COLUMN ONE : New Wall Divides Germany : This one is emotional and social, not physical. And the barrier appears to be growing, deadening the joy of reunification.

“Once, we swore to the nation’s unity despite its division; today, despite unity, we have to realize that the nation remains divided.”

--Egon Bahr

Former West German Cabinet minister

It took several months for the architects of German unity to grasp the extent of economic devastation left by four decades of communism in the east and the difficulties it presented in rebuilding a unified nation. Then they ran into another problem, far more alarming and infinitely more intractable than an economic crisis.

The terrible truth: Germans are still divided, not by the physical and ideological barriers that kept them apart for 40 years, but by experience, emotion, psychology, expectation--their very approaches to daily life.

Collectively, these differences produce an invisible but formidable “wall within” that threatens both the eastern region’s short-term economic recovery as well as the whole nation’s longer-term social cohesion and political stability.

The growing awareness of this inner wall has deadened the joy so openly shared among Germans during their initial months of mixing together, replacing it with a sobering, hard reality.

“A unified state has been created, but the split between the two halves is so deep in economic, social and human terms that we could not have imagined it in our worst nightmares,” Parliament member Wolfgang Thierse told the congress of his Social Democratic Party last month.

For many, it was a headline writer for the Frankfurter Rundschau who best captured the import of this inner wall; summing up a trip by two of Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s Cabinet ministers to the east earlier this year, he wrote: “Chancellor’s Vanguard Travels Through a Foreign Land.”

More worrisome for national planners is evidence that 18 months after the collapse of the Berlin Wall brought the two Germanys together, the gap separating them seems to be widening.

In a powerful historic irony, this gap has in a matter of months generated a sense of separate identity among eastern Germans that decades of Communist propaganda failed to achieve. Those who talk of the east achieving economic equality with the west in several years predict that a unity of spirit will take generations.

The very words ossie and wessie, for example, used to differentiate eastern from western Germans, emerged only after the fall of the physical German frontier. They have since entered the nation’s slang as verbal shorthand for the two stereotypes: the naive, confused, inexperienced ossie and the slick, arrogant, know-it-all wessie.

In the months since East and West Germans danced together atop the Berlin Wall, these stereotypes have become the daily fare of tabloid headline writers, barroom jokes and mutual insults.

New newspapers and magazines have sprouted in the east, appealing mainly to a steadily strengthening separate ossie identity, often playing on the east-west differences with such headlines as “Western Woman Laughs at Naked Ossie “ and “ Wessies Demand 80% of All (Eastern) Property Back.”

An east-west cleft is certainly not new in Germany. Since the country was first unified in the last century, wine-sipping Roman Catholic Rhinelanders reared along Germany’s western frontier have considered themselves lighter, more spiritual souls than the heavier, earthier, Protestant beer drinkers of the Prussian east.

But Germany’s “inner wall” is far higher than history.

In part, it is simply a product of time: the near half-century the two Germanys spent apart, effectively as enemies. But it also stems from the total contrast between these separate postwar experiences.

Out of the wreckage of the Third Reich, western Germans filled a cultural vacuum and built their famous wirtschaftswunder, or economic miracle, as much with free-wheeling, American-style “go-go” as with Marshall Plan aid.

But as western Germans listened to Elvis Presley, watched Marilyn Monroe strut her stuff in “How to Marry a Millionaire” and learned the value of the high-powered sales pitch, their eastern cousins were slipping under the shadow of a neo-Stalinism that stifled personal initiative, scorned self-promotion and suppressed individual thinking.

As a result, with only a little exaggeration, German unification has been depicted as a collision between confident, open, upfront westerners born into the cut-and-thrust of free market competition, and uncertain, bewildered, eastern Germans bred with an introverted, passive nature, group loyalty, an instinct to keep one’s true thoughts for a select few, to avoid conflict and to withdraw when challenged.

Easterners “came to unity with all the skills you don’t need to get ahead in a market economy,” said Manfred Stolpe, the state premier (governor) of the eastern state of Brandenburg. “They developed a special knack for keeping a low profile and were creative only if asked to be.”

Although planners were aware that the east’s weak, obsolete economy would likely buckle under the full weight of western competition, few understood that there would be a second, equally devastating juggernaut from the west--one of brimming confidence, innovative ideas and flashy style that has overwhelmed and demoralized many easterners.

“I stay quiet around wessies, “ admitted an eastern Berlin office worker, “because I’m afraid I’ll be used, laughed at or make some terrible mistake.”

