When a rich West German publisher buys an East German party organ, staff and all, office politics takes on a whole new meaning.

The Mitteldeutsche Zeitung in the blue-collar city of Halle, now one of unified Germany's top dailies, can count itself a success story. But in a year of economic disappointment in Germany, the dysfunctional side of this partnership is unmistakable, as it is in other formerly Communist newspapers there.

Until 1990, the MZ -- in those days called Freiheit (Freedom) was a propaganda sheet, fat with inspirational worker profiles and exhortations to greater productivity. Reporters were favored by their government sources with access to otherwise unattainable goods. Most "news" was planned weeks in advance; a "reporting error" might mean that the wrong section of a speech had been highlighted or that an official had been made to seem less important than he thought he was.

The paper struggled to hold the party line during the breathtaking final months of 1989, as thousands fled to the "class enemies" in the west and swelling crowds gathered each Monday for anticommunist candlelight vigils in Halle's market square. When communist party reformers finally kicked out Freiheit's editor, three weeks after the Berlin Wall fell, and voted deputy editor Stefan Lehnebach into the top job, Lehnebach published a pledge to work for a better socialism. "But I already believed the system was doomed," he says.

Six weeks later, the editorial employees cut their ties with the party. Lehnebach and a colleague climbed into a Russian Lada with picnic baskets of food and spare tanks of gas (they had no deutschmarks) to scour the capitalist world for a buyer.

They found Cologne's DuMont Schauberg, a liberal publishing house that agreed to make capital investments and to keep all the employees who had not collaborated with Stasi, the notorious former East German police.

Since then, jackhammers and bulldozers have provided continuous background music at the paper, with a new $ 140 million printing plant and renovations transforming the dilapidated offices. The news staff switched from typewriters to computers over the course of a weekend; the paper was expanded from eight pages to thirty-two with color; dozens of editors were sent west to Cologne for training at a Schauberg-owned sister newspaper.

DuMont changed the paper's name, but maintained Freiheit's twenty-three local bureaus and editions in an area of 2.8 million people. Meanwhle, the MZ's advantage as paper of record has allowed it to retain about 80 percent of its old circulation, despite a drop in the region's population -- and despite a flood of complaints that the new, improved paper takes too long to read and has too many ads. Media experts give it high marks for depth and locally relevant coverage, and surveys show surprising strength among young readers. New features include a weekly advice section aimed at helping readers adjust to their life as citizens of the Bundesrepublik.

Still, three years after the paper began its new life, the upbeat mood has been replaced by an unease that mirrors the gloom in the industrial wasteland around Halle and elsewhere in the recession-plagued nation, where people from the east ("Ossies") and west ("Wessies") have grown apart. Unemployment in the MZ's readership area is estimated at 38 percent.

Knowing how lucky they are to have jobs, journalists of the old Freiheit crew work a lot harder than they did before, but, according to their western colleagues, they still are only about half as efficient as their Cologne counterparts. Late-breaking wire stories and local angles are repeatedly missed; a three-letter preposition is misspelled in a front-page headline; the Irish punt drops a dizzying 10 percent, a shock to the European currency grid, but none of the Ossies sees the news value and it goes unmentioned. "These guys figure Ireland is too far away to matter. They still don't get it," grumbles an editor from the west.

The collegial creative tension between the two co-editors-in-chief -- one from the west and one from the east -- has given way to tactical sparring by their partisans in news meetings. In private, Wessies gripe about a "coffee-klatsch" attitude among the Ossies, who shrug off criticism and go right on doing what they do. The Ossies, for their part, are tired of being criticized by western collegues, who, they say, are arrogant careerists and are too quick to judge a culture they didn't live and work in.

Behind it all lurk the old ideological differences and mistrust. "You still can't write what you believe here," says Jurgen Badstuebner, an Ossie features editor who accepts the failure of his socialist ideals but has limited enthusiasm for the new world order. Like Lehnebach, he believes that capitalism is based on unequal distribution of resources and the destruction of the environment, both of which threaten the future. "But if I wrote that," he says, "I'd instantly hear the accusation, 'Ach, there goes the old Red again!""

"I don't want to be a censor, but we have to agree on economic fundamentals," says Dieter Jepsen-Foge, the Wessie half of the co-editing team. Jepsen-Foge is increasingly irked by articles that tend to appear in the local sections where some of the Ossie hardliners work. A recent piece began this way: "It's just another day in the market economy: a woman is fired."

If there is one dependable human bridge across this gulf at the MZ, it is the younger reporters in the bureaus who grew up without illusions in the fading Communist world and are energetically honing their skills in the new one. They have the affection and trust of both sides, who see them as the hope of the future. But they are realistic about the years of difficulty ahead.

"I often feel caught between two fronts in a war, but I've made it clear I won't be drawn in," says Steffen Reichert, a twenty-four-year-old communist-trained journalism school graduate and one-time youth brigade leader. "I just want to put out a good newspaper."

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