The Next Wall to Fall.(East German entrepreneurs catching up to their countrymen in the west)

Wolfgang Neubert used to work in an East German combine making clunky refrigerators for the socialist bloc. The factory went under after German unification. Out of a job at 43 but not content on the dole, Neubert hooked up with a Western auto-parts supplier. Today he heads a company with 83 workers in Chemnitz, formerly Karl-Marx-Stadt, manufacturing components for BMW and truck maker MAN. Business is booming despite Germany's recession. "Every one of my employees knows we had to work hard to get from nothing to where we are," he says, adding that his east German employees would even "work around the clock."

For the longest time, west Germans caricatured Jammerossis, or "whining Easties," as slothful parasites collecting welfare checks. But stories like Neubert's are increasingly disproving this old cliche. True, the east is still the economic black hole of Germany, with double the national employment rate and sucking in subsidies of 100 billion euros a year. But it's easy to be deceived by the gloom. All across the old swath of the GDR, easterners are displaying a get-up-and-go spirit of entrepreneurship and hard work that few would have thought possible a decade ago.

Numbers tell part of the story. Ossi entrepreneurs have founded more than 500,000 new companies in the 13 years since unification, catching up to their supposedly more energetic countrymen to the west. They work an average of 1,725 hours a year, compared with 1,592 for Wessis. Their companies are also significantly more likely to stay in business and hire additional employees, according to a recent study by the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin. Young ...