Changing Lifestyles : In Germany, the Pioneers Are the Ones Going East : * They’re called ‘retro-yuppies.’ These upwardly mobile executives are leaving the good life behind to help eastern Germany’s economic recovery.

With his fashionable suit and Pepsodent smile, attorney Juerg Brickwedde seems as though he could easily step into an episode of “L.A. Law,” a confident, young professional with BMWs to buy and tropical vacations to plan.

But in truth, Brickwedde has been living for the last four months in a tiny bedroom behind his office, bathing in the cellar sink two floors below and eating hot-plate suppers--”scrambled eggs, mostly. Cereal, if I don’t want to cook.”

He has no television or telephone to help while away the dull evening hours, and every Friday, the 30-year-old newlywed weaves his way through four hours of traffic on bad roads to spend the weekend with his pregnant wife. Then it’s back to what he wryly refers to as “my monk’s existence.”

Brickwedde is the answer to a new nation’s want ad, an ambitious, idealistic trailblazer willing to “Go east, young man” and help rebuild on the ruins of communism in post-unification Germany.

Call him a “retro-yuppie.”

He is also an exception, not the rule. For cultivating a pioneer spirit in the “me generation” is proving to be a daunting task for Europe’s most affluent country, and frustrated recruiters say thousands of jobs that demand Western expertise still go begging, particularly in marketing, law and management.

While unemployment may be mounting in the east as Communist-era factories and firms shed redundant workers, there is an acute shortage of executives willing to pull up stakes and move to places like Schwerin, or Dresden, or Leipzig.

With its critical housing shortage, serious environmental hazards, shaky school system and lack of recreation, the eastern region is considered a hardship post, and the harsh demands on a top executive, such as overseeing mass layoffs, make leadership posts even less appealing.

Hermann Wagner, personnel director for the Treuhand, the government trust in charge of privatizing state-run concerns in the east, figures he needs to hire more than 1,000 people at the management level over the next year.

He has been flooded with resumes from “the agreeable mediocrity.”

“Unfortunately, four-fifths of them are unqualified,” he said. “What we really need are the best crisis managers and turnaround managers the west has to offer. But they don’t want to come.”

Wagner recalled finding a qualified western executive to head a factory in Chemnitz, only to have him hastily give the job back when he discovered there were no golf courses in the industrial city once known as Karl Marx Stadt.

“The infrastructure is also very bad,” Wagner said. “There’s a lot of stress. There aren’t enough hotels and you end up living in some pension without a bath, with the toilet a floor below. There are no faxes, not enough telephones and no such thing as video conferences.”

The best pioneers, he said, are bored westerners looking for a midlife challenge or a jump-start into management.

“We really like the ones who are 50 to 55 and don’t feel there’s much of a chance left to ascend the career ladders in the west,” he said. “They still have a fire in their belly and are able to motivate people.

“A lot of the 35-year-olds we see are extremely arrogant and think they ought to just come in and tell everybody how everything is supposed to be done. But you have to be able to overlook all the problems and bring in something of your own--inspiration. A sense of humor helps, too, so you don’t take the five crises a day too seriously,” he added.

“Unfortunately, there are far too few true pioneers left out there,” he said, “and way too many ‘wannabes.’ ”

To recruit talent, the Treuhand sometimes offers profit-sharing to top executives, while some western companies such as department stores or banks use bonuses to lure employees east.

No one keeps any precise tally of westerners moving east, but the number appears to be relatively low. Most of the employees dispatched by major firms setting up shop in the region are on temporary assignment, and either live in hotels during the week or commute from western towns on what used to be the border between East and West Germany.

Juerg Brickwedde, however, plans to stay. “I feel at home here,” he said. “It will be a good place to raise my family. “

He decided to come east out of both idealism and ambition. In the west, he figures, it would have taken another 10 years before he could hope to open his own law firm. In Schwerin, there used to be just seven attorneys for 450,000 people; even now, there are only 70 lawyers, and about one-third of them are westerners.

“You get pigeon-holed in western firms,” he said, “but here in the east, creativity is a must. You can help shape something. I knew I wanted to be part of it when the Berlin Wall came down and I felt tears running down my face.”

Brickwedde’s first child is due in January, but his wife, Nicola, has been unable to join her husband because of the lack of housing. “She’s scared to leave her friends and family back home,” he said. “But she’s excited about it, too. It’s a terrific challenge.”

Meanwhile, Brickwedde shares the cramped quarters behind his office with two law school roommates who joined his fledgling firm.

Margret Vosz, a 49-year-old executive with the big Hertie’s department store chain, transferred from Bonn to the eastern city of Erfurt almost six months ago to manage the personnel department at a new store there.

“This is the kind of opportunity that won’t come again,” she said. “It was a chance to test myself. You really have to start from scratch.”

Vosz, who is single, found a renovated apartment in Erfurt and is so pleased with her new life that she already is thinking about extending her two-year contract.

“I feel satisfied. I can breathe again,” she said. “I have the feeling I’m needed and that my work is important. Patience was always a big question for me, and I’ve learned to be patient and not take myself too seriously.”

At first, she said, the western bosses “all made the same mistake of never asking our eastern employees how they used to do things. Now we’ve learned that certain things from before can be adopted.”

Easterners are also still bewildered by western ways in the workplace, she said, recalling the embarrassed pleasure of employees when their new supervisors remembered their birthdays with flowers.

“One employee said none of the bosses in the old store had even known his name after 18 years,” Vosz said.

“The only thing I really miss,” she said, “is a decent breakfast roll. They’re too soft and crumbly here.”

In the rural village of Parchim, dominated by a sprawling hydraulic plant he now runs, Karl Stopfkuchen is embarking, at 55, on what he considers the adventure of his lifetime. “The situation is unique; the world has never seen it before,” explained the transplanted Munich businessman.

Stopfkuchen has no choice but to live in the old workers’ dormitory known as “Hotel Warsaw” on the factory grounds, and the lack of big-city diversions keeps him in his office from early in the morning until late at night.

“The sudden reunification fascinated me,” he said. “I never thought I’d see it in my lifetime.” He moved to Parchim last April, and drives an hour to Berlin each Friday to catch a plane back to Bavaria. A chauffeur waits in the long lines at the town’s single gas station for him.

Although the burghers of Parchim have been friendly so far, Stopfkuchen worries about the future, since “we’re the biggest firm here and we’re letting go 70% of our work force.”

Ironically, Stopfkuchen believes the pioneer spirit is more likely to dwell in people of his generation than in the 20- and 30-something peers of his grown sons.

“At my age, people are more mobile,” he explained. “(Our) kids are grown and we don’t have to worry about schools.”

Unification is also more meaningful to Germans old enough to have known their homeland before it was divided 40 years ago.

“Some of my friends can’t understand why I’d do something like this, and others want to do it themselves,” he said. “I have a good friend who quit his job and went to Leipzig. And there’s my neighbor who owns a VW lot in Munich. He’s 63. He could retire and go sailing, but he wants to come here to sell and repair cars. And my tax man is looking for a spot in Sachsen.”

On the other hand, his children’s generation “grew up with a lot of things and the idea that work must not hurt.”

It surprised and touched him recently to hear his 26-year-old son, an engineer, tell him a secret.

“Dad,” he said, “I’m jealous.”