All Germany sang of freedom and brotherhood that magical autumn of 89.
At first it was like, oh, you can buy all the things you have all the time seen, and
we could go over the border, and it was like, oh, no, we are free and we can do all the
things we want to do.
Less than a year after the wall fell, East and West Germany were unified.
Under one flag, the West German won. One anthem, West Germany's. One law, that of West Germany.
The West German government, that for 40 years sat in the backwater of one, moved itself
back to the old capital of Berlin to become the first all-German government since the
fall of Hitler's Reich.
The tumultuous loving of 89 was consecrated with the marriage of the two Germanys.
It was a hastily arranged marriage. A shotgun wedding, in fact.
Wolfgang Thieser, an Easterner who is now president of the Bundestag, the law house of
parliament, says the rush to the altar was driven by East Germany's economic collapse.
With the unification of the two German states, there was one successful and one failed country
joining forces. So it was very clear. The West Germans were the teachers, the East Germans
the apprentices. That's why there isn't this sense of things being equal.
And it explains the enduring feeling in the East of being less important.
One of those Westerners, a member of the Legion of Bureaucrats dispatched to the East, was
Wolfgang Nowak, his job to reform a communist little school system in the eastern state
of Saxony.
We couldn't create a convincing school system with having the old teachers who had, before
unification, taught them that capitalism is the work of the devil, that all the Nazis
live in Western Germany, that communism will win the world. I have fired, I'm very famous
for it, I've fired some 10,000 people. This is still on my conscience. If you meet every
10,000, has at least a wife, 20,000, has a family, you think some 40,000, 50,000, 60,000
people still hate me today.
The wave of job cuts was brutal. Faced with better Western products, all this Eastern
factory could get for shoes that cost 30 marks to produce was four marks. And so the shoe
factory and factories everywhere started laying off. Unemployment, all but unknown in communist
East Germany, soared. In the East today, it stands at more than 20 percent.
And unemployment is still twice as high in the East as in the West, and business development
in Eastern Germany is still not stable. We are still lagging behind. So then you don't
get this feeling of being equal. And that explains this enduring sense of being less
important, of lacking in self-confidence.
Western man moved in on Eastern man from top to bottom. Everything down to even the chubby
little man on Eastern traffic lights was targeted to conform to Western standards.
I think the Easterns believed in unification, and the Westerners believed in a sort of take
over. And without knowing, overnight the East Germans became immigrants in their own country.
What they didn't realize is that the first generation of immigrants is a lost generation.
I never expected that at the age of 54 I would no longer be needed. My greatest wish is to
be able to work again.
Krista Kloset, who lives in the Eastern town of Bitterfeld, is a member of that lost generation.
She hasn't had a job since the film factory she worked in closed 10 years ago. From time
to time she gets sent on retraining courses for jobs that never pan out.
Her husband, Johannes, hasn't worked since 87 when he hurt his hip in an accident. He's
on their pension now. Krista too draws money from the state. 10 years later she still gets
government benefits of 61% of full pay. That allows them to live in their own home with
a big garden and enough room to put up their grown children. It's part of the general
safety net extended to 17 million East Germans, even though they hadn't paid into it.
Despite their relative comfort to the jobless closers, unification has been a disappointment.
In 1989 we were promised blossoming landscapes and we see now how that ended up. Of course
it was disappointing for us.
I feel very sad that unemployment is so high in this region, that young people are leaving
and that the whole area is getting grayer.
For the closest sons, hanging out in their parents' basement, it may not be any easier.
In Eastern Germany, the young face bleak prospects of their own. No jobs at home and finding
work in the West is not easy either. If they're unlucky, they could be joining the ranks
of a new lost generation, Germany's youth.
When we come back, the new divide between East and West, money, hundreds and hundreds
of billions of it.
Fingers of James Ennis tackle the works of Viennese and Sarah Sate and soprano Misha
Bruegger-Gosman, rapsodizes on her CD debut, So Much to Tell. Misha Bruegger-Gosman, Isabelle
Bruegger-Gosman, and the projector James Ennis on CBC Records, available wherever fine music
is sold.
I don't get it.
When I'm not fixing, I am building. My Skill X-Drive with high speed and high torque settings
helps with my projects. I like to build things. Whatever I want to build, I can build with
Skill X-Drive.
That's me, Jay, over 20.
Only bits and pieces of the Berlin Wall remain now, preserved to remind Germans of what a
fearsome symbol it once was of their country's great divide and the Cold War's most famous
hotspot.
Where once getting anywhere near it meant getting shot, kids now scroll their names.
