TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/070891/0708000.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 13.3 KB | 304 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 28

GERMANY

Unity's Shadows


One year after the jolt of economic merger, a somber nation
realizes that the east will be a burden for a long time to come

By JAMES O. JACKSON/BERLIN -- With reporting by Daniel Benjamin/
Bonn


    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."