Disputed Homes and Land Testing Unity of Germans

The first time the West German stranger appeared on their doorstep, Thomas and Sabine Siede invited him in for coffee and cookies. It was a pleasant visit.

The visitor told the East German couple that their small stone house had been his childhood home. His parents built it in 1932. He remembered a Messerschmitt fighter crashing in the garden during the war. Later, his family fled to West Berlin.

The second time the visitor appeared, he told the Siedes that their doors needed refinishing; maybe a wall could be knocked out to enlarge the tiny living room.

The third time, he brought a can of paint and brushes. He told the Siedes to fix the place up, that he would probably be moving in this summer.

When Siede protested, the West German turned icy. He said: “I’ve already waited 40 years. I can wait two or three more.”

As the two Germanys move swiftly toward reunification, conflicts like this are cropping up with alarming frequency. Nervous East Germans, watching West German cars cruise slowly through their neighborhoods, find themselves waiting for what has come to be called simply “the visit.”

But the question of who owns East Germany goes much deeper, and the visits seem to reflect both the arrogance and fear that color the fragile relationship between two countries and two peoples struggling to become one.

The controversy touches on something they have always shared, a deeply embedded sense of heimat , or home. Yet it also underscores something they have never agreed on and suggests that the success of reunification cannot be measured in bank notes or ballots or borders.

Instead, it may come down to things like a stranger on the doorstep with a can of paint.

The Bonn government estimates that 1 million West Germans could lay claim to property the Communist regime seized when they left East Germany. Neither government can say with any certainty what belongs to whom, and the issue looms as possibly the most complicated and sensitive of all in the process of negotiating unification.

Some West Germans are drawn across the fading border by bittersweet memories. They just want to look, to reminisce and reconnect. Heimat .

But others come with tape measures, video cameras, time-yellowed deeds and a sometimes unsettling determination to take back what they lost so long ago.

“Of course I would like my property back,” Heinrich Wiehemeyer, a 56-year-old West German salesman who remembers with fondness his childhood in Rangsdorf, said in a recent interview. “My aunt owned the house, and I went to school there during the war.”

After fleeing west in 1945, the aunt spent the next 36 years writing to East German authorities to inquire about the three-bedroom cottage on a dirt lane in Rangsdorf. She died nine years ago without ever getting a reply and willed the house to Wiehemeyer and his sister.

“And now I want my property,” Wiehemeyer said.

The East Germans who believe they bought the house from the state for a pittance 17 years ago can stay and pay him a fair rent, he said, “but it is my property.”

Wiehemeyer, who lives in the West German city of Osnabrueck, compares his situation to that of Jews routed by the Nazis during World War II.

“The Nazis took away their homes and gave them to other Nazis,” Wiehemeyer said. “Most of the property seized in East Germany went to Communists. And nobody got restitution.”

After the war, first the Soviets and then the East German leaders began eliminating private property under the slogan “nobility’s land to peasant hands.”

In many instances, owners who were not forced to give up their land and homes had to rent them out at rates too low to cover even routine maintenance. Frequently,these people would end up abandoning their property. More often than not, the houses fell into disrepair, for under the socialist system there was always a shortage of material, capital and skilled labor.

In this quiet, woodsy town where the Siedes live, about five miles from the West Berlin border, a newly formed citizens’ support group estimates that up to 70% of the 1,800 single-family houses once belonged to people who fled to the West. Already, since the first of the year, Rangsdorf has had more than 100 visits or letters from West German claimants.

People tell of a neighbor who was reassured by a West German owner that he would not have to move out but would have to give up one of the two bedrooms every summer for the West German’s vacation.

“Reunification means we want to live together,” one villager said, “but not that together.”

The citizens’ group began contacting neighboring towns, and efforts to organize nationwide are moving quickly ahead. Members are seeking seats on town councils in elections scheduled for next month.

When the new Volkskammer, or Parliament, was convened for the first time last Thursday, protesters gathered outside to demand housing guarantees.

“German unity cannot allow us to be driven from our homes and gardens,” a sign carried by one of the protesters said.

Some people scoff at such concerns.

“It’s just Communist propaganda,” said Helmuth Sehrig, a West Berlin lawyer who estimates that his firm represents about 1,000 West Germans with some kind of property claim in the East. “The old party is trying to stir things up and create this needless angst for political reasons.”

