Eastern Germans Struggle Amid New Freedom : Europe: Clash of old and new shakes up schools and jobs. ‘Everything is confused,’ says Hoffman.

Even against the bleak, wintry tableau, the fresh hyacinth blooming in the upstairs window at Rissweg 53 seems unremarkable, for this is a season of irony in Dresden.

With German unification shaking the city awake from its 40-year socialist slumber, the contrasts between East and West, old and new, often dissolve in the bustle of day-to-day life.

The old secret police fortress now houses the Red Cross and social welfare offices. On the Elbe River, one of the toniest restaurants in town serves fine wines from France--and mushy peas from Communist-era cans.

On pedestrian malls, boys race by on their fancy Christmas skateboards, then crash into each other because they have learned no better way to stop.

And in the old house on Rissweg, Hans Hoffmann counts himself among Dresden’s small ironies.

Hans just turned 55 and now finds himself forced to learn a new trade. The state-run commercial nursery where he tended plants for over 30 years proved too inefficient to survive the free market, and Hans lost the job he thought he would have for life.

Between December, 1990, and January alone, the number of jobless in eastern Germany jumped 18%, to 757,200, or 8.6% of the work force. Another 1.85 million are working only part-time.

Hoffmann is now a locksmith, but he worries that this, too, may not last. His young employer has pinned his hopes for the small business on a contract with a west German firm that sells garage-door openers.

There aren’t really that many garages in east Germany, and Hans doubts that the people who do have them will want to spend $1,000 in these uncertain times to open them.

“Everything is confused,” he said, “all upside-down.”

“I would have preferred working for the railroad,” Hans said, “but they’re laying off people, too, and I’m too old to get a job there, anyway.”

There are other changes, as well.

The owners of the empty lot where Hans and a friend kept a bountiful garden have reclaimed the land in hopes of selling it.

The Hoffmanns will especially feel the pinch next winter when they can no longer count on the tomatoes and beans and pickles they usually put up each summer.

For the Hoffmann children, the western shift has meant better toys and less housework--their mother got her first automatic dishwasher for Christmas.

The youngest of the nine offspring are busy trying to cope with new teachers and new lessons as their schools become westernized.

“I just found out Ludwig XIV wasn’t all bad, like we heard before,” volunteered 13-year-old Volker, the family’s only son. “We just read how he built homes for widows and everything.”

Sixteen-year-old Sabine expresses disdain for some of her classmates now when they plunge too eagerly into their “new” culture.

“All of the sudden, they talk about clothes and the latest hot actor,” she complained.

When the children agree that western arithmetic is less demanding than East German exercises were, their father enjoys a quick jab at the old Communist bureaucracy.

“They taught math better so they could learn to cook the books,” he joked.

Missing now from the cozy banter is 19-year-old Anita, who quit her job in a neighborhood bakery and moved to Berlin, where she is learning to bake organic breads and struggling to find affordable housing. The cramped basement studio she left behind in Dresden cost only $15 a month.

On the cobblestone streets around Rissweg, familiar local landmarks are disappearing overnight, casualties of capitalism.

“A lot of things are just kaput ,” said Hans’ wife, Ingeborg. “The candy shop on the corner closed. So did the shoe store.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty. It’s especially hard for the old people; they just don’t understand.”

Their world is changing so much, so fast, that sometimes the Hoffmanns themselves feel like the boys on skateboards, both thrilled and terrified as they speed along without brakes.

They come from sturdy, adventurous stock, though, and while their enthusiasm over unification may have waned slightly, their determination clearly has not.

The children love to study a parchment outline of their mother’s family tree.

Ingeborg’s forebears were missionaries who explored the world with a lusty freedom later generations would never know in East Germany.

In the 19th Century, one relative even walked from Dresden to Hamburg, where he boarded a ship and set off to civilize Greenland.

In the Hoffmann living room, a handsome china cupboard bears testimony to times more adventurous than the Hoffmanns could imagine in the walled-up world that became their Germany.

The cupboard was made from the wood of 14 crates that carried home the belongings of Ingeborg’s grandparents, who were missionaries in Suriname.

Generations later, despite their new-found freedom to travel, the Hoffmanns hover anxiously close to home.

They consult an atlas to see how far away Bonn is, and quickly decide such a trip would be impossible--all day, probably, in their sputtering Wartburg. The Rhineland, in some senses, is still as distant as Greenland.

They dwell instead on less spectacular changes, the fluxes in everyday life that are both myriad and minuscule.

Ingeborg notes how much easier her part-time job as a letter carrier is, now that the post office has given her a western cart to push.

“It’s lighter, and it has brakes, so it doesn’t tip over all the time like the old ones,” she said.

At work, or in the market, on the phone, Ingeborg marvels that “I really can talk without wondering who’s listening.” Or why.

Hans is also amazed by the change in attitude around him.

In the old days, it would take 18 months just to get an appointment for a routine tune-up at the auto mechanic. Then, the work would be shoddy and parts unavailable.

“If the car broke down, I always had to give them a little extra money--a ‘tip’--to get it fixed,” he said.

“I just had to get it repaired again,” Hans said, “and this time, they gave me something!”

He proudly displays his free calendar.

The Hoffmanns were once indefatigable cheerleaders in the unification Super Bowl. No matter what, they felt, everything would be better.

Now they speak quietly about the massive unemployment, about the messy property questions, about feeling run over by haughty west Germans.

No, they would never want to turn back the clock. But are they satisfied?

“Satisfied?” Hans Hoffmann asked, studying the grease that still seems alien beneath his gardener’s fingernails. “Not really. It is all so uncertain.”

He brightened.

“We can sit in the car and drive forever now.”

But they don’t, not yet.

Instead, they huddle in the warmth of their tiny living room, where a hyacinth blooms in perfumed defiance of the chill outside.