COLUMN ONE : Germany: a Wave of ‘Ostalgia’ : Those from the east are looking back fondly, even on the hard times under the Communists. They’re even taking pride in driving their clunky Trabants.

BERLIN — “What makes people drive Trabants?”

Albrecht Reither considers the question almost shyly for a moment, sitting in an auto shop decorated with poster-sized photos of the tinny, toylike car, East Germany’s contribution to the automotive world.

How, indeed, to explain to an outsider why anyone today would still want to suffer the Trabant’s noisy two-stroke engine, dollhouse interior, the acrid products of its notion of an exhaust system?

East Germany is long gone, and the Trabant--which, unfortunately for the East Germans, means “satellite”--is no longer in production. There are no Trabbi dealerships. To get a Trabbi today, you have to go well out of your way to find one on the secondhand market and be prepared to withstand the ridicule of your fellow Germans.

But then Reither, a burly spare-parts dealer, turns defiant. “The Trabant is a symbol of protest,” he says. “People are saying: ‘I drove this car for 30 years, and I’m going to keep driving it. I’m not ashamed to be from the east.’ ”

Time was, eastern Germans wanted to get clear of anything associated with their Communist past. From bad coffee to the ideological water torture of official discourse, from the baleful Trabbi to the tiresome workplace habit of eating bologna sandwiches every time a colleague had a birthday--in the weeks and months immediately after the Berlin Wall fell, people wanted to discard all of these fixtures of socialist life and anything else that had to do with East Germany.

Of late, however, a wave of nostalgia for Ostdeutschland --call it Ostalgia, as many do--has been washing over eastern Germany. Today, people are driving their Trabbis with a vengeance, to the point of joining Trabbi outing clubs and parading through the eastern German countryside.

Shops specializing in made-in-the-East groceries and household products are opening, and it has become socially acceptable to drink eastern Germany’s sugar-sweet Little Red Riding Hood sparkling wine and to serve eastern Germany’s more chewy dinner rolls.

Ostalgia parties are very much the thing on eastern German campuses. Even the former East German practice of giving all 14-year-olds a sort of secular “first Communion” service--the Jugendweihe, or “youth blessing”--has been enthusiastically revived.

“Most people have quickly found out that the dream of the golden West was just an illusion,” contends Reither, who had the commercial sense to buy all the Trabbi parts he could find and who now does a thriving trade in them. He has made enough money to buy a Mercedes or a BMW, but his sense of eastern identity keeps him behind the wheel of his 1974 Trabbi.

Eastern Germans have had nearly five years now to plumb the joys of Western capitalism, and, as Reither says, many have found them wanting.

True, they no longer have to live with shootings at the Wall, a censored press, the largest spying network in the Marxist world, or the many other instruments of East German state power.

But some have come to the arresting conclusion that they are worse off today than they were under communism. Many men have lost their jobs. Women have lost child-care centers that cost 20 cents a day; practically all households are paying many times more for rent and sustenance.

And even the eastern Germans who now have “made it”--who have bigger apartments, interesting jobs, telephones, fax machines, plausible newspapers, strawberries year-round--even these easterners talk of a certain something that is missing from their lives.

It is, in part, a sense of belonging: They know they aren’t East Germans anymore, but five years of unification have convinced them that they don’t quite fit into the West either.

So, if they aren’t East Germans, and they aren’t West Germans, then what are they?

The current conspicuous return to old ways may be, for easterners, a means of finding out. And if nothing else, it serves for many as a heartening reminder that everything about life in the German Democratic Republic wasn’t thoroughly evil--that life in the East was in some respects actually better.

“I don’t know anyone who says they want the whole German Democratic Republic back,” says Hans-Joachim Maaz, a psychiatrist in the eastern German city of Halle who has written on the special psychological problems of his compatriots. “What I hear about is the lack of values. People say, ‘We don’t want to live in a society where everyone is elbowing their way to the front. We want to have a sense of solidarity. And we want to live in a society where money doesn’t influence everything, even relationships between friends.’ ”

“The tragedy,” adds Maaz, “is that there is nobody who really takes these desires seriously.”

Well, almost nobody.

On a busy street in what used to be East Berlin, Klaus Eichler has carved out a specialty business centered on Ostalgia: He packages tours for eastern Germans who now miss the very thing they would have spurned in the past--group tours, laced with nonstop ideology, to the old glory spots of the socialist world.

Interested in the space race from the Soviet point of view? Eichler has a tour to Baikonur, the Russian Cape Canaveral, where participants undergo mock cosmonaut training and watch a rocket launching. The tour guide is a former East German cosmonaut, Sigmund Jaehn.

Or what about those who like to mix a little sunshine and surf with their politics? For them, Eichler offers two weeks in Cuba, in the capable hands of East Germany’s former ambassador to Havana, Hans Langer. Langer takes the Ostalgic tourists to the beaches but also books political discussions with Cuban doctors, farmers and members of the Asamblea Nacional.

