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Ruge, whose father was killed in the war, studied history and political science, volunteered long enough for the army to get his parachute wings and then turned to journalism. Karl-Ernst Freitag and Artwin Priebisch studied marine engineering, spent a couple of summers sailing the high seas, only to drift into other endeavors: teaching for Freitag, business for Priebisch. Harm Smidt leaned toward the law but turned to the sciences and engineering and wound up a partner in a firm dealing with environmental-impact studies.
Two semesters of dentistry were enough to convince Klaus Hoell that he should switch to business administration; he is now an executive with Mercedes-Benz. After wondering whether to attend university at all, Poeck moved into engineering and an eventual partnership in a consulting firm. He spent several years working in Asia and Africa, where he thinks he can contribute more than at home. Dieter Klussmeyer studied law on his way to the civil service post of district draft-board chief in his hometown. Only Werner Marker, an ophthalmologist, and Klaus Giersiepen, a lawyer, were certain of their career plans.
Now, at Niehues' table, the subject is unification. Those among them who visited the old East Germany remember, as Giersiepen recalls, the "iron faces of the Vopos ((people's police))." When the Wall went up in 1961, they wondered, fleetingly, whether the West would intervene, whether war might even come. The crisis passed, and, preoccupied with starting careers and families, they learned to live with Germany's division. "I always thought history would take care of the separation," says Hoell, "but maybe in 100 years." Born and raised outside Berlin, he fled with his mother to the West in 1949; sneaking across the border, they stumbled, just short of West German territory, into a Soviet soldier -- who let them go. Standing outside his house today, near a sunny Swabian vineyard, Hoell muses about going home sometime to the Brandenburg marsh and lake country.
Smidt is ready to make his move even now: he plans to open a branch of his firm, Ecoplan, in Leipzig. He is well prepared, having spent many a vacation since the early '70s traveling in the East. "What pleases me," he says, "is that after 40 years of totalitarianism, independent thinking remains in the East. The people never identified with the communist state."
A few weeks after the Wall had fallen, Giersiepen and his wife visited Berlin. "You felt as if you had been touched by the breath of history," he says. "I am happy, not so much that Germany has come together -- we should not be too jubilant about that -- but that Europe has grown bigger, that it no longer ends at the Elbe, and that we are part of it."
Some ambivalence remains about the details of unification. Wiethoff is not sure the capital should be moved to Berlin. "Berlin reminds me of the great Nazi marches of the '30s and '40s, of Hitler's 'Do you want total war?' " he says. "Bonn stands for 40 years of tested democracy."