Real Estate: History in Reverse; The Poles are the ones buying up German property.

Byline: Stefan Theil

It's our dream house," says Tomasz Pawlik, clicking through the slides on his laptop. In a few days, the 33-year-old restaurant owner in Szczecin, Poland, expects to sign the contract that will make him the owner of a handsome two-story country house, built in 1917 for a Lutheran parson. What's unusual about this homeowner's bliss is that the house is in a different country. He and his girlfriend, a painter, will soon commute to Szczecin from the German village of Wetzenow, a 25-kilometer hop across what used to be a tightly guarded border.

Before their countries joined the European Union, the Poles' and other Eastern Europeans' biggest fear was an invasion of rich Germans and other Westerners who would buy up land in the much poorer East. In Pawlik's corner of the Polish-German border, however, the invasion increasingly looks to be going the other way. There it's the German side that's poor and depressed, while Szczecin, a boomtown of 450,000, has seen incomes rise and prices explode, thanks to shipbuilding, trade and a rocketing national economy that grew 5.7 percent last year. As a result, newly prosperous Poles--their wallets fattened by more than a decade of economic growth--are snapping up German real estate.

On this strip of land along the Baltic, the stereotypical contrast between a wealthy West and a ramshackle East couldn't be more reversed. While Szczecin thrives, joblessness in Germany's poorest and least populated region, rural West Pomerania, runs as high as 35 percent. Communist-era manufacturing and collective farms have collapsed. Despite tens of millions of euros in subsidies for new roads and infrastructure, young people are leaving in droves. Looking for work in Dusseldorf or Dublin, they leave behind old people and empty homes.

For the Poles, that makes Germany a house hunter's heaven. Real-estate agent Magdalena Pysz, who just opened her office in Szczecin last November, says she has 600 clients looking to buy on the German side. She's found apartments for Szczecin ...