Commented an 18-year-old western Berliner, “If you just want to bum around, then it’s OK ‘over there,’ but if you really want to do something at night, then you stay here in the west.”

“One nation, two different worlds,” summed up Wolfgang Roth, deputy parliamentary floor leader for the opposition Social Democrats.

Examples of the gap are everywhere. For instance:

* Karl Huck, an accomplished eastern Berlin puppeteer, says he sees sharply contrasting children’s cultures:

In the east, children have had a more regimented, docile experience that emphasized discipline, stressed the individual’s role mainly as part of society at large and anchored its lessons in traditional German tales. In western kindergartens, it is the action-oriented world of Batman and of Asterix, a French comic-strip character, that holds sway. There, the stress is on development of the individual personality.

The results are clear. Even at ages 4 and 5, a stronger individuality is visible among western youngsters, said Huck, who recalled his amazement at the time a western German child came up on stage in the midst of a performance and announced that he wanted to play with the puppets himself.

“That would never happen in an eastern class,” Huck said.

And just as that western child was encouraged to experiment, to “dare to be different,” an eastern German child was flunked by her art teacher because she was nonconformist enough to color her horse purple.

* Politician Roth noted that after making a party speech to a western audience, he invariably sees about 10 hands rise among the audience--”people either with questions, criticizing what I’ve said, or adding their own view.”

“I give the same speech to an identical rally in the east and I don’t get a single hand,” he said. “I think they are all lazy--until I get down from the podium and there are 10 lines, each with 10 people, all wanting to cover the same points, but privately, just between the two of us.”

* Differences in body language occasionally generate misunderstandings. One woman brought in from the west to help restructure eastern Berlin’s Humboldt University instantly alienated her eastern colleagues by entering an office unannounced, confidently flopping into a chair and launching into light chit-chat. Although she almost certainly meant no offense, the easterners with whom she would have to work said they considered her demeanor presumptuous and arrogant.

* Wolfgang Engel, resident director of the Dresden State Playhouse, who has served as a guest director at theaters in Vienna and Zurich, says there are differences between western and eastern German performers and their abilities to express emotion.

“Because he’s accustomed to it, an actor from the west (can) . . . turn his soul inside out,” Engel said in an interview. “A GDR (eastern) actor can do that, too, but it takes longer. Maybe he has an internal barrier that questions whether it’s right to reveal too much of himself or whether it might somehow be used against him.”

Eastern and western audiences react differently too.

To a considerable extent, the skill of the East German stage was to communicate subtly with an audience, passing hidden meanings or truths that the public could savor but the censor could not challenge.

For easterners, this was all part of a schizophrenic life, in which daily newspapers dealt in fairy tales and truth was carefully concealed in novels and the theater. Westerners found this theater of the metaphor, as Engel called it, obtuse, intellectual and cold.

* One result of the east’s old Communist “work collective” was that it frequently spilled into free time, with office or factory colleagues grouping together for the theater, sporting events or to help in apartment renovations or in case of illness. That contrasts sharply with the more individual lifestyle of the west. Easterners continue to rely more on the home as the principal place to meet and entertain friends, while westerners, at least in urban areas, prefer to meet outside the home.

However, with unification, many of the factories and offices have closed; as easterners compete for the first time in their lives in an open job market, they fret that they no longer have time to keep up their friendships.

All these differences, so evident when eastern and western Germans are compared, defy the conventional wisdom that in the East European nations, the people had so totally rejected the Communist systems swept away by the 1989 revolutions that no emotional legacy was left at all.

“Nothing disappears without a trace,” says author and political commentator Guenter Gaus, who served for seven years as West Germany’s permanent representative in East Berlin. “Everyone--those who weren’t part of the system, those who rejected it and had nothing at all to do with it--they were all shaped by its demands far more than they themselves realized.”

Many believe that the internal wall separating the Germans also divides other east and west Europeans, complicating the cohesion of a free and open Europe as it searches for its own unity.

“Those in Eastern Europe share a common heritage,” said medical scientist and political activist Jens Reich. “If I’m in Prague or Moscow and speak with a stranger, I understand immediately why the market system can’t function there. We have all traveled on the same ship, had the same experience.”

Gaus says he believes a crucial problem in the German unity process has been an inability on the part of the western-dominated German government to acknowledge these differences--differences that, on a purely personal level, make it far more difficult for easterners to find their way in a rough-and-tumble, free-market society.

