BOOK REVIEW / NONFICTION : A Nation of Contradictions Struggles With Profound Conflict : AFTER THE WALL, Germany, the Germans and the Burdens of History <i> by Marc Fisher</i> ; Simon & Schuster; $24, 351 pages

When Marc Fisher reported for duty as the bureau chief of the Washington Post in Bonn in 1989, he thought of Germany as a country with “a gray reputation” and “a boring image,” a place where a “core of global evil” had been transformed into “a non-threatening technocracy.”

Even if Fisher’s first impressions of Germany are rather too kind and too euphemistic for readers who have not yet forgotten World War II and the Holocaust, he quickly woke up to the complexities and contradictions of Germany on the verge of the 21st Century.

“My idea for a book . . . was overrun by history,” he confesses in “After the Wall,” a report on what he learned during his four-year stint. “In Germany, history is everywhere, and nowhere.”

The premise of Fisher’s book is that Germany, even after the fall of the Berlin Wall, is still “a bundle of contradictions” and a nation in profound conflict.

“Germany is divided against itself, east and west,” he sums up. “It is divided against the ‘other,’ its own 6 million foreign residents. . . . Most of all, it is divided against its past.”

Fisher’s book is a collection of illuminating anecdotes and incidental details that serve to buttress his general observation: “The burden of being German is different for each person, but it weighs upon those who accept the past as well as those who deny it, on young and old, across the political spectrum.”

Credit cards, Fisher observes, are seldom used in German commerce because of “the well-grounded German phobia about debt and inflation.” The reverence for law and order runs so deep that a physician in Duesseldorf was once fined for taking a shower after 10 p.m. in violation of the rules against noise pollution. And Germany still directs a distinct fear and loathing toward “the other,” whether a remnant of Germany’s murdered Jewish community, a “guest worker” or simply someone who looks different.

For example, Fisher reports, a German family once sued a travel agent who booked them into a resort where they were forced to share the dining room with people in wheelchairs--and the offended family won. The very sight of disabled people, the court ruled, “was nauseating, and impaired the well-being of the plaintiffs and their children.”

Reunification, he points out, was the occasion for a new shock wave. Men and women who were accustomed to the little comforts of communism--day-care, sports clubs, government housing, government jobs--were suddenly thrust into the brave new world of West German capitalism. Some of the “Ossis”--the East Germans--wax nostalgic for the good old days, when liberty was sacrificed for security.

“Honestly,” says one grocery shopper, as the women around her grab for cartons of “West German milk,” “our milk tasted good, too.”

The common notion that history began anew in 1945 is still embraced by many Germans, especially now that the last emblems of defeat in World War II--the division and domination of Germany by the victorious Allies--have been erased by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany.

“You’ve got to eat your rhetoric,” insists one German newspaper editor, “and recognize the German democratic revival.”

But Fisher refuses to eat that kind of rhetoric, and he insists on probing deeply into the German economic and political miracle. His book is a well-argued brief for the proposition that Germany cannot escape its own past and, perhaps more importantly, its own nature.

“The new Germany,” concludes Fisher, “finally free to begin writing its own story, is learning that concrete walls are easier to remove than the yoke of history.”