‘Spirit of New Beginnings’ Draws West Germans East : Europe: Despite obstacles, enterprising <i> wessis </i> flourish in ex-Communist region. They call work more satisfying.

Heike Steinmeier’s third-floor walk-up office on a half-renovated block of this city in eastern Germany is a reservoir of the very quality that often seems so lacking in the western part of the country: gumption.

Turning her back on certain comfort in the west, the 31-year-old lawyer gave up her job with a high-powered Munich law firm to hang her own shingle in the cobblestoned center of a city trying to fast-forward into the 21st Century.

“There are 6,000 lawyers in Munich, and everything already works there,” Steinmeier said. “Here, everything is chaos, and there are 500 lawyers. It is a feeling of doing something with more meaning. And the work is a lot of fun. You see something happening every day.”

While many hundreds of thousands of eastern Germans rushed west after the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to seek a job and a better future, a smaller number of westerners-- wessis --like Steinmeier forged east into the new frontier of capitalism. In the crumbling buildings and potholed streets of the former German Democratic Republic, these professionals and entrepreneurs saw the challenge of a lifetime: a vast virgin landscape in which to build a business from scratch.

They saw the antithesis of western Germany, a land grown fat and complacent in its successful postwar reconstruction. For those who still managed to feel ambitious after 40 years of the economic miracle, western Germany was a tough market to crack--crowded, hierarchical and highly specialized. And dominated by silver-haired men.

“There is no social structure in the east. No one here has been in the golf club for 30 years,” Steinmeier said.

“There is a spirit of new beginnings,” added lawyer Kay Schwarz.

They are new beginnings in which many of the newcomers are flourishing, despite tremendous obstacles. They are buying old East German companies and starting new ones of their own, investing in factories and construction companies, restaurants and boutiques, computer companies and graphic arts agencies. In the process, they say, they are learning important and difficult lessons about reunified Germany that their friends back home in the west do not begin to understand.

The eastward pioneers are proportionately a tiny minority. According to the federal statistics office, about 350,000 westerners have moved to the former East Germany since 1990, and no one knows exactly how many of them opened businesses or stayed.

To be sure, there were many carpetbaggers and crooks in the first wave of eastward migration, predators feeding on eastern naivete with insurance scams, lousy products and, particularly, real estate rip-offs. For those raised under communism, ownership of an apartment or office building was more a burden than an asset; with rents frozen at 1935 levels, they could hardly afford to keep the properties up, and many buildings were in shambles. So the easterners-- ossis --happily sold low, never dreaming that almost overnight the capitalists could turn around and resell those old buildings for lots of money.

Some wessis did what they call their “eastern deployment.” They put in two or three years in the east with a big corporation to advance their careers at headquarters back home in the west. They never intended to stay and were only too happy to get out at the end of their duty.

Still others came and failed. They tried to do things on the cheap or underestimated the hardships of working in a land where all the laws were new and all the rules had just been turned on their heads. They didn’t understand the easterners who, in turn, didn’t understand them. And they returned to the west with a litany of complaints about good-for-nothing easterners.

These people helped to sully post-Communist goodwill and foster deep prejudices on both sides of the old Iron Curtain. Steinmeier has experienced the biases in both camps. She tells of driving her car with Munich license plates in Dresden one day when suddenly a stranger yelled at her, “ Wessi slut!” Shortly afterward, she drove to Munich with her new Dresden plates and pulled into a gas station where someone shouted, “Silly ossi .”

When Steinmeier first announced she was moving east, her friends warned that she was throwing away the best years of her life. So did the middle-aged friends of Fritz Straub, a 51-year-old corporate executive from Cologne who decided to buy a furniture company in the east.

“I think there are a lot of people laughing at me. They say: ‘My God, you old bastard. You could have a much easier life.’ So far, I’m having a lot of fun. To be part of such a tremendous change only happens once in a century. Also, I don’t want to sound too idealistic, but we have to help these guys in the east survive somehow and not lose faith in their brothers from the west.”

Lawyer Schwarz admits that when he moved to Dresden in January, 1992, he wondered if his doubting friends weren’t right. The 35-year-old attorney-turned-real-estate-agent had jumped at the chance to go east and do something completely new. But the city known as “Florence on the Elbe” before the British bombed it in 1945 was cold and depressing under a cloud of “typical Communist smog” from burning coal. And its cultural life seemed just as dim.

At first, he went west every weekend. Then every two. Soon he saw the opening of new restaurants, a theater, shops. He and Steinmeier and scores of other lawyers plowed through some of the city’s 40,000 claims for the restitution of properties that had been confiscated, first by the Nazis and then by the Communists. Where property rights were settled, scaffolding went up.

Today, Dresden is a city ringing with jackhammers, its skyline dotted with cranes. Decrepit buildings that survived World War II--vacant shells, really, with trees growing out the top--have been renovated and restored to their 18th-Century beauty.

