Potential for Instability Feared in New Germany : Reunification: ‘Severe, long-lasting trauma’ could develop with people divided, a former official says.

Eastern German to western German, repeating the slogan that led to unification: “We are one people!”

Westerner to easterner: “So are we.”

Nineteen months after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, this mirthless punch line reveals a bitter truth: Germany is united but its people are not.

After more than 40 years of hostile division, the former East Germans and West Germans are only now realizing that neither revolution nor constitution can weave two very different societies into one seamless fabric.

Instead of the euphoria the world witnessed in Berlin that November night when the wall fell, the atmosphere in united Germany is one of resentment, fear, disappointment and confusion.

“For the first time since its founding, the republic has become a potentially unstable country,” said Egon Bahr, the former West German Cabinet minister who helped negotiate the 1970 treaty establishing formal relations between the two German states.

If “inner unity--the unity of thinking, rights and expectations” does not come quickly, he cautioned in an interview with an eastern German newspaper, then “a severe, long-lasting trauma” will result.

Although the rhetoric is plentiful, suggested solutions are few. Concrete programs are even rarer. In dozens of interviews, public figures and private individuals from both eastern and western regions agreed on the key issues behind German disunity:

* An unwillingness to engage in open and frank public debate on the so-called “inner walls,” especially on the part of the church and the intellectuals.

* Tension over the unresolved question of where the capital of united Germany should be. Parliament is scheduled to choose Thursday between Bonn and Berlin.

* Disparate living standards. Most agree that material equality will likely be achieved years before true social unity develops.

Most attempts to bridge the human gulf separating Germans appear to be scatter-shot, grass-roots efforts, like informal encounter groups. And although billions of dollars are being spent to modernize the eastern sector, funding is scant when it comes to tending the national psyche.

“When you pitch an idea for something that might actually help bring the two sides closer together, the officials all say how great it is and how important it is, but it stops there,” complained Christiane Rix, director of the New Society exchange program in Hamburg.

The nonprofit, 37-year-old association arranges government-subsidized adult field trips designed to increase social awareness. Busloads of members regularly travel to cities such as Dresden and Potsdam to meet easterners and exchange views. The city of Hamburg and the Interior Ministry defray most of the costs.

But when Rix sought to host several Schwerin families for a week’s seminar with Hamburg families, the extra 15,000 marks (about $8,800) it would have cost was impossible to raise, privately or publicly.

“The interest in these exchanges is terribly high,” Rix said. “We could easily book two or three times as many trips as we do now. But the money isn’t there.”

The famed Stuttgart Ballet ran into a similar obstacle when it agreed to perform in Dresden for a week last November. “They ran out of money and had to cancel,” said spokesman Rainer Woihsyk. “They rescheduled it for this October, but I expect the same thing will happen.”

‘Summer Encounter’

Perhaps the most ambitious plan is the “Summer Encounter” funded by the Ministry for Women and Youth. About 85,000 children from across Germany are expected to participate. The 20 million marks ($11.8 million) is being divided among dozens of churches and community groups who submitted ideas for camps to give eastern and western youngsters a chance to mingle. Projects include building a raft and floating down the Elbe River, planting trees in a former East German border “death strip” and renovating eastern playgrounds and recreation centers.

“The walls of the mind concern us deeply,” ministry official Juergen Fuchs said.

He said that “a sense of disorientation and insecurity” coupled with a lack of exposure to different races and cultures contribute to rising youthful violence in the east.

Extremist right-wing gangs have sprung up in the east and routinely attack the Vietnamese immigrants brought there by the ousted Communist regime to provide cheap labor. The gangs consider the beatings sport and have a racist term for their outings.

Wolfgang Zirk, a senior Berlin police expert in gang violence, told of a community meeting in the eastern district of Pankow, where neo-Nazis accused a young woman with a foreign boyfriend of “polluting the blood”--an expression from the Third Reich.

“After the meeting, a few of them explained that they now had access to literature denied them during the Communist era,” Zirk said. “The literature was from the Third Reich and they were convinced they had the answers.”

Jens Reich, a scientist who helped lead East Germany’s anti-Communist revolution, said that breaking down people’s “inner walls” will take time and fortitude.

“We were enemies,” he said. “Everything done in each state was conceived as a . . . hostile act against the other society. This of course has left its traces and has only been papered over in the frantic, emotional year of coming together.

“It’s like a not-too-harmonious marriage where, after the honeymoon, you realize how hard living together is,” he added. Despite the difficulties, the process “in the long run (is) one that can become a positive experience, an achievement.”

Many Moving West

The run may prove to be longer--and harder--than either side expected.

With skyrocketing unemployment and lower living standards in the east, about 20,000 people are moving west each month--much to the consternation of Bonn officials who thought unification would stop the flood.

Guenter Gaus, an author and political commentator who served for seven years as West Germany’s permanent representative in East Berlin, noted that the westward emigration of young talent will accentuate the east’s problems and increase its potential to become a poverty pocket for Germany.

