THERE IS NO FUTURE THERE (via Robert Schwartz):

Nation That Once Drew Guest Workers Now Sends Them (RICHARD BERNSTEIN, April 14, 2005, NY Times)

You would not tend to apply the term "guest worker" to Anna Hass, who is a 23-year-old waitress at the large mountaintop Panorama Restaurant in this Austrian ski resort, because for four decades, a guest worker - Gastarbeiter in German - meant a Turk or a Yugoslav who came to labor-short Germany in search of the sort of job Germans did not usually want to do.

But now, in a somewhat painful twist of fate, Germans, especially young people from the former East Germany like Ms. Hass, are traveling abroad in search of work. They become ethnic German Gastarbeiter in Austria or Switzerland or Iceland, embodying the lengthy economic stagnation in the country where Gastarbeiter always meant somebody else.

"It's very bad," Ms. Hass, who is trained to be a veterinarian's assistant, said of her home, a village in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, in northeast Germany. "There's no chance to find a job, except maybe one that's totally underpaid, like 600 euros a month," about $775.

The result, as an Austrian tabloid had it in big headlines last month, is, "The Germans Are Coming!"

The Hun, he always comes with pickelhauben on or hat in hand.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 14, 2005 7:31 PM