Eastern Germany

BERLIN -- Used to a job and independence hardly matched in western German society, women in eastern Germany now are being told that they must become more the docile housewife than the working women they were before unification in 1990.Those who prefer to work are finding jobs scarcer and enrollment in job retraining programs harder to come by.Some 62 percent of the 1.34 million unemployed in eastern Germany are women, but only 43 percent of the participants in training programs are female.

FRANKFURT, Germany - A day after far-right parties made striking gains in state elections in eastern Germany, political analysts cautioned against drawing parallels to the rise of nazism during the Weimar Republic. The spectacle of angry and dispossessed voters turning to the extreme right wing, as they did this past weekend, has an obvious historical echo for Germans. But most experts said these parties would find it difficult to replicate their success in western Germany or on a national level.

BERLIN -- Aso Mohammad's plans to visit a friend recently in the eastern part of this city ended quickly when he got on the subway.He had no sooner sat down than three German teen-agers with crew cuts and olive-green bomber jackets came up to him, demanded that he leave the train and, when he refused, dragged him off at the next station, where they beat him up.After spending the night in the hospital for stitches and a mild concussion, Mr. Mohammad is...

LONDON -- "What are you doing here in Germany," asked the three drunken youths when they ran into Alberto Adriano in Dessau one Saturday night in June. "I live here," Adriano might have replied. But he didn't get the chance. The three were still rhythmically kicking and stamping on his head with their steel-capped boots and chanting "Get out of our country, you ... pig" when the police pulled up and arrested them. Adriano was born in Mozambique, but he came to what was then East Germany in his early 20s and had lived and worked in Dessau nearly half his life.

BONN, Germany -- Germany's political leaders reached a "solidarity pact" over the weekend, seeking to resolve questions of how to divide the huge financial burden of rebuilding eastern Germany. But the agreement's most immediate effect may be to open the way for the Bundesbank to lower interest rates to try to bolster the flagging economy.Many analysts expect two important rates to be lowered Thursday at a meeting of the policy council of the Bundesbank, Germany's powerful central bank.The Bundesbank had been pressing Chancellor Helmut Kohl's government for months to come up with a comprehensive plan to pay for rebuilding the formerly Communist eastern part of the country.

POTSDAM, Germany -- At the Christmas carnival here, Hans-Georg Fesser and his wife Susanne watched their daughters sail high through the air on an amusement park ride, the girls' blond hair whipping around their excited smiles.Then the ride stopped, as surely as the ceremonies and firework-studded celebrations that marked the drive toward German unity over the last year ended with Sunday's re-election of Chancellor Helmut Kohl.Now, both Mr. Kohl and eastern Germans like the Fessers will have to hunker down to manage -- on their vastly different scales -- life in the post-euphoric reunited Germany.

BERLIN -- A Soviet soldier guarding an arms depot in eastern Germany opened fire on Friday on three uniformed German army officers apparently in the act of photographing the Soviet base, wounding one of them in the arm, officials said.It was the first serious incident involving the two armies since Germany was united last year and Soviet forces began to withdraw from what had been East Germany.The Bonn government said that the Soviet action was "in no way justified" and ordered an investigation.

Chilling as it was to read of German youths parading through Dresden last month spouting Hitlerian hate, this phenomenon needs to be seen in the context of jolting change and disruption in the eastern, formerly Communist regions of newly united Germany. Eruptions of nationalism and racism have been unwelcome fellow-travelers of freedom throughout what was the Soviet bloc. Though eastern Germany may be no different, its history is, and therefore the world watches.Unlike West German youngsters, East German youngsters were never taught that their nation bore responsibility for the horror and Holocaust of the Nazi era. Communist indoctrinators put out the line that capitalists and imperialists gave rise to Hitler, and they were all in residence in West Germany.

HELMUT KOHL's dream of breaking Otto von Bismarck's record as the longest-serving German chancellor may remain a dream, unless he can beat Gerhard Schroeder in September."

LONDON -- "What are you doing here in Germany," asked the three drunken youths when they ran into Alberto Adriano in Dessau one Saturday night in June. "I live here," Adriano might have replied. But he didn't get the chance. The three were still rhythmically kicking and stamping on his head with their steel-capped boots and chanting "Get out of our country, you ... pig" when the police pulled up and arrested them. Adriano was born in Mozambique, but he came to what was then East Germany in his early 20s and had lived and worked in Dessau nearly half his life.