“We’ve had misunderstandings because western Germans have yet to realize that for 40 years, they have lived under a false assumption--namely the assumption that once the (Communist) system disappeared, (eastern Germans) would be the same as we are,” he said.

“Because so many believed the system had disappeared without a trace, the majority in the west placed their belief in the power of the market,” Gaus added. “We have fallen victim to that idea.”

Among the believers was Chancellor Kohl.

Initially convinced that only opportunity separated the two German peoples, he repeatedly rejected calls for special parliamentary committees or a ministry for eastern affairs during the run-up to last October’s unification.

Recently, however, Kohl admitted, “We have drifted much further apart than we thought.”

One result of Germany’s psychological mismatch is that the eastern region, with 20% of the country’s population and about 43% of its land area, is virtually without voice or influence in Germany’s first united government.

In Kohl’s government of 52 Cabinet ministers and ministerial state secretaries, seven are easterners. In the Bundestag’s 23 influential permanent committees, where key legislation is shaped for presentation to the full Parliament, eastern members hold one chairmanship, the Committee for Family and Senior Citizens Affairs.

In the country’s two largest political parties, Kohl’s Christian Democrats and the main opposition Social Democrats, not a single eastern member of Parliament serves as chief party spokesman on a key issue.

Although the Bundestag’s seniority system and an unfamiliarity with the rules of Western-style parliamentary democracy certainly play a role in dampening the voice of eastern members--they are defined as freshmen--the “inner wall” adds to the problem.

“When an issue comes up in (a parliamentary party meeting), my tendency--the tendency of most of my western colleagues--is to jump at it, you know, and run with it, really attack it,” said deputy Social Democratic floor leader Roth. “Meanwhile, the eastern MP (member of Parliament) sits there and asks if he might be permitted to ask a question. He’s completely out of the discussion. It’s a mentality problem that’s the result of 57 years of dictatorship.”

Politicians in Bonn still refer to the east as “over there” and in informal conversations, the personal pronouns “we” and “they” now divide a people verbally almost as efficiently as the barbed wire that kept them physically apart for 40 years.

Sometimes they don’t talk at all. When asked how eastern members of the Christian Democrats view German security policy, the party’s chief parliamentary spokesman on the issue, Karl Lamers, hesitated briefly before replying: “I’ve got no idea how they relate to it. It’s a vacuum.”

Eastern members of Parliament share the sense of estrangement.

“We have a totally different way of thinking,” noted Werner Schulz, an activist who helped overthrow East German communism in 1989 and now serves in the Bundestag as a member of the Alliance ’90 Party, a coalition of eastern organizations. “It’s still a foreign society to me.”

There’s a similar western dominance in the media.

Eight months after unification, there remains no powerful, influential, eastern voice--neither institutionally, as in a newspaper or magazine, nor individually, as in a television commentator or newspaper columnist.

Those voices that do speak aggressively for the east often are from the west.

The eastern Berlin magazine, “ extra ,” launched four months ago to capitalize on the emerging ossie identity, carried an inaugural editorial urging its readers to have the courage to stand up and resist “economic colonists from the west, for whom the east has become such a fantastic buy.”

The magazine neglected to say the group that owned it had itself just been bought by western German publisher Gruener und Jahr and Britain’s Robert Maxwell and that the editor who signed the editorial was from the west.

The growing ossie-wessie identity only strengthens the inner wall that continues to separate Germans.

One recent tourist industry survey showed that during the first full year of an open inner-German frontier, less than 3% of western Germans crossed into the eastern region for more than a couple of days.

Michael Kruse, who is researching youth attitudes across the east-west divide as part of a doctoral thesis at Bielefeld University, said that young east and west Berliners, who mixed quickly and enthusiastically in the initial months after the Wall came down, have in recent months gradually retreated to their own sides.

“When I ask why, they always say, ‘I was over there and it was all really nice, but somehow they’re just different than we are,’ ” Kruse said. “Western youths characterize their eastern counterparts as boring, obsequious and as people who avoid direct eye contact. Young easterners complain that western acquaintances are aggressive people, whose direct eye contact in the subways is irritating and who come on with power enough for three people.”

Kruse noted that in one neighborhood along the old Berlin Wall, teen-agers easily crossed through the newly opened barrier in the first months of last year to swap records, experiences and to party.

“Now the Wall has disappeared, but you get the feeling there’s another, invisible wall there that’s getting higher every day,” he said. “The Westerners would rather travel (12 miles) to the Ku’damm (the Kurfuerstendamm, western Berlin’s main drag) than 500 yards to the youth club in Baumschulweg (a street in the east), while the easterner who lived directly on the Wall would rather go to Rostock or Dresden or Leipzig than into the west.”

