Word: berlins
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...criticism is partly self-fulfilling. "The westerners tell us, 'You're dumb. You can't do anything right,' " says Jorg Richter, a psychologist in east Berlin. "That makes people emotionally ill." The sense of psychic distress is so widespread that politicians often use the language of clinical psychology to discuss Germany's problems. Zukunftsangst is fear of the future. Wendekrankheit -- turnabout sickness -- describes the general malaise that has accompanied the sharp dislocations associated with unification...
...violence is showing itself most ominously in scattered eruptions of neo- Nazism. Swastikas are turning up on the walls of Berlin and Cottbus and Leipzig, put there not by elderly lost-cause Nazis but by teenagers with crewcuts and black boots. The neo-Nazism is mostly an eastern manifestation, but it shows up in the west as well. In Bonn, the municipal symbol of a reformed and repentant Germany, a sidewalk last month blossomed with a childish scrawl: (swastika sign...
Hostility to foreigners is widespread in the east. Gangs have chased and beaten Vietnamese who were imported by the communist regime as "guest workers" but were the first to be fired last year when factories lost subsidies and began cutting oversize work forces. Berlin's police chief has warned blacks to avoid subways in the eastern part of the city, and foreign workers are seeking refuge in asylum camps in the western part of the country...
...much time and money will be needed. As little as a year ago, they talked of closing the gap between east and west in two or three years. By this spring they were saying four or five. Lutz Hoffmann, director of the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin, puts the recovery time at a decade: "We calculate that about $705 billion of investment will be needed to bring the east up to western standards. That cannot possibly be accomplished in anything less than 10 years...
...initiatives are there. Eastern entrepreneurs, including former communist managers, are adapting with surprising speed and energy to the market system. Detlef Naujokat, 49, a former food and beverage manager for an East Berlin hotel, has launched a $30 million real estate development in the village of Sommerfeld, 19 miles north of Berlin, as full of promise -- and risks -- as any dreamed up in the west. "This is the first time in our lives that we have been able to do anything like this," he says. "We'll subdivide and install the infrastructure first, then sell the plots and help...