The reconstitution of a uniform German land register and property cadastre is a part of the process of reorganisation of the old giant Soviet empire. An economic imperative for this reorganisation is the introduction of private ownership and real estate, an absolute impossibility under communist rule. For 70 years the term "ownership" was depicted in horrible colours and is thus still connected with this awful picture in most minds. It is true that a great deal has already been done but prejudices instilled over decades will still have to be confronted in the future. The organisational criteria in the real estate sector, including the representation of maps, was uniform throughout the entire Soviet empire. Much was representative and defined by inflexible bureaucratic regulations. There were several cadastres and therefore a great number of surveyors working in this sector. It is not easy for these people to adjust their working practices to new criteria, that is to learn new methods, when until now they had felt themselves to be at the forefront of development in the world and to have delivered "development aid" to many countries.
In the meantime, many former Eastern Block countries have reorientated themselves and even Russia itself has now introduced the concept of private real estate. In this respect it should be noted that the privatisation of the giant combines is effected by the people in these combines leaving, obtaining a licence to practice as a surveyor and making cadastre measurements under private contracts. This development can be clearly seen in Hungary as well as the Czech Republic, Poland and Russia. The following presentation shows that the struggle between socialist ideas and market economy requirements are still not over and that the West would be well advised to continue to support market forces in a suitable manner. From this point of view, the developments taking place during thc reunification are interesting and are the subject of the following presentation.
To a western observer of the situation in the East it seems astonishing that the land register and cadastre, although a single entity, had been preserved and also had a sort of relevance. This was true for the entire Eastern Block, where the rudiments of local tax collection and the changeover to the property cadastres at the turn of the century have left their traces and been preserved in the form of previously learned methods, although not for the registration of property ownership but for land use.
The reason for this surprising fact lies with the personnel, who were organised in a hierarehical structure. The cadastre was not, like the land register, for the protection
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of ownership, the ugly face of which was to be done away with. Cadastre people were not entrepreneurs even before 1945, but were concerned not only with the transfer of real estate but also with taxation, dispossession, settlements, social housing, town and country planning with the methods adapted to suit each of these services, and tried - naturally - to carve out a career within their fields.
Nothing changed in 1945 except that the use of land came under new ideological influences. Surveyors applied their methods or adapted them to suit the objectives of the new political scene. The land reform, for example, produced a lot of work. However, the insecurity about the position of their fields of work in the political landscape caused the professional world in a totalitarian state to stay surprisingly inhomogeneous when observed from outside.
Prescribed procedures and actual implementation were often worlds apart, probably because the "party line" was not described in minute detail without giving rise to inconsistencies. These were however to be avoided. This led to achievements being made which were considered exemplary in the Eastern Block countries such as in cartography, the treatment of social town planning or COLIDO which came so near to being the accurate, incorruptible funetioning of socialist progress. In contrast to other Eastern block countries, the old Department III of the land register remained in operation, finance however took a different path without this security, except where it made it possible to demonstrate excessive borrowing against property by the owners and gave a quasi-legal justification to its acquisition by the state.
Nevertheless, in the last decade the idea of property was on the verge of extinction. The information required to reconstruct the old boundaries was being lost despite the regulations. When in doubt, the fence posts were accepted as boundary markers - it didn't matter about accuracy. The land parcel records demonstrate this clearly. Divisions according to the map without reference to local conditions were the norm. Despite this there was work, the combination "GuK" (land register and cadastre) made sure that its operatives had the right to make cadastre measurements.
However, the idea of house and land being two different legal entities became more and more accepted in the minds of the population. This led to an inereasing diserepancy between the land register, the cadastre and actual conditions. For this reason only a few house owners who had purehased their homes as "socialist property" had felt the need to have themselves entered in the land register (because it cost money). Only when the change under Modrow became apparent was there an enormous wave of survey contracts at the property registration offices, which were intended to define 500 m2 land parcels in order to be able to have a speedy entry made in the land register to secure the legal position. The representatives of the society had long since done this in secrecy.
Private enterprise in surveying had not existed since 1972. The companies were organised into combines. There was, however, a rump of self-employed surveyors
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who could eke out a living under strict controls. Only a few survived until the reunification. The occupation of publicly appointed surveyor died out.
If one looks at the results of the cadastre in the new federal states, one is actually looking back at the cadastre situation in the thirties in respect of the presentation, methods of working, incompleteness and minimality. This is also true in the regions where no changes have been made in the last forty years. In effect a new reality has been createdone only has to consider the (unimaginative) new towns, (Trabantenst%dte).
Nevertheless, this quickly changing situation made it possible to document the historical process which had taken place in the old territories over the last four decades.