East Germany’s socialist laws still provide airtight protection for tenants, Sehrig said, and no one is going to be forced into homelessness.

“Some idiots,” he went on, “are going over there like it’s the Wild West, saying, ‘This land’s mine, and I want you and your cattle to get off by sundown.’ But obviously, that’s ridiculous.”

He said he believes that in the end, a united Germany will pay out perhaps billions of marks in restitution to the old owners, without affecting current owners or tenants.

Reiner Oschmann, deputy editor of the Communist daily Neues Deutschland, said: “Nobody really knows. Everything is open, and that just heightens the tension. It’s really a time bomb ticking away.”

That’s of little comfort to Hartmut Klucke, a 46-year-old physicist who believes he bought the Wiehemeyer house from the state in 1973 for 12,000 marks, about $4,000 at the prevailing exchange rate. On the basis of photographs that “a friend in the neighborhood” sent him, Wiehemeyer speculates that the property is now worth at least 500,000 marks, about $312,000.

“They as much as stole it,” Wiehemeyer said.

After getting a series of letters from Wiehemeyer claiming the 2 1/2-bedroom house and accusing him of knowingly taking “hot property,” Klucke said he suffered a near-heart attack.

“He can’t sleep,” his wife, Ursula, said. “He has to take tablets to quiet his nerves.”

When Wiehemeyer announced that he would be dropping by to inspect the property, the Kluckes spent an anxious Saturday peering through the tall hedges ringing their yard. But Wiehemeyer did not appear.

“This is terrible,” Klucke said. “When we moved in, in ‘73, the house was in awful shape. We redid the roof, put in new wooden floors, five new windows and made electrical repairs.”

Klucke even built a small sauna in the basement. He said poured his savings and his free time into the house.

By Western standards, it is hardly a palace. The rooms where Klucke’s three children slept can barely hold a twin bed. There is a Pullman kitchen and a remodeled bathroom. As in most East German homes, there is no telephone.

But the personal touches assert that, to the Kluckes, it is home. The garden blooms with pansies and the stairwell is a private gallery of Klucke oil paintings.

“We had the best years here,” Ursula Klucke said, “our kids growing up, grandma living with us. . . . We even had pet rabbits. Oh, it wouldn’t kill me to move, but I worry about Hartmut. He practically put this place together stone by stone, with his own hands.”

Klucke insisted that he has no hatred for Wiehemeyer.

“Just fear,” he said. “I feel so helpless.”

When the Kluckes paid off their mortgage last year, they invited friends over for a party. Not long afterward the letters started coming.

Not all West Germans are eager to reclaim property in the East. Indeed, some fear that reunification and the undoing of the Communist “land reform” could saddle them with old mortgages--and demanding tenants.

Gerhard Fuchss, a retired lawyer who heads an association of West Germans with property claims in the East, finds that many people now want to waive their rights as a precaution.

“I had a place in Leipzig, but I don’t want it,” Fuchss said. “It’s old and rotted. I couldn’t do anything with it, it’s in such awful shape. In some cases, it’s better to waive all claims in case they decide to give back the houses with their unpaid mortgages and all these expensive repairs and renovations.”

Only a third of East German households are said to have indoor toilets. Homes are generally heated with brown coal, which is dirty as well as expensive. Scarcities can mean waiting four years for a bathtub or months for a sack of cement.

Thomas Siede is waiting too, waiting for another visit. He and his wife, both 38 and both teachers, have not told their two little girls what the West German stranger wanted. Their house is cramped, but they pay a typically low East German rent to the state--94 East marks, or less than $20 a month.

They worry that the severe housing shortage in East Germany and the country’s economic struggles as it moves into a free-market system will make it impossible for them to find a place they can afford if the West German comes back for good.

“Everybody is so worried,” Sabine Siede said. “Mrs. Schmidt down the street found out from a neighbor that someone with West German license tags drove up and started photographing her property.”

East Germans, the Siedes pointed out, usually move only once or twice in a lifetime, and then to a place assigned and heavily subsidized by a system that is now shattered.

“Mobility is foreign to us,” said Siede, who like many East Germans refers to West Germany as “the other side” in a way that makes it sound much farther away.

“This isn’t a political problem or a legal problem, really,” he said. “It’s a social one. We’ve always been the losers, and the other side has always been the winner. They had the money, and they had the property.

“But we don’t want to lose anymore.”