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- WORLD, Page 30Speeding over the Bumps
-
-
- In East Germany the customer may now be king, but problems of
- adjustment are formidable
-
- By JAMES O. JACKSON/BERLIN
-
-
- For all their Two-plus-Four talks and breakthrough
- agreements on the future of Germany, political leaders are
- still running behind events. More quickly than anyone could
- have imagined, East Germany is being absorbed in the Western
- market economy. From travel-agency offers in
- Frankfurt-on-the-Oder to used-car lots filled with Western
- automobiles in Plauen, the deutsche mark life has arrived. The
- changes are good and bad, sometimes even ugly, but East
- Germany, once Erich Honecker's drab land of barracks communism,
- will never be the same.
-
- The old frontier posts, abandoned, are being dismantled;
- police and customs officials have disappeared, and not even a
- speed bump slows traffic between the two Germanys. The Berlin
- Wall is all but gone, its absence a daily wonder. Most of the
- 108 streets blocked off in the city in 1961 have been reopened,
- all guards and controls removed. A drive along the old Wall
- trace is a journey in discovery: neighborhoods rejoined, old
- acquaintances renewed. Children frolic among the abandoned
- guard towers of the former death strip, the resident rabbits
- scampering for cover -- the only victims of unification.
- Traffic jams form at former crossing points, while new openings
- just blocks away go unused. Occasionally, a confused motorist
- stops, passport in hand, waiting for border guards to emerge
- from buildings that are locked and shuttered forever. Old
- habits die hard.
-
- "We are already unified," says Klaus Hartzel, spokesman for
- the East Berlin municipality. "And," he sighs, "we already have
- all the problems that go with it." They include stop-and-go
- traffic, a rising crime rate, high food prices, mass layoffs
- and an alarming influx of squatters.
-
- But unification also means new life and light, a cornucopia
- of opportunity, freedom and the little courtesies available
- wherever the customer is king. "They're so nice," chortled
- housewife Gerda Hubner as she walked out of a brand new Meyer
- food market on East Berlin's Leipziger Strasse. She carried a
- shopping bag with a few meager purchases -- milk, oranges,
- bread and cheese. She also carried a yellow rosebud. "They're
- giving these to all the ladies," she said. "They really want
- our business." The Meyer chain is one of hundreds of West German
- companies that have moved with lightning speed into a
- potentially lucrative market: East Germans hold the deutsche
- mark equivalent of some $70 billion in unspent savings as a
- result of economic union on July 1.
-
- The logistic marvel of supplying thousands of East German
- shops with Western products was brought off so smoothly and
- quietly that hardly anyone noticed. In the days before July 1,
- thousands of West German trucks rolled through the frontier
- posts, like so many military convoys, ferrying in goods most
- East Germans had only dreamed of. Used-car lots sprang up in
- small towns and along country roads hardly changed since the
- end of World War II -- time warp over and over again.
-
- But beneath the dash and glitter of the Western commercial
- invasion not all is well. East Germans, for one, are turning
- out to be hard sells. Despite rosebuds and smiling salesclerks,
- they pinch their pfennigs. They are overwhelmed by choices
- never available before. "Too much, too much," an old woman
- muttered after emerging from a suddenly well-stocked department
- store in Erfurt. The only luxury some are indulging in so far
- is a trip to the West, something denied most of them during 40
- years of communism. The internal travel business, by contrast,
- is suffering. Beaches along the Baltic seashore are empty
- because East Germans are vacationing abroad; West Germans are
- not attracted by the relatively spartan accommodations
- available.
-
- That does not mean West Germans are not visiting. According
- to polling estimates, at least 10 million of them are planning
- to go this summer -- nearly equal to the 16 million population
- of East Germany and maybe more than the place can bear. On the
- E51 autobahn near Leipzig, the daily traffic jam stretches a
- standstill nine miles with such regularity that police have
- mounted a permanent warning sign. In the center of Leipzig,
- legal parking places are unavailable, as are decent hotel
- rooms. Anywhere on the sparse East German autobahn -- much of
- its concrete laid in the Hitler era and barely improved since
-
- are plenty of accidents -- tiny plastic Trabants traveling at
- their full-bore 60 m.p.h. are no match for the thousands of
- Western cars and trucks thundering past at much higher speeds.
- Road deaths in the East rose 60% in the first six months of
- 1990, claiming 1,078 souls.
-
- "One of our big problems is law enforcement," says East
- Berlin's Hartzel. "With the old regime gone, people seem to
- feel they don't have to obey the laws anymore, not even the
- speed limits." Crime is surging: burglaries up 66%, muggings
- nearly 100% and fraud -- practiced on gullible East Germans --
- out of control. "The police were there to take care of
- aggression against the state, and now they don't interfere when
- people commit aggression against each other," says Hartzel.
-
- Part of the problem is a lack of laws. The communist regime
- never enacted legislation against certain kinds of social
- misconduct. For example, West German advertising trucks
- equipped with monstrous boom boxes are cruising East German
- towns blaring rock music interspersed with advertising blurbs
- for such attractions as a tractor pull, of all things -- a
- disturbance West Germans would never tolerate on their own
- streets. A policeman on Spandauer Strasse merely shrugged last
- week when an indignant citizen called his attention to a passing
- sound truck. "It's not illegal," the officer said. "Nowadays,
- all that is not prohibited is permitted."
-
- Other Western imports are equally unwelcome. Squatters,
- sensing a new land of rent-free opportunity, are pouring into
- East Berlin. "We have 75,000 vacant apartments here, mostly
- because they are run down and not really habitable," says
- Hartzel. "Now squatters are moving in, not only from West
- Berlin but from Amsterdam and all over Europe."
-
- The greatest resentment, however, comes from the West German
- takeover of a captive market. Western merchandisers have
- written exclusive supply contracts with East German managers
- that prohibit them from selling things made in the G.D.R. "It's
- a real scandal," says Hartzel. "The Western chains are trying
- to control the market and drive up the prices. So the food
- prices here, where the average salary is $600 a month, are
- higher than in West Berlin, where the average is $1,379. That
- just isn't right."
-
- In the end, the merchandisers themselves may have to pay for
- rapacity. "I am no economist, but it is obvious to me that if
- the West merely treats East Germany as a market to unload
- goods, there will come a collapse that will drive down the
- deutsche mark, and they will pay," says Ingrid Stahmer, West
- Berlin's deputy mayor in charge of housing and social services.
- "There has to be investment. We must put money in, not just
- take it out."
-
- One reason for Eastern docility in the face of aggressive
- Western sales forces is 40 years of communism. "It is hard to
- imagine what the central command system did to people," says
- Stahmer. "Too many of them just sit and wait for instructions.
- They lack initiative and judgment. It's a crash course, but
- they are learning fast."
-
- One notably fast learner is Hartmut Issel, 19, deputy
- manager of the retail outlet of East Berlin's Cityback Bakery.
- Formerly part of a huge government-owned combine, the bakery
- has become a private corporation but is near collapse because
- almost all its former customers are locked into exclusive deals
- with Western suppliers. At one point, production fell from
- 50,000 loaves of bread a day to fewer than 15,000. "But our
- bread is just as good, and it's cheaper, so we opened our own
- shop here in the factory," says newly minted free-marketeer
- Issel. Customers have been flocking in for bread that costs 30%
- less than in the West. Issel says the bakery is planning to
- open nine more outlets in the city. And he wants more. "We're
- going after contacts with small bakery counters in the West,"
- he says. "We have to compete now. If we don't, we lose our
- jobs."
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