“There will be a steady, continuous emigration of the clever, more mobile younger people from east to west,” he said.

In the workplace, integrating easterners and westerners requires a particularly delicate touch, experts say.

In the eastern states, where the cost of living is considerably lower, workers earn about half what their western counterparts do. The Bonn government argues that equal salaries would drive up unemployment even more and hinder long-term economic recovery.

A mixture of eastern and western civil servants in Potsdam recently launched an after-hours group encounter session to help co-workers understand their differences.

“We get along well, but we also realized there were a lot of differences between ossie and wessie, “ said co-founder Sigrid Sommer, using the German slang for easterner and westerner.

“The big problem is a lack of knowledge of each other,” said Sommer, a 31-year-old press officer for Potsdam. “Both sides carry a lot of prejudices that don’t square with reality.”

Some of the sessions grew quite heated, Sommer noted, recalling a debate over equal pay for equal work. The ossies complained about the lucrative incentives westerners get for working in their city. “Their bonuses are bigger than our net salary,” she said.

Many feel that open debate, difficult and painful as it may be, is the only way to overcome prejudices and get past each side merely whining about the other.

“The (eastern) German intellectuals have once again failed,” said Wolfgang Engel, director of the Dresden State Playhouse. “They should have begun a discussion right after the wall came down about all these questions that have been raised, even if there was a danger that it would have once again made the intellectual completely unloved.”

Konrad Weiss, an easterner and Parliament member for the alternative Alliance 90 party, believes that intellectuals and the churches have sat on the sidelines too long.

When the Evangelical Church held its first convention since unification earlier this month, only 10,000 of the estimated 100,000 participants came from the east. (A western commentator noted that an eastern bishop who championed unity was not invited to speak, but the chairman of the restructured Communist Party was.)

Church President Erhard Eppler acknowledged the spiritual gap between easterners and westerners. On one side, he told the gathering, is the “sometimes haughty self-righteousness of the confirmed,” and on the other side is the “despairing bitterness of the disappointed.”

Weiss recalled how a parish that was divided by the Berlin Wall “immediately reunited after the revolution.”

The parishioners gradually realized how alienated they had become. The two pastors found themselves subtly competing for what they assumed would eventually be one job. Western members worried that all the church’s money would end up going to the poorer easterners.

The parish decided to divide itself again, Weiss said, “but not to break off contact with one another. They decided to keep talking about their fears and anger. They just had had too little time to move toward each other.”

Weiss said the parishioners plan to unify now “when the time is ripe.”

In the military, integration has been forced. Each of the 7,500 officers taken over from the defunct East German army has been sent west for training that goes beyond technical courses.

Maj. Gen. Hans-Konrad Bromeis, commander of army forces in the eastern states, said the easterners had trouble shaking the blind obedience expected of them in the Communist regime.

“What surprised me most was their inability to engage in an open discussion,” Bromeis said. “We’re accustomed to having a meeting, discussing different points of view and building an opinion, a point of view. In the east, it was completely different. They were accustomed to getting orders, carrying out those orders and nothing else.”

Bromeis considers bureaucracy a major obstacle on the road to some form of economic and material equality, which many see as the prerequisite for breaking down the inner wall.

“We’ve got to go to unconventional, unusual measures so large contracts can be started without massive bureaucratic involvement,” he said.

“Why, when we have so many jobless, such bad roads and the money to repair those roads, can’t we put the three together?” he asked.

Western bureaucrats working in the east only slow things down, he added, because “when they import the bureaucrats, they import the mentality.”

He recalled the army’s method of getting rid of obsolete East German equipment: “If we had handled this in a routine bureaucratic way, with copies here and copies there . . . declarations of who would receive the materiel, what it would be used for . . . we’d never have come to the point of freeing the troops of this useless materiel.” Instead, he said, the unwanted items were simply gathered, compressed and carted off.

Bonn or Berlin?

Political debate over the inner wall will intensify when Parliament decides whether Germany’s capital should be Bonn or Berlin.

Because Berlin was divided, the city would symbolize the union. In practical terms, a Berlin-based government would draw more investment into the eastern region.

“For me, there is absolutely no doubt that Berlin must be the capital,” said Parliament member Weiss. “Bonn was the capital of the old Federal Republic of Germany and whoever wants to keep it in united Germany wants to keep the walls within as well.”

Potsdam encounter group organizer Sommer agrees, saying the shift of the seat of government would provide the ultimate example in encouraging people to get to know each other and see for themselves what is happening.

“Only when the problems are right on the lawmakers’ doorstep and not 600 kilometers away can they really begin to understand,” she said.

Henning Vorscherau, the Social Democratic minister president of the city-state of Hamburg, was pessimistic about the pace of German unity.

“Common living standards will take 10 years,” he said in a recent interview with the eastern daily Der Morgen. “Similar housing and urban conditions will take 20 years, similar environmental protection 30 years and a unified mentality 40 years.”