Germany Unity's Shadows

By James O. Jackson/Berlin

Finally it has come together for the Germans. After years of waiting and praying, Germany is one nation again, a people united. The Berlin Wall, once the ugliest scar on a wounded country, has been knocked down, its pieces carted off to a huge depot for resale as art or to be crushed for use as roadway ballast. The border fences marking the Iron Curtain that for so long divided Europe have been dismantled.

All across the country, families have been reunited and people have rediscovered homes they thought they would never see again. In the former German Democratic Republic, the secret police have melted into the night. There are no more prying wiretaps. Numbing political regimentation has come to an end. Germans, all 80 million of them, are free to read, watch, hear and say what they please and travel wherever whim takes them. For the first time in more than a half-century, easterners can choose -- and criticize -- their leaders, and make their own economic decisions: quit a job, sell a house, start a business, buy a car.

Germans are turning their faces to the future, after a unification that came sooner and easier than they or anyone else could have imagined. Only a year ago, on July 1, 1990, monetary union made the Federal Republic and the Democratic Republic a single economic zone. Three months later, on Oct. 3 -- henceforth to be the national day -- the raising of the black, red and gold flag above the Reichstag in Berlin made Germany a single political entity. It should have ushered in a prolonged period of rejoicing, a time for rebuilding.

Yet there is little joy in Germany today. The mood is subdued, as if, at a time that should be reserved for quiet satisfaction, a shadow has fallen on the land. A few years down the road it will all work out, Germans assure one another, but most are aware that unification has proved -- and will continue to be -- a more difficult task than anyone expected amid last year's euphoria. There are times when it seems that Ossis and Wessis, as they sometimes contemptuously call each other, are growing further apart, not closer together.

There is as much tearing down, of old truths as well as old structures, as of building up. The industrial plant of the east turned out to be so outmoded and run-down that most of it is beyond salvation. The east has awakened from a 40-year socialist sleepwalk to the devastating realization that countless lives have been wasted on the communists' failed experiment. The west achieved its dream of unity and freedom for "our brothers and sisters" only to discover that those siblings will be an expensive burden for some time. Dependence breeds resentment on both sides of a relationship, and that has produced ugly stereotypes: Wessis as arrogant, bossy moneygrubbers; Ossis as lazy, whining freeloaders.

Such feelings did not exist, or were not visible, before unification, when all but the iron-minded leaders in the east accepted that the two German states were culturally one nation. "For 40 years we did not talk about differences, only about similarities," says Volker Ronge, a sociologist at the University of Wuppertal. "We were all Germans together, and we thought we would be able to understand each other perfectly. But now we realize that the influence of Western values here, and of Stalinism there, created differences that will last a long time."

In the east, Ronge says, competition among ideas and movements was suppressed and decisions came down from above. As a result, some people there are uneasy now with the rough-and-tumble of Western-style political debate, preferring consensus or passive acceptance of authority. Wessis are exasperated by such attitudes. They remember their own postwar economic miracle, which transformed a bombed-out war zone into an economic superpower, and wonder why the same isn't happening in the east.

Easterners labor under their own set of misconceptions and disappointments. They expected substantial help from their rich western cousins, and virtually instant elevation to a comparable standard of living. They discovered that wealth is not synonymous with generosity. Among the first west Germans they met were property owners with eviction notices or investors with dismissal notices. A western-run agency, the Treuhandanstalt, was installed to salvage the state-owned assets of the east; to Ossis the Treuhand looks more like an undertaker appointed to dispose of the country's paltry remains. By the beginning of this year, easterners were pouring into the streets by the hundreds of thousands to demonstrate against job losses and policies imposed by the government of Chancellor Helmut Kohl.

Most disappointed of all are the former dissidents who led the 1989 * rebellion against Erich Honecker's regime but who found themselves left out of post-unification politics. New Forum, the umbrella organization that served as a catalyst of protest, failed to transform itself into a political party; many of its former leaders now regret that. "It's not so much that the west made mistakes or failed to do anything," says Jens Reich, 52, a molecular biologist who was one of New Forum's most eloquent spokesmen. "We were the ones who did nothing. We failed to defend and preserve what we wanted to keep."

One major disappointment is the loss of control over the mass media. The entire eastern publishing industry has been taken over by such western giants as Burda and the Axel Springer group. One result is an outpouring of sensationalist and sometimes sleazy newspapers and magazines targeted specifically for the east. The western quality press is barely penetrating the new market. "They don't have anything to say to us," says Marion Fischer, an east Berlin translator.

No wonder that the image of the Wessi is a fat man with alligator-hide shoes and a Mercedes-Benz, a Goldgraber, best translated as carpetbagger. "They are unbelievably arrogant," says Stephan Engelberger, 24, an east Berlin hairdresser who recently opened his own salon. "They have plenty of money, but they come over here because everything is cheaper. They behave as if everything belongs to them, as if they know it all and we are stupid."

The criticism is partly self-fulfilling. "The westerners tell us, 'You're dumb. You can't do anything right,' " says Jorg Richter, a psychologist in east Berlin. "That makes people emotionally ill." The sense of psychic distress is so widespread that politicians often use the language of clinical psychology to discuss Germany's problems. Zukunftsangst is fear of the future. Wendekrankheit -- turnabout sickness -- describes the general malaise that has accompanied the sharp dislocations associated with unification.

