FOR Denise Neugebauer, a gangly, blond 14-year-old from Berlin's eastern district of Prenzlauer Berg, the ceremony marking the end of her childhood last week was not quite as gruesome as she had feared.
"The music was all right even if it all sounded the same and the speech was better than the one a couple of years ago when my brother did this. That time it was awful but today's was quite nice," she said.
Denise was one of almost 100 teenagers who gathered at Berlin's planetarium to go through the ritual of Jugendweihe, a secular form of confirmation almost unknown outside the former East Germany.
An important official rite of passage during the communist era, Jugendweihe, which literally means "youth dedication", was expected to disappear following German unification in 1990, but it is experiencing an unlikely boom, with 100,000 young easterners taking part this year in Jugendweihe rituals organised by the Berlin-based Jugendweihe Initiative.
"This is a tradition in Germany going back 150 years but when the German Democratic Republic was set up, they adopted it and used it for their own purposes," said Werner Riedel, the Initiative's president and a member of the liberal Free Democratic Party. "It was an official state event and every young person had to go through it. They made a vow of loyalty to the party of the workers and peasants or the Red Army, or who knows what."
Last week's ceremony had a relaxed, cheerful atmosphere that would have been unthinkable under Erich Honecker.
Surrounded by their brothers, sisters, friends, parents and grandparents, the 14-year-olds giggled and joked their way through the 90-minute event. It started with a succession of images of fertility, growth and hope projected on to the domed ceiling of the planetarium. A band called Sally's Garden played traditional Irish music and read poems by Kurt Tucholsky while the teenagers started to daydream and talk among themselves.
By the fourth song, a blond boy in the front row was energetically chatting up a pretty girl next to him, a strategy which won him a phone number and a shy smile afterwards.
Mr Riedel told his young audience that their childhood had ended and they were beginning the process of growing up. He told them that justice, wisdom, courage and love should form the foundations of their adult life and he made a few lame jokes about adolescence in the manner of a benign, atheist archbishop.
Finally, the 14-year-olds trooped on stage in groups of five, a few dressed in their Sunday best but most wearing jeans and running shoes. Mr Riedel handed each one a certificate and a little girl presented them with a bunch of freesia and a picture book about Europe.
The Jugendweihe Initiative organises character-building talks for teenagers on such subjects as drugs, AIDS and how to apply make-up, but anybody can take part in the Jugendweihe. "You just give them your name, pay the fee and go on stage," said Felix Kromarek (14).
"Religious people have confirmation and the rest of us have Jugendweihe. It's a tradition and it's a bit of fun and you get lots of presents."
MOST of the teenagers were hoping to get between 500 deutschmarks from their parents afterwards, but Mr Riedel denied that parents were motivated by nostalgia for the old East German system when they signed their children up for the event.
"Seven years have passed since the end of the GDR and so much has happened. Why should we be the focus for nostalgia now? The reason this ceremony is still attractive here is that only one in 10 easterners belongs to a church and they want a rite of passage similar to confirmation or communion."
Although he insisted that the ritual goes back to its 19th century roots among Germany's freethinkers, he admitted there was no sign of its taking off in the west of the city. "As of now, we have no westerners at all taking part, but that could all change in the next few years and I hope that by 2003, at least 20 per cent of our young people will be from the west."
As he prepared to join his parents for a celebratory lunch in the centre of Berlin, Felix pronounced himself pleased with the experience of leaving childhood behind him and looked forward to spending his Jugendweihe loot.
