Voices Of East Berlin

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I am in the Journalisten-Haus, a kind of press club across the street from the train station. The speaker is editor of a youth paper for politics, culture and economic topics -- circulation 1 million. He is in his 50s, having ^ a sandwich with Reimund, 39, the press agent for the huge, state-owned Zeiss optics and microcomputer industries.

"It's a revolution for me and for him, a continuing daily revolution," says Reimund. "You don't know what the day before was. But 40 years is 40 years . . . I don't want reunification. This land is this land. But people want cooperation with the Federal Republic. We are Germans and they are Germans. And not all is bad here the past 40 years. Our people are more advanced than Poland. Poland wants capitalism, not us. We have more welfare, more consumer goods. There are no better-fed refugees in the world than the ones who went to the West. They went to West Germany in cars."

It is evening, and together we walk toward the border, passing by the embassy of the U.S.S.R., a huge imperial palace with a bust of Lenin bathed in subdued light.

"Now it is the hope to make this country better," says the editor. "Yet ours is only a hope because there are many problems. Daily we are learning a new life. We can write differently now. Journalism in this land is now powerful . . . Every day a new revelation. Yes, the country is in shock. But not so much shock that there is no action. Daily there is action."

For an American, the biggest surprise is to hear Germans speak with fear of Germany. "Helmut Kohl said a united Germany is a capitalist Germany. But a capitalist Germany is a dangerous Germany for Europe," Reimund continues. "Because the power is so big that people in other countries say this country, this united Germany, is a danger for peace in Europe. Because the history in this country was capitalism. A big, powerful Germany is an aggressive capitalism."

As we speak, we pass the U.S. embassy, smaller than the U.S.S.R.'s, less imposing, and, with its picture-window display of satellite views from outer space, it seems even less relevant to these new East Europeans.