The first room in a shared apartment of one of my best friends in Erfurt in 2015 cost 80 euros cold.

A friend recently said that renting just under seven euros per square meter in Magdeburg is still considered expensive.

Anecdotes about rental prices that make students in West Germany rub their eyes in amazement.

I've been able to collect loads of them over the years.

Studies on the rental market confirm the tendencies: Chemnitz is regularly voted Germany's cheapest student city.

In places two to ten, there are noticeably many other cities from Saxony, Thuringia, Saxony-Anhalt and Brandenburg.

Rostock in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania even made it into the rankings with a real curiosity - the Oststeestadt was the only one in Germany with falling rents.

Low rents are an important plus point, especially for students with little or no income.

I've also benefited: My first room in a shared apartment in Erfurt was 30 square meters and I paid 260 euros for it.

So is the east the unbeaten rental paradise?

Oh well...

When landlords pay the semester fee

A brief historical review: During the GDR era, my living situation in Erfurt would have been both unusual and expensive. At that time, only a few students lived in their own apartment or in a shared apartment - also because the state rarely wanted to allocate them apartments. Most of the students at that time lived in dormitories (around 70 percent) and paid prices from ten marks, even the bed linen was included. To do this, however, they also had to share a room for two or three people. The dormitory places were heavily subsidized, and most of the students also received a state scholarship and thus did not have to work during their studies. The opportunity to obtain a university degree was therefore much less dependent on the income of the parents than it is today.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, this kind of support was no longer available: however, housing was still affordable for the time being. Many East German cities lost a lot of residents very quickly, landlords had a hard time getting their (often unrenovated) old apartments to the people. Around ten years ago it should still have happened in Leipzig that landlords attracted potential tenants with a free bike or students paid the semester fee for the first year when they set up a new flat share. At around the same time, the city of Erfurt was developing into a secret stronghold of alternative forms of living - there are hardly any other places in Germany where there are so many residential projects in which people try to rethink how they live together.

Some of the foundations that were laid in the GDR are still left today.

A significantly higher proportion of students live in dormitories in eastern Germany than in western Germany.

Many of the GDR dormitories were taken over by the student unions after reunification.

At the same time, more students in West Germany live with their parents.

This is also due to the fact that the regional density of universities is higher there.