EUROPE: FIVE YEARS LATER : Pforzheim, Germany : Scaling Back Expectations in the West. . . : The Wall’s demise has meant sharing the wealth with eastern neighbors and has ushered in an era of limits.

The full-bellied bronze statue planted on Pforzheim’s main shopping street is a tribute to prosperous times. “Manly Figure,” says the plaque next to the satisfied Herr . “Here I stand, the fat one, thanks to many donations by my Pforzheim friends.”

Pforzheim is the “Gold City,” leveled by Allied aircraft in 20 minutes near the end of World War II and rebuilt on its ruins by a successful jewelry industry, plus mail-order houses and machine-tool makers.

Like so much of western Germany, the city gleams clean and modern, the golden fruit of a postwar economic miracle and, to top it off, a bonanza in sales after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

But Mayor Joachim Becker looks out from the balcony of his City Hall office, over a spanking-white convention center and performing arts theater, and sees the shine dimming on a diet of budget cuts--belt-tightening for the fat man.

The five years since the fall of the Wall have ushered in an era of limits for western Germany, a feeling for the first time in the republic’s 45 years that perhaps Germans cannot have an ever-expanding all.

Is it the recession? Immigration? The more than $300 billion that western Germany has spent to rebuild the former East Germany? These issues all run together in the minds of the many westerners who have lost jobs to eastern Germany and Eastern Europe. It is confusing to have these shrinking expectations and it makes some people downright angry.

The fat has softened the blow for a majority so far. Pforzheim contributes about $27 million a year to the reconstruction of eastern Germany--about 6.5% of the city budget--and Mayor Becker has done his best to ease the city into the new era. He has reduced his staff through attrition only, sold city properties, increased debt. Kindergarten classes are a little bigger, city advertisements a little smaller. Streets and schools are not cleaned as often as they used to be, and newlyweds cannot count on as many flowers at their City Hall weddings.

“The average citizen doesn’t realize the change yet. The most difficult time is ahead,” Becker said. Then, only half-joking, the 52-year-old mayor added: “We are making music on the Titanic.”

That may sound like hyperbole, but that is how it feels to generations for whom life is shifting from the pursuit of higher education, more pay and longer vacations to a struggle to hang on to what they’ve got.

For decades, West Germany was the rich uncle of Western Europe and the example to its bad-boy half, its joined-at-the-spine Communist East Germany. Today, the world perceives unified Germany as bigger and stronger still, ready to take on an expanded role in the new world.

But many western Germans feel slightly weakened instead and unenthusiastic about assuming more responsibility. Because however slow capitalist development in the east might seem to easterners, many westerners cannot help feeling that the country’s future lies in that direction.

“In 10 years,” said City Atty. Wolf-Kersten Meyer, “the music will play in the east. Not the west.”

Like all of Germany, Pforzheim was shocked when the Berlin Wall came down Nov. 9, 1989. Many residents of this city in the southern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg had never seen the Wall and knew little about their brethren on the other side. Older Germans had dreamed of the day their country would be reunited into one big, happy family, but few people ever really believed the Soviet empire would collapse.

Pforzheimers watched the historic event on television, thrilled and a little scared by its magnitude. The Cold War was ending. Half of their country was suddenly open to them. They could visit a bigger Berlin, Weimar and even the Wartburg Castle, where Martin Luther translated the Bible and created the modern German language.

Within days, those funny-looking East German cars, Trabants, rolled into Pforzheim, and residents waved happily to the newly liberated easterners. With reunification 11 months later, Pforzheimers poured into the streets themselves to rejoice under ringing bells at City Hall.

The open borders were a boon to Pforzheim’s jewelry and mail-order businesses. Easterners loved zodiac medallions and ordered more television sets than German companies could supply.

“Customers had to wait in line,” said Manfred Bader, a director of Versandhaus Bader, the city’s oldest mail-order house.

The company received a flood of new orders and expanded its lines of simple, two-piece outfits to suit the tastes of eastern women. Bader grew by 50% to 1,500 employees, and sales in the past five years have grown by two-thirds to nearly $670 million annually. A third of that business comes from eastern Germany.

This helps to explain why Bader believes that western Germany must do its share to rebuild eastern Germany.

“We couldn’t help it that we landed in the sunny side after the war and they in the shadows,” the 60-year-old Bader said. “We have an obligation to participate. West Germans should be ready to pay part in exchange for the profit they get from the east.”

But the boom could not prolong the post-Communist euphoria forever. What westerners found on the other side of the wall was a country far more impoverished and environmentally spoiled than imagined, and the tremendously expensive job of making things right again.

This unhappy realization settled over western Germany about the same time as the world recession. The windfall also could not counter the truth of Germany’s labor costs--among the highest in the world. Jewelry companies in Pforzheim were losing business to Asia. After the Wall came down, machine-tool manufacturers moved some of their production to the Czech Republic, where salaries are a 10th those in western Germany.

As a result, unemployment in Pforzheim has risen to 10%, and many of the city’s 115,000 residents are feeling far less generous than Bader. Unemployment costs the city money for social services guaranteed to the jobless under German law. It means less business for local merchants, less income for city coffers. And with all that trouble, western Germans should send their money east? Guenther Riches, a 60-year-old retired farmer, doesn’t really think so.

Germany pulled itself up by its bootstraps after the war, Riches insisted, and now the east must do the same. He resents the migration of nearly 1.5 million eastern Germans to the west.

“They should stay there and make the land work again. It’s fertile land. What good does it do to spend all the money there if they come over here?” he asked.

