E. Germans Facing Future With Exhilaration, Fear

It was an hour after official closing time for the town’s only bank, yet 14 weary souls waited quietly in the cheap fluorescent glare as the lone teller labored on.

In calmer times, everyone here would have long since been home, the bank’s manager, Martina Bengsch, admitted, and she would occasionally see her infant daughter before she went to sleep.

But for East Germany, these are not calm times.

In this gray industrial town 20 miles east of Berlin, as elsewhere in the country, the ritual of standing for hours in a seemingly endless line to open new accounts is part of a precarious balancing act of family finances in the run-up to Sunday’s scheduled union of the East and West German currency.

In the coming months, jobs will disappear, taxes will jump, pensions will rise, grocery bills and rents will rocket while salaries remain a giant question mark in a disorienting flurry of change.

Indeed, what economists regard as a first-of-its-kind experiment in what happens when a former Communist country gets one of the West’s premier currencies, and what politicians view as the first step to German unity, has become, above all, a powerful personal drama for the people of East Germany.

It is a moment when the lives of an entire nation are about to be turned upside down, when the only certainty is uncertainty.

For a people subjected over four decades to Eastern Europe’s most carefully programmed Stalinist society, it is an unsettling, yet perversely exhilarating experience. It is also a moment of truth for each of those who helped build what was arguably the most remarkable of all the revolutions to sweep through Eastern Europe last fall: Can they make it in a free, open world?

The answer is as crucial for Germany and for Europe as it is for Martina Bengsch and her customers.

“If the experiment succeeds . . . then it’s not just a victory for East Germany . . . but also an encouraging example for the other East European countries,” noted Hans Tietmeyer, a director of the West German Bundesbank and a key architect of the currency union.

If the East Germans, with massive assistance from West Germany and their own inherent industrial discipline, fail to make the transition from Communist to free market society, then the future for the rest of Eastern Europe looks bleak, diplomats and other analysts in both Germanys believe

The change will be painful.

From wages that are already less than half West German levels, East Germans will, by the start of next year, give up hefty bites of between 19% and 53% for the previously unknown Western practice of personal income tax. Social security and health payments will also rise.

There is talk of increasing wages and salaries to compensate, but no one knows how, when or by how much.

East Berlin garbage collectors this week threatened to strike over their demand for a 60% wage increase. Such a strike could trigger an avalanche of industrial unrest, said city government spokesman Klaus Hetzel.

Low rents and subsidized services that characterized the Communist command economies will also go, but few understand what will come in their place. Jacqueline Nun, a 28-year-old East Berlin office cleaner, for example, said she had been told the $38 monthly rent on her small public housing apartment would be frozen through the end of the year, but then be quadrupled before the end of next year.

Also, she has no idea what will become of the $156 state subsidy she gets as a single parent for her two children or if the child-care center to which she pays $2.50 a month for each child will be closed as uneconomic. Both are critical to her financial survival, but she has found little real information.

“There are rumors the child-care center will be closed, but nobody really knows anything,” she said, her eyes welling with tears of frustration. “How am I supposed to plan for a family under such conditions?”

Under the currency union, pensions will rise by an average of about 11%, but for pensioners as for everyone, the heavily subsidized 7-cent pound of flour, 10-cent pound of sugar and baby food for a dime a jar will also disappear. A loaf of rye bread that costs 33 cents in Dresden today will cost more than $2 Monday morning. As a consequence, such staples that can be frozen or stored have been swept from the shelves by eager buyers.

The family budget is only one of the many unknowns for which a disoriented East German bureaucracy has few answers.

For millions of East Germans raised in the belief that access to a job was a right, it has become a distinct possibility that a quarter of the work force may be out of work by year-end.

At East Berlin’s prestigious Humboldt University, history professor Steffi Gloess says the 60-member department may be cut in half.

Internal East German government studies indicate that between one-fifth and one-quarter of the country’s obsolete, over-manned industry may go under immediately in the face of Western competition.

“There’s no such thing as a secure job now,” said Deitmar Seelig, 32, who has already quit his old job as an engineer in a factory with an uncertain future. He is studying to get in on the ground floor of a growth industry in East Germany: tax consulting.

Others worry that their homes, confiscated by the Communists from former West German property owners decades ago and handed over to East Germans, may be taken away.

Bank manager Bengsch’s family home for the last 25 years is one of up to 1 million such cases in East Germany.

“Sure, these homes were seized illegally, but 25 years of upkeep, care and remodeling has to count for something,” she argued. “The lawyers and the courts will be booked up for the next 20 years.”

Yet despite such personal worries about homes, jobs and salaries, there is no visible panic. On the eve of the great experiment, a perceptible, yet tenuous optimism prevails.

In its own unspoken way, this collective leap into the unknown has somehow bound together the 16 million people of East Germany with a sense of common destiny that doesn’t exist in richer, more individualistic West Germany.

It has bred a solidarity that leads Bengsch to close but not lock the bank’s door at the normal closing time and then to let in anyone who knocks. The sickening fear expressed frequently among East Germans that--for them and their country--life could be very bad for a while, is held in check by the oft-repeated comment, “It can only get better for us, because it can’t get worse.”

To an outsider, this optimism occasionally seems unrealistic: Such is the case with a shopkeeper here whose upbeat mood did not reflect the fact that he faces immediate eviction because the premises have been bought by a West German and he has few prospects of relocating in a decent area.

But for those who have lived their entire lives as second-class Germans, Sunday’s currency union means much more than getting the deutschemark.

With it comes a freedom of choice, of travel and a new self-respect that is hard to understand for those who have never listened to East Germans dream of impossible journeys or seen East German couples refused tables at restaurants in their own country only to watch West Germans with hard currency be seated in their place.

“I’m happy for my daughter, that she can buy things, that she doesn’t have to be humiliated by our relatives from the West,” said a sales assistant at the East Berlinfurniture store Wohnkultur, who identified herself only as Heide. “The constant ‘Thank you very much’ for a piece of (Western) chocolate was humiliating. We were basically second-class human beings.”

Poor quality goods, endless shortages and waiting impose their own degradation that they see the deutschemark and the free market bringing to an end.

Those who had waited an hour in the rain just to get inside a local supermarket here expressed that hope. Although the store was far from full, no one was allowed in without a shopping cart and carts were in short supply.

“We have a hundred in the basement with broken wheels but where are we supposed to get new wheels?” asked the store’s assistant manager, Gabrielle Knobel, with a shrug.

And so, in hopes of leaving such dilemmas to a bygone age, some East Germans will celebrate Saturday night in their own way, taking advantage of a large party being advertised on posters in East Berlin.

“Dance in the D-mark,” the posters say. “The ostmark is valid until the end.”

BRIGHT FUTURE--For a 28-year-old mechanic, the outlook is good. A12