Wall Behind the Wall is Crumbling : East Germany: Egon Krenz is less a reformer than a renovator vainly seeking modifications in the system.

East Germany’s Politburo has sacrificed their leader of 18 years, Erich Honecker, in favor of Honecker’s own protege, Egon Krenz. He immediately announced prospects for more liberalized travel regulations, more open media and a more self-critical discussion of domestic problems with broader elements of society. Has East Germany finally come in from the cold?

Not yet. Krenz is not the Mikhail Gorbachev of East Germany; he is a young Konstantin Chernenko, the transitional head of a collectivist leadership driving the East German Communist Party off a cliff. He is less a reformer than a renovator seeking modifications in the current system. He wants to control the pace and scope of change while maintaining the leading role of the party and isolating democratic opposition groups.

He will fail. His domestic opponents have lost their inhibitions, and his “allies” will no longer support such policies.

Will the Wall come down? Perhaps. At the moment, however, it is the wall behind the Wall that is crumbling.

When confronted with the prospect of a flood of Western visitors and ideas following detente in the 1970s, the East German regime responded with a harsh, systematic policy of Abgrenzung-- in essence building behind its infamous wall of concrete and barbed wire an invisible wall of regulations and prohibitions designed to shield East German society from the West’s liberalizing influence.

During more recent years the challenge of openness has come from the Soviet Union, guarantor not only of East Germany’s external security but also of the regime’s internal authority. Bewildered, East German leaders responded with a stopgap version of Abgrenzung , directed this time toward the East yet derived from the same fear that unsettling ideas could loosen the regime’s grip.

The regime built into this second wall an intricate series of “safety valves,” policies that controlled Western access to East German society and allowed popular frustrations to be vented without blowing the lid off the system. By 1989, manipulating these safety valves had become a hopeless task, given the compound societal pressures generated by a mixture of detente and glasnost. The fear of internal repression had diminished enough to stimulate a broad sense of reform-minded solidarity within the population.

External changes also undermined Honecker’s careful calculations. When the Iron Curtain fell in Hungary this summer, East European allies signaled an end to support for East German policies.

More fundamental, however, was the Soviet Union’s change of position. Gorbachev had tolerated the East German position because of Moscow’s overriding goal of stability on the front lines of the East-West fault line.

By the time Gorbachev visited East Berlin to celebrate the regime’s 40th birthday, he had come to the conclusion that non-reform was damaging the credibility of his entire European policy and that Honecker’s “safety valve” policy had become destabilizing.

How will things develop? Although the safety valve approach to openness has been undermined, the new leadership is driving down the same road, only at a much faster speed. Recent glimmers of glasnost are an attempt to buy time and find newer, more legitimate channels of control. The Krenz regime has turned to the other four (Communist-dominated) political parties in East Germany as the new vents for popular frustration and as instruments to control change while criminalizing the independent opposition.

Yet current pressures require virtuosity in turning the spigots of power. Krenz is no such maestro. Unless he qualifies his position regarding Communist primacy and decriminalizes the opposition, he will be swept away by the waves of change in the East. The most relevant question at the moment is whether he will crash before or after the Communist Party Congress scheduled for next May. The march by 100,000 protesters in Leipzig this week suggests that he has very little time.

The key reason why the regime refuses to commit to fundamental reforms in the face of such pressures is a deeply held belief that such a society would have no inner rationale to distinguish itself from West Germany. True pluralistic reforms are equated in their mind with the end of East Germany as a separate country.

East Germany is one of the test-tube babies of international politics; unlike Polish, Hungarian or Czech rulers, the regime cannot fall back on distinct national traditions or on a sense of historical continuity that binds its citizens to its leaders.Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy and the regime’s self-definition as “the anti-fascist German state” have been the only East German pillars of social cohesion and political legitimacy. Both have crumbled.

Today the operative issue in Central European politics is not German reunification but what a new stage of German-German reassociation could mean for the European balance of power in a period of rapidly shifting circumstances. The lurching collapse of Communist authority in East Germany has moved German-German reassociation into a new phase without a compass to guide political leaders and citizens in either German state or in neighboring countries.

East Germany remains the fulcrum of the two central issues of the Cold War--the future of Eastern Europe and the German question. While the major focus of public debate and policy has until recently been change in Eastern Europe, the issue of East German viability is the clear link between reform in the Soviet empire and the German question. It deserves serious attention.