With East Germany about to merge with West Germany, tens of thousands of West Germans stand poised to lay claim to houses, shops, factories and lands abandoned when they fled from the Communist takeover. Many have already come to look over their former properties, raising all sorts of anxieties among East German tenants accustomed to low and secure rents.
''The Prince is only one big example of what is happening all the time now,'' said Gerd Friedrich, the Mayor of Ballenstedt and a former Communist Party member. ''I have constant visits or letters from West Germans who want their property back.''
More precisely, Prince Eduard Julius Ernst August Erdmann Ascanier of Anhalt, a 48-year-old television host from Munich, told the people here that he would like to turn the castle into a training school for the unemployed and a luxury resort and turn the 35,000 acres he claims into model farms. All that, he said, would bring the long-suffering town prosperity, tourism and a new sewage system.
