BERLIN — It can be hard for visitors to Berlin to imagine where the Berlin Wall once separated Germany’s communist East from the U.S.-friendly West.
Today, commuters run to catch a metro where trains stood for nearly 40 years. Curried sausages are sold. Illegal (but popular) parties are celebrated in empty warehouses feet from where East Germans were shot by their own countrymen as they tried to cross the border to the west.
On Sunday, Germany will celebrate the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and at first glance, it seems as if the country is more united than some nations that were never split.
But numbers and images illustrating differences in lifestyles and problems between East and West Germans tell a different story.
While 75 percent of Germans who live in the east said they considered their country’s reunification a success in a recent survey, only half of western Germans agreed. That’s not the only distinction.
A photo taken by astronaut André Kuipers from the International Space Station in 2012 shows another division of Berlin: The lights are yellow in east Berlin and green in the western part.
Daniela Augenstein, a spokeswoman for Berlin’s department of urban development, explained that each side historically used different streetlights.
The street lamps used in West Germany were much more environmentally friendly, reflecting the emergence of the western German environmental civil movement in the 1970s and 1980s. At that time East Germany was heavily reliant on coal.
Today, eastern Germany is the heart of the country’s renewable energy transformation. But viewed from space, the historic differences still define Berlin’s nightly appearance.
Data reveal further cleavages between east and west.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, formerly communist eastern German companies and factories had to compete with their much more efficient western counterparts. Capitalism came too fast. Many eastern German companies went bankrupt, and some regions never recovered. Income levels are still much lower in the east than in the west.
Germany’s unemployment rate made headlines when it hit a two-decade low this summer. But that rate is not evenly spread: former West German states still have far better employment levels than their eastern neighbors.
That’s in part because more young people have moved from rural eastern areas to the west.
This has led to a paradoxical situation: Many young people in rural eastern Germany say they are forced to move to the west or to larger eastern cities because of a lack of competitive wages and job opportunities. Consequently, many eastern German companies cannot find enough young trainees for entry-level positions and are recruiting in Poland or the Czech Republic.
Demographic differences are not only the result of joblessness and income gaps. Most foreigners who live in Germany have chosen to settle in the western parts.
The climate is less friendly to foreigners in the east, according to a study by Leipzig University researchers who interviewed 16,000 Germans over 10 years. These findings coincide with a larger presence of right-wing neo-Nazi sympathizers.
The comparisons might make eastern Germany seem like a bleak place to live, but in some ways, it’s ahead of the west. Take trash production. Why? Having dealt with constant food shortages until 1989, eastern Germans learned to economize and buy only those items they deemed necessary. This attitude seems to prevail today.
Communist East Germany also emphasized child care. While eastern German mothers were employed, western German women often stayed home to raise their children. So the East German government invested heavily in child-care facilities, and that legacy remains today.
One map points to another legacy of eastern Germany’s communist past. In then-East Germany, agricultural fields were much larger, because they were not owned by individuals, but by a pool of farmers. After reunification, the fields’ sizes rarely changed.
In the east, it was also much more common, and politically supported, to get a flu shot. Even today, eastern Germans are more committed to this practice, as the German news website Zeit Online recently noted in a comparison between eastern and western habits and beliefs. (According to the site, eastern Germans also own significantly fewer legal small arms than citizens living in west Germany.)
