Once upon a time -- and it was boomtime in the early 1990s after the reunited Berlin was named the future capital of Germany -- a semicircle of thirteen skyscrapers, each 500 feet tall, was to turn East Berlin's Alexanderplatz into a homage to the Manhattan skyline. But as the city's economy sputtered and real estate prices plummeted, investors hesitated or dropped out. The ambitious project is on hold.

One of the businesses to move in, if the skyscrapers are ever built, is the daily Berliner Zeitung which, for now, remains on the Alexanderplatz in a rather unglamorous sixteen-story period piece of socialist architecture. These are the same offices that the paper worked from when it was still East Berlin's local daily and a mouthpiece of the all-pervasive government of the late German Democratic Republic.

Today, the Berliner Zeitung belongs to Gruner + Jahr, the huge, Hamburg-based subsidiary of Bertelsmann, and it's struggling to grow wings and fly. An ambitious $20 million relaunch has already delivered a fresh design and scores of new hires, among them some of West Germany's brightest stars. The publishers want to create a paper of national importance for the metropolis that is expected to grow in the next millennium. The question is whether its readers and, indeed, the city will catch up.

 Much hope rests on the government's arrival from Bonn next year and the eventual major demographic shift in the city's population. But, for now, a huge problem remains: almost a decade after the Wall came down, Berlin is still deeply divided in its mentality and reading habits. Neither of the city's two quality papers has managed to make inroads into the other's territory. While 82 percent of the Berliner Zeitung's city readers live in East Berlin, Der Tagesspiegel, the broadsheet of West Berlin's liberal establishment, has 90 percent of its readers in West Berlin. In late 1989 Der Tagesspiegel launched a marketing campaign in the East, expecting significant gains. Instead, today's circulation of 132,000 is the same as then. "When the gift subscriptions ran out, no one renewed," says publisher Hermann Rudolph, adding that "you cannot jump ahead of larger trends in society."

The Berliner Zeitung is less laid-back. No longer subsidized by the socialist government, its newsstand price rose to 60 cents, and circulation dropped from 304,000 in 1991 to 219,000 today. To focus only on East Berlin, thus eliminating marketing costs in the West, "would have been more profitable in the short run," says managing director Andreas Albath. "But at some point, the two parts of the city will become truly one. We want to be the medium that speaks to all of Berlin" -- and eventually, the publishers hope, to the whole country.

This ambitious approach -- Gruner + Jahr chairman Gerd Schulte-Hillen called it a "marathon" -- has given editors the opportunity to reinvent the paper. A first assessment: eclectic. Along with a redesign that nods to The Wall Street Journal, the front section emulates the world's better dailies by leading with global and national issues, while the arts pages cover current intellectual debates. Some features, like the weekly page that assists readers in dealing with city agencies, make a bow to public journalism. The city pages are still searching for a mix of politics, crime, anecdotal city-life material and service-oriented features.

The staff reflects this diversity: editor-in-chief Michael Maier, an Austrian formerly of Vienna's daily Die Presse, came in January 1996 and hired big names and young guns away from competitors, adding tabloid-experienced journalists to the local section while shopping for thinker-types in the arts pages of the center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Still others came from the alternative press. Too many cooks? "We wanted the best in each field," says Maier.

Or, as critics would put it, the best of the West. Although a few of the paper's better-known reporters are from the East, all but three of the decision-makers (publisher, top editors, department heads) are not. The massive editorial staff-turnover during the last two years -- 46 left and 44 were hired for an overall total of 174 -- saw an influx of mostly Western newcomers and an exodus of East German veterans. Maier points out that some West Germans at the top level left too, adding that the overhaul was needed to weed out what was left of socialism's old guard.

 But all the hiring-and-firing depressed newsroom morale. Some East German reporters recall an atmosphere of intimidation last summer. The question "Who's next?" hung heavy in the air. Employee representative Renate Gensch says East Germans were especially troubled by the firings, "because they had not seen anything like that before."

 Given this painful process, the Berliner Zeitung's claim to be a laboratory of reunification seems hypocritical to some -- and symptomatic of how West German companies and politicians view reunification. Says one bitter East German reporter: "The idea is that, for the two to grow together, the East has to turn into the West first."