HELMUT KOHL's dream of breaking Otto von Bismarck's record as the longest-serving German chancellor may remain a dream, unless he can beat Gerhard Schroeder in September."

TRAVEL THROUGHOUT the eastern part of Germany, the states that until 1990 composed the communist German Democratic Republic, and you see cranes, bulldozers and backhoes everywhere. Autobahns have been widened and resurfaced, railroad track relaid; shopping malls built outside large towns and small; and Dresden's baroque places along the Elbe are being lovingly restored.Behind such infrastructural improvements and a dramatic rise in eastern Germans' living standards (wages have been lifted to 80-90 percent of western levels)

BONN, Germany -- Closing a final chapter of the Cold War, Germany's highest court ruled yesterday that East Germany's spymasters could not be tried in a reunited Germany and that top espionage officials already convicted would not have to serve their sentences.The ruling, on a 5-3 vote, amounted to a virtual amnesty for former Communist spymasters such as Markus Wolf, the shadowy figure behind three decades of East German intelligence operations.Under the decision, the highest-ranking espionage controllers of the former East Germany will no longer be obliged to serve sentences imposed on them or face criminal proceedings, even though many of the agents they ran will remain in jail.

BERLIN -- When a television station announced recently that it would broadcast a special program that evening featuring Lutz Bertram, high ratings were all but guaranteed.The station, ORB, is one of the principal news sources in eastern Germany, and the acid-tongued Mr. Bertram is its most popular moderator.But instead of being treated to one of his biting interviews with the famous, fans were stunned by a rambling confession in which he acknowledged having been an informer for the East German secret police in the 1980s.

EISENHUETTENSTADT, GERMANY -- As the metalworkers' strike spreads across eastern Germany, the steel workers in this city are concerned about more than just pay and hours. For strikers here the question is survival: of their jobs, their plant, their city, their way of life."Fifty thousand people live here," says Brigitte Thieme, a steel worker on the picket line at the gate of the big EKO Steel plant."If this plant closes, 25,000 will leave overnight," Ms. Thieme says, "Eisenhuettenstadt will become a city of retirees, and a dead city."

BERLIN -- Somebody has taken a shot at solving the contentious property ownership problem in eastern Germany: They set fire to the land records.Police reported that arsonists burned up about 1,300 feet of property files stored by the old Communist government of the German Democratic Republic in a castle near Barby, a small town 70 miles southwest of Berlin.Called the most important property files in East Germany, the records are crucial in determining who owns what in most of the old Communist part of Germany.

TRAVEL THROUGHOUT the eastern part of Germany, the states that until 1990 composed the communist German Democratic Republic, and you see cranes, bulldozers and backhoes everywhere. Autobahns have been widened and resurfaced, railroad track relaid; shopping malls built outside large towns and small; and Dresden's baroque places along the Elbe are being lovingly restored.Behind such infrastructural improvements and a dramatic rise in eastern Germans' living standards (wages have been lifted to 80-90 percent of western levels)

There is a direct connection between protest demonstrations in eastern Germany and the unseemly wrangling between Bonn and Washington over the financing of the Persian Gulf war. This week, President Bush and German Finance Minister Theo Waigel sought to put the dispute behind them, with the latter promising prompt payment of Germany's $6.4 billion pledge and Mr. Bush expressing appreciation.Nevertheless, the matter will probably continue to rankle. Many Americans were vocally unhappy over Germany's reluctance to supply troops during the war, even in support of NATO ally Turkey, and about illegal German shipments of chemical warfare materials to Iraq.

BONN, Germany -- Germany's political leaders reached a "solidarity pact" over the weekend, seeking to resolve questions of how to divide the huge financial burden of rebuilding eastern Germany. But the agreement's most immediate effect may be to open the way for the Bundesbank to lower interest rates to try to bolster the flagging economy.Many analysts expect two important rates to be lowered Thursday at a meeting of the policy council of the Bundesbank, Germany's powerful central bank.The Bundesbank had been pressing Chancellor Helmut Kohl's government for months to come up with a comprehensive plan to pay for rebuilding the formerly Communist eastern part of the country.

BONN, Germany -- Economics Minister Guenter Rexrodt delivered a gloomy assessment of Germany's short-term economic prospects yesterday, predicting zero growth this year as the country struggles to overcome the effects of a global slowdown and the task of rebuilding the former communist east."