COLUMN ONE : New Wall Goes Up in Germany : Disillusioned easterners retreat from their embrace of western ways. Their search for a separate identity forms an invisible barrier and threatens to upset the political balance.

Ilona Wolke misses East German ketchup.

It may not have been the best, she admits, but she grew up on it and liked it.

As with many things East German, Wolke’s favorite ketchup disappeared amid the avalanche of change that accompanied German reunification, and she complains that the replacement products--all from the West--not only taste different but contain additives.

“And who knows what they’ll do to you,” she pouts, arms folded, leaning in the door of the hardware store she helps run just off the central square of this sleepy Spree River town 70 miles southwest of Berlin.

Nostalgia over something as simple as Communist-era ketchup is a small part of a larger mood settling over eastern Germany--a mood heavy with disillusionment and characterized by a retreat from the initial, wholesale embrace of things western.

It is dominated by a startling, unsettling fact: Less than three years after the Berlin Wall came tumbling down to the cries of “ Wir sind ein Volk! “ (We are one people!) from eastern streets, those same eastern Germans are in the process of redefining themselves as a separate people--still German, but a different type of German.

“At present, it’s still wispy and diffuse, but the search for a separate identity is now in full swing,” said Hans-Joachim Maaz, chief physician at a Protestant Church-funded psychotherapeutic clinic in the eastern industrial city of Halle and author of books on East-West differences. “It’s driven by the insecurity and disappointment that is visible throughout eastern Germany now. There is a rejection of the competitive nature of the West, the ‘I society’ and the envy that’s linked to it.”

The vague threads of this identity include the tendencies:

* To place a higher priority on group solidarity than on individual achievement.

* To reject the idea that money (or lack of it) should define human relationships.

* To value security above mobility, simplicity above sophistication, friendship above competition and passivity above assertiveness.

These are invisibles that also separate other eastern and western Europeans three years after the Iron Curtain fell. The differences are highlighted in Germany because of the intensity of the unification effort and the problems they pose for it.

To a significant extent, these values represent the residue of Marxism; any wholesale retreat to them would almost certainly hamper already problematic efforts to build dynamic market economies in the region.

“If we face enormous trouble in eastern Germany, it’s most likely even worse in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland,” commented Michael Stuermer, director of the Ebenhausen Institute, a government-financed think tank near Munich. “It is the terrible habit of the Soviet Man.”

Hans-Dieter Grosse, 42, is one of those in the East who is unsure he accepts the pillars on which much of western affluence rests. He works as a parking lot attendant here after being laid off by the local brown-coal mining company. He talked wistfully of the job security he once knew and critically of the way new competitive pressures have altered relations with work mates.

“Before, if you had a friend in trouble, you’d cover for him at work and it would be OK. But you can’t do that anymore,” he said. “Now it’s everybody for himself. I ask myself, ‘Is that progress?’ ”

In Germany, seeking out old Communist-era products is seen by social scientists as an easy way for easterners to declare this separate identity. Indeed, Wolke and others have fueled a revival of demand in the East for eastern goods that, two years ago, were on the verge of extinction because they were rejected as inferior by the very people who now seek them out.

Fit, the liquid dish soap that generations of East German housewives loved to hate, is only one such example. The soap all but vanished after the July, 1990, currency union gave easterners the deutschemarks they needed to buy western competing products. Yet today, Fit has regained 20% of the eastern German market.

“I think the point is that people say to themselves, ‘If the quality is OK, why should I buy a western product and endanger an eastern job?’ ” said Horst Hernichel, an executive at Leuna AG, the eastern company that produces the soap.

Eastern products ranging from beer to toothpaste and jam to sour pickles and light bulbs are enjoying similar revivals. Many eastern producers have begun to label their goods as coming from the region.

“Business is growing steadily for these products,” reported Peter Michalski, who runs a large wholesale and retail food market specializing in eastern goods in the eastern Berlin working class district of Marzahn.

Elsewhere, traditions like the Jugendweihe , a 19th-Century, secular rite of passage ceremony revived with gusto by the Communists, remains popular largely because eastern German youth wanted to keep it. The event, replete with presents, a dinner and often a trip to the disco, was designed for young people as a substitute for religious confirmation; those who administer the ceremony claim the growing awareness of being ossie --German slang for an easterner--has worked to maintain its popularity.

While some elements of eastern life remain, the majority do not, including such apolitical benchmarks as longer shopping hours, subsidized child care, crime-free streets, a degree of frugality, the absence of a gap between rich and poor, and free medical care.

A collection of children’s essays titled “Suddenly Everything Is Completely Different” published earlier this year reflected the bewilderment about the extent of the changes.

It came through, for example, in the words of a 12-year-old from the northern port city of Rostock who wrote, “Sometimes I don’t really know where I belong. Suddenly, everything’s different--in the world, in Germany, in me.”

A 13-year-old eastern German student added, “Something inside me remains tied to the old East German state, but what?”

But those same essays also uncovered a strong sense of regional identity and pride even among the youngest of eastern Germans. “We’ll show those wessies (slang for westerners) that we’re not second-class people,” wrote Toni Thiele, 9, of the Thuringian city of Hermsdorf.

The quest for identity now under way among eastern Germans follows a roller coaster of emotions that began with the post-revolution euphoria in the fall of 1989 and worked its way through a binge of consumer spending. It ended in the bitter disappointment of unemployment lines, personal debt and the realization that western, free-market democracy not only failed to offer instant prosperity but sharply devalued much of what easterners considered important in life.

“It’s kind of like sobering up after a drinking bout,” said psychotherapist Maaz. “Easterners are looking at what they had with a more critical eye.”

In some instances, this realization has already triggered a reaction.

Ulrich Schulze, deputy editor of the Berlin Tagesspiegel, a rare western paper that reports with a high degree of sensitivity about developments in the East, noted that earlier efforts among easterners to conceal their origins when traveling or working in the West have begun to disappear. “Now they are quick to declare who they are,” he said. “They say, ‘I’m from such-and-such region (in the East) and I’m proud of it.’ ”

Few here believe this emerging eastern identity poses a threat to German unification. There are no Slovak-like voices advocating independence for the East, and there is no desire to turn the clock back to a totalitarian state. But for a nation that, even in the best of times, has considered its political stability as brittle, the broader implications of this emerging eastern identity are still considerable.

Many agree with Stuermer that the values that make up this identity are bound to slow both the unification process and the economic recovery in the eastern region.

Others, including newspaper editor Schulze, believe that the five eastern German states will develop into an identifiable political bloc, pressing its own special interests nationally, much in the way Bavarians do today through their Christian Social Union party, which is a junior member of Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s three-party coalition government.

The Committee for Justice, an eastern pressure group formed last month to the disgust and condemnation of most western Germans, has already been interpreted in some quarters as the precursor of a full-fledged eastern regional political party. If such a movement succeeds, it could upset the national political balance that has provided Germany with stable, moderate coalitions for most of the post-World War II era, some analysts fear.

But psychotherapist Maaz sees the potential for significant political benefits, as well as grave dangers, in this new identity.

“If it were to work positively, it would bring a national debate about who we are and where we are going,” he said. “Then something of what we have to offer would be accepted as sensible.

“If things work out negatively and economic recovery in the East fails to materialize, then this political insecurity and sense of disappointment will grow and there will be resistance,” he added.

Maaz worries about the prospect of social unrest, a radicalization of the political process and what he termed, “a search for a new, strong man to reinforce eastern identity and push eastern causes. The instability is already there latently. The only thing certain is that the eastern identity is going to grow stronger.”

Petra Falkenberg, a researcher in The Times’ Berlin bureau, contributed to this story.