While the west is an affluent, somewhat staid European city, the east is a work in progress. Even more striking is the cultural gap that still divides Germany, as my group of visiting American journalists quickly found. When Germany reunited in 1990, many East Germans, accustomed to the shabby security of a communist state, found the change a shock. Many lost their make-work jobs and found they lacked marketable skills. They also found themselves overwhelmed by the sheer over-abundance of Western popular culture.
Newspapers are a case in point.
East German papers, eight pages long, were meant to be read cover to cover. Now commercially owned, they remain essentially unchanged in form. West Berlin papers, their best marketing efforts in East Berlin notwithstanding, still have 90 percent of their circulation in the west. A correspondent for the national newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine suggests why. He told us he'd bought a subscription for an East German couple.