For East Germans, It Was a Year to Destroy, Rebuild : Unification: They test new freedom. One family encounters job switches and economic worries.

DRESDEN, Germany —  The autumn wind on the riverbank lashed a frantic kite through the gray sky over the Elbe; it spiraled down, then soared up again, refusing to fall.

Ingeborg Hoffmann gazed past the kite and across the muddy water to the scaffolding encasing the palace of August the Strong. Like most of Dresden’s neo-Rennaissance landmarks, the 275-year-old Stadtschloss was burned in an Allied bombing raid that left 35,000 dead toward the end of World War II.

“They’ve done a lot to restore it in the past year,” Hoffmann remarked. She was a small child during the war; she has looked past its ruins most of her life.

Now, she said, she is eager to see the workers hoist the palace’s highest tower into place--a 335-foot crown for the city on the anniversary of German unification.

It has been a year of great change, of destroying and rebuilding, for the 16 million East Germans whose country simply ceased to exist last Oct. 3.

Ingeborg Hoffmann measures the effects of that historic day within the safe borders of her own family, anxiously watching her nine children try to find their way in an uncharted land, testing their freedom like small kites in a turbulent sky.

She recognizes the newness of their world in her daughters’ wanderlust, in her teen-age son’s growing cockiness and in the strong grip of her husband, Hans, as he holds her hand walking along the timeless Elbe.

“One year already,” she said, shaking her head in disbelief. “It’s gone by so fast. It’s been exciting, though.”

A new grandchild was born, and another is on the way. One daughter got married, and another is planning a November wedding. Hans taught himself a new trade at 53. Ingeborg’s mother died.

“She had just been to Amsterdam the week before,” Hoffmann said. “Since the borders opened, she was always taking off on a trip somewhere. She was 78, but she managed wonderfully by herself. She traveled right up to the end.”

On Aug. 28, the adventurous great-grandmother hung up her wash, then went upstairs. She cried out for her daughter, who found her clutching her chest and rushed her to the hospital. She died in her sleep the following day.

“We haven’t done anything yet to her apartment upstairs,” Hoffmann said. “We just keep telling ourselves Grandmother is away on another trip. . . .”

With the economic uncertainty that has already plunged 1 million eastern Germans into unemployment, the Hoffmanns are debating whether to rent out the tiny studio upstairs to help make ends meet while their four youngest children are still at home.

“The entrance is through our living room, though, and that makes it difficult,” Hoffmann said. The family is also considering renovations that would turn cellar space into a bed-and-breakfast room for rent.

Like all major cities in the east, Dresden is drastically short of hotel rooms now that thousands of western investors, managers and consultants are commuting there to oversee new enterprises.

Hans Hoffmann realized early on that the state-owned nursery where he tended plants for 30 years would not survive the free-market system, so he joined a friend’s new locksmith shop and learned that trade.

“Business is good so far,” he said. “There’s lot of work.”

The Hoffmanns have been able to buy a used western car--a 5-year-old Opel station wagon--and change the heating in their home from brown coal to gas.

“No more schlepping coal,” Ingeborg Hoffmann declared.

She just switched from part- to full-time work at the post office. She worries that, at 53, she will be forced into early retirement or unemployment when the inevitable layoffs come.

“We’re on six-month contracts,” she said. “I decided I’d better go to full-time so I can qualify for unemployment if I’m let go.”

The change has turned the household routine upside down, which isn’t always necessarily bad, Hoffmann pointed out.

“Now Hans is making the bed for the first time in 31 years!” she laughed. “I have to be at work at 6:30 in the morning, and he doesn’t have to be in til 7. I like some order around the house, so he has to make the bed.”

Hans Hoffmann smiled sheepishly and clasped his wife’s hand as she reached over to give him a pat.

She frets about not being home to make Hans and the children a hot midday meal anymore. They’re used to eating heartily at noon, then nibbling cold cuts or something else light in the evening.

Now, they eat leftovers for lunch, and the mother and the girls cook a late dinner so the family can still eat the day’s big meal together.

Keeping up with the housework is also exhausting after the longer workday, Hoffmann found.

“Before unification, I would send out all the bed and table linens to be washed,” she said. “That’s too expensive now. We have to wash and iron them ourselves.”

Although the family strongly supported unification, a certain nostalgia for the quiet way of life they lost now creeps into their conversation. Hans Hoffmann refers to the past as “our time, East German time.”

The Hoffmanns still divide their country between “West Germans” and “East Germans,” and the simple word before now carries an implicit meaning--before unification.

Ingeborg Hoffmann excitedly tells of finding eastern products in the grocery stores again. Brightly packaged western goods have dominated the shelves since unification.

“Butter and milk are from here again, instead of from Munich,” she said, “and when we went on vacation to the Black Forest, we saw potatoes and detergent from the east on sale in western stores.”

Within their big, noisy family, the parents said, the child who has changed the most this past year is 14-year-old Volker.

Volker has grown from a polite little boy into a headstrong adolescent who snaps his fingers for service in a restaurant. He suffers his sisters’ teasing with scowls and, despite himself, grudging smiles.

His parents blame the transmogrification on puberty, but they also realize that the future is much more demanding for their only son than it was a year ago.

“He knows he really has to work hard in school now and make himself marketable,” his father said.

Before, under the Communist regime, Volker would have been told how much education he could have or what vocational skills he might learn. He would have spent 18 months in the army as a conscript. A job would have been assigned to him, and losing it was not a possibility.

The girls, too, find school more demanding now.

“Before, you needed 95% for an A, and now it’s pretty much 100%,” said 17-year-old Sabine, whose course load includes biochemistry, Latin, French and Russian.

Even 10-year-old Kristina notices a difference.

“We have a box in our classroom now where we can write down what we like and don’t like on little slips of paper,” she said. The class elects representatives to read them with the teacher and discuss changes.

“One thing we did was ask the art teacher not to draw on our work to show us something,” Kristina said. The teacher now draws corrections on an easel and lets the children change their own drawings.

Their grandmother’s thirst to see the world that was closed to her for 40 years lives on in the Hoffmann daughters.

Unable to find work after she moved to Berlin earlier this year, 20-year-old Anita scraped together all of her savings and spent two months touring Mexico, Guatemala and Jamaica, flying home on a cheap Aeroflot flight that stopped over in Moscow in the midst of the August coup.

“Anita was so frustrated,” her mother recalled. “She really wanted to get out and see what was happening, but it was just a brief stopover on the way back to Berlin.”

Now Anita is living in a phone-less, one-room walk-up on the fourth floor of an eastern Berlin building. The communal toilet is in the hall. Trained as a baker, Anita has been unable to find work in Berlin, but is now studying to become a pediatrician’s assistant and is collecting unemployment.

“She never wanted to be a baker, anyway,” her mother said. “But you were given lists of what you could do depending on what grades you earned.”

The family gets together often for birthdays or other celebrations. Whenever Ingeborg Hoffmann hears of another attack by gangs of neo-Nazi punks, she feels a wave of pity for the family life she is certain the youths never enjoyed.

“If there was order established in their families, this wouldn’t happen,” she lamented. “They come from homes where they have money in their pockets but no attention.”

She is grateful that her own children are not adrift in the new Germany, that they are anchored against the storms by something stronger than their own anger.

There is a hilltop Ingeborg Hoffmann loves outside the city, with a panoramic view of the land below. She cannot see her house from here, but she knows where it is.

Last Sunday, the Hoffmanns stood up there for awhile, trying to find the Elbe far off in the distance. The small, feisty kite was no longer visible. Ingeborg rested her cheek on Hans’ shoulder for a moment, and he hugged her. They stood steady in the wind.