Migrants From East Straining Housing, Other Resources in W. Germany : Refugees: Tensions rise as the nation struggles to cope with what one official called a ‘catastrophe.’

Two months after the East Germans first discovered a hole in the Iron Curtain and began pouring into the West via Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the mayor of this North Sea port declared his city so filled with refugees, it could take no more.

That was last week.

When East Germany threw open its borders last Friday, Bremen’s mayor, Henning Scherf, announced plans to house future refugees in a massive shelter under the city center known locally as “The Bunker” and built for a nuclear catastrophe.

What was once the butt of black jokes in the early days of the city’s refugee problem was suddenly on the edge of reality.

“The catastrophe is here,” explained Hans-Christoph Hoppensack, the city’s housing director, as officials in Bremen and other large West German cities braced themselves for the worst.

Initially at least, the avalanche of East German refugees predicted by some has not yet occurred. Of the estimated 2 million East Germans who flooded across the inter-German frontier and the Berlin Wall last weekend, only 23,000 requested permanent resettlement in West Germany.

West German Interior Ministry officials also noted that the number of refugees had dropped from 13,000 per day on Friday to just under 3,500 by Sunday.

But for both federal and local authorities responsible for refugee welfare in West Germany, these are nerve-racking times.

A national housing shortage, already serious, has suddenly become critical. Public authorities are spending resources they say they don’t have, and competition for jobs has become acute in many parts of the country.

In a nation that has always worried excessively about the fragility of both its prosperity and its democracy, the influx of refugees has also raised concern about new social strains.

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, or openness, and the softening political climate in Eastern Europe already have unleashed a flood of ethnic Germans trapped in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe since the end of World War II.

Before last week’s dramatic opening of the inter-German borders, the (West) German Assn. of Towns and Cities in Cologne had predicted an influx of 3 million refugees into West Germany over the next six years.

“This projection has been totally overtaken by events in East Germany,” said the association’s spokesman, Ewald Mueller.

Before East Germany’s repressive regime suddenly relaxed stringent travel restrictions and promised free elections, more than 1.4 million East Germans had formally applied to abandon their homeland for good.

More than 200,000 East Germans have arrived in West Germany since September.

How many may now reconsider their decision to leave East Germany--or how many of those already in West Germany might think of returning home to a more relaxed political climate--is unclear.

“There are one and a half million East Germans over there now trying to decide what they should do--make something of the new chance or leave,” Scherf said. “It’s completely impossible to know which way it will go.”

But what Scherf and the mayors of other large West German cities do know is they are fast running out of resources to care for the newcomers and places to put them.

In Hamburg, the city has already chartered two ships to house 1,300 refugees and is preparing to convert school gymnasiums into dormitories.

“We can only anticipate the influx is going to continue as it has,” said Hinnerk Fock, spokesman for the Hamburg government.

Emergency shelters have been activated in Frankfurt and Bonn, while in Bremen, new arrivals are being housed in West German army barracks as the underground shelter is hastily prepared and housing officials talk of requisitioning empty dwellings in the city.

In a profile typical of many of the country’s cities, Bremen boasted a surplus of housing until late 1987.

However, with the steady arrival early last year of ethnic Germans from Poland, Romania and the Soviet Union, this surplus was quickly exhausted.

The city then built a series of temporary dormitories and three weeks ago won permission to house newly arriving East German refugees on nearby military bases.

The British, French and U.S. governments also have offered to house refugees at their military bases in West Germany, but Scherf said that no U.S. or British base commander in the Bremen region had yet agreed to such a move.

As in other German cities, Bremen has launched an emergency building program--but that will have little impact on the community’s immediate housing crunch.

With Bremen’s once-bustling port in decline and unemployment running at around 15%--twice the national average--city officials worry about growing social divisions between haves and have-nots and an eventual backlash against refugees.

“There’s a honeymoon period now, but this can’t last,” Scherf said. “If you don’t have a job or a place to live, it’s extremely worrisome. It can lead to new kinds of (social) divisions.

“There’s a danger in this process,” he added. “It’s a real threat to the democratic development of the country.”

Added Regina Bruss, author of a book on the city’s early postwar years and an exhibits organizer at a Bremen museum: “Those who have lived here all their lives and can’t find work are clearly upset when someone comes in and gets a job immediately.”

A few miles west of the city center, on the campus of Bremen University, student leaders expressed anger that officials ignored their pleas for additional housing, yet now launch an emergency construction program for refugees.

Students last year briefly lived in tents to protest the city’s housing shortage.

“For us, there is absolutely no understanding for this,” said the university’s student council president, Andreas Bovenschulte. “It’s hypocrisy.”

The student leader added: “We’ve always demanded that empty houses be requisitioned, but were told it was against the law. Now they are going to do it for the refugees.”

He said the present euphoric mood in the country eventually would be overtaken by a growing resentment.

“It’s the government’s fault, but the refugees could end up being a scapegoat,” Bovenschulte said.

In part, his remarks reflected a sharp generational difference in West Germany’s reaction to its refugee problem.

Older Germans, who remember another, far larger wave of refugees who came West in the chaos that followed the Nazis’ collapse in 1945, have been quicker to volunteer material help than those too young to have memories of such events, officials said.

Those who lived through those early postwar years also say West Germany’s enormous prosperity has left residents less rather than more willing to help newcomers.

Many recalled a deep sense of solidarity among people who existed on 1,000 calories per day, grubbed for coal and made sweaters from old sack material.

“There was a greater preparedness among people then to rebuild together than there is today to divvy up and let others have a share of the prosperity,” Scherf said.

Scherf complained, for example, that some city landlords have said they prefer to keep their buildings empty rather than rent them out.

“That’s clearly a provocation, and we must force them to rent those places,” he said.