East Germans Look Wistfully Beyond the Wall : They Have Best Economy in Eastern Bloc, but Nothing Like Their Neighbors

That quarter of Germany claimed by the Soviets after World War II today boasts the best economy the East Bloc has to offer, but East Germans still look wistfully to the West.

They could brag about the cleaner shops run by kinder clerks than their ideological comrades in the Soviet Union can claim. They could compare the foods and clothing available here with the consumer’s sorry lot in Romania or Bulgaria.

But television, tourism and trade have drawn the comparative glances of East Germans to the West, and impressed upon them how much less they have achieved in 40 years of statehood than their West German brothers.

Nowhere is the contrast between capitalism and socialism, West and East, have and have not, so stark as in the divided city of Berlin.

The bright lights and buzzing commerce of the Western sector fade abruptly beyond the graffiti-splashed Berlin Wall that has stood as a symbol of restriction since its erection in 1961.

Changing Landscape

When the visitor emerges from the walled-off western sector through Checkpoint Charlie, the view changes to a gray landscape of cinder-block buildings and battered fences hiding the East German capital’s ubiquitous construction sites.

As the number of East Germans allowed to visit the West has grown over the years--a record 7 million last year--so has a creeping inferiority complex taken root among the nation’s 16 million citizens.

“This is a society of rising expectations,” observed a Western diplomat with long experience in Eastern Europe. “What was unheard of 20 years ago is available now, but still short, and that fuels a sense of frustration.”

“We know we have much less in material terms than our brothers in the Federal Republic,” commented a broadcast executive in her late 30s. “We see it every day on television, and in the gifts we get from relatives abroad.”

At the heart of East Germany’s stunted development is the hardship it endured in the first years of nationhood. While West Germany pulled itself from the smoldering ruins of the Nazi dictatorship with the aid of the Marshall Plan, the East German state was at first treated by Stalinist occupiers as a conquest that owed what little it had left to the victors.

Industries were rebuilt, but much of the early production was absorbed by Moscow to support its postwar recovery.

The modest advances achieved over the last two decades can be attributed in part to both official and private generosity of Germans in the West, who were able to effect more change in the other Germany after acknowledging its statehood in 1970.

The Bonn government pays $430 million a year to maintain its transport corridor to West Berlin, a sum one official of the West German Ministry for Inter-German Affairs said is considered a “face-saving contribution to improve the lives of our fellow Germans.”

Millions in Hard Currency

There is also millions in hard currency sent by West German citizens to East German relatives that can buy better-quality goods from special stores than are available for East German marks.

Western experts estimate that more than 8% of East Germany’s gross national product is provided by West Germany.

After four decades of division, hopes persevere among older Germans on both sides of the border that reunification is still possible. But West Germans concede that the prospects are slim as time heals the wound of separation and a new generation with no memory of one Germany becomes the majority in both states.

The future holds out little hope of improvement for East Germans. The socialist leadership of Erich Honecker has failed to embrace either the social or economic reforms championed by Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Honecker maintains that a wholesale revamping of the type Gorbachev espouses with his perestroika , or restructuring, is unnecessary in East Germany because of his nation’s relative success among the socialist states.

The 76-year-old Honecker, reported at times to be in ill health but showing no signs of an intent to bow out as head of the Socialist Unity Party, dismisses suggestions of a unified Germany as an unrealistic refusal to deal with the political facts.

He has also dashed hopes that East Germany in the age of Gorbachev and glasnost , or openness, might be willing to dismantle the Berlin Wall that Western leaders have labeled an anachronism of the Cold War.

Responding to appeals during a recent Vienna human rights conference that the Wall be torn down, Honecker declared that it would stand another 50 or 100 years, as long as the differences dividing East and West demand it.

The Wall was erected in 1961 to stop the flood of East Germans seeking refuge in the West.