Beauty contest where east wins out

When psychologists and sociologists conduct surveys of eastern and western Germans, the citizens of the formerly communist east seldom emerge well from the comparison. They are less happy, less confident, less tolerant and less optimistic than their wealthier compatriots in the west and, not surprisingly, many suffer from a sense of inferiority.

But a new study shows that in one important respect, Ossis win out over Wessis - they are far more pleased with the way they look. While westerners punish themselves for their failure to live up to a physical ideal, easterners look in the mirror and feel content.

According to Wolf Wagner, a western sociologist who now lives in eastern Germany, most people assess their physical appearance by comparing it with an ideal image. "This usually produces a feeling of defeat," he says.

The reason easterners feel more confident about their appearance is that their ideal physical shape is closer to the reality of their own and they identify more closely with their own bodies. A group of sociologists from Leipzig University who questioned Germans from east and west about their bodies discovered that easterners were almost always happier with how they looked.

"They experience their physicality with more enthusiasm and pleasure and are less subject to a sense of competition or achievement," the sociologists concluded.

The source of westerners' unhappiness with their appearance lies in the association of self-esteem with power and prestige. The rich and famous determine trends and fashions and they also ordain what kind of physical shape is deemed to be beautiful at any given time.

In recent years, the male ideal has become younger, so that slim, boyish figures have replaced more traditionally masculine types as the advertisers' dream. The female ideal is no longer an unapproachable, high-born lady but an attractive sex toy.

This female ideal is, according to Dr Wagner, not just a challenge to most women - it is simply impossible. "They must be extremely slim but with a well-defined musculature, they must be tall with long legs but also have full, firm breasts," he said.

The embodiment of this ideal is the German model Claudia Schiffer, who is seen by many men as the ultimate in human physical development but has long been regarded by women as a goddess with whom they can never compete.

German admiration for Ms Schiffer's beauty does not end at the former border between east and west but easterners have pinups of their own, most of whom leave westerners cold. The statuesque ice-skating champion, Gunda Niemann, for example, would never adorn a billboard in the west but she is regarded as a beauty in the east, where she has recently raised her profile by advertising Thuringian sausages.

Easterners like their icons to look strong and well-nourished, wholesomely healthy rather than elegantly thin. Dr Wagner explains the satisfaction easterners feel with their bodies in terms of a 60-year tradition of idealising the petit-bourgeois, German norm, first under the National Socialists and later under the Communists.

When Erich Honecker's wife, Margot, started colouring her hair a subtle shade of violet, other Communist wives disapproved so strongly that she had to revert to a more conventional hue.

Before Hitler came to power, the ideal German male was large and well fed and no upstanding Prussian fretted about his figure. The Nazis replaced this corpulent ideal with a muscular, lantern-jawed figure inspired by their elite soldiers.

Working class Germans, along with many immigrants from Turkey and former Yugoslavia, still favour the heavily muscled look but Germans get leaner the further up the social scale they move.

Almost 10 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, westerners are so accustomed to looking down on their eastern neighbours that they will be perplexed by the sociologists' findings about attitudes to beauty in both parts of Germany.

It may also reinforce a western suspicion that many foreigners can confirm - that easterners may be poorer, less stylish and more likely to be on the dole but they make much better lovers.