New telephone lines have opened communications between east and west that once were so jammed you could practically only call in the middle of the night. And Schwarz has found camaraderie among like-minded people in Dresden, westerners mostly, who enjoy the risk and creativity of the new, dynamic eastern Germany.

The wessis say they have made friends with a few easterners who are adjusting quickly to the new system and starting to prosper in business. But relations between easterners and westerners remain difficult. Steinmeier notes that the first question always asked about someone new in business is whether he comes from east or west.

“The attitude from the west is that the system from the east has failed, so the people have failed. The system wasn’t competent, so the people weren’t competent,” Steinmeier said.

“Easterners ask the question too, but for other reasons. They’ve had a lot of bad experiences with west Germans, so they think westerner means robber,” she said.

Straub sees the problem in equally strong terms. He and three partners bought the bankrupt Deutsche Werkstaetten Hellerau furniture company in September, 1992, and promptly fired two-thirds of the staff in an effort to make it profitable.

Straub had come from a competitive Western business culture where resources were always plentiful but only the fittest survived. His employees, on the other hand, came from a society in which shortages constantly impeded production and profits were not paramount, where no one was ever fired no matter how much or how little he worked because, with full employment, there were plenty of people on staff to do the job.

Their meeting was a shock for both sides, as Straub tried to explain to his remaining 100 employees that Germany really did not need another furniture company and that, therefore, they had to quickly improve the quality and efficiency of their production if they were to compete with their already successful counterparts in the west.

“I felt very much, and still feel, like a stranger here,” Straub said. “I really felt like I was (arriving) in a country where I went in as a colonialist. It’s a little as if we won the war. . . . It’s our system. It’s our rules, and they have to adapt.”

Clearly, many easterners do feel colonized by westerners and resent those who treat the east as an undeveloped country that should be grateful to the west. Many easterners are disappointed with capitalism, which has turned out to be more expensive and less gratifying than they had dreamed.

Western managers in the east are finding that ossis were not all as unhappy under communism as the west had believed. They had low rents, guaranteed jobs and child-care centers that look increasingly attractive as time goes by.

All of this leaves western employers “with a funny feeling” over misunderstandings that occur between their eastern employees and themselves. The manager of a large western hotel in what was formerly East Berlin describes the relationship with a humor that betrays real frustration.

“If I ask for dark blue, they give me light blue,” said the manager, who asked not to be named.

“They give you the answer ‘Yes,’ but it does not mean they will do what you ask. And once a mistake has happened, you will never find the guilty person. You say you want the water served cold and it is still served hot. Then a community of people will try to explain why it didn’t happen or why you as a boss didn’t explain which water you wanted cool,” the manager said.

He suspects some of the misunderstandings are a kind of quiet resistance to the new order that may not always be conscious, because in general, he says, he finds easterners to have “more heart” than westerners--and more scruples.

“If you want to be successful, you have to find a way to their souls,” he said.

Also to their minds. Before 1989, East Germany was a big white spot on the map for most westerners--largely inaccessible, a foreign country. Now, wessis who want to do business in the east have to learn about life before the collapse of communism. They have to learn about eastern Germans and, inevitably, they make a lot of mistakes along the way.

Dagmar Alberti, an easterner whose advertising agency in Apolda, in the eastern state of Thuringia, handles several western clients, says she has seen terribly misguided advertising campaigns come out of the west. In one case, a frozen-pizza producer tried to sell “the Italian lifestyle” to eastern Germans who had never been to Italy and could not relate in the least to images meant to lure them to the frozen-food section of their supermarket.

A western media company bought a radio station in Thuringia, which is also the name of a bratwurst in the west. The company thought it was being funny when it advertised its station with a sausage wearing a pair of earphones, but Thuringia residents were not amused.

A cigarette company from the west also missed the mark when its ads virtually ordered easterners to buy the brand.

“For 40 years they were told what to like, what to buy,” Alberti said. “Now they have their own opinions. You have to offer them a choice, not give them an order.”

But for those willing to learn and work alongside easterners, the opportunities seem boundless. Markus Rickinger, a 28-year-old from Plattling, Bavaria, started his own paint and scaffolding company in Dresden in early 1991. Today he has 80 employees and does more than $4 million a year in business--growth that would have taken him 10 years in the west.

Rickinger is at his desk by 5:30 each morning and then travels all day among his 15 ongoing renovation projects in a burgundy BMW, with a cellular telephone always close at hand. He leaves the office again about 8 p.m. to tour potential sites with architects or meet with his employees for a beer.

Rickinger says he has a tremendous sense of accomplishment at having built a business. And he is proof that for a young wessi entrepreneur, there’s no business like the east.

“You just open your eyes,” he said, “and see everything that has to be done.”