The Pangs Of Unity

THE changes are taking place so fast that you forget what existed earlier," says Anja, a young German girl who grew up in the East German town of Karl Marx Stadt, which has now reverted to its original name, Chemnitz. Anja was referring to the furious building activity in Leipzig, where she went to university for five years. She last visited Leipzig a year ago and she could scarcely believe what she saw. Many of the buildings in the city centre had been torn down—not a religious person at all, she was also surprised that a religious library that existed in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) times, under a communist regime, was now a trendy cafe.

This frenetic pace of change is sweeping just about every aspect of life in the whole of the former GDR. And six years after reuniting with West Germany on October 3, 1990, the people are still coming to terms with it. Some have adjusted, others are taking a little longer.

Now a resident of Berlin, Anja has the same thing to say about her adopted city—which she used to visit earlier either to meet some people or buy denims—like the Berliners who claim it has turned into the biggest "building site in Europe". Berlin, especially the areas in the East, is dominated by huge cranes. Earth-moving equipment, dump trucks and a large number of workers are building one of the most modern cities in the world—an effort to revive its past glory, its pre-war eminence.

The German government is scheduled to move to Berlin from Bonn by 1999. The Reichstag, the Parliament building till 1933, is being extensively renovated to make it the seat of German politics. The Parliament has not met here since 1933, when Hitler came to power. Soon after he took over, the building was mysteriously burnt, for which the Nazis blamed the communists and used it as an excuse to take full control over the German government.

The Potsdamer Platz, in the heart of Berlin and split in the middle when the Berlin wall went up in 1961, is also being resuscitated. As everywhere, there is frantic construction here too. Daimler Benz, Sony, Deutsche Telekom, the German railway called the Deutsch Bahn (which is laying an underground network) are investing millions in the project. Daimler Benz, for instance, is building a city quarter of 19 buildings, to cover 3.4 lakh square metres of gross floor area, which will be used for office space, housing, restaurants and entertainment. What라이브 바카라 outstanding about the massive construction effort is that it is being carried on with minimal pollution, either noise or air. The River Spree, flowing through Berlin, has been diverted to make way for an underground road and rail network in Berlin—and the construction site is now a tourist spot.

Post reunification, the key words were development, restructuring and modernisation. But there is a growing realisation that the "blooming landscape" in East Germany, promised by Chancellor Helmut Kohl, is a long way off. The initial euphoria has long been replaced by a quiet realism that the social, cultural, emotional and psychological union between the two peoples, the two Germanys, is going to take longer. The "wall in the peoples’ head", as someone described it, still stands.

Agrees Dr Heinz Kontetzki, head of the ‘working group on new federal states’ in the Federal Chancellor라이브 바카라 office: "The main problem is to get the people together psychologically". He identifies this as one of the two tasks that need to be addressed for a successful union with East Germany. The other being the continued infusion of financial assistance to help revive the East라이브 바카라 economy.

He admits that after the reunification, there was an "illusion" that the process of unifying the two deeply divided and diverse entities would take five or six years. "But now it라이브 바카라 clear to people on both sides that it will take more time and more money," he says. Some feel it might take up to 15 to 20 years.

Dr Kontetzki says people from the East are still trying to adjust to the new, open democratic system of West Germany. But it라이브 바카라 not only the East which is finding it difficult to cope with the ways of the West. West Germans, who sometimes derisively refer to people from the east as "Ossis" (Ossi means east in German), have themselves failed to come to terms with the fact that nearly 16 million East Germans had now become a part of the larger and more affluent West Germany.

While the people from the East suffered in terms of losing a massive support base erected by their communist rulers and guaranteed employment, it was the people from the West who had to bear the burden of shelling out Deutsch Marks in billions to revive the economy. The German government imposed a solidarity tax in the West to help support the financial package for the East.

Materially speaking, many East Germans are better off now. But prod them a little and the disillusion surfaces. The problem, some say, is one of perception. Others disagree. They argue it runs much deeper—East Germans often feel slighted by the condescending attitude of the richer West. Says Volker Ebermann, a translator in GDR who was among the first to lose his job at the time of reunification: "The attitude of the West German is something like this—they feel that we (from the East) are their poor brothers and since they can’t choose their brothers, they have to spend money on us". He relates an incident. While chatting with some friends in Holland, he was told by a couple from Cologne that the Berlin Wall should never have gone down. That라이브 바카라 the degree of resentment.

Another East German complains that many West Germans, who moved to or were sent to their part of the country for infrastructure development or other work, think that they are "pioneers in the East—like the pioneers who landed in America and found the local Indians there".

바카라 웹사이트Ebermann admits he is not too unhappy—he has a car (in GDR everyone had to wait 15 years to buy a car)—but he frets for his jobless, 50-year-old brother in Dresden, a telecommunications man: "My brother is on unemployment benefits, he lives a better life than before, but he has no work. He has at least another 15 years of work left in him and doing nothing is psychologically devastating". He jokes that the Germans had to take just one look at Chancellor Helmut Kohl and the last prime minister of GDR, Lothar de Maiziere, standing together in 1990 "to know where the overweight was"—de Maiziere was short and a small person compared to the bulky Kohl.

