The historic city of Jena, best known for producing Carl Zeiss optical instruments in the early 20th century, is enjoying a revival after the upheavals of German unification.

Most of the east German city's plants and research institutes were decimated during World War II, and few believed Jena could ever recover, but it did-until the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.

The east's era of swollen employment came to an abrupt end when the economic shock of reunification impacted on its labour market shortly afterwards.

Vast numbers of workers in Jena and in neighbouring Leipzig, Dresden, and Chemnitz were axed as traditional communist markets in eastern Europe crumbled, and companies went bust.

There were fears Jena would suffer the fate of other eastern industrial centres where firms were snapped up by western competitors at low cost, then downsized or even shut down.

Revival

Not until Lothar Spaeth, a canny former premier of the western state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, arrived in Jena did an economic turnaround take place.

Jenoptik became the successor firm of Carl Zeiss and Spaeth its chief executive. He allowed former Carl Zeiss employees to use the firm's facilities to create their own companies, spawning a flood of new startups in the 1990s.

The hillside Beutenberg Campus was created in 1998 along with a string of research institutes and two science centres, one of them for biotechnology. Enterprises like Zeiss, Jenoptik, Schott Jenauer Glas and Jenapharm helped consolidate the region's ailing economy.

The introduction of new technologies added to Jena's high-tech company attractiveness. Dr Michael Mertin, Jenoptik's chairman, talks of the city's "unique cooperation between economy and science."

Chatting with a group of journalists recently, he said the company had restructured its business into five divisions covering optics, lasers, defence systems, traffic solutions and industrial metrology.

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