East Berlin

BERLIN -- With the recession easing, employment increasing and inflation at bay, the economic wounds of German reunification are healing smoothly. Yet, five years after the Berlin Wall came down, east and west Germans seem as divided as ever, sneering at each other across a psychological gulf that isn't likely to narrow soon.Today is the anniversary of the moment the wall was opened to hordes of East Germans, a moment that symbolized the collapse of the Communist regime and reunification of East and West Germany.

BERLIN -- They came as brutal conquerors. Then they posed as liberators, only to betray the cause by overstaying their welcome and helping prop up an infamous wall.And even as the last of 380,000 departing Russian soldiers said goodbye to eastern Germany yesterday after 49 years of uneasy occupation, they left an odd, ambivalent legacy: barracks stripped of every item of value; fields polluted by jet fuel and kerosene; a black market in surplus hats, medals and weaponry; grandiose monuments to a bygone Soviet empire; a lingering east German taste for left-wing politics; and, strangest of all, hundreds of stray cats.

New York. -- The last time I saw Berlin, less than a year ago, it was pleasantly boring. The wall and the tension were down, the feeling that perhaps tomorrow we die was gone, and the ''capital'' of a unified Germany was coming back down to earth after more than 40 years as a ''flashpoint'' or ''tinderbox,'' the place where World War III would begin.So President Clinton was in the wrong place at the wrong time last week to get what he wanted (and needs): a flashy rhetorical foreign-policy triumph that might have reminded Americans of the dangerous excitement when President Kennedy looked over the wall between West Berlin and East Berlin in 1963, or even the lesser moment in 1987 when President Reagan shouted that Soviet President Gorbachev should tear down the wall.

Berlin -- At dinnertime a few nights ago, my wife and I stopped by the Moscau Restaurant, the place on Karl Marx Allee where East Berlin's communist elite would meet for a treat. The giant Sputnik was still on the roof and, in fact, the restaurant looked better than it used to -- candles, crisp linens and gleaming samovars made the main room more inviting than it ever was in the bad old days.But no one was there. A lone waitress looked across the room at us, longingly. We shook our heads.

BERLIN -- Mrs. Mustafa Akyol, a stout Turkish matron from the Black Sea town of Trabzon, waters her flourishing garden on a traffic island that once belonged to Communist East Germany.A jolly woman in a beaded Muslim head cover and a shapeless dress that reaches to her toes, Mrs. Akyol grins happily as she talks about her crops through impromptu interpreters.She grows corn, beans, onions, sweet potatoes, sunflowers, tomatoes and herbs on this tiny plot.Mrs. Akyol's garden is one of the more prosaic enterprises that have sprung up along the strip where the Berlin Wall used to be. Here in Kreuzberg, Berlin's equivalent of New York's lower East Side, some anarchist enclaves have been settled in for years, tucked into oddball patches of East Berlin once left outside the wall.

BERLIN -- In the dear dead days of the East German Republic, the more ironic socialist burghers called the Palast der Republik "Palazzo Prozzo," an Italian pun that meant Pretentious Palace, or Palace of Pretentions.The Volkskammer, the rubber-stamp Parliament, met in the Palace of the Republic, and its members pretended they were really representatives of the people.Nobody paid much attention to them because everybody knew they were powerless and irrelevant. The leaders of the Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (DDR)

BERLIN -- At the big electronics plant in east Berlin, Bernhard Doering now takes ginseng tea in the morning with his new Korean colleague, Woongil Kim."It's one of our new tastes," Mr. Doering says.East Berlin's electronics workers have been acquiring these new tastes since Korea's global Samsung conglomerate took control of the plant at the first of the year.Hard work may be one of the new Samsung flavors."If you drink ginseng tea, you can do more work," says Mr. Kim. "Ten hours a day or more."

I t's been nearly three years since the Wall came tumbling down. Still, it's the first thing most American tourists want to see as soon as they hit Berlin.All they're likely to find are bits and pieces. One small part of the infamous barricade remains standing at the Potsdamer Platz. It's mostly a tourist attraction at what was Checkpoint Charlie, the famed border crossing from West to East Berlin.Vividly painted on what was its west side, drab concrete on the other, the historic barrier is almost lost in the colorful souvenir stands offering everything from framed wall fragments to secondhand East German and Russian officer hats, passport stamps to German Democratic Republic license plate tags.

BERLIN -- Sgt. Jerry Brooks can't help grinning when he thinks of the irony. His unit's tanks -- the symbol of Western resolve to hold this city during the hottest days of the Cold War -- will not be allowed back into the United States until every bit of German soil is washed off."Department of Agriculture regulations against pests. It makes sense but is kind of funny. None of the soil we defended is allowed back," said the 27-year-old tank commander, who was born in Baltimore and grew up in Lynchburg, Va.Sergeant Brooks and his three-man crew have spent the last two weeks taking their M-1A1 tanks apart, meticulously cleaning them, then putting them back together.

BERLIN -- On Buddha's birthday, Vietnamese here gather in their storefront temple on Krefelderstrasse to worship before an altar bedecked with fruit and flowers, silk lotus blossoms, burning candles and smoking incense.They sing and chant the sutras, eat spring rolls and curries, laugh with their children, sit under the old flag of South Vietnam, and talk of their lost homeland.The drapes are drawn and Berlin is shut out for a while. Vietnamese are under considerable pressure in Germany, especially in East Berlin and what used to be Communist Germany.