The strikes were the largest in western Germany’s postwar history. They reflected not only the eternal quest for more money but also divisions between the two Germanys in the aftermath of unification. The annual cost to the western part of the country is now more than $120 billion per year, far more than Chancellor Helmut Kohl forecast in the heady days just after the Berlin wall fell. And the average west German is paying the bill, in the form of higher taxes and a 4.5 percent inflation rate that, by German standards, is frighteningly high. In fact, the new German buzzword is Verteilungskampf: the distribution battle. Kohl asked Germans last week to consider “whether it is possible in one of the richest countries on earth to give up at least part of one’s growth in income” to help their eastern brethren catch up.
That doesn’t seem so much to ask in a country whose wages are the highest in the industrialized world and where the average worker is on the job only 1,499 hours per year, compared with 1,847 hours per year in the United States. But striking workers disagree. Ursula Mollmann, a Berlin university secretary, earns $1,430 per month and shells out $95 per month in new unification-related taxes. “We refuse to pay for the huge mistakes Kohl made in trying to go down as the chancellor of unification,” she says. The current unrest also underscores the social and psychological differences that still separate the two Germanys. “The standard westerner is a know-it-all and the eastern German is a whiner,” says Wolfgang Thierse, a Bundestag deputy from east Berlin.
Kohl is finding it difficult to please both sides at once. His government took another blow last week when veteran Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher resigned after 18 years in office. Genscher said “the time has come to give up the office.” But many interpreted his move as a kind of no-confidence vote in the Kohl government’s future. His departure also led to a tawdry succession battle among junior politicians in his Free Democratic Party that further embarrassed the government. The opposition Social Democrats crowed that Kohl’s days were numbered.
But Kohl has been counted out before. Only a year ago the chancellor was pelted by egg-throwing demonstrators in the east. At the time, almost half of east German workers were unemployed. Today unemployment in eastern Germany is down to 15 percent, and workers in the east are rapidly approaching wage parity with the west. As Kohl himself gleefully noted last week, there are no elections in Germany until 1994, by which time he plans to have engineered a similar rebound in the western half of his fractious republic as well.
