Eisenach (dpa/th) - After the jury decided in favor of Halle an der Saale as the location for the planned future center for German unity and European transformation, competitor Eisenach congratulated the city in Saxony-Anhalt. "But of course we are sad," said the coordinator of the Eisenach application, Steffen Schütz.
In Eisenach, Halle was given the go-ahead, said Schütz. The choice fell on a city "which, just like Eisenach or Frankfurt (Oder), has really been able to demonstrate a structural need". Despite the rejection, the coordinator can see a lot of positive things in the application process. In the past year and a half, work has been going on in the city at full speed. "We were creative and achieved things that seemed unthinkable in Eisenach." The city won "in every sense".
In the application, the west Thuringian city with 42,000 inhabitants emphasized above all the experiences with the far-reaching change as an industrial and working-class city. "Transformation should be explored where it can be experienced most strongly," it said. The future center was to be built in the middle of the city "close to the people and their problems" on the site of a former automobile factory.
In addition to Halle and Eisenach, Frankfurt (Oder), Jena and the duo Leipzig and Plauen were in the running. According to the city of Frankfurt (Oder), the Future Center is the federal government's largest construction project in the current decade. The new institution is intended to honor the East German experience of unification and make lessons from it usable. Social upheavals are to be examined from an artistic and scientific point of view.