Ossis certainly have good reason for distress. Of an eastern work force of 9 million, 840,000 are officially jobless and 2 million are being paid to do little or nothing on a government-subsidized system of "short-time work." When these job-protection agreements end, as many as 4 million easterners will lose even short-time work. That level would be catastrophic in any society, but is even more so in one with a deeply ingrained work ethic.

Hans-Joachim Maaz, in a newly published book titled Der Gefuhlsstau (The Emotional Bottleneck), asserts that the chief obstacle to normalization of the east is psychological, not political or economic. "All of these people were formed by repressive relationships almost from the moment they were born," says Maaz, head of the department of psychotherapy at Deaconess Hospital in Halle, a dingy industrial city near Leipzig. "The authority of the father was replaced by the authority of teachers and then by the authority of the state." The result is a society of spiraling violence. "The lid is off," says Maaz, "so now the repressed violence can escape. It will get worse because of new social problems -- a crisis of identity, of confidence, of authority and of security."

The violence is showing itself most ominously in scattered eruptions of neo- Nazism. Swastikas are turning up on the walls of Berlin and Cottbus and Leipzig, put there not by elderly lost-cause Nazis but by teenagers with crewcuts and black boots. The neo-Nazism is mostly an eastern manifestation, but it shows up in the west as well. In Bonn, the municipal symbol of a reformed and repentant Germany, a sidewalk last month blossomed with a childish scrawl: (swastika sign) IST GUT.

Hostility to foreigners is widespread in the east. Gangs have chased and beaten Vietnamese who were imported by the communist regime as "guest workers" but were the first to be fired last year when factories lost subsidies and began cutting oversize work forces. Berlin's police chief has warned blacks to avoid subways in the eastern part of the city, and foreign workers are seeking refuge in asylum camps in the western part of the country.

Such rebellions might also be called nascent anarchy. Authority in the east, ubiquitous until the revolution, has all but disappeared, and what is left is ineffectual. The scofflaw is pervasive. Drivers in newly purchased Mercedes and Audis routinely ignore speed limits even when overtaking the rare police vehicle. One reason for the lack of law enforcement is that eastern policemen are unfamiliar with the federal laws now in effect. The problem is compounded by a lack of manpower: thousands of police quit their jobs before unification or were dismissed because of party or Stasi connections.

One benefit of unification that should gladden even the gloomiest German heart is the reduction of superpower forces and an end to the crises and tensions of cold war. Yet there too unexpected problems have arisen. The withdrawal of the Soviet Union's 380,000 troops in the east, due to be completed in 1994, is turning out to be costly and messy. First there is the more than $15 billion that Bonn promised to pay Moscow for transportation, new housing and the purchase of vacated bases. But it could cost nearly that much again to clean up oil, munitions, radioactive wastes, chemicals and other pollutants left behind.

Slowly, the east is beginning to look much like the west. Colorful storefronts and advertisements have covered some of the east's shabbiness. VWs outnumber spluttering Trabants. Blackened buildings are disappearing behind scaffolding as workers scrape away a half-century of grime. The air is cleaner.

Germans are beginning to show a sense of qualified optimism -- a certainty that the country will prosper, tempered by an equal certainty that there will be difficult years to survive before it does. "1990 was a year of good news; 1991 is a year of bad news; but 1992 will be a year of good news again," says Gunter Albrecht, chief economist of the German Association of Chambers of Commerce and Industry. "In the autumn we will see the start of an upturn, and things will improve day by day." He cites harbingers of recovery: small businesses in the service sector to generate consumption, a rise in construction and a growth in banking to finance it.

Politicians are learning, to their dismay, just how much time and money will be needed. As little as a year ago, they talked of closing the gap between east and west in two or three years. By this spring they were saying four or five. Lutz Hoffmann, director of the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin, puts the recovery time at a decade: "We calculate that about $705 billion of investment will be needed to bring the east up to western standards. That cannot possibly be accomplished in anything less than 10 years."

But the initiatives are there. Eastern entrepreneurs, including former communist managers, are adapting with surprising speed and energy to the market system. Detlef Naujokat, 49, a former food and beverage manager for an East Berlin hotel, has launched a $30 million real estate development in the village of Sommerfeld, 19 miles north of Berlin, as full of promise -- and risks -- as any dreamed up in the west. "This is the first time in our lives that we have been able to do anything like this," he says. "We'll subdivide and install the infrastructure first, then sell the plots and help the buyers get financing to build houses on them." Naujokat's personal commitment to the project is $23,000, representing his life savings, and a five-acre plot of Sommerfeld farmland that had been part of his wife's inheritance. The rest of the money is coming from the Dresdner Bank and a credit line backed by the German Unity Fund.

"There's nothing wrong with this country," says Rudolph Sommerlatt, 64, who recovered control of his family's industrial-insulation business on the day economic union took effect. "Just give the middle class a chance. We have a lot to make up for after 40 years of socialism when we could not function. We don't have anything against good, healthy competition. We'll make it."

With reporting by Daniel Benjamin/Bonn