It's a bitter irony that the English word kindergarten comes directly from the German language. Because Germany these days is anything but.

New data suggests that the German birth rate -- the lowest in the European Union -- may be plummeting faster than was thought. According to a report in the conservative daily Die Welt this week, only 676,000 children were born in the last quarter of 2004 and the first three quarters of 2005 -- the drop, the paper calculates, of 30,000 births or 4 percent from 2004, is the steepest in 15 years. In other words, fewer Germans came into the world last year than any time since the birth of the post-war German republic.

As if that weren't bad enough, a new book released on Wednesday by the Berlin Institute for Population and Development takes a close look at what Germany's changing demographics mean for the country. A number of towns in Eastern Germany, the book -- entitled "The Demographic State of the Nation" -- concludes, may soon cease to exist altogether.

The consequences are troubling. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has calculated that, given the current demographic trend, the best economic growth Germany can hope for in 2025 is half a percent. Even worse, Michael Hüther, the director of the Institute for the German Economy in Cologne, says that there is little politicians can do to fix the problem. Efforts to deregulate the labor market, push through budget reforms and invest in education -- reforms undertaken partly with Germany's looming demographic problems in mind -- have come too late. "There's not much that can be corrected now," Hüther told Die Welt.

According to Hüther and other experts, the right time to combat the decline of the birth rate was several decades ago. Former German chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who held office during the years of Germany's post-war "economic miracle," was notoriously indifferent to demographic issues. "People always have children," he once famously remarked. In fact, the German birth rate began to fall during the 1970s, a time of economic crisis when production slowed, tax income fell, and unemployment rose. Of course, the development of oral contraceptives -- the "pill" -- also played an important role. But it alone cannot explain the declining birth rate. In East Germany, the number of births increased during some years despite the pill; in West Germany, it did not.

Recent German history suggests that the birth rate changes in response not just to economic trends, but also to specific political events. The rise in the East German birthrate throughout the 1970s is often linked to an increased optimism following Honecker's assumption of power there in 1971. The reunification of Germany had the opposite effect. By 1994, five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germany had the lowest birth rate ever measured in the world (0.77 children per woman); the number of births had plummeted to 79,000 from 220,000 in 1988.

Despite the seeming inability of political policies to boost the birth rate, German politicians are not giving up. German Family Minister Ursula von der Leyen -- a mother of seven herself -- said this week that Germans can no longer afford to treat children as a purely personal, rather than as an economic issue. "Germany has to become more parent-friendly," Von Der Leyen told the ddp news agency. "By international standards," she added, "we're an underdeveloped country."