These days, Berliners mostly rush by oblivious of how for nearly three decades the Wall ruled
their daily lives.
Around this relic in Potsdamer Square, in what during the Cold War was an empty no man's
land, a whole new world has arisen. Office buildings, shopping centers, theaters, and
coming soon, a new Canadian embassy.
The square which used to be the heart of Berlin's darkness now glitters at night. Money, money,
big money was spent here. But the glitter is an illusion. Many offices, whole buildings
in fact, stand empty for lack of renters. Those bright lights hide more than just emptiness.
They hide a dark taboo.
Klaus von Dohnany headed a blue-ribbon inquiry into unification.
The taboo is that one should not talk to the East Germans how much it cost the West Germans
to build up East Germany because then they could feel like people who always have to
take and not to give, people who receive benefits and don't deal out benefits, etc. But I think
you have to tell the truth.
The truth is that trying to move the decrepit industrial society of communist East Germany
into the modern age has been a bottomless money pit that's pulling down the whole German
economy.
Since unification, salvaging the Eastern States has eaten up close to a staggering $2 trillion
in tax money. That's about what the Canadian government has spent in the last 15 years
governing a country with roughly twice the population of East Germany.
East Germany's chemical industry epitomizes the problem. At its peak, 120,000 people worked
here. When the wall fell, they had been promised their living standards would rise to equal
those in the West. Instead, as their plants collapsed around them, most of them lost their
jobs.
Overnight, Eastern Germany became confronted with the ruthless Western-style capitalism.
We're all used to it. And at the same time, they lost their traditional markets, former
Eastern Europe, because everything broke down.
Closing and demolishing the factories was the easy part. How to replace them and what
to do with the people who once worked here has been more difficult and costly.
Under the communists, thousands of chemical workers lived in these apartment blocks.
As they lost their jobs, they left.
Where once the laughter of children filled the air, there are now only silent ruins.
Hans Walter is one of the handful who stayed. His last job, eight years ago, was demolishing
the factory he had worked in most of his life.
Everything was kaput, just as they're doing around here now. Kaput, yeah, gone, gone,
everything gone.
To him, the destruction of his world seemed as though World War III had started.
I remember as a child during the war, the bombs destroyed everything, just as the bulldozers
are destroying everything now.
It's not what he expected in his old age. All around him, emptiness. Where once 46,000
people lived, only 16,000 remain. It's a social tragedy that has created ghost towns
throughout East Germany, inhabited by the old and the unemployed.
Nearby, signs of recovery, factories where people have good jobs, places that might as
well be on another planet. But what looks like salvation turns out to be just an elaborate
band-aid.
This is the Bayer Aspirin factory. It produces enough of the painkiller to supply all of
Europe and Asia, and makes money out of it.
Based in West Germany, the company balked at building here. Bayer's boss once said,
Bayer, you're so hopelessly polluted, it should be wrapped in a shroud. So why did Bayer change
its mind and come to the newly joined states, or as the states are called in German, Bundesländer?
Georg Frank is Bayer's manager here.
Chancellor Kohl convinced the chemical industry to invest in what we call the neue Bundesländer,
so Bayer decided to invest in Bitterfeld.
So the Chancellor twisted arms?
A little bit he did, yeah.
Former Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the architect of unification, sweetened his arm-twisting
of Western companies with massive subsidies. Bayer got a third of its costs covered.
But here's the rub. Those subsidies were used to build automated plants where robots like
Adolf do most of the work. There are few people to be seen. As a result of robotics, this huge
plant only hired 800 people.
And we had more than 25,000 people applying for the jobs, and we did more than 7,000 interviews.
So you hired 800 people, what happened to the other 24,000?
Some of them got jobs at other companies, some of them moved to West Germany to get a job there,
some of them are still in unemployment.
This went not just for Bayer, but for the whole chemical industry around here.
The East is now set to produce the same volume of chemicals it did before the fall of the wall.
The big difference, it's being done with only one-tenth of the labor force it employed then.
As for the rest, they come to try their luck here at the job search center.
It's brand new with state-of-the-art computers, but the same old problem.
Too many applicants chasing too few jobs.
Unemployment benefits and pensions for the old is where most of the money goes in propping up the East.
Nearly half the population is on social support. Unemployment benefits are not only generous in Germany,
they go on for years.
That's one of the problems. Our pressure on people in Germany is comparatively low.
We think it's more social and more fair if you sort of give the people the money to live
and then wait until they make a decision to work.
Here in West Germany there is a growing unease about the subsidies to the East.
Nestled in the West German countryside just 30 kilometers from the old border with the East.