Without doubt, the drive of the federal states for autonomy has permanently influenced the development of surveying and led to variations which were not case driven but politically and "culturally". State sovereignty was promoted.
In addition there was a broadening of public law, the tentacles of which embraced surveying and placed a questionable emphasis on boundary demarkation as a principle at the centre of public surveying today.
The shaping of the rights of ownership has also taken a few steps backwards in surveying in the old Federal Republic in parallel with the discussions over four decades about property owners as a bamer to town planning. However, the bastions of ownership in federal law have not been tampered with although the reading of Article 14 of the constitution is now different to what it was in the 60's. The development of the partitioning agreements according to federal and state building laws can be seen in the light of the opinion of the Federal Constitutional Court, which disapproves of the subdivision of land parcels and thus bases the business of land parcel allocation on the possible building use.
In addition the settlement of boundaries between neighbours has almost entirely been replaced by demarcation protocols. In some federal states (e.g. Rheinland-Pfalz) the landowner has lost the right to define the economic use of his land, thus restricting its usefulness as security against a loan and representing a sort of bureaucratic "dispossession".
It would therefore be wrong to base the dual development in Germany on the concept of "securement of property". On the contrary, there were clear objectives for the property cadastre and state surveys in the West under survey law and clear advantages for the property owner, which were also economic advantages in the procurement of loans, purehase of land parcels and legal rights over neighbours, the latter mostly concerning the right to build.
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Without a doubt, private enterprise in the field of property cadastre and state surveys has grown since the war. It developed wherever there was an increase in demand, in particular in North Rhine Westphalia. The communalised cadastre offices were opened to deal with greater requirements in the community. For this reason, there was also more room for growth in the private sector of surveying. In those states with public cadastre administrations other conditions prevailed: The private sector was mostly concerned with the supervision of building works from the formation of land parcels to certification for securing credit. Public contracts for new surveys, regrouping, lower order networks and rationalisation of estate and the final survey of longitudinal plants changed the cadastre landscape. There is a hardly a spot which has remained untouched. Without exaggeration one can say that the ground has becn cleared and such a cadastre is able to give a legal framework to the planning, building and administration in the country. That there are differences in degree should however be mentioned.
One important difference in the preparation of the cadastre was the preseribed separation of the responsibility for cadastre measurement and administration laid down under western laws. It had a greatly beneficial effect on the quality of the cadastre. The purpose of the private professional was and is the securement of the rights of property owners within the multitude of regulations governing real estate.
Where there is work which pays well, there will be people willing to do it. Thus, for decades, there were differences of opinion about building surveys, about promotion within the administration and about the recognition of publicly appointed surveyors, whose professional scope was usually curtailed by those whose business it is to pass the laws.
It was under these conditions that the event of the century for Germany - the reunification - took place. Both in the East and in the West one was confronted for the first time with the "other side". Professional meetings were initially concentrated in the new territories, however this soon changed. A new orientation phase began in the East. The property service sector smelt dawn, in "GuK" the bosses disliked by the personnel were fired. The "GmbH" (private limited company) grew in attractiveness and the organisation was very quickly changed into such state owned enterprises, some of them still being in existence today. These companies were swimming in money since they had once been part of one of the most successful combines. Many of their personnel orientated themselves on the private professional in the West, who now - attracted by the profusion of work - appeared everywhere, and made the transition to selfemployment.
The old state borders, and the old property boundaries began to be transparent and the inhabitants felt themselves to be in a new and strange reality. The old states
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helped with personnel from their administrations who, working day and night, tried to deal with the flow of applicants hoping to regain property once lost and the restructuring. Hardly surprising if something from one's own state was reflected in this when one had no other comparison. There were many discussions between the delegates from the old states as to where the various sponsoring states should send their help. There was also much competition for personnel which is continuing even today. Administrations and politicians accused the private professionals of poaching the best people, and for the first time in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany we had a situation where, for a short time, people were not interested in the safe haven of thc civil service. The trench warfare between the Bavarian "Guelfs" and the Association of German Surveyors' "Ghibellins" was sparked off in Sachsen and Th[cedilla]ringen and reached its height when almost 1000 people demonstrated in Erfurt on 7th November 1991 and the promise was exacted that the profession of publicly appointed surveyor would be recognised in Th[cedilla]ringen. The competition for personnel took many forms, even in technical associations, and the surveying sector was no exception.
Laws on surveying, the professional regulations, were drawn up - one after the other. Administrations employing between 1200 and 1900 people grew up in each state and those wishing to practise privately, between 30 and 110 per state, are waiting for the examinations, whose form and content vary from state to state, to be held. Cadastre operations could be seen to have begun. One could have expected that the discussions on the property cadastre would settlÇ down and a peaceful phase of work would begin.
