NEWS ANALYSIS : East Germans Seek Close Ties, Not Unity : Reunification: The people feel self-respect and pride in pushing the regime to undertake reforms.

Despite the scenes of euphoric Germans dancing on the once-impenetrable Berlin Wall, events of recent weeks have revealed a surprisingly lukewarm view of reunification among East Germans.

Official Communist dogma has long rejected the idea, and the evidence that a majority of East Germans also feel that way has come as a shock to West Germans, who have grown up with reunification enshrined in their constitution.

If this East German public sentiment persists, and there are reasons to believe it will, any full reunification would be virtually impossible no matter what the shape of the future government of East Germany.

Both East and West Germans have an overwhelming desire to develop closer ties. But among the East Germans who hugged and celebrated in Berlin and towns and cities along the inner-German border, few expressed a longing for political union, even as an afterthought.

“Forty years of separation, 40 years of two nationhoods, throw a long shadow,” said a front-page commentary Wednesday in West Germany’s most respected daily, the Frankfurter Allgemeine, noting East German coolness to the idea.

The conclusion carried a sense of disillusionment.

The reasons behind this East German attitude are subtle, yet important.

Political analysts believe one of the little-noted achievements of East Germany’s embryonic opposition has been to generate a sense of a separate East German national identity, apart from simply being the Communist Germans.

The widely held perception among East Germans that they had wrested their new rights from an unwilling government through mass demonstrations has brought an entirely new degree of pride and self-confidence to a people who had long considered themselves as the left-out, leftover Germans.

There was also a sense of pride among East German visitors, a pride in their own material achievements, however modest they might be compared to those of their Western brethren.

Their only frowns came in a few rare instances when they believed their hosts might be laughing at their little automobiles and their low-valued currency rather than sharing in their joy.

East Germany’s opposition groups and its Communist reformers both seem to reflect these sentiments. They envision a democratic East German state--but one with a strong socialist dimension--and separateness from West Germany.

A poll of East Germans, conducted by a West German opinion research organization on the first day after the borders opened, found 71% of those questioned preferred two independent, democratic states to reunification.

East German leader Egon Krenz may not command widespread popular support, but his stand in rejecting reunification appears to be one area where he is in tune with his public.

“There are advantages here (in West Germany), but there are also pluses in our system,” commented a young East German working mother, who proceeded to reel off a string of social welfare programs without which, she insisted, she would have no career.

With the prospect that long decades of repression are over, the German Democratic Republic, as East Germany is officially known, finally seems to offer its citizens a real future. The drop in the number of East Germans seeking permanent refuge in the West appears to confirm that a majority now believe there remains something to stay and work for.

This conviction remains tentative and could evaporate quickly if the government’s commitment to free travel waivers or its promises of free elections are not fulfilled.

From an average of 10,000 to 11,000 per day who slipped away via Czechoslovakia and Hungary in the weeks before the East German regime opened its frontiers, the number rose to 13,000 during the first 24 hours but has declined sharply since.

West German Red Cross officials have also reported a growing number of inquiries from East German refugees seeking information about returning home.

“There are people who are going back, but it’s impossible to know how many at this point,” said Bernhard Doeveling, who heads the refugee assistance department at the West German Red Cross.

Events of the past week have also led West Germans to radically upgrade their image of their East German cousins, toward whom they had long felt a quiet sense of superiority.

In one stroke, they accomplished something no other Germans ever could: They rose up and neutralized the despots who ruled them.

For West Germans--who, despite their material affluence and democratic success, have wrestled with the haunting question of why more wasn’t done by Germans to rid themselves of Adolf Hitler--the significance of this development is hard to underestimate.

“Germans feel that for once they have launched a revolution that worked,” said Michael Stuermer, director of the Research Institute for International Policy and Security near Munich. “It not only worked, but it didn’t kill anyone.

“It injects a pride and confidence that could permanently alter the way we look at ourselves as a people,” he added. “With this, the euphoria is complete.”

If a new, democratic East Germany does develop, this new image would probably act as an equalizer in relations between the two states and possibly reinforce the apparently unenthusiastic response to the idea of reunification.

Those who paint images of the two Germanys rushing headlong toward reunification also overlook one other significant, but unspoken, fact about the scenes on and around the Berlin Wall: The ground on which the wall and the rest of Berlin rests is not administered by Germans but by the four victorious Allied powers of World War II--the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and France.

It was a British military officer who ordered West German police to the wall when crowds got rowdy last Friday night.

Before the Germans themselves ever put their sentiments on the reunification issue to a vote, all four countries will also have had their say on the future relationship between the two Germanys.

Times staff writer Tyler Marshall was recently on assignment in West Germany.