Duderstadt, a picture postcard town with a 700-year history and modern problems.
Many people here feel that bailing out the East with their taxes has cost them too much.
All German individuals and companies pay a solidarity tax that helps pay for the subsidies
and social benefits in the East.
Frank Günther, who runs his family's road construction business in Duderstadt,
feels it's time to rethink the bailout for the East.
When we see how much money has flowed to the East in such a short time,
we have to say that it is the West that was neglected.
The solidarity tax was the right thing to do in the beginning.
I was willing to help get something new going, no question about it.
They said it would last three, four, maybe five years, but it's been 15 years now
and it's incomprehensible to me that it's still not finished.
In my opinion, that no longer has anything to do with solidarity.
Most of the company's road building equipment is standing idle.
Günther says he can't compete with construction companies just down the road
that benefit from general estate subsidies because they happen to be located
across the old border in the new Eastern states.
Much of the work on roads in Germany, such as this custom brick cutting,
is highly labor intensive and therefore costly.
What Günther particularly resents is that the Eastern companies can get away
with paying their workers 20 to 30 percent less than he is obliged by law
to pay his own.
Even if he were to hire Easterners to work on jobs in the East,
he'd still have to pay the Western wage scales simply because his company
is based in the West.
Frank's father Hans, who founded the business, that's an outrage.
We were shut out of the market through trickery.
I have to say it's trickery. It has nothing to do with a normal market.
That trickery, according to the Günthers, has not only cut them out of the East
by making them pay higher wages, it's also eaten into the road building business
they had before unification in the West.
That's because their Eastern neighbors used subsidies to lure away 50 local businesses.
The flight of those companies to the East cut Duderstadt's tax base in half
and reduced money available for road building.
Hope dies last, of course.
Well, I always say that I belong to the survivors.
Right now we've really landed at the bottom.
It doesn't go much lower or we'd have to shut down.
Back in East Germany in the town of Bitterfeld, a different business,
with similar complaints about unfair business practices.
Rainer Thiele, too, runs a family business started by his parents.
My mother was actually the inventor of this classic torte cake mix.
But he didn't exactly inherit the Kathe cake mix company.
The communists nationalized the plant and the family hung on for decades managing it.
Then, after unification, he bought it and expanded it.
He resents how some Western businesses have behaved in the East.
Western businesses arrived here bankrolled with so-called Eastern subsidies.
And then after their special five-year agreement ended,
many of them shut down and headed back West.
His business is thriving.
The cake mixes are a big seller in the East because many East Germans
remember them fondly from the old communist days.
In the West, though, Thiele says his sales in Western Germany
are being hurt by a backlash against the flow of money to the East.
We're at the point at which tensions are rising between the East and West Germans.
And now they're saying, don't buy any Eastern products.
The more Eastern products you buy, the more our jobs are in danger.
And the same game is played in reverse.
The same is said in East Germany.
But not all the friction between East and West is about money and jobs.
Sometimes it's just about identity, as in the Ampelmann affair.
Ampelmann is the little, rolly-poly guy with the funny hat
who adorned East German pedestrian walk signs.
After unification, the authorities started replacing him
with the West's leaner, leggier version.
All these years later, though, the Ampelmann is still around,
coexisting with his Western counterparts.
In fact, he has become an icon.
He's on lamps, he's on T-shirts, on keychains, on you name it.
For many East Germans, the Ampelmann became a symbol
for the identity they feel they lost.
Faced with his popularity, the politicians backed down
and brought the Ampelmann back.
No big deal, just a small gesture to acknowledge
that there still is such a thing as an East German identity.
The unease about unification exists on both sides of the German divide,
so much so that one in five Germans would like nothing better
than to bring back the Berlin Wall.
When we come back, a different ghost of German history,
a specter older than the wall, the troubling rise of neo-Nazism.
The spectacular glass dome of the Reichstag symbolizes
both the transatlantic and the German
and the German democracy.
The strength of that democracy is now being put to the test
by the government's campaign to rein in the spiraling cost of reunification.
Down under the dome, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder has been firm.
He's staking his political future on his economic reforms.
In Zukunftschancen, what we began together will pay off.
In the form of future opportunities in freedom and wealth
for our children and their children.
The challenge to Schröder comes not from the opposition in this chamber,
it comes from opposition outside.
For Germans, it's been a summer of discontent.
Every Monday, for weeks on end, there have been left-wing demonstrations
against the government.
Down with Hartz IV, they chanted in Halle, a city in eastern Germany.
Hartz IV is the most controversial part of the reform program,
a law that will cut unemployment and other welfare benefits.