Not so, difficulties presented themselves from all sides - not only from those directly involved - and they still continue today. While the setting up phase of the statc organisations is largely completed, the communalisation of the property cadastre in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is unsettling the personnel. How large and with what responsibilities should the surveyors departments in the cities and counties bc? What should be the contribution of the newly created, self-confident private sector?
Will the new survey law in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern deprive the publicly appointed surveyors of their work at a stroke, when up till now it was their best field of operations? Approximately 350 to 400 publicly appointed surveyors are working in the Sachsen/Mecklenburg-Vorpommern area and have been, as Sachsen's Minister for Home Affairs said in a rare moment of praise at the Association of German Survcyors Congress in Dresden "in their importance, of immeasurable help in thc reconstruction".
The majority have become supraregional and for the first time are in a position to compare the state regulations pertaining to the cadastre. They have tasks unlike any they have ever had before. Land classification was totally successful. The result is apparent to any traveller and demonstrates the capabilities of the medium sized businesses with whom the western offices preferred to deal. The phase in which the
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commercial areas were set up has now passed its zenith, in the housing market the hour of (missing) demand in the coming year has struck. Travelling costs are beginning to make themselves felt, the recession is in progress, a painful process, and will leave its scars. For many the process is too slow; in administrations and private enterprises they want to be left in peace and numerous methods for hampering progress have been invented in order to make their lives difficult, beginning with "advice" on the positioning of location points in the cadastre office through to artificially induced errors in copying.
The administrative regulations are more and more concentrated on delimiting legal boundaries - negating agreements between neighbours by banning these to previous normally unminuted "hearings". Subsequently the recorder reports in writing on the boundary delimitation and collects waivers of the right to appeal from the owners or their representatives. This stilted legal structure has nothing to do with the concept of justice on the part of those affected. It is a bent process, the construction of which can only be understood from the viewpoint of "autonomy". The solution is even more strange, in that the administrative instrument is only issued by the cadastre office after transfer. The special processes contained in the law on acceleration of registration methods is in the same class: its aim is to determine land parcels without a survey. This means all obstacles resulting from state legislation in this area are circumvented. The line on the aerial photograph is now to define the property boundary. One can assume that the authors have never been involved in a dispute over property boundaries with a neighbour otherwise a signed declaration from the parties involved about the situation on the ground would have been obtained as a supplement to the aerial photograph. However, this law can also only be understood from the point of view of "squeezing between responsibilities". In the meantime it has been "gathered in" by the state governments.
Another brilliant mistake because it is more costly, is seen in the compulsive drive towards a coordinate cadastre. All coordinate cadastres from Austria to Hamburg have failed up to now in the sense that on transfer of legally enforceable coordinates locally it does exactly that which it is intended to negate, it takes account of local conditions. The difference between the identification of a point and a coordinate is indisputable and can only be removed by linear identification measurements.
In addition, the polar identification of points is more costly than the linear and the double inercase in charges made by the Lower Saxony red-green state government of 1993 only goes to show that, in this sector, a government can operate with impunity. The operator agrees to any idiocy, so long as the processes can be measured and he can carry out his customer's wishes.
All ministers subscribe to the view that privatisation is necessary in surveying. Minister President Scharping recently alleged that surveying in North Rhine Westphalia is completely privatised. Minister Eggert is of the opinion that Saxony's state surveyors are only required to make ongoing surveys for training and control
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information. At the same time, a method has been invented in Saxony and even more so in Sachsen-Anhalt, in which every request for documents can be under state control; in Sachsen-Anhalt a request by a publicly appointed surveyor is initially refused and only approved after consideration of an urgent request to the state president.
These measures effect the centralisation of application procedures, the decision as to whether a task can be undertaken is made centrally. This is not privatisation but exactly the opposite. The intention is to regulate the market and exelude private operators from other states. At the same time the medium sized businesses are clamouring for faster methods for obtaining loans secured against land because the banks will only accept this type of security. Periods of two or more years for the delimitation of land parcels are unacceptable. They are lobbying the Federal Govemment. The state governments, however, are going their own way, this being apparent in Sachsen-Anhalt.
This clearly shows that cadastre development in Germany, especially in the new states, has failed in its task.
German cadastre history is moving on, if and when it has to take account of European regulations is not yet known, but it is conceivable. German history has clearly shown that this state instrument can be used for and against property owners, that it can be changed into its opposite. One things is sure, the private operator in cadastre matters can only survive when the citizen uses his interests and financial possibilities to determine the way things go.
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