East Germany Seen Frozen in Hard-Line Rut : People Seeking Escape as Regime Refuses to Undertake Reforms

East Germany faces its refugee-induced crisis with an ailing leader, an aging leadership, and nothing to offer its people except more unpalatable, hard-line, Communist dogma, according to diplomatic analysts here.

East German leader Erich Honecker observed his 77th birthday Friday, recovering from a recent gall bladder operation, with no anointed successor to take over the Communist government should he be incapacitated.

“They tell us Honecker is alive,” said an observer in this East German capital. “But whether he is kicking is the question.”

Western diplomats say the mood in East German hasn’t been so sour since 1961 when the Berlin Wall went up. And they believe that nothing is going to change under the present Stalinist-oriented leadership.

In large part, this explains why so many East Germans have decided to take advantage of the liberalized emigration rules and the newly created opportunities for escape along the Hungarian-Austrian border.

A foreign analyst said: “The feeling here is, get out while you can.”

About 90,000 East Germans, in a nation of 16.7 million, are expected to be granted official emigration rights this year, while another 10,000 may flee illegally.

Why doesn’t the East German government liberalize, as has been suggested by Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, and put into uncertain practice the changes being wrought by Poland and Hungary?

“The country’s ruling Politburo is an old men’s club,” one veteran diplomat here said. “They remember how they as Communists were persecuted by Adolf Hitler and how they created a new socialist state in East Germany.

“They believe that East Germany is doing fine, thank you, Mr. Gorbachev, and they point to the other East Bloc nations to show by comparison how well East Germany is functioning.

“They don’t seem to realize their citizens are not comparing themselves to Poles and Czechs but to West Germans, whose affluent society they see every day on Western television.”

TV Signals From West Germany

Most of East Germany, with the exception of a low-lying area around Dresden, receives television signals from West Germany.

The refugee crisis has also exacerbated East Germany’s relations with Hungary, for the latter’s lenient policy toward those fleeing, and with Bonn, for its alleged encouragement of illegal East German emigrants.

Relations between the two Germanys are at the lowest ebb since Honecker visited West Germany two years ago, officials say.

There has been much discussion in official circles here of the remarks made recently by East Germany’s top ideologue, Otto Reinhold, head of the Social Sciences Academy in East Berlin.

Reinhold, 63, declared that significant changes in the hard-line Communist approach here would, in effect, deny East Germany its reason for existing.

The other Eastern European Communist states, said Reinhold, “all existed before their socialist reorganization as states with capitalist or semi-feudal structures.”

That is, they were nation states with common languages and cultures.

But Germany was only one state until it was divided by World War II’s legacy.

“What right to exist would a capitalist East Germany have next to a capitalist Federal Republic (West Germany)?,” Reinhold asked. “None, of course.

“Only when we are aware of this does it become clear how important it is for us to have a social strategy that uncompromisingly aims at cementing the socialist system.”

No Room for Freedom

In other words, according to Reinhold, East German can exist “only as a socialist state.” There is no room for free markets or freedom itself.

Reinhold’s remarks were the first by a leading East German official spelling out so baldly what is at stake and why the East Berlin regime is so loath to introduce political or economic reforms.

Honecker, who is head of state and secretary of the party, is scheduled to make his next public appearance at a ceremony Friday marking the start of World War II. Later, he will appear at the semi-annual Leipzig Trade Fair. Questions are being raised about whether he will be fit enough for public appearances by then.

Speculating on Successor

Already diplomats here are speculating about a successor to Honecker, who took leadership of the regime in 1971. The leading candidates, if the Politburo looks to younger men, are:

-- Egon Krenz, 52, the hard-line security chief who observers consider the most natural inheritor of Honecker’s mantle.

-- Guenter Schabowski, 60, East Berlin Communist Party head who, in public, maintains an anti-reform line but is thought to hold more moderate views in private.

-- Joachim Hermann, 60, the party propaganda chief who has reflected Honecker’s anti-Western, Stalinist views.

-- Siegfried Lorenz, 58, party leader in Karl-Marx-Stadt (formerly Chemnitz) who is thought to be less ideological than most of his colleagues.

-- Hans Modrow, 61, the party chief in Dresden, who is also believed to favor a more pragmatic approach to solving East Germany’s problems.