Like Riches, many Pforzheimers have no relatives in the east. They don’t know easterners and have yet to travel across the old divide. Somehow, in the news and on television, the baggage of unification becomes clearer to them than the benefits. And resentment grows.

Easterners are “lazy,” some westerners say. They don’t want to work for their money. The east “wants it both ways,” these people say, accepting western investment and at the same time voting in large numbers for the Party of Democratic Socialism, the reformed Communist Party. They want the comforts of consumer goods and the benefits of a socialist state.

Others are miffed that easterners who rushed to consume western goods, who were so eager to have westerners open shops in their cities, now complain about the bad influence of western consumerism and the fact that experienced western entrepreneurs are driving eastern neophytes out of business.

And so for some, the idea of one, big reunited German family has been exposed as a fantasy.

Helga Duerr, a 53-year-old family assistance worker for the city, had relatives living in the former East Germany whom she visited several times, wrote letters to and sent care packages before the Wall came down. “We don’t write anymore,” Duerr said sadly.

“With the Wall, there was more of a duty, an obligation to stay in touch. They want more distance now. They want to reach the same level and don’t want any help anymore. Sometimes there is even a bit of aggression, a little shame. They don’t want people watching them narrowing the gap,” she said.

Yet along with the difficulties have come some positive revelations. Easterners, it turns out, are not so completely different as westerners had feared after a 40-year separation. Germany is a country marked by strong regional identities. In the minds of westerners, easterners are Saxons more than they are former Communists, no more different, really, than folks from Bonn and Bavaria.

Human beings are human beings, says Susanne Senkel, a 20-year-old student at Pforzheim’s Fachhochschule, a technical school. Easterners “are like people here, only they have another history,” she said.

“Only the way they live is different,” said Kirsten Dingler, a 16-year-old high school student who has visited the east and has easterners in her class. “They live in old houses, and things are not as modern.”

This acceptance has roots in the fact that Pforzheim, like many German cities today, is actually a cultural melting pot, with about 25% of its population of foreign birth. They include about 19,000 Aussiedler--Russians of German descent who took advantage of their right to a German passport--and about 7,000 Turks. The city is one of a handful in Germany with a mosque, and the crowd downtown is mixed with African, Asian and southern European faces.

Pforzheim has not registered any major racist attacks in recent years, although 20% of voters cast ballots in 1992 for the ultra-right Republikaner party to protest the country’s liberal asylum laws. Since the laws have been changed, the rightist vote has dropped again to an insignificant count.

Among most Pforzheim residents, there is an evident desire to understand easterners and to accept them. Pforzheimers are proud people who want to be open-minded, difficult as that may be. For those adversely affected by the fall of the wall, clearly it is a struggle.

Rainer Scherer, 32, lost his marketing job at a ball-bearing factory in the Bavarian city of Schweinfurt in 1993 after the company nearly went bankrupt buying a former state-run company in the east. He was lucky to find a job in Pforzheim as assistant to the director of the technical school.

Scherer met many easterners in Bavaria and was sympathetic to their plight; they were the ones who had to start over in a society where all the rules had suddenly changed. They were naive about western capitalism but certainly not stupid, as some westerners charged. If they fell prey to scams and scoundrels, it was not their fault. They were just learning the rules.

“It’s not easy to get along with them, but you can’t merge two parts that were totally different and expect a happy marriage overnight,” Scherer said.

But as Scherer talked, his irritation came out in spite of himself. No, easterners are not lazy. “But they expect the same standard of living we have. The feeling here is, well, earn it. Look at the Czech Republic. They didn’t have a west to merge with. They say, ‘We have to do it ourselves,’ and they are doing very well.

“What gets me fed up is the neo-Nazism based in east Germany,” Scherer added. “It’s not easy to be German, anyway. I get pissed off when I see a (racist attack in) Rostock or Hoyerswerda.

“I can’t pick my countrymen, but I have more in common with Belgians and Dutch. They have bought a Eurail ticket and traveled. Easterners have never done that. We (westerners) like the same music, movies, artists,” he said.

Calming again, Scherer explained that he has friends from the east today. “But we’re different and you feel it. We’re getting closer, but it takes time. Five years isn’t anything,” he said.

That is an assessment shared by many Pforzheim residents. Five years is too little time for both sides to have fully adjusted.

“We know the Wall is gone,” said Scherer’s boss, Rupert Huth. “Clearly, the Wall is gone. But in the head, the Wall still exists.”

There’s no denying that for some there were comforts in the old order. For easterners under communism, perhaps it was low rent and job security. For many westerners, it was the fat economy and clear rules of the Cold War. The world was divided into good and evil, with American, British and French troops present to rebuild Germany and protect it against evil.

While virtually no one wishes to reconstruct the Wall, clearly the dream of a united Germany was easier than the reality. The country tries to focus on its economic challenges, and the world clamors for more help from what is now Europe’s largest economy, a land with more than 80 million citizens.

But Pforzheimers don’t feel as if they belong to a bigger Germany. Many do not want to see their enlarged country step out into the world to assume more power. The post-Nazi generations raised on anti-nationalism do not raise the flag at school or sing their national anthem. For them, to be German has never been fuel for the spirit and to be bold is not in Germany’s future.

“Once burned, a person shies away from the fire,” said Peter Miczka, 57, director of Heidach primary and secondary school “Now that Germany is reunited, the demand comes from the outside. It does not come from us.”

Peter Kabitzke, managing director of Guthmann & Wittenauer jewelry manufacturers, agreed. Germany’s national duty, he said, is to rebuild the east.

“Those are the big tasks. Try to find work and places to live for all those people, try to get the environment back on track,” Kabitzke said. “And then you may be able or allowed to think about the weight of Germany in the world.”