The aim of the cuts is to make life uncomfortable enough
to force people to take a job.
The government has been trying to make it difficult for people
to work, but the aim of the cuts is to make life uncomfortable enough
to force people to take a job.
But for the demonstrators, Hartz IV has it the wrong way around.
Here in the east, this union official is saying,
it's not the will to work that's missing, but work itself.
And if those jobs are missing, the demonstrators here believe,
not of the workers, nor even all that much of the capitalists,
but of the politicians and of the way it all went wrong after 89.
For Annette Loeser, her husband Frank Stadtko, and many others here,
there is a nostalgia for what might have been.
In 1989, there was great optimism, a joy that we are going to take control of this.
We are the people. We are now going to shape a new East Germany.
There were all sorts of people who would have liked to have kept East Germany,
but in a reformed way, who saw the good parts of the state as worth keeping.
And that which wasn't so good could have been improved.
I would have liked to have kept a reformed East Germany.
Shall we put it in here?
No, I don't think so.
That was the dream?
At least that was the dream at first.
But increasingly, a majority wanted quick money and quick consumer goods,
and the new freedom was sold out for bananas and fast cars.
Right, please.
Annette and her husband certainly don't have much use for the new, unified Germany.
Neither of them works. She is on long-term sick leave from teaching.
Frank has been unemployed for six years.
He was a Communist Party organizer in the old days.
After his party job disappeared, he went back to his old job as a welder.
But the state-owned company he worked for was privatized and then closed,
confirming all of Frank's prejudices against capitalism.
Under the guise of capitalism, the bosses allowed themselves to make the worst kinds of threats.
If someone complained, they could be told to pack their bags and go.
But then East Germans of old might have had a hard time imagining the comforts
Frank and Annette have in a capitalist society without working.
They have a three-bedroom apartment with all the amenities all to themselves,
something that was rare under the Communists.
They also get a clothing allowance, health care coverage, and discounts on theater tickets.
I am living well enough. I don't go hungry.
I can afford the odd hobby, but I do have to be careful.
I am not a particularly sad, unemployed person. I keep myself busy. That I can do.
I don't feel poor. What worries me is that we won't be able to afford to make certain things possible for our children.
For example, my son's piano lessons. I don't consider it a luxury.
Culture should be available for everyone.
That culture for everyone includes 80-year-old Augustine's piano lessons, which are subsidized by the state.
There is an irony in their situation.
They probably live in greater comfort without working than they might have working in the socialist society they still yearn for.
Many East Germans share a sense of disillusionment.
It's not just the joblessness.
It's that even having a job doesn't get them what they were promised at unification,
a standard of living as high as that of West Germans.
Now they're hearing from their own, from politicians like Wolfgang Thieser and Easterner himself,
that they should compare themselves not to West Germans, but to Poles, Czechs and Hungarians
who have had to work their way out of the communist morass without West Germany as a sugar daddy.
I always tell people it's no good just to look to the West. That's not the only yardstick.
Look to the East as well. That's a second yardstick.
That can be helpful because it makes you recognize the scope of the problems and the difficulties you have.
That, though, doesn't wash too well with this crowd in Halle.
In Halle there are no jobs. I would go on the streets myself as well.
I'm forced to accept jobs which are not there.
This is an absorbed theatre play which we are living now.
This is the reason why people go on the streets.
The demonstrations go on. As both the weather and the political climate get colder, though,
there are fewer and fewer demonstrators.
But the disillusionment keeps on growing, and not just on the political left.
The East German discontent has been a boon to the parties of the far-right.
There have been impressive gains in recent elections, but the influence is nowhere near that of the anti-immigrant right
of France or Austria, or for that matter, Holland.
If, however, the flow of money to the East should end up draining the Western cash cow
and impoverish the whole country, then all bets would be off.
The alarm bells are already ringing.
In September, Germans in the eastern state of Saxony took to the streets to protest
the strong showing of the extreme right National Democratic Party in state elections.
The party won 9% of the vote, almost beating out Schroeder's Social Democrats.
Nazis raus! Nazis out, they yelled.
Nazis raus! Nazis out!
The chant followed the 12 newly elected deputies of the MPD, as the party is known by its German initials,
as they arrive to take their seats in the Saxon parliament.
The first time in 35 years the far-right has won any seats in a German legislature.
The MPD is not a nobody of a party any longer, he says.
The MPD are called neo-Nazis not just on the streets.
The government tried before the election to have the MPD banned under a law that makes it illegal
to spread Nazi propaganda, but it failed.
I am not a neo-Nazi. I protest this expression.
I am a National Democrat who wants to work for Germany with all his might.
