COLUMN ONE : Germany: One Nation, Two Peoples? : Experiences since World War II have created distinct Eastern and Western mind-sets. Leaders worry about merging them.

With its carefully measured mix of sex, sports and politics, West Germany’s biggest newspaper, Bild Zeitung, knows exactly how to grab reader attention.

“East German Women Are Better in Bed!” it heralded in a half-page-deep front-page headline early in the unification process.

Over the next few days, readers were treated to a bizarre flurry of front-page pseudo-analysis about that questionable claim which seemed to achieve little other than stoke male imagination and boost Bild’s 4-million-plus daily circulation.

Yet, in its own way, the paper had underscored a deeper reality: Whatever the validity of its story, there is little doubt that East and West Germans are very different people who often know surprisingly little about each other and sometimes seem not to want to know.

As an awareness of the size of these differences begins to dawn, political leaders and social scientists from both sides of the disappearing political divide worry that merging the two German consciousnesses is likely to be among the most delicate, least understood aspects of unification.

The cry: “Wir sind ein Volk!”--We are one people!--that thundered from the streets of East German cities last fall and brought one of Europe’s most entrenched dictatorships to its knees may have been politically effective, but, in truth, it frequently rings hollow.

“The experience of recent weeks has shown how different we really are,” East German Prime Minister Lothar de Maiziere said during a break from intensive inter-German negotiations last week. “That’s why I push so hard during my travels for youth exchanges. It is the next generation, our children, who’ve got to” bridge the gap.

Anyone who has experienced both Germanys since the Berlin Wall opened last November would find it hard to dispute De Maiziere’s comment.

Much Separates Them

There has been intense mixing among East and West Germans in the almost 10 months since that event, but so much still separates them as they move toward unity that it is often hard to describe unification as a joint experience.

West Germans live in a healthy, environmentally clean, politically stable country whose industry has a 5% growth rate, and the prospects for continued prosperity look nothing but bright.

East Germans are saddled with one of the filthiest environments in the industrialized world and face rocketing unemployment and an economy that is declining at a rate of 7% a year. And a recent investigation disclosed that 68 of its 400 recently elected members of Parliament are believed to have been involved in secret police activities during the Communist era.

Opinion surveys conducted mainly by West German polling companies have highlighted some other differences.

West Germany’s respected Allensbach Research Institute, for example, found indications in a series of polls conducted early this year that East Germans place a far greater emphasis on traditional German values, such as punctuality, orderliness, good manners and modesty, than do their West German cousins.

On the other hand, West Germans gave higher ratings to such matters as personal grooming and having a good figure.

“East German attitudes are the same as we had in the 1950s and 1960s,” said Allensbach Executive Director Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann. “It is as if we were going back to the Germany of the Wirtschaftwunder “ -- West Germany’s postwar economic miracle.

Noelle-Neumann argued that these value differences stemmed in part from the late 1960s era of student rebellion, a phase that lasted only a few years in the United States but which has never really completely ended in West Germany.

“In West Germany, it was felt you could change society if you could educate the child to challenge its parents,” she said. “That is what has happened.”

But, even to the casual observer in a city like Berlin, where Germans East and West mix freely, there are hints of far deeper differences.

Universal access to the hard West German mark since July 1 may have signaled an end to the cheap shoes and drab clothes that once made it so easy to spot East Germans among their flashier-clad Western cousins, but other hints, including body language, remain, the legacy of 40 years of dictatorship.

As a rule, West German heads tend to be held higher, their faces are more open, their walk and manner generally more confident.

“There is a timidity, an inner barrier in so many East German faces that I don’t see in the West,” said Marlene Vlack, who worked for the East German film company, Defa, before fleeing to the West last year. “It’s like a snail withdrawn into its shell.”

The West German diplomat-author Guenter Gauss, who served as his country’s first permanent representative to East Berlin in the 1970s, coined the phrase “niche society” to describe an East Germany in which people spoke freely only with close friends in the quiet, well-protected niches of their lives.

By force of habit, people often buried their innermost thoughts.

Internal Emotion

The director of the Dresden State Theatre, Wolfgang Engel, who is about to begin a three-month guest directorship at the Burg Theatre in Vienna, remarked during a recent radio interview that Western actors managed to express internal emotion better and more freely than their East German counterparts.