“Of course, we have to admit that there wasn’t enough that was good about East Germany. Otherwise it wouldn’t have failed,” he says. “But, nevertheless, I think that quite a few people here believe that in East German times we enjoyed a more peaceful way of life, even a more pleasant way of life. It’s difficult to explain this, but it has something to do with human feelings and with values--with the feeling that my neighbor was my friend, and not my competitor.”

Eichler thinks eastern Germany’s fixation with the past may be a sign that a broader quest is under way for a new ideology--some sort of economic arrangement that is neither capitalism nor communism.

To understand why eastern Germans feel the way they do, look with eastern eyes at the way German unification has turned out.

In the early, heady months after the Berlin Wall was breached, people dreamed big dreams of what the future might hold once unification was complete: People would vote in free elections; they would enjoy real representation in an authentic national assembly; inefficient state enterprises would be reorganized and the public would become shareholders; a new, all-German constitution would combine the best elements of the East with those of the West.

But as reunification took hold, it became clear that West Germany had no intention of retaining what may have been “good” about the East.

Free elections were held, true enough, but West German political parties sent in candidates and dominated the political scene. Far from making easterners shareholders in their former country’s industrial stock, the unified government sold much of what was salable to outside investors. New, private owners, in many cases, then laid off the easterners by the thousands.

As for a new constitution: It is still being brought up to date, but so far, nothing from East Germany has been kept.

The way things have turned out, the only East German artifact that the unified government has preserved has been the freedom to turn right on some red lights.

Which is why people like Werner Riedel have set about saving bits and pieces all by themselves.

“The practice of celebrating the youth blessing in the German Democratic Republic was not 100% bad,” says Riedel, who plucked that East German custom off the endangered list in 1990 and has revived it virtually single-handedly. “It was just sort of exploited by ideology and forced on people.”

Indeed. In former times, when East Germans turned 14, they were put through indoctrination courses, then formally initiated into adulthood in a public ceremony. The young people took an oath and were presented with a book about their place in the universe, “The Cosmos, the Earth, and the Human Being.” Then, typically, doting relatives took them home, showered them with gifts and fed them a big lunch.

“I can remember my own youth blessing,” says Riedel. “It was sort of automatic. I’ve forgotten the oath, but I still remember all the presents I got, and the big meal.”

In the turbulent months after the East German government collapsed, Riedel says he began worrying about young people and thinking maybe they needed proof that somebody cared about them.

In many cases, he says, their parents were thrown out of work and spending all of their time trying to survive. Riedel thought the old youth blessing might put much-needed structure back into their lives--as long as it was stripped of its former ideological content.

He assembled a volunteer staff, organized a curriculum, printed up some brochures and has never looked back. Last year in Berlin, 8,000 14-year-olds received the new, post-Communist youth blessing--10 times as many as those who received their first Communion. Across eastern Germany, about 80,000 adolescents are enrolled in the program this fall.

As it happens, even the young people Riedel is catering to--teen-agers who are too young to have arrived at much of an understanding of what it was to be an East German--have joined the Ostalgia kick.

Consider the goings-on at Friedrich-Schiller University in Jena, a city in the southern part of what used to be East Germany. Deep under the city’s center, in a campus rathskeller, posters of the late East German dictator Erich Honecker share wall space with portraits of Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the onetime Soviet leader, and the album covers of popular East German musicians.

“Forward to the 300th Anniversary of the German Democratic Republic!” exhorts a banner over the dance floor. Young people swill Vita Cola, an East German soft drink, and an ersatz sangria made only with apples, pears and grapes (it was difficult to find imported fruit in East Germany, so no one ever had oranges or pineapples).

When a young man leaps onto the bar and begins singing, the whole crowd joins in: “Build, build, build! Help us to build a better society! We’re going to construct a new homeland, for a better future!” It is an East German classic, and everybody knows the words.

This is an Ostalgia party, a rage on campuses all over the former East. University students show up in polyester clothing that would otherwise never make it out of the darkest corners of their wardrobes.

At the entrance, organizer Steffen Bernhardt sits at a table graced by a pile of transcripts of the late North Korean leader Kim Il Sung’s speeches, taking money. He is 27, old enough to remember what it was like in the former times, when the student club was twice shut down by the authorities for minor ideological infractions. But he is prepared to explain why students today are embracing the symbols and impedimenta of the repressive system they used to hate.

“We don’t want to deny our own history,” he says. “These things are part of our lives, and that’s why we keep them.”

There is a shriek and a woman runs by, reeking of chemicals; a prankster has just anointed her with a discontinued East German deodorant. A tall man in an army jacket and an enormous red motorcycle helmet comes by, brandishing an old copy of Neues Deutschland, once the official newspaper of the East German Communist Party.

“If I had seen this newspaper five years ago, I’d have said, ‘Oh, hell,’ ” says Dirk Spoerl, a 29-year-old handyman. “But now I can laugh about it.”

“We are no nerds,” adds Bernhardt. “We can speak like the West Germans. We can write like the West Germans. We are as tall as the West Germans. Yet everything from the German Democratic Republic is being destroyed. That is a mistake. It is history. History will never end.”