GERMANY IN TRANSITION : Anger in Leipzig Led to Drive for Change : East Germany: Fury over civil ills prompted the ‘miracle’ that made the city the birthplace for the reform movement.

East Germans are now calling Leipzig, the decrepit, dreary center of the country’s rust belt, the “birthplace” of the national protest movement.

If Leipzig is its home, surely St. Nikolai Lutheran Church, with its glittering golden spire, is the cradle of the demonstrations that have toppled a hard-line Communist government, replacing it with new leaders promising unprecedented reforms.

Pastor Christian Fuehrer, in fact, speaks of a “miracle” through which a few dozen people meeting here on Monday nights burgeoned in a few months’ time into mass gatherings of hundreds of thousands of protesters.

“It was astonishing and still difficult to believe,” said Fuehrer, a compact, jeans-wearing cleric with a ready smile, in his airy third-floor study across the street from the 12th-Century church.

Why did the movement begin and flourish specifically in East Germany’s second city, the capital of Saxony?

“Conditions were ripe here,” said Fuehrer, who noted that the Monday night sessions actually began in 1982 as prayers for peace--that is, for disarmament.

“We met in the church because there was really no other place where people could safely gather,” he added.

The meetings remained small until this year, when they began building strength--partly in anger against allegedly rigged local elections in May and also because of the appalling economic conditions in and around Leipzig, a city of 550,000. The burghers of Leipzig were seething with resentment against government policies that had left it without inner-city housing and plagued by air pollution as stifling as anywhere in the world.

It was not by chance that the largest proportion of East Germans fleeing to the West came from the smoky, coal-mining south--leaving a desperate shortage of doctors, nursing staff and even bus drivers.

“When the wind blows from the north or south, we get the fumes from the brown-coal mines,” said city official Heinz Rossberg, interviewed in the blackened, baroque “new” City Hall. “When the wind comes from the west, we get the stink from the chemical factories.”

Rossberg, who is a Communist Party member, had no compunction about criticizing the situation in Leipzig.

He said much of East German industry is based in Leipzig and that the city has always been a leader in manufacturing--the origins of the semiannual trade fair dating back to the year 1265.

But under deposed leader Erich Honecker’s housing program, high-rise but sterile and slapjack living quarters were built in the unappealing outskirts of town--while those in the central city were left rotting and unrenovated.

For instance, he said, 4,000 new flats were built this year--but 2,000 others were abandoned, leaving central neighborhoods looking as if a plague had swept through.

As the plight of Leipzig--and other southern cities like Dresden, Karl-Marx-Stadt, Halle, Erfurt, Jena and Gera--worsened, construction workers were ordered to East Berlin last year to spruce up the capital for this year’s 40th anniversary celebrations.

“How could that be when we urgently needed houses, roads, even tracks for trams?” asked Rossberg.

The lack of housing, among other problems, said Rossberg, caused many citizens to leave--with and without permission.

“Medical students are assisting doctors in operations,” he said. “Soldiers are driving buses and trams. Many nurses have left.

“We had promises for new construction from the Housing Ministry,” he added candidly, “but they are empty promises. People are not satisfied.”

Under pressure, Mayor Bernd Seidel resigned recently and has not been replaced.

“He will be--when the right man is found,” said Rossberg, breaking into an ironic smile.

As to the role Leipzig played nationally in the protest movement, Rossberg said, “People watched the weekly demonstrations on West German television and looked to Leipzig; we were the focus.”

In the focal aperture was Christian Fuehrer and his Monday night prayer service, which caught the nation’s imagination.

The single most important night, Fuehrer said, was Monday, Oct. 9, just after the police violence against demonstrators during the anniversary celebrations of the Communist state.

At 2 p.m., about 1,000 Communist Party members entered the austere, whitewashed church to fill up all the pews--keeping out the regulars.

“We went ahead with the service anyway,” recalled the graying, crew-cut Fuehrer, “and afterward, they thanked us. I think that was a turning point.”

The party members’ presence did not prevent a crowd of 70,000 from gathering outside the church and marching through the center of town.

The following Monday, the numbers soared to more than 200,000--and two days later Honecker was out and Egon Krenz took over as East German political leader.

This month, as Monday gatherings continued, the government resigned, the Berlin Wall was opened and a new reformist prime minister, Hans Modrow from Dresden, was elected by a freshly independent Parliament.

“I think this country now has a genuine future,” said the 46-year-old Fuehrer. “But this new government start requires time. And things must stay peaceful.”

Apart from the dismal inner-city decay, Leipzig has some amenities to offer its citizens: new parks, playgrounds and swimming pools; one of the most elegant public buildings in Germany, the “old” City Hall; the Gewandhaus Orchestra under Kurt Mazur; a first-class opera house, and a lovely architectural ensemble fashioned around the Thomaskirche, where Johann Sebastian Bach was choirmaster for nearly three decades.

To wander into the ThomasKirche, or Thomas Church, and catch by chance a rehearsal by musicians and singers of a Bach cantata--delicate melodies wafting through the lovely, arched nave--is another world from the mean streets just beyond the city center’s ring road.

There, in a dark tavern called the Riebert Stubl, on a grim, gray corner, the workers of Leipzig sip their Saxon Brau.

A machinist drank alone, perhaps because he admitted to being a member of the Communist Party and others seemed to ignore him.

“People are leaving because they are dissatisfied, they can’t come to terms with the government,” he said, looking morose.

“They work hard and can’t find anything to buy with their earnings. That’s why they are leaving. Nothing has been done for these old buildings here, which were good buildings once. And now nothing can be done.”