A difference in attitude, according to a top German banker, is also evident in the lack of curiosity young West Germans show in visiting East Germany. On the other hand, the East Germans, at least those who can afford it, are making up for lost time by travelling to West Germany and other West European countries.

The sudden disappearance of the crutch that was the state is what is taking time getting used to, especially for people like Ebermann라이브 바카라 brother. Women, too, have suffered. The percentage of employed women in GDR was higher than men. And the state had an excellent support system for bringing up children. Things have changed—women have not just lost their jobs, but also their support systems. In fact, the birth rate in the East is believed to have gone down since reunification because of various factors.

But Dr Walter Heering, an economist in the Free University, Berlin, disagrees that there is any real problem. In a survey done by his department in the chemical industry situated around Bitterfield and Leuna, working women were quizzed on life after reunification—47 per cent said they were better off, while 22 per cent said they preferred the earlier times. But asked what was the general situation of women in the East now, 91 per cent of the same respondents said women were worse off. He feels that it is largely a problem of perception.

DR HEERING feels that the worst, in terms of lost jobs and retrenchment, is over and that the job market should start improving soon. "But people have a completely opposite feeling, that things are getting worse and this would be a problem in the future. People have both positive and negative experiences, but you remember only the negative ones and for this it is easy to blame the government," Dr Heering points out.

In fact, no one can complain that the German government is not spending money on the East. Billions of Deutsch Marks have been pumped into the new states. Starting from the net transfer of DM 115 billion in 1992, it rose to DM 140 billion in 1995. At the political level, too, the German government is determined to continue giving financial aid to the new states into the next century, though the slowdown in the German economy has put tremendous pressure on this resolve. There are groups which are bitterly complaining against the subsidised nurturing of the East.

Differences on this crucial issue are emerging between politicians on both sides. While the Minister President of Bavaria, Edmund Stoiber, wants the subsidies to be cut to the minimum, the state Premier of Saxony (in the east), Kurt Biedenkopf, has been quoted as saying that big cuts will be dangerous for the future.

This, in fact, is a big debate in the country—whether and how long should the German government continue to subsidise the East. A large part of these subsidies, observers say, do not only go for infrastructural development, but also for old-age pensions, unemployment welfare schemes and such measures. Says Wolfgang Thieme, who heads a huge chemical complex called the Chemie Park in Bitterfeld, in the East: "Subsidies which help initiate investment in this region and lead to the return of investment, and help to bring in tax payers instead of recipients, is fine. But subsidies which are being given to make life easier, in general, are a waste".

His argument is that subsidies may be used in an interim period to soften the impact of certain processes. But if these "help to maintain the past and hinder the development of companies," then there is a serious problem. Thieme is presiding over the privatisation of a huge chemical complex, which like most other industries in the GDR had obsolete equipment in pre-reunification times. During the Cold War, Bitterfeld was more famous for being the most polluted city in Europe. The rigorous German environmental standards for industry have helped to considerably clean up the place. German and foreign pharmaceuticals and chemical firms are now coming in to invest in this small town with the big potential.

CHEMIE Park, spread over 13 sq km, is an example of how industry has been privatised in the East. After the government took over this complex, it closed down the units violating environmental laws or were inefficient. In some areas, the land had to be decontaminated. Old debts were paid off so that companies from the world over could come and take over. While this process has succeeded in many cases, it has been a failed experiment in others.

There have been instances where the government agency set up to privatise the GDR industry had to redo the work because the new owners failed to meet the commitments. In fact, the GDR government set up the Treuhandanstalt to privatise industry. There were 8,000 state-owned companies and enterprises in 1989, which included the Bitterfield unit. According to Gabriela Althaus, who works with Treuhandanstalt라이브 바카라 successor, BMGB, there were 8.6 million workers. The Treuhand began the task of privatisation by first hiving off and separating industry into smaller units. Says Althaus: "About 13,000 companies were formed from those 8,000 by 1990. The number of employees were 4 million. By the time Treuhand itself was closed (its mandate was until end-1994 only), it had privatised 13,800 companies, which employed only 1.5 million people".

But the retrenchment in the East is a troublesome political problem. While the unemployment rate in East Germany is nearly 16 per cent this year, in West Germany it is 8.9 per cent—the figures for the East are disguised because nearly 1.1 million people are artificially employed in job-retraining programmes. Some observers say that many of those who grabbed the chance are doing well, but an equally large number is impoverished. Says a taxi driver in Potsdam, who worked 20 years for the state-owned taxi company in GDR: "There was a strict limit to the number of taxis then, so I had enough work. Now there are too many taxis and not enough work."

Observers say the predominant feeling in West Germany that its financial aid to the East had slowed down the economy is not entirely correct. They argue that after the reunification, companies in West Germany were mobbed by millions of new customers, starved of consumer goods for long. This boosted the German economy, thereby delaying recession.

But Germans have seen worst times than these. As Dr Kontetzki says: "It took a great deal of effort to rebuild West Germany. The same effort will be required to rebuild the East". And those who say they are unhappy with the present system, according to Anja, have "fast forgotten the difficult times of the past". She is happy that she is able to do the work that interests her and hasn’t ended up as a translator in an East German news agency, a job she was assured of when the first stirrings of change were taking place.