Speeding Over The Bumps

By JAMES O. JACKSON BERLIN

For all their Two-plus-Four talks and breakthrough agreements on the future of Germany, political leaders are still running behind events. More quickly than anyone could have imagined, East Germany is being absorbed in the Western market economy. From travel-agency offers in Frankfurt-on-the-Oder to used-car lots filled with Western automobiles in Plauen, the deutsche mark life has arrived. The changes are good and bad, sometimes even ugly, but East Germany, once Erich Honecker's drab land of barracks communism, will never be the same.

The old frontier posts, abandoned, are being dismantled; police and customs officials have disappeared, and not even a speed bump slows traffic between the two Germanys. The Berlin Wall is all but gone, its absence a daily wonder. Most of the 108 streets blocked off in the city in 1961 have been reopened, all guards and controls removed. A drive along the old Wall trace is a journey in discovery: neighborhoods rejoined, old acquaintances renewed. Children frolic among the abandoned guard towers of the former death strip, the resident rabbits scampering for cover -- the only victims of unification. Traffic jams form at former crossing points, while new openings just blocks away go unused. Occasionally, a confused motorist stops, passport in hand, waiting for border guards to emerge from buildings that are locked and shuttered forever. Old habits die hard.

"We are already unified," says Klaus Hartzel, spokesman for the East Berlin municipality. "And," he sighs, "we already have all the problems that go with it." They include stop-and-go traffic, a rising crime rate, high food prices, mass layoffs and an alarming influx of squatters.

But unification also means new life and light, a cornucopia of opportunity, freedom and the little courtesies available wherever the customer is king. "They're so nice," chortled housewife Gerda Hubner as she walked out of a brand new Meyer food market on East Berlin's Leipziger Strasse. She carried a shopping bag with a few meager purchases -- milk, oranges, bread and cheese. She also carried a yellow rosebud. "They're giving these to all the ladies," she said. "They really want our business." The Meyer chain is one of hundreds of West German companies that have moved with lightning speed into a potentially lucrative market: East Germans hold the deutsche mark equivalent of some $70 billion in unspent savings as a result of economic union on July 1.

The logistic marvel of supplying thousands of East German shops with Western products was brought off so smoothly and quietly that hardly anyone noticed. In the days before July 1, thousands of West German trucks rolled through the frontier posts, like so many military convoys, ferrying in goods most East Germans had only dreamed of. Used-car lots sprang up in small towns and along country roads hardly changed since the end of World War II -- time warp over and over again.

But beneath the dash and glitter of the Western commercial invasion not all is well. East Germans, for one, are turning out to be hard sells. Despite rosebuds and smiling salesclerks, they pinch their pfennigs. They are overwhelmed by choices never available before. "Too much, too much," an old woman muttered after emerging from a suddenly well-stocked department store in Erfurt. The only luxury some are indulging in so far is a trip to the West, something denied most of them during 40 years of communism. The internal travel business, by contrast, is suffering. Beaches along the Baltic seashore are empty because East Germans are vacationing abroad; West Germans are not attracted by the relatively spartan accommodations available.

That does not mean West Germans are not visiting. According to polling estimates, at least 10 million of them are planning to go this summer -- nearly equal to the 16 million population of East Germany and maybe more than the place can bear. On the E51 autobahn near Leipzig, the daily traffic jam stretches a standstill nine miles with such regularity that police have mounted a permanent warning sign. In the center of Leipzig, legal parking places are unavailable, as are decent hotel rooms. Anywhere on the sparse East German autobahn -- much of its concrete laid in the Hitler era and barely improved since -- accidents or minor breakdowns cause huge snarls. And there are plenty of accidents -- tiny plastic Trabants traveling at their full-bore 60 m.p.h. are no match for the thousands of Western cars and trucks thundering past at much higher speeds. Road deaths in the East rose 60% in the first six months of 1990, claiming 1,078 souls.

"One of our big problems is law enforcement," says East Berlin's Hartzel. "With the old regime gone, people seem to feel they don't have to obey the laws anymore, not even the speed limits." Crime is surging: burglaries up 66%, muggings nearly 100% and fraud -- practiced on gullible East Germans -- out of control. "The police were there to take care of aggression against the state, and now they don't interfere when people commit aggression against each other," says Hartzel.

Part of the problem is a lack of laws. The communist regime never enacted legislation against certain kinds of social misconduct. For example, West German advertising trucks equipped with monstrous boom boxes are cruising East German towns blaring rock music interspersed with advertising blurbs for such attractions as a tractor pull, of all things -- a disturbance West Germans would never tolerate on their own streets. A policeman on Spandauer Strasse merely shrugged last week when an indignant citizen called his attention to a passing sound truck. "It's not illegal," the officer said. "Nowadays, all that is not prohibited is permitted."

Other Western imports are equally unwelcome. Squatters, sensing a new land of rent-free opportunity, are pouring into East Berlin. "We have 75,000 vacant apartments here, mostly because they are run down and not really habitable," says Hartzel. "Now squatters are moving in, not only from West Berlin but from Amsterdam and all over Europe."

The greatest resentment, however, comes from the West German takeover of a captive market. Western merchandisers have written exclusive supply contracts with East German managers that prohibit them from selling things made in the G.D.R. "It's a real scandal," says Hartzel. "The Western chains are trying to control the market and drive up the prices. So the food prices here, where the average salary is $600 a month, are higher than in West Berlin, where the average is $1,379. That just isn't right."

In the end, the merchandisers themselves may have to pay for rapacity. "I am no economist, but it is obvious to me that if the West merely treats East Germany as a market to unload goods, there will come a collapse that will drive down the deutsche mark, and they will pay," says Ingrid Stahmer, West Berlin's deputy mayor in charge of housing and social services. "There has to be investment. We must put money in, not just take it out."

One reason for Eastern docility in the face of aggressive Western sales forces is 40 years of communism. "It is hard to imagine what the central command system did to people," says Stahmer. "Too many of them just sit and wait for instructions. They lack initiative and judgment. It's a crash course, but they are learning fast."

One notably fast learner is Hartmut Issel, 19, deputy manager of the retail outlet of East Berlin's Cityback Bakery. Formerly part of a huge government- owned combine, the bakery has become a private corporation but is near collapse because almost all its former customers are locked into exclusive deals with Western suppliers. At one point, production fell from 50,000 loaves of bread a day to fewer than 15,000. "But our bread is just as good, and it's cheaper, so we opened our own shop here in the factory," says newly minted free-marketeer Issel. Customers have been flocking in for bread that costs 30% less than in the West. Issel says the bakery is planning to open nine more outlets in the city. And he wants more. "We're going after contacts with small bakery counters in the West," he says. "We have to compete now. If we don't, we lose our jobs."