Journalist with the Stuttgarter Zeitung

You are a 29-year-old journalist, working in Stuttgart for the Stuttgarter Zeitung, a center-to-right newspaper and one of West Germany's largest daily publications. You are married but separated from your husband, who is a researcher with a big pharmaceutical company. You completely reject his 19th Century view of marriage. (He doesn't support you in your career and thinks you should stay at home, cook and have children.)

You love your job as a journalist but frequently you are upset by the hostile environment at work: many older, male colleagues think that you are a "pretty little thing," and that therefore your intellectual capacities must be limited. You struggle hard to convince them that the opposite is true. Even though you have won several awards for your work, these older colleagues still treat you with disrespect.

You were about to be promoted to a better paid position when the Wall came down on November 9, 1989. Since then a steady stream of East Germans has come to Stuttgart to seek employment with Mercedes-Benz, HP, IBM, Porsche and your newspaper. The East Germans are willing to work more for less money and generally they are very well educated. Due to the arrival of two journalists from East Germany, your promotion has been delayed indefinitely.

One year after the fall of the Wall, the West German government introduced a "solidarity contribution," an additional tax on West Germans to help pay for rebuilding East Germany. All this has given you the impression that on the one hand East Germans are taking away jobs from West Germans (because they accept lower pay), while at the same time West Germans are forced to pay more taxes to subsidize East Germans. You are fiercely opposed to this and believe that other ways should be found to help East Germany. Most of all, you believe that measures should be taken to create work for East Germans in East Germany and prevent them from migrating to the West.

There have been times when you have felt that life was much easier before November 1989, but at the same time you enjoy being able to drive around Dresden and Weimar without fear of being interrogated by Stasi officials. You are particularly impressed by the conditions that women in East Germany enjoyed, be it at home or in the workplace. One of your new East German colleagues is female and has told you how things were run in the East.

You want to make sure that the government reduces the tax burden on West Germans and that East Germans stay where they are, get off their duffs, and get to work to get their part of Germany up to speed.