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12

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 1990

New Germany

Continued from Page 10

the East Germans, business
has rarely been better.
There are other revealing
details beneath the headlines.
I talked to Prof. Thomas
Kramer-Badoni, a professor
at the University of Bremen,
specializing in urban living
and urban planning. He is in-
volved in two widely diver-
gent experiments: members
of his seminar, including his
wife and himself, have taken
a pledge to manage without
their automobiles for half-a-
year. He forsees that German
vehicular traffic, already log-
jammed without the predic-
table growth of East German
car ownership, will soon come
to a crunching halt.
Mr. Kramer-Badoni also
acts as a consultant to an ex-
perimental station in the
Ruhr valley, which is attemp-
ting, as a micro-project, the
detoxification of a polluted
former factory site. The pro-
cess is long and laborious.
"What will it take," the pro-
fessor asks, "to clean up a
whole country, soiled by
40-odd years of environmen-
tal neglect?"
There is a feeling of job in-
security on both sides of the
former border; of course more
pronounced in the East. At
our conference, a woman ar-
tist, the wife of a professor,
was optomistic. She foresaw
new outlets for her hand-
crafted jewelry in the West.
But one West German craft-
sman I spoke to was
dismayed; he feared precisely
that kind of competition:
"They will undersell us," he
darkly predicted.
At the conference we also
heard of mass dismissals at
schools and universities,
because some of the faculty
were doctrinaire communists
or because institutions were
overstaffed. But on quite a dif-
ferent level an auto mechanic,
performing an emergency
repair on a friend's car, feared
that "semi-skilled" East Ger-
man mechanics would replace
him and, in fact, could
weaken West Germany's
labor
.movement, re-
established with the help of
American union leaders after
World War II.
But not only Germans are
affected: On my flight to
Hamburg I was seated next to
a woman originally from East
Germany, but now a bilingual
secretary in Newark, N.J. She
had escaped from East Ger-
many in the 1960s; as a
result, her home had routine-
ly been confiscated by the
state. She was on the way to

her former home in Rostock,
attempting to reclaim it by
engaging a lawyer in
Hamburg.
Foreign workers now in
Germany may be affected. A
"guest worker" from Turkey
started a conversation with
me in a McDonald's near
Hamburg's railroad station,
one of the few blots on this
bustling, efficient, function-
ing, attractive metropolis. "I
hear ugly words," he said,
"Auslander, raus (out with
you foreigners). We have
enough troubles of our own in
this new Germany and we
don't need you anymore."

Such voices are not isolated.
Both major parties, con-
fronted still with an ongoing
trek from east to west and
an influx of men and women
claiming German descent,
are considering the convening
of a constitutional convention

Foreign workers
now in Germany
may be affected.

in order to restrict Germany's
constitutional right of
asylum, currently the most
generous anywhere.
This revisionism has
already had consequences:
the admission of Russian
Jews to Germany has slowed
to a trickle. Die Zeit, a week-
ly published in Hamburg,
called that a "shameful act."
Which, of course, it is, a
shadow on Germany's gleam-
ing future.
Gunter Grass, one of Ger-
many's most prestigious
authors, has, in fact, argued
that a federation of the two
states, rather than their
unification, would have been
preferable.
On balance, however, I feel
that the new Germany will
not lapse into the errors of the
old. Are there revisionists in
Germany? Of course! But if I
were to walk into a high
school or university class in
any part of Germany — I've
guest-lectured in many parts
— and enjoin students to fight
for the lost territories in the
east, for Breslau or
Konigsberg, they would roar
with laughter.
And here in the city of
Hamburg — and certainly
among its university students
— I found a future vision not
of a Germanized Europe but
of a European Germany. ❑

