COLUMN ONE : ‘You Can Go Home Again’ : Some Germans who fled West speak bitterly of its isolation and materialism. The labor-short East is eager to woo them back.

He slumped in a plastic chair in the TV room, drinking yet another beer, smoking yet another cigarette. Nothing much to do, and nowhere to go. The locked gates and sour guards saw to that.

The man’s bleary eyes darted about, and his words poured forth in a staccato burst:

“I’m Andreas,” he announced. “Age 38. Unmarried. Born and raised in Glauchau, East Germany. I left in January, 1985.

“And now I’m back.”

Back to a drab, half-empty high-rise where loudspeakers in every room summon people by their first name and number to polite interviews where the same questions are asked over and over. Why did you leave? Where did you go? What did you do? Why are you returning?

Andreas is one of a nebulous number of East German expatriates who have decided to come home after fleeing to the West.

They are called rueckkehrer-- crossbacks or turnarounds--the ones who see East Germany’s newly open borders as an entrance rather than exit.

While thousands of East Germans stream out of the country, the rueckkehrer trickle back, hoping to reclaim a life they often spent years trying to escape.

For many, the nameless government compound in this sleepy village 30 minutes from Berlin is the first step in starting over.

“I never thought I would stay away for good,” said Andreas, who preferred not to give a last name.

“I was unhappy with the political situation, and I wanted to be able to travel,” he said. “I left because there was no sign anything would ever change. But now it has. So here I am.”

Unlike many of the new refugees now crowding West German resettlement camps, these East Germans do not speak excitedly of the freedom or bountiful consumer goods found on “the other side.”

Instead, they speak bitterly of isolation, materialism and disillusionment.

“Write this down!” demanded Mario Friebe, an intense, 29-year-old crossback who was arrested four times for political opposition in East Germany before legally emigrating six months ago.

“Capitalism is like an apple that is shiny on the outside but rotten on the inside,” Friebe cried. “Rotten!”

His excitement is lost in the spiritless halls at Zepernick, where the rueckkehrer-- most of them single men--seem more subdued than jubilant.

There are no welcoming committees throwing flowers or hugging strangers on this side of the border, and though officials try to make Zepernick at least bearable, the little touches such as a miniature golf course and outdoor Ping-Pong table are useless in winter.

“We’re trying to get them through here and resettled as quickly as possible, usually within a few days,” said Roland Stegbauer, an Interior Ministry official who runs the Zepernick camp.

“It’s important to let them know that, yes, they really are back, and that they belong,” he said.

“You can go home again,” Stegbauer asserted, “You just have to show that you want to.”

Faced with a catastrophic labor shortage because of the exodus of nearly 300,000 citizens, Communist authorities are taking unusual steps to lure back these people who once might have been viewed as virtual traitors.

The government has announced that every East German is welcome back, and that no one will be punished for having left.

Authorities opened emergency shelters at major border crossings for the rueckkehrer and East German TV even showed teddy bears waiting in some of the cribs set up for returning families.

Karl-Heinz Borgwadt, the new president of East Germany’s Red Cross, said preparations were being made for up to 10,000 returnees.

Special trains and buses to transport them would be available at the border, and people were given assurances that their old jobs and apartments--or comparable ones, at least--are waiting.

Party leaders urged that the crossbacks be treated with compassion and “solidarity” by East Germans who stayed behind.

The returnees are allowed to bring any of their belongings into the country duty-free, and were even offered small loans and a little grocery money.

But so far, there appear to be relatively few takers, possibly mere hundreds. In East Berlin, only 70 of the 12,300 workers who left have returned, city officials said.

Various government ministries and local officials insist that no one is keeping exact count of the crossbacks, even though they must report to authorities at some level to be assigned jobs and places to live.

“Ten thousand is nonsense,” said a Red Cross worker at what was supposed to be one of the busiest border crossings.

“We’ve only seen 27 in the past week.”

Many of the special shelters closed within a matter of days for lack of occupants.

In Magdeburg, where 2,000 beds were set up in barracks and auditoriums earlier this month, operations are now centered at the train station, where the Red Cross has an emergency clinic.

The dozen beds there remain freshly made, unused by any rueckkehrer.

“Most people are just going straight home,” a Red Cross spokesman said.

Whether they still have a home depends on how long they were gone and how tight housing is in their particular town. Apartments belong to the state in East Germany, where rent is heavily subsidized and people often wait years before getting an apartment.

“If they were only gone three or four weeks, you can virtually guarantee that their apartment and belongings are still there,” Stegbauer said.

Many of those who fled west were under age 30 and were still living with their parents while waiting for a place of their own.

Officials say those who hastily abandoned their homes without first selling furniture or household goods have been allowed since October to appoint a trustee to dispose of the belongings, which previously would have been seized by the state.

Stegbauer said some of the crossbacks begged not to return to their old jobs or hometowns “out of embarrassment.”

A few, he added, have been rejected by their former work collectives because co-workers were resentful of the exhausting overtime and extra tasks they took on trying to fill the void left by those who fled west.

“They feel like they were left in the lurch,” Stegbauer said. “It’s the exception, though, not the rule.”

Matthias Wolf is not sure what he will find coming home after 10 months in West Germany, where he legally emigrated with his parents after a four-year wait to join relatives already there.

The 21-year-old pipe player will live with his fiancee in her apartment in Potsdam, the Berlin suburb where he grew up “facing the (Berlin) wall every day.”

“If they had just given us the chance to travel before, I would have visited West Germany and probably decided to stay here,” Wolf said. “I would have known my place then.”

But fearful of never seeing his parents again and curious about the West he had “heard so much about,” Wolf left last January.

He spent several months in a dormitory with 19 other emigrants, then found his own apartment in Moenchengladbach and a job that paid what seemed to him an unbelievable sum--2,000 West German marks a month.

He traveled to Holland, then Luxembourg. He spent a weekend in London, a bit of time in Paris.

“But I still wasn’t satisfied,” he said. “My friends were mostly a tight little clique of other ex-East Germans. The West Germans treated us like foreigners. Nobody invites you for a beer after work, everybody just going their own way.

“And they think they already know everything about you--that you just came over for the material things.”

The capitalist work place was also a shock to Wolf, who angrily recalled being told by his company’s owner to rip out some pipes he had laid and redo the whole job.

“I’m the craftsman,” he protested. “I know best where they belong. In East Germany, you get more respect. It’s more equal in the workplace.”

Mario Friebe worked a couple of months as a security guard on the overnight shift in West Berlin, “but my nerves got so shot I had to get vitamin infusions every 10 days.”

He was working in a candy factory when he heard “how easy it was to come back. So on an impulse, I got in my car and crossed the border.

“The first thing I did was search out some of the demonstrations. I couldn’t hardly believe it. Things here have changed not 180 degrees, but 360 degrees.”

Friebe remembers feeling disappointment his very first day in the West, when he saw a beggar on the street.

“I always figured it was just propaganda, the bad things we read about the West in our papers,” he said, “but then I knew it was true.

“The outgrowth of capitalism is crime, drugs and a social structure that centers not on people but money. Every man thinking only of himself, and what he can get.”

Matthias Wolf is matter-of-fact about the harder days ahead.

“I know the living standard is now truly higher in West Germany,” he said, “but material things just aren’t that important.

“And just what good is the freedom to express your opinion when nobody is interested in hearing it?”

He expects to see fellow emigrants coming home soon, too.

“They’re just waiting to see what happens to me,” he said. “We’re just the tip of the iceberg. More will surely come.” He paused, thinking he heard his name and number over the loudspeaker. He hoped to leave Zepernick that night. He was anxious to begin an old life.