Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 10, 1993 TAG: 9310100278
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By George Rodrigue DALLAS MORNING NEWS
DATELINE: KLEIN MACHNOW, GERMANY LENGTH: Long
Three years after German unification, every trace of the old wall has fallen. Wealthy "Wessis" build new homes amid the village's prewar bungalows. Pensions and salaries are higher than ever before, even for the unemployed.
But a "Wall in the Head" still runs through the town, separating Easterner from Westerner and neighbor from neighbor. Its persistence testifies to the difficulties of remaking any of Eastern Europe's societies, even under ideal circumstances.
"There is tension. Two completely different ways of life collide here," said Deputy Mayor Wolfgang Blasig.
On the sunny side of the wall live the town's new Western occupants, BMW-driving yuppies from Berlin. For them, unification has meant mostly the inconvenience of slightly higher taxes and the bitter knowledge that they are pumping up the East with $100 billion annually in mostly borrowed funds.
On the grimmer side of the Klein Machnow Wall live the town's traditional residents, such as Hildegard Faber, 59.
Pale and chain-smoking, she props herself against an overstuffed sofa pillow and confesses that she is afraid to go outside or even to check her mail.
"Anybody could come here and try to throw us out," she said. "When the mail comes, I hardly dare look, because I could get a letter saying that I cannot keep my house. What will I do then, live under a bridge?"
Faber has lived here for 32 years. Under East Germany's Communist regime, lifetime guaranteed rents were so low that there was no point in buying the house. After the Wall fell, she pulled together her life's savings, cashed in an insurance policy and made a down payment.
Three months later, a wealthy Bavarian woman "in a big Western car" pulled into her driveway and demanded that she give the house up.
The woman's family had once owned the house. They had not been politically persecuted, Faber's attorney told her. They simply chose to flee to the West, allowing the East German government to claim the house through default on tax payments.
Even so, Faber's attorney says she has at best a 50 percent chance of keeping the house in which she raised her three children.
"You know, I have always been self-assured," she said. "But I hardly dare go out now, because when you meet people the first question they ask is, `How is your case?' "
Blasig says almost two-thirds of Klein Machnow's 3,239 homes face similar claims, under a unification law designed to let Western owners recover properties seized by the Communists.
Across eastern Germany, 1.2 million such claims have been filed since the Oct. 3, 1990, reunification.
Even Klein Machnow's unhappiest residents admit they are earning more today than three years ago. Generous Western pensions and unemployment benefits make even the unemployed richer than when they were working for the Eastern state.
But the money cannot erase the numbing uncertainties and bitter adjustments required of many Easterners.
For many residents, the Westerners' rights to reclaim old property are part of a general Western takeover of law, culture and business - the complete destruction of an old order that had always seemed at least to be predictable, if not pleasant.
Eastern women, especially, feel the burdens of what some call Western colonialism. Only three years ago, they were pushed into a work force where the socialist government guaranteed jobs, child care and health benefits.
Today, they are pushed by circumstance and policy toward the Western "three Ks": "Kinder, Kirche und Kueche" (children, church and kitchen).
In June 1990, there were 200,000 male executives in the East, and 100,000 female executives. By last summer the German Institute for Economic Research reported that only 80,000 men remained and "hardly any women."
Seventy percent of Eastern women are unemployed. Once-public child care is becoming private, scarce and expensive. Western leaders seek to restrict abortions and already have greatly complicated divorce for Easterners.
Earlier this year a poll in Brandenburg, the eastern state that surrounds Berlin, found that 82 percent of the women surveyed believed things in general were worse for them now than in 1989.
Over the past three years, Eastern marriage rates have fallen by half. Childbirth rates have fallen by 53 percent.
"Conditions of life are such that women are answering with a birth strike," said Editha Breier, the women's affairs commissioner in the Eastern city of Magdeburg.
Eastern resentments arise out of even the most mundane aspects of life in Klein Machnow.
"To take one small example, the right-turn-on-red arrow at the traffic light here has been tested for 20 years," said Dr. Heinz Rechenburg, 57, whose home also has been claimed by a Western family. "Why should the Western government have to test it again?"
"Almost every company in the East has been sold to strangers or foreigners," he added. "A whole region is being administered from somewhere else, and guided by the needs of another country's capital."
The benefits of Western capital can be seen throughout the East. New highways, rail lines and fiber-optic cables will give the Eastern "Laender" better communications than their Western neighbors.
North of Klein Machnow, Berlin is still rushing to connect its severed East-West transit links. Eventually, it hopes to host the German government if Western politicians ever keep their promise to fund the move.
But the benefits of unification have spread unevenly.
Crime is another result of the upheaval, even in placid Klein Machnow, where longtime residents say no one ever bothered to lock their doors when they lived under the communist regime of Erich Honecker.
Faber's eighth-grade nephew was regarded as a budding track star by the old East German sports network. He practiced five days a week and was preparing to enter a special sports school.
The end of East Germany meant the end of his athletic career.
"He does not want to do sports any more," said Faber's brother. "He breaks into cars and houses. If you want to put it that way, the political changes have destroyed my son.
"Of course, not all children reacted like he did. But in his class, 14 of 28 children have flunked. This is madness. There has to be something behind it."
Planners in Bonn had realized from the start of economic union that many Eastern Germans over 40 would lose their jobs and never work again. What they had not counted on was the trickle-down bitterness of eastern Germany's youth, some of whom have become ready recruits for violent right-wing "skinhead" gangs.
Crime terrified 53 percent of all Easterners questioned this summer, but only 33 percent of the Westerners.
Despair, too, has followed the old order's collapse.
Real unemployment rates in the East surpass 30 percent, by some estimates, or roughly three times Western rates. One survey earlier this year found that two-thirds of all Easterners were "very worried" about unemployment, compared to only 43 percent of all Westerners.
Public opinion surveys indicate that Westerners promised by Chancellor Helmut Kohl that unification would be quick, cheap and pleasant feel little sympathy for their Eastern cousins.
Only 22 percent of all Westerners and only 11 percent of all Easterners said they felt a common German identity this summer.
Westerners were trained from their youth in self-reliance and coping with crises; Easterners were taught to be obedient and, in a sense, helpless, said Klaus Kies, 43, a counselor at a Berlin distress hot line.
"The major causes for problems in the East are the massive societal changes," said Dr. Klaus Schneider, 53, one of the staff psychologists.
He and his team are working with a former Eastern engineer who now must work as a door-to-door salesman, and believes that he is begging for a living.
Then there is the Eastern man who hanged himself. He had been a Communist Party boss; after the party collapsed he could find work only as a doorman at a chemical factory, and died of the shame and loneliness, Schneider said.
"People fear life itself," he added. "They say, `I don't know how to make it through tomorrow. If I did not have the children, I would have jumped out the window long ago.' And people DO jump out the window, every day."
by CNB