Documentary : Four Years After the Wall’s Fall, Germans Are Troubled, Haunted : The euphoria of the east-west reunion has faded, a journalist finds. People are suspicious and shrink from a demanding future.

The Berlin Wall had fallen the night before, and the mined, barbed-wire, inner German frontier had been open less than a day when I arrived at the busy Helmstedt checkpoint to witness the euphoric reunions of Germans east and west.

The emotion of those initial hours in the cold November of 1989 stayed with me for months, as did many other symbolic things that happened that day: the Helmstedt police who put marigolds rather than tickets under the windshield wipers of eastern cars illegally parked in the town’s main square, the nervous excitement of the young East German mother, toddler on her arm, lined up at the Town Hall to collect her 100 mark (about $65) “welcome present,” and the Germans crowded onto autobahn overpasses waving at the sputtering little Trabant cars of the easterners as they passed below, moving west.

It was nearly a year later in Berlin--well after the glow had faded from the Great Reunion--that I saw another West German waving at a sputtering Trabant. This time there were no smiles. The Trabi, trapped in rush hour chaos, its confused driver obviously lost in the western part of the city he hardly knew, had simply come to a halt. Blocked on all sides, the impatient westerner began to rage, honking his horn, yelling and flapping his arms at the delay.

For a long time that scene became my metaphor to describe the chemistry between Germans east and west.

When I first arrived in Germany just over four years ago, I came to a nation expectant, hopeful, optimistic. The prospects for peace and prosperity in Europe seemed boundless, and no country stood to win more from all this than a freshly reunited Germany.

As West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and his delegation winged its way home from the Soviet Caucusus in July, 1990, after winning Mikhael S. Gorbachev’s approval for German unity, the mood was so high that one reporter in the press corps joked that we didn’t need the plane to fly.

Germany has long since come back to earth. With a thud.

Today, I depart a very different country--a troubled, worried land, whose people wrestle with ghosts of a turbulent past, who seem fixated more by the problems than the potential of their new unity and who visibly shrink from a future that demands more from them.

The chancellor who steered the Germans to unity is today equally unpopular on both sides of the old divide. The status of politicians as a group has fallen so low that the country’s premier jelly bean maker, Haribo, decided to discontinue a line of candy shaped to the likeness of national leaders because of falling sales.

The Germans are disgusted with their leaders, even sugar-coated.

For a people instinctively suspicious and wary of change, simply too much has happened.

The former Soviet Bloc has become dangerously unstable, and neo-fascists such as ultranationalist lawmaker Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky (dubbed the “Russian Hitler” by the German tabloid press) seem to appear from nowhere and rattle nuclear sabers. Foreigners cascade into the country seeking political asylum and a better life, unemployment is soaring and economists warn that the nation’s days of affluence have peaked. Meanwhile, the dream of European unity--long an anchor of German post-World War II identity--is fading as the 20th Century nears a close.

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The cumulative effect of all this has left Germany paralyzed by a bout of Kleinmut , a German word that means a failure of courage at the crucial moment.

One morning over breakfast during the first heady days after the Berlin Wall collapsed, historian Michael Stuermer tempered his own excitement with a twinge of doubt.

“My only worry,” he mused, “is that we Germans won’t realize what a tremendous opportunity this is.”

Stuermer knows his country well.

In the east, the prevailing mood gradually turned from unrestrained hope to disillusionment as unemployment grew and westerners began treating easterners-- ossies in the western slang--as second-class citizens. At the same time, resentment grows in the west as living standards drop and government funds continue to flow eastward. The national weekly, Die Woche, recently headlined a cover story, “Can We Still Afford the East?”

Here in the east, in the shadow of the Polish border, Bonn is, quite literally, a world away. The distance is only accentuated by the dearth of easterners with any influence in the German capital.

In Kohl’s 18-member Cabinet and the chairs of Bundestag’s 36 committees, subcommittees and special commissions, easterners number a grand total of three.

For the foreseeable future, the east will survive on western subsidies that will allow them to buy western goods shipped to their doorstep. Not surprisingly, the young and talented continue to go west. The Federal Statistics Office last November reported an alarming 21% drop in the number of 15- to 25-year-olds in the east since 1988.

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This array of domestic worries has added to Germany’s reluctance to take on the international responsibilities of a large and wealthy democracy. More than three years after Germany regained its full sovereignty, there is neither the necessary two-thirds majority in Parliament nor much public enthusiasm to lift a constitutional restriction that would permit German military forces to participate fully with its allies in U.N. peacekeeping operations or in out-of-area activities with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Discussions on the issue among Germans inevitably split into what I call the Helmut Kohl and author Guenter Grass factions. (Aware of the political dangers of isolation, Kohl has consistently pushed for a normal military German role, while Grass contends just the opposite--a view summed up with his famous statement, “We can never get beyond Auschwitz and shouldn’t even try.”) At least in the debates I’ve listened to, the majority sentiment clearly seems to lie with Grass.