We are working for a better Germany. We are not neo-Nazis.
Peter McLeod and his wife Andrea are both MPD stalwarts.
He is in the party's executive in Saxony-Anhalt.
She recently won a seat on the town council of Halle.
They say they stand for jobs for Germans first, ahead of immigrants.
I was called a Nazi slut when I was out collecting signatures,
but there were also some pretty good reactions from people who said,
yeah, we'll support you, we will give you our signature.
This is the ward Andrea represents.
It's an impoverished area, fertile ground for the extreme right.
The secret of the MPD's current success seems to be that it has watered down its message
and disassociated itself from the violence of the far-right skinhead past.
We have no skinheads. No skinheads. Not quite true.
This skinhead demonstration, for instance, was organized by a shadowy organization
calling itself the Free Resistance Movement.
But among the demonstrators, MPD flags and MPD slogans such as
no tax money for synagogue construction.
That message, strictly speaking, is not anti-Semitic.
Just wink, wink, support for the separation of church and state.
It's part of the MPD's double-track strategy to fight against the
it's part of the MPD's double-track strategy of maintaining its skinhead support
while attracting a broader following with a kinder, gentler image.
We are open to everyone.
The profile of our members goes from an unemployed welfare recipient to professors, doctors.
So we are a party of the people.
Politicians are scared of us. I don't know why.
Maybe they think we're going to pull a new Hitler out of our pocket.
Every German will deny that there is a danger of neo-Nazis.
The danger is that we get used to them, and the danger is that it's not politically correct
to think why they are successful.
And they are successful because a lot of East Germans think they have no voice.
They are denied a voice, and therefore they are trying to look for new voices.
But the new voices of the extreme right are, of course, an echo of old voices,
the voices of the Hitlerian past.
It doesn't take too many of them to raise questions about the resilience of German democracy.
But then I also say that the democratic system in Germany as a whole is so stable,
so well anchored, that these right-wing extremist parties are not a genuine danger.
The challenge must be taken seriously, but one shouldn't dramatize it in the wrong way either.
But democracy could be in trouble in Germany.
After the fall of the wall, it had a promising start in East Germany.
In the first election, an astonishing 99% of them voted.
Two years ago, it was down to 45%, and it could get worse.
People think the actual democratic system is not able to solve, or helping to solve, the German problems.
And then the German democratic system is at stake.
It doesn't mean that we will have a new Hitler or something like this.
The trust in democracy will decline.
When we come back, why what's happening in Germany is not just a German problem,
how it could affect the rest of Europe.
And Stalin is struggling.
You look around both sides of the old divide now, and you can see the exuberance of unification.
Berlin looks sleek. It is a city reborn.
All dressed up for its dream role as the political center of a united Germany at the heart of a consolidated Europe.
But the costs of integrating the East have left the federal government floating on a river of red ink.
The private sector too is in trouble.
Just about every day brings bad news.
Factories closing, companies moving abroad, big layoffs.
No, not just in the East, but also in the West. The cash cow that's been bearing out the Easterness.
And that threatens to sink the dream of a new Germany, and much more.
Our responsibility is more than just a German. It's a European responsibility.
We are really the integrator in Europe. I mean, we are the center country.
We are really the integrator. If we don't function, Europe is not going to function. There's no question about it.
Germany is Europe's powerhouse. If the Germans should falter, the rest of Europe would suffer too.
Not just economically, but politically.
The glue that holds the 25 countries of the European Union together is mainly the dream of prosperity.
That dream should fail so inevitably with the cohesion of Europe.
Germany may be in trouble, big trouble, but it is not about to fall apart.
It is still a rich country with a resourceful people.
Occasionally I remind people that we in Germany are indeed living in historical terms in a state of happiness.
The citizens unified and united in one country, in borders which no one disputes,
at peace with our neighbors, surrounded by friends.
When in German history has this ever been the case?
That's what I call an historical fortune for us.
If you want to see where Germany is at now, Durestaat's monument to unification is the place to look.
I think there is an invisible wall. It is a new wall. It has a new border line.
I think at the first time of history a country became divided by unification.
It will take another 15 years, so altogether that will make 30 years.
To an individual life that is a long time, but in the history of a country that isn't long at all.
15 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germans are still dancing, still reaching out towards each other,
hoping that once the bruises of their encounter have healed,
they may yet end up in the embrace of an harmonious union.
For CBC News correspondent, I'm George Lezinger in Berlin.
We'll be back after the break.
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Because I am now called a symbol, I feel that I have a responsibility to do more in my life
and future.
Beyond Tears, Sunday on CBC News correspondent.