Silke Gawenda's east German hometown has its charms -- brick fortifications and timbered houses from the Middle Ages, quiet streets lined with linden trees.
A little too quiet for the 18-year-old, who is counting the days until high school graduation so she can leave for university in the more prosperous west -- joining an unprecedented exodus of young women from what used to be communist East Germany.
"Wittstock is so dull, I just want to get out of here," said Gawenda, who wants to study graphic design. "There's no future here for me -- no jobs, no night life and no way to get a good education."
More than 60 towns with more than 5,000 inhabitants in the east have fewer than 80 women per 100 men, a study by the Berlin Institute for Population and Development showed. That compares to a ratio of 51.1 percent women to 48.9 percent men for all of Germany.
The mayor of the small eastern town of Freital near Dresden has even offered 2,000 euros (US$2,800) and help finding a job and an apartment for each woman aged 18 to 39 who moves there. And the town of Strehla had only one contestant this year for the title of Strehla Nixe, or Mermaid -- the town's tourism ambassador.
In Wittstock, population 16,000, about 3,500 people have left since reunification at the end of the Cold War in 1990 and unemployment remains high at around 20 percent. Government statistics show that 1,745 men but only 1,418 women in the age group between 18 and 34 live there.
Many old buildings have been fixed up but dozens are vacant and crumbling. Shop windows of former grocery and clothing stores stand empty, giving the streets a forlorn air. On the market square pedestrians are mostly seniors, while groups of young men sit drinking beer at an outdoor coffee shop.
It's the young bright ones who leave, such as Silke and her older sister Inka, working on a doctorate in molecular biology at the University of Hannover in the west.
Why it's the women who leave for opportunity in the west remains a topic of intense discussion. Sociologist Steffen Kroehnert, who did the report on the female exodus for the Berlin population institute, suggests that female-headed households and a lack of male role models in education may play a role.
"One of the reasons for this phenomenon is that young men in eastern Germany don't have any male role models and are not encouraged to strive for a better education," Kroehnert said. "Much more than in the West, most kindergarten and school teachers are female and more often families are raised by single moms."
Helga Berger, who works for the town's youth services office, said she noticed that Wittstock's young men are passive and hard to motivate.
"The guys in rural east Germany are real mama's boys," she said. "If they don't have a strong alpha animal to tell them what to do, they won't do anything -- the girls here are just so much more flexible and open-minded."
East Germany gave everyone a job, motivated or not. In Wittstock, more than 2,000 workers -- 95 percent of them female -- lost their jobs after the shutdown of the formerly state-owned Obertrikotagen Betrieb clothing factory in the early 1990s. Yet even though the women were hardest hit, they seemed to cope better.
Dirk Scharfenort, 36, belongs to the group of young men who don't want to leave their hometown despite lack of opportunity. He was unemployed for several years before he opened up a bar in Wittstock. His bar "Scharfe Ecke" has become a hangout for young unemployed men.
"A lot of people who come here are without work, angry and right-wing," Scharfenort said, adding that while he felt sympathy for these men his political attitude was more centrist.
He said most young men had a deep-seated attachment to Wittstock.
"We just don't want to leave our hometown," he said.
More than 1.5 million people have left eastern Germany since the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 -- the majority of them to the former West Germany. While in the early days more men left, that changed quickly after German unification in 1990 -- since then, two-thirds of those who have left have been female, Kroehnert said.
The German government recently promised a 4 million euro emergency program including mobile libraries, improved public transportation and better medical treatment to stop the migration from the eastern states. But critics say what the region really needs is long-term investment to create new jobs.
Inka Gawenda, Silke's older sister, said right-wing violence -- an immigrant from the former Soviet Union was beaten to death in 2002 -- and the job shortage were reasons why she left after high school in 1997. For a while she thought about moving back to be close to her family. But she couldn't.
"Just the thought of moving back makes me cramp up inside," Gawenda said. "It's really sad but I have no hope that the situation for young people in the East will improve any time soon."
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