East, West German Dog Breeders Divided

Gerlinde Schultze, 46, from Berlin poses with her purebred East German shepherds Shorty, Ceasy and Penny, from left, in Berlin, Monday, Oct. 1, 2007. As the country celebrates 17 years of reunification on Wednesday, some animosities between the formerly communist East and capitalist West remain and few are as doggedly contested as the fight over whose shepherds are superior. (AP Photo/Franka Bruns) (Franka Bruns - AP)

First bred by Max von Stephanitz in 1895, the dog is Germany's most popular canine with more than 2,200 local shepherd dog clubs across the country, according to the national German Shepherd's Club.

The debate over which type is superior is fueled by the near mythical status the shepherd has in Germany, where it is celebrated for embodying traditional German virtues like loyalty, reliability and resilience.

Because of this, the claim for the better dog at times sounds more like a battle over moral superiority between the East and the West than breeder rivalry.

Grube called the claims from the East German breeders an "obvious case of Ostalgie" _ a sentimental nostalgia about life in former East Germany, which went out of existence at reunification in 1990 at the end of the Cold War.

East German breeders get particularly upset when confronted with the widespread assumption that most of their dogs were used at the border to keep citizens from fleeing to the West.

"The army and the police only got the scum _ the best ones went to dog lovers," said Werner Dalm, the former government official for shepherd dog breeding in communist East Germany. However, he acknowledged that the East German army asked particularly for those "that could really bite well."

Today, Dalm, who is still breeding shepherds at age 81 and is also convinced of the East German dogs' superiority, believes that pure East German bloodlines are all but extinct.

"Since the unification in 1990, we've been mixing bloodlines," he said. "Even my dogs don't have pure East German pedigrees any longer."

Whatever the truth, it does seem like the East German shepherd is making a comeback among the 75,000 members of the German Shepherds' Club and even abroad.

"We get so many requests for our dogs, there's an international wait list of several years," said Schultze, adding that puppy Xaver's future owner had been waiting for the dog for two years and already paid the $850 price.

"When I told her about Xaver's birth last week, she was so happy that she burst in tears of joy."