New Germany's contrasting fortunes

Karl Marx still keeps watch over Chemnitz

By Chris Burns
CNN Berlin bureau chief

BERLIN, Germany (CNN) -- The former East Germany is one huge construction site. Hundreds of billions of dollars in public and private investment have rebuilt roads, railways, homes, offices and factories.

To the naked eye, Germany has come a long way in the 10 years since unification.

Overnight, one of the world's richest nations absorbed 17 million people and a crumbling communist economy.

But despite the shiny new buildings, the new Germany has not come far enough for those among the 17 percent of the eastern German workforce who are unemployed amid the draconian switch to capitalism -- especially among those who grew up and trained under the communist system.

"It was like a hammer on the head, when you were told all your training was for nothing," said Gesine Neubert, a 37-year-old unemployed engineer who has had to settle for administrative jobs in the city of Chemnitz. "My life is better than 10 years ago, but I look for work and it's hard."

QUOTE "It was like a hammer on the head, when you were told all your training was for nothing. My life is better than 10 years ago, but I look for work and it's hard." Gesine Neubert unemployed engineer

Marx watches over

Many Germans also grumble about the so-called solidarity tax taken out of their pay cheques. After all, where did all the money go since East and West became one, the $700 billion in government aid alone to the former East Germany?

In the city the communist regime named after Karl Marx, the huge bust of the father of communism still stands in front of what are now government finance offices. The city has reverted to its pre-communist name of Chemnitz. But Marx remains a symbol of what former East Germany struggles with -- the sometimes crushing legacy of a collapsed system.

Construction projects are creating a new eastern Germany

The rickety little Trabant car, once an omnipresent symbol of a poor and oppressive regime, is an endangered species. Easterners snapped up shiny new cars, the most tangible expression of freedom. In former East Berlin, there are more cars per capita than in the western part of the city, according to government figures.

But underneath this sheen of prosperity is the rumbling of discontent, a decade-long hangover from what was at first a wildly euphoric reunion.

The fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, was the start of a remarkably peaceful and rapid collapse of a regime the Soviets had propped up for four decades.

Concerned there could be an exodus from the East and worried that Moscow might change its mind, then-West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl quickly forged a single nation of 82 million people on October 3, 1990. He promised easterners a blooming landscape.

Youth turn to neo-Nazis

But the euphoria soon evaporated as millions of easterners lost their jobs and all Germans saw the price tag on unification. Today, unemployment in the east is more than double that in the west.

QUOTE But underneath this sheen of prosperity is the rumbling of discontent, a decade-long hangover from what was at first a wildly euphoric reunion.

Companies were sold for as little as one deutschmark to attract investors, some of them unscrupulous carpetbaggers who took advantage of tax breaks and subsidies without providing employment.

Amid the harsh economic resconstruction, frustrated youth have turned to violence and the neo-Nazi movement, blaming the tiny population of immigrants in the east for their problems.

Others have left for better-paying jobs in the west. Some cities, like Chemnitz, lost 15 percent of their populations before rebounding.

"We have a brain-drain and at the same time an outflow of youth," said professor Rudolf Boch of Chemnitz's Technical University. "So even well-functioning industries like machine tools have an older workforce than in western Germany."

But there are some success stories, like a software company in Chemnitz, a husband-and-wife team who turned the technology they developed under communism into a money-making operation with 21 staff that trades with major Western firms.

Their company, Simec, overcame the prejudice against all things eastern, or "ossie."

"When you have an East German stigma, it's sometimes difficult in the financial aspect, " said Simec president Uwe Knorr.

It is a perception that will die hard on both sides of the former Iron Curtain.