This present mood--what a recent RAND Corp. study labeled “Germany’s culture of reticence”--leaves the region’s biggest and richest nation as a minor player in events that affect its future.

I’m not sure whether I’m relieved or alarmed that so many Germans seem content for things to stay just as they are. What I am sure of is that the country’s mass circulation daily Bild-Zeitung fits somewhere into this national insecurity.

Each day, its editors conjure up new, ingenious ways to stoke the national Angst-- usually in huge front-page headlines whose very size exude alarm:

“Russian Hitler: Nuke Germany!”

“North Sea: Poison Everywhere, Massive Catastrophe”

Or, on a slow news day:

“Ripped Open! Five Children Dead in Their Beds.”

What makes Bild noteworthy is the paper’s enormous success. It sells well over 4 million copies a day, making it Europe’s largest-selling daily newspaper. I leave still mystified by the perverse chemistry between Bild and its readers.

What is it in the German character that draws readers in such numbers each morning to news presented in ways that would make most people want to crawl back under the covers?

The problems now swirling over the country are a windfall for Bild. They have also led Germans to take shelter as never before in their tightly controlled social order--that carefully constructed haven of laws, ordinances and regulations that define the rhythm of German life--from store hours, to the legally enforced afternoon “quiet time,” to how far away from your neighbor’s fence you can plant a shrub.

I came to understand this penchant for order as a kind of national security blanket. As long as everyone keeps to the rules, the country will be safe. Even apparently harmless violations of this code are somehow viewed as a threat to this security, as I discovered entering a supermarket with my German mother-in-law last summer.

After finding a crowd milling around the door marked Enter, I casually walked through the adjacent door marked Exit. As I turned, expecting my mother-in-law to follow, I saw instead a look of horror cross her face as she declared flatly: “That, I won’t be a party to.” And she wasn’t. She waited, as did everyone else, at the Enter door until the bottle-neck had cleared.

Keeping to all the rules of German life is tough for foreigners and is often a source of friction and a barrier to integration, but the rise of xenophobia and physical attacks on foreigners that began after I arrived is of a completely different order.

The riots against foreigners in Hoyerswerda and Rostock, the fire-bombings of Turkish homes in Moelln and Solingen that together claimed eight lives, and the 7,000 less-sensational incidents of right-wing attacks recorded by federal authorities since unification, serve as a bitter reminder that half a century after the Holocaust, racial hatred still percolates in Germany.

One of the great disappointments of my years in Germany has been not just the failure of the country’s moderate political right to move forcefully against the xenophobic strains in their midst, but its latent pandering to them--apparently out of fear that it could be outflanked by the likes of the former Waffen SS Sgt. Franz Schoenhuber, leader of the extremist Republikaner.

With nearly 20 elections scheduled during this year, the tendency is likely to grow.

Understandably, many foreign correspondents based in Germany, along with human rights groups and Jewish organizations, have devoted considerable energy investigating the hard-core German right and its potential threat. I always came up short in my search for real leaders, meaningful organization and sizable funding. It may be there, but I never found it. Instead I found something almost as disturbing.

At the heart of Germany’s new hate I discovered a generation of lost, neglected young people, many under 15, few over 20.

In a country still traumatized by the Third Reich, they had found the ultimate attention-getter: violence with a Nazi salute.

Sitting in a fast-food shop in Weimar that had become a kind of hangout for teen-age toughs, I found it hard to attach an ideology to their violence. The stories of their attacks made their violence seem more like recreation--a sport in which the assaults against foreigners were ends in themselves rather than part of a grand goal to purify Germany. They wore no uniforms, paid no dues, and worshiped no Fuehrer.

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Most of extremist youth I met were sure that the silent majority was on their side, a confirmation of the damage of government inaction.

In fact, the silent majority looks elsewhere.

Even as a reunified Germany confronts its huge new problems, it has been quick to help those outside its own borders. The country shelters more refugees from the war in former Yugoslavia than any nation outside the immediate zone of conflict.

The groundswell of relief sent to the former Soviet Union to prevent starvation during the winter of 1990-91 was one of the largest efforts of its kind ever mounted from one country to another. And last January, the city of Berlin launched a campaign for Los Angeles earthquake victims that netted more than half a million dollars.

Surrounded by boxes and movers, I received one of my last calls in my Berlin apartment from Klaus Pakusch, a 65-year-old pensioner who had just donated $300 to the quake fund.

“I just wanted them to know I cared,” he said.

I said I would pass on the message.