By Martin Ahrends, a former East German writer now living in Hamburg. From the cultural weekly Freitag of Berlin.

The most disappointing thing about the west is that there is no spiritual alternative here, only an economic one--making a living, in the broadest sense of the word, but not making sense of one's life.

My first impression of western Germans were of gray-haired young people, of people with empty faces, of smugness and indifference. Get to know them, I told myself, but my first impressions were not disproved. The richer the material world, the poorer the human one. When one looks strangers in the eye, one sees shop windows.

Western Germans lack restraint, and self-doubt is utterly beyond them. They smile about the crazy Zonis (people from the former East German, or Soviet-Occupied Zone), about how they will have to learn to take their piece of the pie. Western Germans have more and are poorer. They must always give their all, but it is not always their best. Things do not just move faster here but also more violently (in a very civilized way).

Getting ahead, eating, being well groomed--the lesser things of life have been cultivated to the utmost and made into the higher things of life. Shopping, furnishing a home, travel--they are what is important. From the outside, western Germany looks as if it must have a great culture: The lesser things of life are so carefully attended to that people must have had their hands and heads free for the higher things. Wrong. Both their hands and their heads are consumed with taking care of the lower things, and the lower things have become the real mark of the culture.

Everything in the west is consumed--ideas, interests, even the consumers. Highly paid specialists have discovered everything touching on my existence. I no longer need to look; I need only consume. Wear out my old clothes, wear out my carpet. My life has a price tag on it, a certain value for those who want to sell my labor. This price tag takes all of the value out of life.

The customer is king? People in the west talk to me as if I were an object. I look away, but their techniques are designed for just such behavior. Advertisers seek to arouse every tiny trickle of interest before it is ready to be indulged. We are not supposed to "earn" our pleasures but "indulge" them, the more frequently the better.

Prosperity does not ask why or to what end. It has, in the best of cases, a bad conscience. Deprivation, on the other hand, demands explanations. As a result, people in the east have (or had) more connection to the idea of Germanness. The ideas of the postwar world and a better Germany had to make sense to them. Learning from history and building a better Germany--socialist or not--was a project worth some sacrifice.

In the east, I always had the sense that something important could happen. That it was worthwhile to be open. In the west I have closed my eyes, because I have become sure that everything that could come already has. The west has no positive idea of itself, no perspective. In the west, one lives as if in the belly of a beast blindly stumbling through an empty landscape. One simply lives. It "costs" so much to live, and one's life is "worth" so much--but only in money.

In the east, life cost, too, but it had value as well. Money was a peripheral issue. It was also worthwhile to "keep clean." Life had value when you rejected professional advancement and various sorts of privileges offered by the state that would have cost too much. It was in this moral battle that the east made its achievements, although they were scarcely as visible as the economic achievements in West Germany.

In East Germany, one had to decide whether one wanted to stay in one's profession to improve things--or at least to prevent the worst--or stay clean and be shut off from power and influence. In the west, one did not generally confront these choices, for better or for worse. Western society asks far less of people's consciences than the east did. For if we were working hard at something in the east, it was not at making cars or highways but at creating a culture of conscience. What the westerners are now reading in their newspapers--the lack of conscience of the East German secret police and of many of those who were in power--is proof of how clear the dilemma was for each of us. We could go along and profit from the system, with the eventual consequence of being despised by the people and not being able to sleep nights. Or we could drop out.

By the 1980s, the role of the dropouts had become paradoxical: They had had many years to come together as a social force under the protection of the church, and the force that they created was one that the secret police could not master. The dropouts had nothing to win or lose, because their minimal existence could not be threatened. Anyone who could come up with the ridiculously low rents would not lose his housing; the cheap food also was not a problem. So people did not need to exert their every effort--as they do in the west--just to guarantee their existence (the fact that this existence was on a different level is well known).

Those who "thought differently" led lives that were reduced to the basic necessities, and they therefore looked for chances to expand in other spheres. Relationships with their children were important (and children were comparatively "inexpensive" in East Germany). Conversation, friends, playing music, creating theater, learning crafts, initiatives of every sort to fill lives--these were the things that people in the waiting room called east Germany had plenty of time for, and they cost nothing. People invented their own lives and, perhaps, felt within these lives a political responsibility for the entire nation, a responsibility that the gray men who were in power were less and less capable of assuming.

Under this pressure and amid this maneuvering room, people learned virtues that were surely worth preserving: modesty, courage, solidarity, active responsibility for the whole, imagination and serenity in political disputes, patience, tenacity. In the west, these virtues seem not to count. Yesterday's heroic East Germans are today's unemployed and hard-to-retrain employees. They are living in poor housing that they may well lose. They were the vanguard but now find themselves on the bottom rung of a world that they hoped they had left far behind.