EAST IS EAST, WEST IS WEST

By JAMES COLLINS

The history of Germany since World War II--partition and unification--is reminiscent of one of those studies of twins who have been brought up in completely different families. They may have inherited many of the same characteristics, but in this case they have grown up in environments that are as unlike each other as possible. When they are brought back together, how similar will they be? How well will they understand each other?

In her perceptive, engaging, but ultimately frustrating new book, The Politics of Memory: Looking for Germany in the New Germany (Random House; 293 pages; $27.50), Jane Kramer, who writes the "Letter from Europe" column for the New Yorker, addresses the question of how the former West Germans and the former East Germans are adjusting to each other. She finds wariness and disappointment; they are making an edgy acceptance of unity without much enthusiasm. "As far as 'mentality' goes," Kramer writes, paraphrasing the thoughts of one German, "the Wall is very high in Germany, and will still be high in ten or twenty years."

Kramer's approach is not systematic, and the subjects of her six chapters are very specific: a restaurant in a bohemian district of West Berlin, an East German poet who spied on his friends for the secret police, the struggle over what kind of Holocaust memorial--if any--should be built in Berlin. Perhaps the most poignant and telling of the stories is the one about a young man whom Kramer calls Peter Schmidt, a drifting East German who tried to escape when the Wall still existed, was caught and imprisoned but was eventually sold to the West (the East often traded political prisoners for hard currency). But he is ill-suited to the ambitious, aggressive life in the West. As Kramer writes, "Peter says that maybe the role of being East German, the pity of being East German, is that you are always at your best, and your clearest, standing at a wall, or a border, or a prison door, reflecting on the other side."

Peter suffers from a deep passivity, bred by East Germany's attempts to "produce a worker for the worker's state, someone not too smart, not too skeptical." When Peter first arrives in Hamburg in 1985, Kramer writes, "He had a little cassette player, tapes by Pink Floyd, Grace Slick, and the Grateful Dead, a filter coffeepot, and two hundred and fifty grams of Jacobs Fein und Mild Guatemala-blend coffee. He had everything he needed until someone came and told him what to do."

The book offers many such pointed moments. Kramer quotes a West German after the Wall has come down, saying, "What can I possibly say to an East Berlin scientist who, after years of trying, finally gets permission to travel, and buys an old piece of western equipment for his lab, and spends a year rebuilding it, and is proud of it--and then scientists from the West arrive and say, 'This East German science is ridiculous,' and his lab is closed." In her chapter about the opening of the Stasi files, Kramer focuses on a poet, Alexander Anderson, who is a devotee of French literary criticism. When informing on a fellow poet named Uwe Kolbe, he "supplied the Stasi with the bewildering news that Kolbe was 'relieving the noun of its burden ... with phonetic adjectival exaggerations.'"

As illuminating as individual passages may be, The Politics of Memory lacks overall coherence. In large part this is a result of its origins as separate pieces that Kramer wrote for the New Yorker between 1988 and 1995. She clearly hopes these disparate tales will reinforce one another, but the relationship between them is often not apparent. Her brief introduction doesn't help; it reads more like an ex post facto rationalization for the collection rather than a convincing account of its themes and conclusions.

Because of their diffuse construction, even the individual pieces frustrate the reader who is trying to figure out what Kramer really means. She follows the practice of many New Yorker writers, languidly laying out her reporting with only the gentlest nudges as to its significance. There is a constant hovering quality to her prose, as if she is unwilling to land in one spot and stake her flag there. This open-endedness can have merit, but here it also leads to slack writing and aggravating indirection. Trying to evoke a people's spirit requires subtlety, but some more explicitness would not have unduly bruised the delicate effects Kramer does achieve.

--By James Collins