November 1, 2001	Thursday	Shaba’an 14, 1422

BERLIN: Twelve years after the Berlin Wall fell there are only a few remnants of the Cold War barrier that once cut the city in half.

But even though Berlin was reunited physically and politically amid a wave of euphoria after the Wall collapsed in 1989, bitter divisions have plagued the German capital for the last decade.

Many Berliners in the formerly communist east do not like their brethren in the former capitalist enclave of West Berlin because they view them as cold, arrogant know-it-alls. The “Wessies”, for their part, disparage “Ossies” as lazy, ignorant and ungrateful.

“A lot of frustration and disdain have built up between easterners and westerners,” said Gero Neugebauer, a political scientist at Berlin’s Free University. “The mentality is very different. There’s still a wall in people’s minds.”

Economic, social, and cultural gaps remain even though the federal government has pumped more than $100 billion into the eastern region since 1990. The local elections in Berlin earlier this month made the divide even more obvious.

The reform communist Party of Democratic Socialism, successors to the Communist party that built the Berlin Wall in 1961, won 48 per cent of the vote in east Berlin — more than four other western parties combined.

To the horror of west Berliners, the PDS won all five eastern districts. But it struggled in the seven western districts, winning just seven per cent of the vote. Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s Social Democrats were the top party in the west with 34 per cent but were a distant second to the PDS in the east with 23 per cent.

Colour maps of voting patterns showed the PDS, portrayed in bright red, dominating all the eastern districts with the SPD, in a lighter shade of red, and the conservative Christian Democrats, in black, sweeping the western districts. “Berlin is still a divided city,” said a Stuttgarter Zeitung newspaper editorial after the election.

Aside from the renewed political split, Berlin is badly torn by divergent attitudes and even mating habits. Envy, resentment, and distrust are on display when easterners and westerners talk about each other.

When it comes to marriage, Berlin is divided by a Cold War that lingers in bedrooms. City marriage records show that only about one in 30 couples were east-west partnerships.

“Westerners are always pushing themselves into the spotlight and they’re so arrogant,” said Irmgrit Schwaebel, a 58-year-old east Berliner working at a sausage stand. “Wessies are different.”

Westerners view Ossies as backward and poorly educated people who failed to purge the Nazi past the way West Germans. Ossies are also accused of giving united Germany a bad name with outbursts of right-wing violence and attacks on dark-skinned foreigners.

Although that problem affects all of eastern Germany, it is especially acute in Berlin, the country’s largest city with 3.4 million residents. The percentage of foreigners in west Berlin is nearly 30 per cent while less than 10 per cent of the east population is foreign.

“I don’t feel safe in the east and I won’t go there,” said Carl Camurca, a west Berliner whose father is an African American. “I feel threatened. They look at me in a strange way. You can feel racism directed against people who look foreign.”

Camurca, a 36-year-old biology student, said his friends from west Berlin also avoid the east part of the city. “These are two completely different cultures in east and west Berlin,” he said. “There isn’t a lot in common.”—Reuters