The divergent experiences in the months since unification--the west booming as the east sinks into a morass of unemployment and industrial decay--have only underscored and intensified the differences.

For the westerner, unity has disturbed virtually nothing in daily life. The 30% unemployment, the dying industries, the polluted rivers, the job-retraining programs and agonizing adjustments are all “over there.”

But the easterners’ different experience affects even what they read and talk about.

Magazines and newspapers carry “how-to” articles on obtaining work, on self-salesmanship and fighting depression, all non-issues in the larger, mainstream western media. Gaus’ recent book, “Wendewut,” about a middle-age eastern woman’s problems in adjusting to her changed life, is a best-seller in the east, but it has been largely ignored in the west.

Conversation in an eastern German living room invariably starts with a list of who has work and who doesn’t, how to pay the new-style phone bill or when the rents will rise--topics all but irrelevant at western cocktail parties.

Eastern Germany is probably the only region in the industrialized world where detergent commercials on television trumpeting how one brand outperforms another are the subject of so many prolonged, sometimes intense, dinner conversations.

Suddenly, choices are required for everything from life insurance to body deodorant.

“There are 72 different kinds of toilet brushes on the market,” noted Ingrid Koeppe, an eastern member of Parliament who said she counted them. “I’m astonished how much time people set aside just to pick one out.”

Under the Communists, East Germans had just two types--one round, one square.

In peacetime, few peoples have experienced a more complete transformation.

Guaranteed jobs and fixed rents are gone. Crime has mushroomed; schools are being reorganized in size as well as curricula; the banking, health and legal systems have all been transformed; income tax rules have changed; utility bills are new and confusing; newspapers carry “real” news.

For some, the changes have become too much.

Joerg Richter, a psychologist who helps staff the phone lines at a small crisis center called Telephone of Trust in cramped quarters just off eastern Berlin’s main Alexanderplatz, said one-third of the callers find life “so complicated that they can’t see their way through it.”

A generation of over-45s, too old to retrain, too young to retire, often seem incapable of seeing beyond the unemployment line that later this year could contain half of the eastern German working population. Many political observers now believe they are part of a “lost generation” who will be permanently jobless or underemployed during the years when they should be most productive.

“They are passive, they feel helpless,” Richter said.

The calls represent the tip of an iceberg of anxiety that has begun to show up in statistics.

In eastern Berlin, for example, marriages are down by 40%, births are off by a third and divorces and alcohol consumption are up.

The region’s suicide rate, traditionally twice that in the west, remains high, but the predominant reasons have changed--from domestic unhappiness to social uncertainty--giving rise to what one social psychiatrist called “a second suicide wave.”

“What we experienced in 1945 was a total, violent, bloody and visible destruction,” said the respected eastern writer and essayist Friedrich Dieckmann. “But this has been a remarkably soundless collapse, and that makes it harder psychologically, not easier.”

Friedrich Schorlemmer, a politically active Protestant pastor from the east, put it this way: “Many people in the east now live in a mood of depression: We’ve done nothing, we’re not needed, we live mainly from handouts. . . . It can’t go on like this.”

When asked how he believed eastern Germans would eventually adjust to the challenge of life in a free-market economy, Dresden theater director Engel quoted fellow director Benjamin Korn: “Half of the east Germans need a psychiatrist; the other half will become wolves.”

Indeed, the initial euphoria of Germany’s national reconciliation has been replaced by a sense of disappointment and disillusionment. The hugs, the excited waves and honking of horns that greeted easterners coming west for the first time in November, 1989, have dissolved into a low-grade grumbling among westerners about having to pay higher taxes to lift people whom they increasingly look on as “dumb, lazy easterners” out of economic squalor.

“After the honeymoon, we have reality again,” said Reich, the scientist. “It’s not a hostile relationship, but a very alienated, frustrating one.”

Social observers fear resentment and anger could follow. A backlash in the east has spawned T-shirts emblazoned with the words, “I Want My Wall Back.”

And the full brunt of eastern exposure to the west has generated the very sense of East German identity that the Communists failed to instill.

“I never loved my GDR identity and acquired it seriously only after 1989,” Reich said. “To survive as a person, you can’t reject all that has happened over the decades.”

In the course of an hourlong interview, Reich spoke of apolitical benchmarks of life that characterized the German Democratic Republic, such as a quality of life in the polluted southern industrial towns where thankless conditions welded people together in much the same way as they have in the coal-mining regions of South Wales or West Virginia.

