(FORTUNE Magazine) – Even before they were officially reunited, Germans on both sides of the hated border were feeling qualms about their new togetherness. West Germans resent the prospect of paying higher taxes to subsidize the bedraggled East. Their Eastern brethren, jolted by 14% -- and rising -- unemployment and a 42% collapse in production, miss the stability of the bad old days. The newsmagazine Der Spiegel caught the uncivil spirit in a recent cover, which reads: ''United yet strangers. The unequal Germans.'' (See photo below.) Can this troubled new Germany be a good place for business? You bet! As East German enterprises get privatized and entrepreneurs rev up, productivity will climb. Deutsche Bank economist Ulrich Schroder estimates that the Eastern economy will grow 8% annually for several years. Supported by some $55 billion in subsidies next year, East Germans thirst for goods that are almost taken for granted by their Western peers. For example, 86% of the West German households have color TVs, compared with 39% in the East, and 92% have telephones, vs. 7%. Homebuilders in the West complain that they can't get toilets and sinks because ''Ossies,'' as they call Easterners, have drained the market. There's no time to waste. Says Robert H. Holdheim, a trade specialist at the American Chamber of Commerce in Germany: ''The best companies to buy and the best sites to build on will be sold first.'' Folks who missed Germany's postwar economic miracle must move fast to catch the sequel.