The Germans themselves are quick to note the distinctions that separate them.

East of the Berlin Wall, locals speak of “the Wessies”--loud, arrogant, impatient, superficial and full of material values.

“For a Wessie, he’s not a bad type,” one young East German woman was overheard telling a friend when waiting for a subway train in East Berlin.

By contrast, West Germans frequently describe their Eastern brethren--”Ossies” or “Easties”--as unsophisticated, ill-motivated and, occasionally, just plain lazy.

A correspondent of the leading West German illustrated weekly Stern recalled an incident that occurred when he was talking with a group of striking East German coal miners near the small town of Bleicherode, close by the old inter-German frontier. A passing West German driver slowed his car, surveyed the miners, then screamed out a lowered window: “Why don’t you finally get to work, you lazy pigs!”

(Ironically, public opinion surveys show that East Germans enjoy their hours at work more than do West Germans.)

Nowhere are the differences between “Ossie” and “Wessie” more visible than on the streets and highways in and around Berlin, where the two mentalities--sometimes literally--crash together.

The arrival of more aggressive West German drivers, apparently incapable of adjusting their fast-paced habits to East Germany’s poor-quality roads and slower traffic, has propelled road accident statistics in East Germany to new heights during the seven months of 1990.

In announcing what he called “a tragic new record,” East German Police Director Rolf Lorenz noted that half of the 40,000 accidents had been caused either by excessive speed or failure to yield the right of way.

In one typical, particularly comical, scene witnessed recently at a West Berlin intersection, a West German driver gradually became so enraged at the hesitancy of the East German car ahead of him that he first shouted uncontrollably, then leaped out to accost the offending individual.

Only then did the East German car trundle off, leaving the Western driver alone in a cloud of exhaust fumes.

Other more overt, more worrisome differences are easier to spot.

For example, 40 years of one-party dictatorship has left East Germans often ill-prepared for the lively exchange of political views that has been a part of the West German public discourse for a similar period.

In the last two weeks, Cabinet ministers, including West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and De Maiziere, have been pelted with eggs and rotten fruit as they tried to address East German crowds, and an information stand erected in East Berlin by the right-wing Republican Party was attacked by East German street toughs.

“It will take years for any real political normalization in the sense of a democratic recovery to take place,” Bonn University historian Karl Dieter Bracher said.

Bracher and others worry about the lingering legacy of the East German Ministry for State Security--known as the Stasi--whose tentacles reached so deeply into society that an estimated two-thirds of the country’s population was touched by its actions, either as victim or as accomplice.

In an interview with The Times, former East German Foreign Minister Markus Meckel counted this legacy as the most difficult of all burdens East Germans collectively carry to unification.

“Whoever we are, whenever we apply for any job in the future, the question will always be there for the employer: ‘Was he or wasn’t he?’ ” Meckel, a Protestant pastor, said. “That will always separate us from West Germans.”

Bracher said: “In 10, 20 years, the Stasi files will still play a role, either in political mudslinging or in the threat of blackmail.”

Some worry also that simple ignorance of the differences that separate the two German people could bring the seeds of future social problems.

One-Way Interest

Although most East Germans have watched West German television for years and have used their newly won freedom to visit West Germany in recent months, the level of knowledge and interest is far lower in the other direction.

“Most West Germans know little or nothing about East Germany and seem to feel no need to know,” noted Monika Zimmermann, a West German journalist who recently was named editor of the East Berlin daily Neue Zeit. “Soon, it (East Germany) will disappear, and the chance to understand will go with it.”

A recent series about East Germany in the West German daily Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung ran under the title: “The Unknown Country--Insights Into the German Democratic Republic.”

West German President Richard von Weizsaecker recently warned a national television audience of the depth of the problem facing the united Germany.

“Not everything (dealing with unification) is answered with material questions,” he said. “Along with the economic and currency union, the social and political union, we’ve got to achieve a union of consciousnesses--to enter into a union of feelings--and that means we have to open ourselves up to each other. It is a process that demands time, one that just can’t simply follow legal rules.”

Despite all the differences, however, many believe that enough similarities remain among the Germans in terms of language, heritage and identity to eventually overcome the years of separation and forge a common Volk .

“National character is often underrated,” Noelle-Neumann said, “and the national character linking East and West Germans is so strong that it can overcome a lot.”