TIME Europe, November 15, 1999
Across the Great Divivde
Ten years ago this week, the Wall fell and Germany began the process of reunification. Though Berliners have come together, in many ways the city is still split

by CHARLES P. WALLACE

To Frank Schulz, a 35-year-old Berlin postman, the injustice is as plain as his threadbare shirt. Six days a week, Schulz sets off to deliver letters in a Berlin neighborhood called Kopenik. It's exhausting work, pumping his sinewy legs to move 100 kilos of mail heaped into leather bags on his bright yellow Post Office bicycle. Despite the arduous labor, Schulz is paid about $2,400 a year less than most other German mailmen. Schulz is an Ossi, the German slang for an easterner, and even though the Berlin Wall came down a decade ago, Germans from the eastern part of the country still earn less than their counterparts in the west. "I feel like a second class citizen now," he says. "I'm really disappointed with the way our life turned out."

On the other side of Germany's new capital, in the neat West Berlin neighborhood of Schöneberg, Kurt Galert frets impatiently in his apartment while his wife is out working to support the family. The 52-year-old Galert was pushed into early retirement by an aviation company three years ago, and he blames the Ossis for taking his job. "They work for less money," Galert complains. "It's too late to put the Wall back, but I wouldn't mind if things were like they used to be."

Ten years after the Wall collapsed, it's difficult to find any physical traces of the concrete and barbed wire barrier that once sliced Berlin in half. Only a few short stretches remain, mostly in outlying neighborhoods, while the rest was chopped up for souvenirs or pulverized into dust. But while Berlin is a united city again, the two distinct worlds that existed on either side of the Wall have proved surprisingly resistant to change. Sure, East Berlin now has its share of supermarkets and sporty BMW sedans, while western Berliners have the freedom to take a weekend drive into suburbs once barred by a death strip. But attitudes are changing much more slowly than the landscape.

A potent illustration of the gulf that still divides Germany's largest city emerged last month in elections for the Berlin Senate, the legislature that governs the city. The headline news in Berlin was that the Social Democratic Party headed by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder suffered a crushing defeat because of lingering concerns about the government's economic reform plans. But examined more closely, the results showed that the reactions of the two halves of Berlin were almost diametrically opposed.

All of the districts of the former West Berlin, with one exception, gave the majority of their votes to the conservative Christian Democratic Union. All except two districts of the former East Berlin voted for the Party of Democratic Socialism, the successor to the former communist party that ruled East Germany. According to Manfred Güllner, head of the public opinion researchers Forsa, the results were even more extraordinary because 40% of young people aged between 18 and 25 in East Berlin voted for the pds, disproving the notion that only older voters with ties to the party voted for the former communists. "There is a difference between east and west here, a difference of political socialization," Chancellor Schröder told Time. "The people of the east, in my experience, expect the state to do more for them than the state can do. From a state perspective, we have created one Germany. But if you look into people¹s hearts, we haven't yet."

Even those hearts apparently beat differently. The tabloid newspaper Kurier reported recently that of 15,000 marriages it checked in Berlin, only 400 involved a spouse from the west and a spouse from the east. More people surveyed by Forsa think that Ossis and Wessis remain strangers than those who believe they have got to know each other well. One in five western Germans would like to see the Wall rebuilt, while only 14% of eastern Germans want a return to the past. "No normal person could expect a drastic change to happen overnight," Helmut Kohl, who was Chancellor when the Wall opened in 1989 and the country was reunified 11 months later, told a German newspaper. "After all, we were divided for 40 years. There were disappointments because expectations were too high."

For Frank Schulz, the East Berlin postman, the disappointments are more than just about pay. The rent on his old apartment is 10 times more than it was in 1989. Free to travel at last, he says he can't afford to make an overseas trip. Like many eastern German women, Schulz¹s wife once held a well-paying job, but now she is unemployed. "Social security and [living] conditions were much better back then," he says.

