On one side of a half-demolished tenement in Neustadt, the poor, crumbling part of Dresden where workers and students live in narrow cobbled streets and dark courtyards, and where skinheads make sporadic raids, smashing up or setting fire to the student cafés, there is a large and locally renowned piece of graffiti: it shows one small squealing pig being mounted by another, bigger, lip-smacking pig, and underneath, in dripping black paint, the slogan reads 'Wiedervereinigung - nur so!' (Reunification - the only way!) Over the last nine months, there has been a growing sense among East Germans that they are indeed involved in an irregular union, and that there is no doubt about who is feeling the pain.

Earlier this year, towards the end of March, when a poll showed that 85 per cent of East Germans felt they were 'second-class citizens', the public mood found a political voice: 80,000 people revived the Leipzig Monday Demos in protest at Chancellor Kohl's broken election promises and at the unexpectedly harsh effects of the privatization of state-run firms by the Treuhand organization, which was likened to a slaughterhouse by union leaders. It was the unions, together with churches, factory committees and citizens' action groups, who organized the Leipzig demos and they were emulated in other cities, including Dresden. But they died out in April after the shock of the Red Army Faction assassination of the Treuhand boss, Rohwedder. Exploiting the East Germans' pride in their peaceful revolution, Kohl's CDU succeeded in ...