For East German Family, a Time of Hope, Fears : Unification: The Hoffmanns of Dresden face unemployment, higher prices, rising crime. Still, they see a bright future.

Hans Hoffmann peered anxiously down the unlit road, looking for the ambulance that his family had called 45 long minutes earlier.

The wait was not unexpected. For all the good things that German unity has brought and still promises to deliver, there are still plenty of moments like this--everyday struggles that somehow get lost amid the history-making.

“A baby could bleed to death by now,” Hans said, his voice tight and measured in the chilly blackness.

Across the way, inside a cramped basement apartment, his wife and daughters tried to soothe his 3-year-old grandchild, who had split her head open on a heavy piece of furniture.

The jagged wound across Paula’s brow looked deep, and blood soaked the towel pressed against it. Her 25-year-old mother, Ruth, was worried that the toddler might have fractured her skull.

The Hoffmanns already had ruled out rushing Paula to the emergency room in the family’s aging little East German car. Moving a child with a head injury would be too risky, they decided, especially over the cobblestones and gaping potholes of Dresden’s streets.

Finally, the ambulance lumbered around the corner and crawled up the block. Hans waved it down, and three attendants in starched white coats hurried into the basement.

A few minutes later, Paula was carried out, whimpering in her father’s arms. The wound would need closing, but Paula would be fine.

Such emergencies are met with relative cool in the Hoffmann family. Hans and his wife, Ingeborg, have raised nine children under often-difficult circumstances. Now, with their country of the last 40 years swallowed up, they have agreed to allow The Times to check periodically on how they are coping with what unification may bring.

These are the best of times, they feel, even though the future has never before been so uncertain.

“We always had the wish to be one Germany again,” said Ingeborg, 51. “We waited 40 years for it to happen.”

Hans nodded in agreement, vehemently insisting that he won’t miss East Germany for a minute, even though unification is about to throw him out of work. But despair still quickly worms its way into the core of optimism that people like the Hoffmanns maintain.

Already, 1.4 million people from the east are jobless, and another 370,000 are working only part-time. Experts say the numbers may quadruple before the economy evens out. Hundreds of businesses are expected to fail under the rigors of a free-market system.

The collective nursery where Hans Hoffmann tends decorative plants “is barely treading water now” and will probably close next month, he said. He doubts that any nurseries in Dresden will be able to compete with their more modern, efficient western cousins, so he must consider a new line of work altogether.

“I can collect about 500 marks ($320) a month in unemployment, but that won’t go far,” he said.

Prices already have jumped noticeably since summer, and with four children still at home, costs for staples such as milk and bread add up quickly.

Ingeborg has begun working as a temporary employee at the post office to help out, but the work is sporadic.

Hans has not started searching for a new job yet; he feels no sense of real urgency.

Despite the dire predictions in the daily papers, unemployment is still an alien concept to many; officially, it didn’t exist in East Germany under the Communists.

“I’ll find something,” Hans said, “ideally something that will pay well and provide a little fun.”

For now, the family is only buying “what’s absolutely essential,” he said, but they are hardly an isolated case.

“No one’s buying much of anything because there’s so much concern about what the economy is going to do,” he said.

“Soccer games used to be sold out here in Dresden, but now no one’s buying tickets,” he said. “Concerts have had to be cancelled, even though they still cost half what they do in the west.”

The Hoffmann children, eight girls and a boy ranging from 9 to 29, know that things are tight, but their parents don’t belabor the point.

“We don’t want to worry them,” said Ingeborg.

Still, the children clearly sense the problems that their parents stoically try to play down. When the family took a summer vacation with West German relatives, Kristina, the youngest Hoffmann, saw her first Barbie doll.

“She really wanted it, but in the end, it was Kristina herself who saw the price tag and decided it was too expensive,” her father said proudly.

And Monika, 17, has asked for textbooks for Christmas. She is studying foot therapy and knows the western books she now needs are something of a luxury.

“I just have another year to go, and I’m sure to get a good job,” she said.

She notices how quickly her small world has changed since East and West Germany began merging.

“Going to the movies costs twice as much as it used to,” she said, “and I don’t like walking home from the theater alone at night anymore. I used to feel safe, but now I’m nervous.

“There’s a lot more crime now,” she said. The home of a friend’s mother was burglarized. Monika has heard of banks being robbed and cars vandalized. There were reports of roving street gangs beating innocent passersby.

Her parents keep saying things will have to get better, that they can be no worse than they were under the old system. Monika says she believes them.

Most frustrating of all are the things that have remained the same, that don’t seem to have changed yet at all. Like the ambulance.

Monika’s animated young face went pale the night Ruth tore into the house to call the hospital.

Everyone has a horror story about emergency services in what was East Germany until last Wednesday--tales like the one about the 42-year-old Berliner who died of a heart attack because an ambulance took two hours to arrive.

Although Dresden is the third-largest city in this half of the newly united country, there are only 30 ambulances to serve 600,000 people in the city and neighboring villages. Only 10 of them, gifts from the west, are fully equipped. East Germany had a total of only around 2,500 ambulances for a population of 16 million.

One time, the Hoffmanns called an ambulance for Hans’ mother, who was slipping into a diabetic coma. Once it came, the family piled into the car and headed for the hospital.

“We got there a half-hour before Grandma,” recalled Hans. There were four other patients inside the ambulance.

Because a majority of East Germans had neither telephones nor cars, even summoning help can take precious time.

Paula was lucky. Ruth was able to rush across the street to use her parents’ phone.

The little drama turned out to have a surprise ending, Ingeborg Hoffmann reported later.

Once at the hospital, doctors were able to use a special bandage from the west to close Paula’s gash without stitches.

German unification means that a little girl can grow up without a scar on her face.

Ingeborg and Hans Hoffmann want to believe that the journey Germany is now undertaking will be like that, full of small miracles that can close the wounds and leave no scars. But sometimes, they know, they will still find themselves waiting in the dark, hoping help is on the way.