East Germans Feeling Separate and Unequal

The stone goddesses are flaking on Big Garden Street. The steel mill started its slide years ago. The textile plant has fared no better. Steeples glimmer above the rooftops, but the hopeful flicker doesn’t obscure what Otto Mahler sees as one long betrayal.

“When East and West Germany reunified after communism, they promised us the world,” said Mahler, a retired steelworker whose factory has cut its 10,000 jobs to 750 over the last decade. “They said we’d all have an equal standard of living. We were deceived in an awful way. They destroyed our businesses and enriched themselves.”

Mahler’s kind of bitterness is likely to jolt German politics during elections today in the eastern states of Brandenburg and Saxony that are expected to result in sizable gains for far-right and former communist parties. Fifteen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, economic and social reforms by Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and his Social Democrats have angered an east still struggling with persistent unemployment and perceived indignities.

The chancellor has endured insults, hurled eggs and a slap from an irate constituent while pushing reforms that seek to trim a generous welfare state and make the country economically competitive. The reforms also point to a larger dilemma: Despite spending more than $1.2 trillion on reunification, Germany remains a troubled and divided nation.

A recent Forsa poll found that 24% of west Germans and 12% of easterners would favor a new wall between them. Such sentiments reveal that the poetic pronouncements and euphoria that accompanied the early days of reunification have not bridged the problems inherited from a communist state with bloated industries and a workforce ill-prepared for globalization.

Two standards of living exist in Germany. Unemployment in the west is 8.4% compared with 18.3% in the east. Cuts in long-term unemployment compensation -- slated to affect 2 million laid-off workers next year -- are expected to hit especially hard in the east, where new factories and investment have been scarce and federal subsidies will diminish in coming years.

“Schroeder is the best advertisement for us,” said Bernhard Droese, an official with the far-right German People’s Union, which, according to projections, may capture 5% to 8% of the vote and increase its standing in the Brandenburg state parliament. “Every day Schroeder’s in power means more votes for us.”

The Social Democrats and their rival Christian Democrats remain the dominant parties throughout the nation, but gains by far-right and former communist groups would add a populist dynamic to German politics. Schroeder has cautioned voters not to allow resentment to veer into extremism marked by anti-immigration and isolationist policies that for years have resonated with fringe parties.

“Germany is a free and democratic state,” he said in a radio broadcast as polls showed that the National Democratic Party, which the government is trying to outlaw for alleged Nazi tendencies, might win 10% of the vote in Saxony. He added that anything “connecting us to the brown [Nazi] cesspool damages us, damages Germany and damages our standing with international investors.”

Most Germans acknowledge that some type of reform is necessary to overcome years of stagnant economic growth. But cuts in health and social programs have unnerved much of society, which until a few years ago was accustomed to government-funded spa vacations.

Ralf Foth, a laid-off construction manager in the city of Brandenburg, west of Berlin, said he was willing to accept additional tough times if the nation emerged stronger.

“I’m 45 years old,” Foth said. “I was well off, but I had to sell my house and now I’m starting my own business. The problem was that the billions of dollars pumped into the east ended up in the hands of local officials with no experience. I want Schroeder to follow through on these reforms. We just want a chance to work.”

Schroeder is taking a political pummeling. His party’s nationwide approval rating is about 26%. In parliamentary elections in the western state of Saarland this month, his Social Democrats won 31% of the vote, down from 44% in 1999. The good news for Schroeder is that Germany’s other major party -- the Christian Democrats -- has yet to convince most voters that it can fix the problems of Europe’s largest economy.

Former Chancellor Helmut Kohl, a Christian Democrat who presided over reunification in 1990, recently announced that years of economic turmoil was forcing him to retract his prediction that east Germany would become a “blossoming landscape.”

A train ride through the east, past fields of rolled wheat and imprints of the Cold War, is a glimpse at an unfinished dream. The countryside is dotted with jobless men sipping beer in the sun and campaign posters of airbrushed politicians.

In downtown Brandenburg, a noon bell chimed and the shade trees rustled. The Havel River coiled past a medieval tower and storefronts painted in pastels. The facade cracked, however, along the cobbled alleys and past blushes of graffiti, shattered windows and broken mortar. A good mood was as rare to detect as a pocket with a bump of cash.

“Irritation lies behind the paint,” said Rene Kretzschmar, 25, a laid-off bricklayer and truck driver running for the state parliament with the former communist Party of Democratic Socialism. “People don’t know what’s ahead, and nobody seems to be telling them how to get out of this mess. Why does someone in the east earn only 80% of what someone earns in the west? This is dangerous.

“Nothing was planned right. They trained me for a bricklayer. I didn’t want to be one, and there was no need for any more. I graduated technical school with 299 other bricklayers. That’s too many in a town of 70,000 with a terrible economy.”

Polls indicate that the Party of Democratic Socialism may win 35% of the vote in today’s election -- more than any other party in Brandenburg. Disenchantment with Schroeder’s reforms has given the former communists a 12-percentage-point jump from the last election.

Inside the community center on Big Garden Street, Ingrid Raddatz and Friedheld Gnewikob sat at a desk in the morning sun. They relied on each other to fill in memory gaps from communist days. How many did the steel mill employ? Remember the woman everyone called Mother Courage? When did things get so bad?

“When you meet someone on the street these days the first question is, ‘Do you have a job?’ ” said Raddatz, whose husband has been working in the steel plant since 1958. “Then there’s a sense of depression that sets in.”

“People have retreated to their homes,” Gnewikob said. “We used to have cultural houses and people would be out in the evenings. Most live from hand-to-mouth. The savings are gone.”

Lars Fritsch leaned on a bench near a stand selling beer and ice cream. A bunch of men were gathered there, and no one seemed in a particular hurry to get someplace else. An unemployed mechanic who is more disillusioned than angry, Fritsch said he would vote for anybody but Schroeder.

“Reunification is a failure,” he said. “In old East Germany even the laziest and most stupid had a job. You had to work. But now you can’t find a job, and the state doesn’t care.”

Otto Mahler ambled over the tram tracks near the forlorn goddesses. He said the reforms were just too painful. “These changes are coming too fast,” he said. “It’s not right.”