Germans still in two minds about unity

TWENTY years on since the two Germanys became one there is a popular phrase that sums up the divide that still runs through this country.

• Many Germans, both from the east and west, seem oblivious, if not hostile, to the historical significance of the Berlin Wall today. Photograph: Getty Images

Die Mauer steht noch immer - in den Kpfen (the wall still stands… in the mind) is the phrase and it accurately sums up the feelings of a nation of two halves, each regarding the other with suspicion, envy and often hatred.

While the political elite will celebrate reunification with fireworks over the Brandenburg Gate this week and utter the usual banalities about economic achievements, liberty, progress and pride, ordinary East and West Germans regard this seismic event in world history with disdain.

Stereotypes are not accurate historical barometers but neither can they be ignored. To most Wessis or westerners, their eastern cousins - Ossis - are workshy, welfare addicts, unable to wean themselves from the teat of the state, prone to self-pity and easy prey for neo-Nazis.

In return, Wessis are branded arrogant, carpet-bagging predators who stripped the best out of the German Democratic Republic while leaving a nation of 17 million to sink or swim in the harsh currents of a capitalist sea. Either way, there is little love lost between two tribes united by ethnicity and little else.

Wessis rarely marry Ossis. Many Wessis proudly boast they have never visited the former east and have no intention of doing so. The cities and towns of the GDR are as alien now to many as they were when guarded by the wire and mortar of the Berlin Wall.

Despite the colossal sums of money hurled at East Germany to rebuild its rotted infrastructure, it remains blighted by high unemployment, low birth rates, an ageing population and a continuing haemorrhage of citizens. Two million have left since reunification and around 100 a day continue to make the exodus west.

In Eisenhttenstadt, for example, a former steel and coal centre, the population has shrunk from 60,000 to virtually half that today. The jobless rate is around 20,000 and young people a rarity.

It is part of the vast swathe of the former East Germany which has morphed into a German version of Italy's Mezzogiorno - its impoverished south. Like the disconnect there between citizens of the north, so it is between east and west in Germany.

Decisions taken 20 years ago by well-meaning politicians had devastating economic consequences for industries, most of which never recovered.The then Chancellor Helmut Kohl's decision to tie the East German mark to the D-Mark of the west was catastrophic; at a stroke the move made the area's exports 400 per cent more expensive. Then there was the work of the Treuhand agency, which was given the job of privatising east German state-owned industry. This translated into a mass sell-off to the west, which often simply meant mass closures. No wonder that 20 per cent of East Germans in a recent poll said they wished the Berlin Wall was still standing. Little wonder, too, with sentiments like these, that straight-talking Brandenburg state premier Matthias Platzeck said German re-unification in 1990 was not a merger of equals but instead an "Anschluss" or annexation.

It is the huge size of the payouts to the east which dismays westerners so much. Berlin has thrown 1.3 trillion into rebuilding a country whose roads were little better than cart tracks, whose buildings had not been renovated since the end of the Second World War, and whose lignite-fired industries polluted the land on an unimaginable scale.

Now East Germany boasts some of the best autobahns; great gleaming tracts of asphalt that wind through the plains of Mecklenburg and the hillier reaches of Thuringia and Saxony. Trouble is, not many people use them. They are often, literally, roads to nowhere. And the coal mines are closed, along with the industries they fed. While there are no ghost towns as such, there are numerous places where the desolation is palpable; some cities have even torn down the grotesque workers' apartment blocks that sprouted like concrete mushrooms on the outskirts to allow the forest and the weeds to reclaim the land.

Last month, a poll was published in Stern magazine which showed that 67 per cent of easterners feel they do not live in a unified country, whatever the politicians say or the history books record. Only 25 per cent of those polled said they felt like "one people" with their western counterparts.

Premier Platzeck believes the fault lies with a western system that tried too much shock therapy too quickly, and killed the patient. "Everyone in the west is baffled that easterners mourn the old days," he said. "They ask: 'Why don't you feel like you're part of one country after all the money we spent for you?' My answer to them is always: 'Just imagine you're from a society that completely disappears and there's nothing left'. You would also feel to a certain extent homeless. Some people got back on their feet but many never did."

Of course there are pockets of success. Leipzig and Dresden are doing nicely, with new airports, burgeoning tourism and car firms like VW investing heavily. Some of the Baltic towns lure tourists in record numbers. But deep down, as well as deep in the heart, reunification remains a work in progress that has a long way to go. Perhaps it is best summed up by pointing out that not a single blue-chip company in Germany has a single Ossi on its board.Not a single football club from the East plays in the Bundesliga. Although chancellor Angela Merkel is an Ossi there are no other Ossis in her cabinet. Even Merkel pines for the old days. She still does her laundry with an East German liquid detergent, prepares East Germans' favourite Soljanka soup (made with sausages and pickle juice) - and can't fight the urge to stockpile goods she sees at the supermarket.

"Sometimes I can't stop myself from buying things just because I see them - even when I don't really need them," the 56-year-old Merkel told magazine SuperIllu ahead of today's celebrations.

Referring to former times under communism when people would stand in line for hours to buy a few bananas or oranges, she added: "This inclination to hoard is deeply ingrained in me, because in the past, in times of scarcity, you took what you could get." Old habits die hard.