Archie Bunker Sets Up Shop In German Sitcom

BERLIN - Friedhelm Motzki, the Archie Bunker of Germany, considers the fall of the Berlin Wall a "black day in history."

Eastern Germans, he says, are money-grubbing ingrates who should be forced to wear cloth patches identifying them as despicable "Ossies."

Germany has managed to stumble through the collapse of communism, a frightening wave of anti-foreigner violence and a deepening recession.

But now comes a creature from the country's deepest subconscious - Motzki, a Teutonic TV tyrant who is played for laughs but who some fear may end up splitting the two Germanys as even the Wall couldn't.

"Motzki," the sitcom, began a 13-week run on German TV this past week, and critics, politicians and ordinary Germans are worrying that the foulmouthed grouch will exacerbate already-strained relations between Western Germans and their troubled cousins in the formerly communist east.

A bald, flabby widower recently retired from life as a driving instructor, Motzki fires resentments from his tacky throne in a relentlessly brown living room.

His inevitable foils are Edith - ring a bell? - the quiet, suffering and noble sister-in-law from the east, and Gulusan Ukzknurz, a Turkish shopkeeper who worships Motzki as the consummate German and speaks like Tonto, despite having been in Germany for 19 years.

This being Germany, home to 2 million Turks, the Turk is played by a Romanian actor.

Motzki, who debuts in Episode 1 with his pants dropped to his ankles and a roll of toilet paper in his hand, rails against women, Turks, foreigners, bad drivers and, above all, Ossies, slang for eastern Germans.

"You've been German for three years now," Motzki, played by Juergen Holtz, tells Edith. "When will you finally catch on?"

"We were Germans before too," Edith responds. "We're at least as German as you."

A shopkeeper tells Motzki that "your friend is waving to you" from across the street. Motzki glances over and says, "That's not a friend. That's a Turk."

Germany's government-controlled television network is nervous about reaction to the program.

"There will be lots of talk about dividing the country," says Michael Schmid-Ospach, a network official. "And there will be applause from the wrong places. But there will also be conversations within families and throughout society, and that discussion can only be healthy."

Jutta Hoffmann, the eastern German actress who plays Edith, put it more bluntly: "I don't see how the series can divide us more than we already are."

Motzki's creator, Wolfgang Menge, first won fame in the 1970s with the German version of the British show "Till Death Do Us Part," the same program that inspired CBS to make "All in the Family."

Menge's original Bunker character - a right-wing loudmouth named Alfred Tetzlaff who dispatched his wife to the kitchen to fetch him a beer, then called her an ignorant cow - revolutionized Germany's still-staid TV landscape.

Tetzlaff was piqued primarily by politics; everything awful in life was decreed to be a product of West Germany's then-ruling socialists.

Now Menge returns with a character he says is less of a caricature than Tetzlaff. Motzki, the author says, is as real as the tax hikes western Germans have been hit with as Bonn pumps countless billions into the east to fulfill Chancellor Helmut Kohl's promise of a Western standard of living.

The writer believes the social, economic and psychological divide between Germans east and west will last "well into the next millennium."

Menge says he aims to build sympathy for the Ossies and their plight, both by pushing Motzki's prejudices over the top and by making Edith the series' only likable and complex character.

Gentle Edith is a far weaker character than Motzki, no match for his bluster. She tries to communicate the hardships easterners lived with for 40 years, telling about the hours she spent searching for a simple pair of black shoes, only to end up with the wrong size.

Motzki hears the word "share" - the term the Bonn government uses to describe the huge transfer payments from the rich west to the poor east - and explodes: "I don't ever want to hear that word again. Always share, share - with 16 million wild men! Who's going to share with me?"

Edith quietly responds, "I'd like to, but we don't have anything."