The job-seeker

Ellen Goerner might be out of work, but she's determined not to let herself go. She shares a cramped three-room apartment in a high-rise estate on the edge of Dresden with her grandson and three of her five children, and even though it's small, it's always tidy and clean. She always lays the table for breakfast because she knows that shared mealtimes mean happier, healthier families.

Family comes first

Ellen lives with her two teenage sons, both serving apprenticeships, and her 25-year-old daughter Ulrike, who's a mother herself. Her son Mauro began school in 2009, and she's hoping to become a nurse. So the 70-square meter apartment is home to three generations.

Ellen Goerner says monotony is the worst thing about being unemployed. There's only so much vacuuming and laundry she can do every day. She also checks her e-mail, watches some TV and surfs the Internet looking for work. But so far, she's never come close to finding a job online.

At midday the bells of the church next door remind her that it's time to pick up Mauro from school. She smokes a quick cigarette and then she's off.

Mauro is always pleased to see his grandmother. Ellen has a second grandson called Linus – he also enjoys visiting her. She loves both of them dearly, but she wouldn't consider looking after children for a living. After raising five kids of her own, she says her nerves couldn't take it.

Ellen Goerner was born and bred in Zwickau in Saxony – where her parents moved after the Second World War. They were Sudeten Germans – ethnic Germans who lived in what was then Czechoslovakia before the war. After 1945, the Soviet-allied government expelled the majority of ethnic Germans, including Ellen's parents.

Growing up in the GDR

At school in Zwickau, Ellen did well and graduated second-best in her class. She could have gone on to university, but that would have meant leaving her hometown. She didn't want to, and instead went to work in a paper factory and then a wholesale bakery.

She has fond memories of communist East Germany. “We all had work that paid a decent age,” she remembers. “We didn't have bananas often, but we had oranges from Cuba. They were the sort of oranges that are only good for juicing, but we were happy.”

Cuba didn't just send oranges to the former East Germany. It also sent workers. Ellen fell in love with one of them and moved to Cuba with him after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

She suffered severe culture shock when she returned to a reunified Germany in 1996. Zwickau had always been a city that relied on industry, and the post-reunification years had not been kind to it. It was completely run-down. All the businesses Ellen used to know – including the wholesale bakery – had been forced to close.

Coping with change

But she didn't waste any time. She worked in a home for the deaf, and set about gaining a new set of skills, including IT. She even spent some time on the Canary Island Lanzarote.

Her years in Cuba had turned her into a fluent Spanish speaker, and the Job Office flew her out to the holiday island off the coast of Spain to work first as a cook, then as a hotel receptionist and eventually with a security company. But then came the global financial crisis, and Ellen was among its victims. She was made redundant. Now she's back in Dresden, spending her days in front of her laptop.

Today she's having mash potato and fish fingers for lunch. The day is already half over – much to her relief. She heads to the mailbox to see if she's been invited to any job interviews, but as usual, it's empty. Ellen has registered with several job agencies and recently went for an interview as a security guard. Dresden is home to numerous museums, and she wouldn't mind getting a job as a guard in one of them.

Not long ago she found an advert in the newspaper for a hotel in Tirol, which needed a receptionist. She applied for the position, but was immediately asked her age. In her broad regional accent she told them she was 54 and they politely told her they'd be in touch. She's still waiting.

Ellen herself feels that 54 is still young, and she won't give up hope.

“To me there's nothing more humiliating than living off state hand-outs,” she says, her eyes filling with tears. "I would do anything to get off benefits.”

Author: Anastassia Boutsko (jp)
Editor: Rina Goldenberg