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A prominent early casualty of reunited Berlin’s rapid transition from bloom to gloom was the lavishly renovated Friedrichstrasse, which, along with the Potsdamer Platz and the area around Checkpoint Charlie, constituted the most ambitious commercial redevelopment in the new Berlin. In 1994 great hopes attended the cornerstone-laying of the new complex, which was designed to house high-rent stores and offices. Mayor Diepgen was on hand to tout the “living big-city atmosphere” of the Spree metropolis. Representatives of the Societè Générale d’Enterprises, a French building concern that was backing the project, smiled broadly. And why not? Galeries Lafayette was building an 8,000-square-meter store, and this was just one of seventeen enterprises scheduled to open in the complex. Yet there were very good reasons for worry. Rents in the western part of the city were steadily dropping because the supply of retail and office space already exceeded demand. Some 25,000 square meters stood empty in the west as the project was launched. Could all this come to “a great crash?” asked Munich’s Süddeutsche Zeitung, with undisguised schadenfreude. Two years later, when Galeries Lafayette opened its doors, there was indeed little to smile about. The floors were full of beautiful things but virtually devoid of customers. Other new enterprises on the street also lacked for trade. Their owners’ only consolation, if one could call it that, was that things were bad all over the city. In 1995, according to a local trade group, Berlin’s retailers experienced “one of the worst years since the war.” Even the world-renowned KaDeWe, that mecca of consumerism in western Berlin, saw its sales drop 10 percent from their peak in 1992.

More important than Berlin’s economic trials was its difficulty in living up to its promise as “workshop of unification.” True, it certainly looked’like a workshop. The town, especially its eastern part, crawled with bulldozers and road graders. A forest of cranes towered over Potsdamer Platz, once Europe’s busiest square and now its largest construction site. (One of the Potsdamer Platz cranes, incidentally, had a bungee cord attached to it; for a mere one hundred marks one could take the plunge.) All the efforts to rejoin streets, reconnect utilities, and transform the east into a shining replica of the west, however, did little to pull the city together politically or socially. With the Berlin Wall now just a memory, the much-discussed “Wall in the Head” seemed to have become an even more formidable barrier to mutual understanding. Years earlier, Peter Schneider had heard a member of West Germany’s mission in East Berlin muse: “Sometimes I think the Wall is the only thing that still keeps us Germans together.” Now that the Wall was down, it was apparent that the man had a point.

The euphoria that accompanied the fall of the Wall, when thousands of easterners had swarmed into the west to be greeted with hugs and “welcome money,” was more or less gone after two or three years of unification. During that short period West and East Germans discovered that the long years of separation had yielded different ways of thinking and acting. Mutually disillusioned, they began trafficking in negative stereotypes. Wessis, resenting the huge transfer payments from west to east (some DM 150 million per year), and the higher taxes these necessitated, decried the Ossis as dependent, shiftless, backward, and ungrateful. Earlier, West Germans had harbored a negative image of the GDR state but not of the people; now the people themselves were seen to be the problem. Ossis, for their part, found their western countrymen boastful, aggressive, and insensitive to the special problems they faced. They complained that the Wessis failed to acknowledge that the East had suffered much more than the West as a result of the settlement following World War II. In their eyes, the westerners were all too inclined to confuse the luck of political geography with talent and initiative.