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"Can you believe it? We ran away four days before the border opened," says Birgit Zittlau, 26, stopping in Bockwitz with her husband Bernd, 27, to chat with an old school chum, Ulrike Bromann. "We didn't know if we'd ever see our friends again. Now we come over once a week." Bromann says she was shocked and saddened when the Zittlaus fled: "I thought they were gone forever, but here they are." A divorced mother of three, Bromann says she would never contemplate leaving East Germany for the West, adding optimistically, "Anyway, the standard of living over here will be the same within five years."
The Zittlaus have prospered since they left. Bernd found a job as an electrician in Tulau, a farm village near the border. The family moved into a modest apartment, made a down payment on a 1979 VW and began a new life only two miles from their old one in the East. "We'll never come back here to live," he says. "But we can visit whenever we want. Everything is normal now."
Not every resettler has found it that easy. At least 125,000 newly arrived East Germans are still jobless, and West German officials hope the shortage of work will prevent a further rush from the East. More than 58,000 East Germans crossed over permanently during January alone, and by some estimates 3 million are ready to flee westward if general elections scheduled for March 18 fail to produce a government capable of reforming the economy and restoring stability.
"Everything depends on democratization," says Wolfsburg Mayor Schlimme. "People have to see that they have a future over there. Otherwise, they will come over here to find it. And no businesses from here will take risks in the East unless they have the security of a reliable democracy." Nevertheless, Schlimme is enthusiastic about the prospect of Wolfsburg as an economic magnet drawing on resources stretching from Hannover in the West to Magdeburg in the East. "VW employs 65,000 people and draws them from a radius of 60 miles," he says, sketching a 60-mile semicircle cut off by the East German border. He then completes the circle, taking in Magdeburg, only 40 miles away across the border. "Why not draw workers from here as well? And why not have workers from Wolfsburg go to factories in Magdeburg?"
Volkswagen, in fact, has already made a large commitment in East Germany. A development company financed by VW is planning a plant in Karl-Marx-Stadt to produce an East German-designed replacement for the beloved but outmoded Trabant. "With our help they can do it," says VW spokesman Ortwin Witzel. "They have excellent workers and fine engineers. They just haven't had a chance to show the world what they can do."
In Posseck something else is happening. Schubert's 17-year-old daughter Yvonne, pretty and blue-eyed, shows up to read the Hof newspaper. She is wearing a Hof-bought T shirt embossed with the word KAMIKAZE and a grinning skull in Day-Glo colors. "The kids from here go over to Hof a lot," she says. "We shop for clothes. We try new cosmetics. We listen to music. We go to clubs. We meet other kids." Youngsters from the West, she says, come back with them to Posseck to play music and dance at the village youth club, once the ballroom of a manor house confiscated from a former aristocrat.
Does she have many Western friends?
"Yes."
A young man?
Blue eyes flutter; a blush rises.