 Rewind to November 1989 when the Wall came down: suddenly, the Berliner Zeitung's staff was on its own. No more directives from top officials. While many East German intellectuals dreamed of building an independent socialist republic that would avoid the pitfalls of Soviet-style communism, Berliner Zeitung staffers, too, entertained visions of controlling their own fate. But, says Alexander Osang, one of the paper's star reporters, "Our heavily indoctrinated image of the Western media told us that someday some entrepreneur would arrive" to buy the paper.

In May 1990, when Germany already was headed for reunification, British media tycoon Robert Maxwell visited East Berlin. The successors to the socialist leadership, who still controlled the Zeitung and its sister publications in the company Berliner Verlag, preferred Maxwell to throngs of West German companies waiting in line. After Maxwell got the deal, he partnered with Gruner + Jahr, and, when he died in November 1991, the German partner assumed sole ownership.

One of the first Gruner + Jahr executives to turn up in Berlin was the current managing director, Albath. He recalls entering the building in November 1990 where a grumpy porter was of little help. "You could still feel the old apparatus at work," he says. "It was the time of the pioneers. There was a lot of enthusiasm but also anxiety. And Gruner + Jahr was a little uncertain about exactly what to do." The new publishers shut down most of the Berliner Verlag's other publications, but hardly touched the staff of the Berliner Zeitung. Poised between the lofty ideal of creating a "German Washington Post" and the reality of a staff and readership not ready for the endeavor, the Berliner Zeitung just limped along.

Meanwhile, East-West conflicts flared up in the newsroom. Petra Bornhšft, one of the first West German reporters to arrive (she's now with the newsweekly Der Spiegel), recalls accusations of West German "colonialism." Frank Herold, the East German editor of foreign news, says the veterans felt offended when their new colleagues urged them to confess to being collaborators during the socialist regime.

Today, several years and a relaunch later, such confrontations are less common -- partly because Gruner + Jahr eliminated salary differentials between East and West in 1995. (In many of East Germany's struggling businesses, wages still haven't reached West German levels.)

But another, more subtle issue lingers: whether a paper aiming at Western elites is appropriate for its present readers in the East. Take the arts pages, or "feuilleton," where the Berliner Zeitung is at its most ambitious. Like its West German counterparts, the new Berliner feuilleton differs from American arts sections in that it goes beyond cultural-event reviews to provide what editor Jens Jessen calls "a kind of panel discussion" on the great intellectual issues of the time. A recent eight-part series focused on "What Is Just?" addressing topics such as globalization and the decline of the social-welfare state.

Jessen, one of several well-known writers hired from West German feuilletons, insists he is not merely recreating his earlier work in the West, and that he does take East German issues and writers into account: "I cannot make an East German feuilleton myself but I give East German colleagues free reign."

Still, the tone of the feuilleton reminds some of ivory towers. Though giving it a good review, Mathias Greffrath, former editor of the Wochenpost -- a now-defunct weekly for the East German intelligentsia -- says there's "a problem with making a highbrow feuilleton for an average city readership." He notes that most East German readers have difficulties with articles that "draw on the history of an intellectual discourse that has existed in West Germany for decades." Reiner Oschmann, editor of the daily Neues Deutschland, owned by the successors to East Germany's socialist leadership, perceives a certain arrogance in "suddenly confronting readers with this entirely different feuilleton."

The problems of repositioning the paper are felt even more keenly in the city section. Editor Jens Stiller tries to attract readers in West Berlin knowing that he's irritating many readers in the East. The task of finding subjects that resonate in both Berlins can be mind-boggling. "We try to catch some of the life the city has, even when that means being less profound," Stiller says. "You sometimes have to run stories about, say, the duckling at the Berlin zoo."

Michael Sontheimer at Der Spiegel's Berlin bureau says the city's dailies have no choice but to pander to the parochialism of their readers in East and West: "The problem is there's no one big liberal establishment in Berlin." And he questions whether the cosmopolitan readership the Berliner Zeitung covets is ever going to arrive, given the present economic stagnation. "We need some buying power here," he says. "Now everyone is waiting for the administration to arrive from Bonn. But how much money is a petty bureaucrat going to spend in the city?"

This much is clear: if Berlin isn't booming yet, it's not for lack of trying. Recently, investors giddily announced the opening of a Donna Karan boutique in East Berlin's wannabe Madison Avenue, the Friedrichstrasse. Nearby, dozens of other luxury stores are hoping for better days. As much might be said about the relaunch of the Berliner Zeitung. Determined to grow into a high-class paper in a glorious future, it has tied itself to Berlin's fortunes as a unified city. Together they rise, or together they fall.

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