hopes. "So I've put some money to one side so that at least I can afford to be taken there to be buried," she said.
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