According to the government Labor Office, about 90% of women in East Berlin held jobs before 1989, compared with only 60% of West Berlin women. Today, almost half of the unemployed in the east are women. "It was the social norm that women worked, which contributed to their self-esteem," says Klaus-Peter Florian, a spokesman for the Labor Office. "They could rely on child care and they could care for themselves in their old age." One by-product of this social upheaval is that shortly after the fall of the Wall, East Berlin women went on a "womb strike." The birthrate in East Berlin, which reached a high of 15.2 births per 1,000 residents in 1982, dropped to 5.8 in 1993 and is only 7.1 today. In contrast, the birthrate in the old western sector is 9.6, virtually the same as it was 20 years ago. What's more, says Annette Simon, a psychologist who treats patients from both east and west, "insecurity about how to live in this society is far greater" among her patients in eastern Berlin. "Until the ¹80s, the borders were very clear: if you transgressed, you would get into certain difficulties," she says. "It's now a very different society with unclear borders and many people feel powerless." The older the person, the more likely they feel anger at seeing the East German state mocked and devalued, she says. Just before the Wall came down, protesters raised a huge banner in East Berlin¹s famed Alexanderplatz that read: "We are the people." In time for the 10th anniversary, there is a new, ironic banner in the same spot: "We were the people."

An example of how radically life has changed is Berlin's police department, which was unified in 1989. At the time of unification, 2,300 top ranking westerners were sent to the east to take over supervision of the force. Of the roughly 12,000 East Berlin policemen serving in 1989, only about half passed the entry requirements for the unified force and survived the purges of communist spies and torturers. Like other Berlin civil servants, they still earn only 86% of the salary of their western colleagues. Such experiences have given rise to a stereotyped view of life in the new Berlin: "the 90% rule." Talk to easterners these days and invariably one complaint arises: 90% of the bosses are westerners, or 90% of the real estate is owned by westerners. No statistics exist to support such prejudices; in fact, roughly the same number of eastern Berliners have moved west as the number of Wessis moving into houses in the east.

Social as well as economic differences still divide the two halves of the city. According to pollster Manfred Güllner, easterners have a higher divorce rate and live in households with more people, while westerners show a greater tendency to live alone. One academic even complained that Ossis speak more grammatically correct German than Wessis. One way the government is trying to help young people to adjust to the new reality is by holding seminars for teachers on how to impart the unvarnished history of the former East Germany, including the feared secret police known as the Stasi. Some teachers were purged from the system because of past work as informers for the Stasi. But Falco Wekentin, who helps train the teachers, says a new generation of educators has emerged that is genuinely interested in establishing the truth. "They want to understand why the system operated the way it did, why it collapsed, and why it fostered so much evil among its people," he says.

Given the ruthlessness of the police state that existed in East Germany, it can be a surprise to see how many eastern Berliners are now expressing an unvarnished nostalgia for their old way of life, a phenomenon jokingly called Ostalgia. Several thousand people turned out for a huge Ostalgia party in East Berlin last month to mark the anniversary of reunification in 1990. The spectators danced to East German rock bands, watched videotapes of old East German television shows, even quaffed Vita Cola, the communist Coke. "People link the parties to a little melancholy and an opportunity to dive back into a part of their personal life that is gone," says Ralf Heckel, who organizes Ostalgia parties across Germany. "People are able to stand apart from the system now."

The German government has spent about $800 billion on reunification in the last decade, much of it to upgrade the collapsing infrastructure in the east. That works out as $12,000 in taxes for every western German man, woman and child. Not surprisingly, having spent such a huge sum, many westerners regard eastern disappointment as ingratitude. "After billions of marks in financial help, they complain about inequality and still vote for the communists," said Kurt Nolte, a teacher in western Berlin. "Haven't they learned anything in 10 years?"

‹With reporting by Brent Goff and Regine Wosnitza/Berlin