East German Stefanie Klimke, an architectural draughtswoman, left her former communist homeland earlier this year when she discovered she could earn more than twice as much in western Germany.
Klimke, 22, rejected local job offers after completing her training in the town of Hoyerswerda near the border with Poland. She packed up and moved to Silberstadt near Stuttgart.
"With the wage they were offering in the east I would not have been able to afford a flat or a car," said Klimke, who was born in the town of Bautzen about 50 kilometres east of Dresden. In Silberstadt, her net monthly pay is €1,200 ($1,390) compared with the €500 she could have earned in Hoyerswerda.
Klimke's story illustrates a problem that analysts and academics say threatens the future of the five states that made up the former communist East Germany: brain drain.
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, more than 2.8 million people have left East Germany, about 17 per cent of the population. Many were young, energetic and educated.
"The creative heads are leaving in droves, the ones with the ability to start up companies and create wealth and employment," said Christiane Dienel, a professor of European social policy at the college of Magdeburg-Stendal in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt.
The trend has gathered pace since the mid-1990s even though Germany's federal government has pumped around €80 billion into the eastern regions each year since reunification to try to bring living standards up to western levels.
East German workers earn on average less than three-quarters as much their western counterparts. The unemployment rate of 17.8 per cent in the so-called "new states" is more than twice the west's 8.1 per cent.
Studies show that jobs are an important reason for the exodus from the east.
According to a survey conducted by the government of Saxony, almost 40 per cent of the people who have left the state have the equivalent of an A-level qualification or high-school diploma. Just 18 per cent of the population have those qualifications.
And more than 20 per cent of the migrants have a university degree, again more than twice as high a proportion as the population as a whole.
"The reality is that the money invested in education and training for young eastern Germans ends up benefiting the West," said Mr Dienel, who has been commissioned by the Saxony-Anhalt state government to study the problem and suggest solutions.
"The worst-case scenario would be if East Germany ends up like Italy's Mezzogiorno," she added, referring to the southern Italian regions where unemployment among the ageing population runs at more than 20 per cent.
The westward flight of young, educated eastern Germans is hurting companies in the region, executives say.
"I cannot find any young people - they have all left," said Werner Kempe, owner of Metallwaren Kempe, which makes high-grade steel and aluminium fittings in the town of Ebersbach in Saxony.
"Everyone around here is my age," 55-year-old Mr Kempe told Reuters. "The government must do something."
Federal Transport Minister Manfred Stolpe, himself from the east and responsible for the reconstruction of the region, says the problem is damaging the east's economy and tearing families apart.
"We have to create opportunities for young people so that they are not forced to leave their home town," he told a forum on youth issues in Berlin earlier this year.
Stolpe predicted that new opportunities would open up for eastern Germans when countries such as Poland and the Czech Republic join the European Union next year.