History /
Polish-German alliance. [489]
So what? Very few solvent people invest their money in run-down mansions in order to feel great playing noblemen. Being pseudo-junker is their marginal utility, the enterprise is probably financed through a local Polish bank and the hole thing benefits the local artisanry.
That's what might seem reasonable and yet reality was different. I lived most of my Polish life in Western Poland. Cities were maintained and some thrived, as much as the communist Poland's coffers allowed. Rural areas were different.
Most Poles who moved to Western Poland were forced to do so. Big numbers were Poles and Ukrainians expelled from Western Ukraine. They had been through a lot of crap in the 30 years prior and so their trust and hope for stable future was simply not there.
"Germans will come back and take this away, so why bother taking good care of all this" was the gist of people's approach. Perfectly good farms, buidlings and infrastructure went down and deteriorated, some beyond recognition.
In 1970's when relations between Poland and Bundesrepublik Deutschland allowed West Germans to visit Poland you could see a lot of Germans visiting their hometowns, villages and cities. Some actually did invest in what wasn't theirs anymore. Whether they did so hoping to come back one day or not is another story, but these were not isolated cases.
If Germans did invest in run down properties in 1970's when few even hoped for communism to fall in the next 50 to 100 years then I would be surprised if the scale of German investment in private properties in Poland did not increase. It may be silly, sentimental or economically suicidal but never underestimate the power of sentiment.
