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Kramer vs. Kramer

Beasts from the East, Pests from the West

Reunification may have been almost 16 years ago, but Germany is still just as divided as ever. The lazy easterners hate the arrogant westerners -- and the feeling is mutual.

Remember all those newspaper headlines and television spots in November 1989 about the fall of the Berlin Wall? What about the accounts not quite a year later of the reunification of Germany? It was a wonderful feel-good story -- finally some good news after decades of Cold War.

The only problem is it never happened. It was one of the best-orchestrated non-events of all time. Oh sure, the Wall no longer severs Berlin into two, equally untenable parts, but the iron divide is still in existence.

West Germans have little more than disdain for their poor, post-communist eastern cousins. They're lazy; they whine about everything; their fashion sense is appalling; and they cost a ton of money. "Why was East German toilet paper so rough?" goes one joke about the "Ossis", or easterners. "So every last asshole would be red."

And the Ossis? Having left behind their post-unification meekness, they now dish it right back. The "Wessis" are arrogant; they are materialistic and self-absorbed; they are shallow; and they have no concept of solidarity whatsoever. "What's the difference between a western necktie" -- not a favored garment in former East Germany -- "and a cow's tail?" goes one joke about Wessis. “The cow’s tail completely covers the asshole.”

In short, nearly 17 years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and it's more clear than ever that the post-reunification national love fest never happened and both the Ossis and the Wessis are now equipped with the much discussed "wall in the head." Many eastern Germans feel that the country they grew up in was basically annexed into West Germany with everything east chucked on the trash heap of history -- the geo-historical equivalent of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Eastern Germans pine for their close-knit family life, cuddly Trabant family sedans, sawdust-dry crackers, and even canned Trabant exhaust -- a collective malaise known as Ostalgie -- or nostalgia for the East. The current razing of the former East German parliament building -- the Palast der Republik -- is, for many former east Germans, just one more indication that the evil Wessis simply have no respect for eastern Germany.

For Wessis, though, even raising the possibility that some things might have been better in East Germany smacks of ingratitude. The Wessis point to the some €1.25 trillion that have flowed eastwards since reunification -- money which has gone toward completely rebuilding eastern German infrastructure, jacking up pension payments and installing a social net that, while not quite as generous as the western benefit package, immediately granted eastern Germans a lifestyle that other Warsaw Pact waifs could only dream of. Still, unemployment remains double western German levels and hundreds of thousands have fled the region for better job and job-training prospects in the west. Many eastern German cities are almost completely devoid of young people.

Tongue-in-cheek calls for the Wall to be rebuilt come from both sides, and are tinged with bitterness. And the prejudices show little sign of disappearing any time soon. Just last year a trendy, self-absorbed teenager was overheard complaining in a Berlin pool hall about “those lazy Ossis.” The boy was asked his age. “I’m 15,” he said, meaning born in 1990 -- a year after the Wall came down.

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