The capital city of Europe's biggest economy is looking to Ireland to help resolve its growing unemployment woes.
With unemployment in Berlin, whose population is 3.4 million, running at 16 per cent, the city's labour office is trying to fill 1,000 jobs in Ireland.
"Jobless in Berlin? How about a job in Ireland?", ran a headline in Berlin's popular BZ tabloid today above photographs of picturesque countryside and the river Liffey.
The move to get workers to shift to Ireland comes at a time when Germany has launched a Green Card scheme to encourage 10,000 skilled foreign workers to come to Germany to fill vacancies in the information technology sector.
BZ said the labour office was offering 5,000 marks (£2,000) to help German workers get started in Ireland, a country considered by Germans more of a holiday destination than a jobs oasis.
On its website, the labour office for Berlin and the surrounding state of Brandenburg warns that working hours are longer in Ireland and in most cases the pay is lower but said rent and other living costs were comparable with Germany.
"Experiences abroad are enriching, not just in a personal sense but also in job terms, they are an investment in the future and an important contribution to a more open society in Germany", the labour office said on the site.
Among the workers being sought are teachers, waiters, construction workers, doctors, dentists and physiotherapists, as well as call centre staff.
The labour office is organising hiring fairs locally in conjunction with FÁS.
German workers tend not to leave the country to work in big numbers, although there are huge domestic flows from the poorer former Communist east of the country to the more prosperous west.
Unemployment in Berlin is considerably higher than the national average of 9.4 per cent. In the early 1990s, during Berlin's post-German unification building boom, labourers from all over Europe including Ireland flocked to the city to work. But the boom ended in 1995.