August 15 1994

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Germans find reconciliation is harder than reunification.

A recent study, commissioned by German Baptists, concludes that the reunification of East and West has been a one-way street.

Though West German Baptists understand reunification as an unqualified blessing, their East German counterparts view it as "a life-changing event consisting of both good and bad elements."

Yet, no one prefers a return to former times. "Transformation is much more painful and Western society much less perfect," the study reports, "than Easterners had originally assumed."

One Reformed pastor from East Germany recalls the angry reaction he had during his initial discussions with West German colleagues after the fall of the Wall in 1989. "The only thing they asked was, 'What does your church possess?' They didn't care about us, only about our real estate."

The issue of material possessions has driven a deep wedge between Germans from East and West. The famed East German author Christa Wolf claimed in a recent lecture, "Our relationship to possessions divides us most. We in [East Germany] dealt with possessions in a more lax fashion. We never accepted it as the will of God when a society produced ever-more super rich at one pole and ever-more destitute at the other."

In April, Martin Kruse, in his outgoing sermon as Berlin's Protestant bishop, attacked the legal ruling returning real estate to those who left the East after World War II and taking it from those who had lived on or used that property since. "Most [Easterners] find this ruling unjust," he concluded. Wolf has commented, "Re-enfranchizing the old propertied classes was given precedence over relaxed, interpersonal relations."

Since World War II, Baptists in West Germany, now numbering 70,000, ...