“It was polluted and it wasn’t healthy, but it was home and it was their life,” said Reich. “Now they’re frustrated with an invasion of people (from the west) with well-tied neckties, flashy suits and smart behavior.”

A revival of interest in former GDR products, rejected by easterners only a year ago as second-class junk, is another indicator of the appeal to this new eastern identity. In recent weeks, papers circulating in the east have carried advertisements for “low-cost, fresh, new GDR products.”

And the Berlin district council of Mitte, which formerly comprised downtown East Berlin, recently surprised westerners by refusing to rename Wilhelm Pieck Street, retaining the name of the first East German president.

How long it will take to overcome these differences is far from clear, but the answer carries implications for the longer-term social and political stability of Central Europe’s biggest, richest nation--a nation that in the course of history has survived instability badly.

Reich, expressing an opinion shared by many, said the east-west divisions in Europe are “something we have to reckon with for generations to come.”

Few observers predict any quick way to break down an “inner wall” that the very young are already seeing through their elders’ eyes.

A pert 6-year-old western Berliner named Sylvia recently came across an auto accident. An eastern Wartburg had wrapped itself around a signpost at a busy intersection. Recognizing both the eastern car and its eastern license plate, she thought for a moment before sizing up the situation: “Typical ossie .”

The Germanies Are Split Along Economic Lines . . .

Average income for former East Germans is less than 40% of that of their western counterparts.

Monthly income for second half of 1990.

Eastern Germany: $780

Western Germany: $2,079

Source: Federal Statistics Office.

As a result, many eastern Germans are unable to purchase consumer goods.

Percentage of households that own the following consumer items:

Automatic washing machines:

Eastern Germany: 48%

Western Germany: 85%

Clothes dryers:

Eastern Germany: 7%

Western Germany: 25%

Refrigerators:

Eastern Germany: 78%

Western Germany: 95%

Freezers:

Eastern Germany: 22%

Western Germany: 38%

Refrigerator-freezer combinations:

Eastern Germany: 8%

Western Germany: 36%

Color televisions:

Eastern Germany: 67%

Western Germany: 68%

Black and white televisions:

Eastern Germany: 62%

Western Germany: 19%

Video recorders:

Eastern Germany: 8%

Western Germany: 40%

Dishwashers:

Eastern Germany: 3%

Western Germany: 36%

Microwaves:

Eastern Germany: 4%

Western Germany: 30%

Compact disc players:

Eastern Germany: 2%

Western Germany: 20%

Source: Burda-Marktforschung/RWI

Moreover, unemployment in eastern Germany is stubbornly high and expected go go higher.

Total jobless, in millions of workers

1990

July: .656

Aug.: 1.499

Sept.: 1.729

Oct.: 1.704

Nov.: 1.710

Dec.: 1.794

1991

Jan.: 1.856

Feb.: 1.904

March: 2.002

April: 2.842

May: 2.805

Source: Special journal “Blaetter der Wohlfahrspflege” (Paper on Welfare Work), Oct.-Nov., 1990

. . . But Psychological Divisions Are Deep as Well

Eastern Germans report a higher level of health and stress-related problems than those in the west.

Percent of poll respondents who say they suffered from one or more of the following health problems:

MEN WOMEN East West East West Trouble sleeping 32% 19% 45% 28% Circulation trouble 29% 19% 40% 33% Fatigue 32% 19% 44% 27% Nervousness 33% 17% 43% 24% Stomach complaints 26% 19% 33% 20% Dizziness 16% 8% 32% 15% Loss of appetite 10% 4% 15% 6%

Source: Allensbach Institute (1989 in the west, 1990 in the east)

Attitudes and values also differ from west to east. Here is a look at which values eastern and western Germans think are important and which are not.

MEN WOMEN East West East West Punctuality 51% 75% 29% 13% Tradition 35% 58% 45% 23% Orderliness 37% 67% 38% 19% Being good-looking 73% 58% 22% 15% Sunday roast dinner 39% 52% 38% 27% Fidelity 65% 68% 19% 18%

Former Germans were polled in April about whether they felt confident or concerned in various aspects of their lives.

Percent of respondents

Confident Concerned Income and pension 64% 36% Support from the west 54% 46% Economic development 34% 66% of the east Job security 7% 93% Costs of rent and energy 5% 95% Social violence and crime 1% 99%

Source: Leipzig Opinion Research Group