The Party Is Out; a Street Party Shapes Up : East Germany: Impatient with politicians of every stripe, the people are starting to see reunification as a short cut to democracy and prosperity.

In East Germany, the party’s over--the Communist Party. Egon Krenz, the communist leader, had opened the Berlin Wall to gain a breathing space in which to regain some sense of credibility with his people. Instead, Krenz’s hoped-for breathing space has become his last gasp. Reforms were not forthcoming; the regime seemed to dodder from one challenge of crisis management to the next. The verdict of the East German people was swift: You can’t teach old Stalinists new tricks. Krenz and his associates are being swept away.

The Communist Party has had the wind knocked out of it by the furious force of retribution coming from the streets. It is now crumbling in a fit of self-incrimination. Krenz’s predecessor, Erich Honecker, and his cronies have been expelled from the party and are under criminal investigation. Some have been arrested. Krenz is likely to be a target of investigations as well. A new Communist Party, perhaps with a new name, will be shaped by radical grass-roots reformers. But they, too, will become increasingly irrelevant to the forces of change in Central Europe.

The power of the people has also surprised much of the opposition. Those political activists who sponsored East Germany’s gentle revolution had been so engaged because they dreamed of creating an East German alternative to West German capitalism and Stalinist socialism. Yet they have been hampered by a lack of economic competence and political organization. The so-called bloc parties have also been slow to emerge from the shadow of communist co-optation in which they operated for 40 years. As a result, a political vacuum has appeared in which the grass-roots call for German reunification is growing. The political agenda is being set on the streets.

Disillusioned by the extent of criminal corruption within the party and the state apparatus, demoralized by revelations about the true state of the economy, and casting an apprehensive glance at the economic catastrophe afflicting other reformist states in Eastern Europe, the East German people are now looking hard for a short cut to prosperity and democracy. A growing number believe that short cut could be reunification.

Reunification as reform will be the dominating topic in the next four weeks in both German states. Although East German political activists have not stressed the issue, the silent majority within the population has found its voice and is quickly pushing reunification to the top of the political agenda. Watch for the time when East German demonstrators change their current slogan, “we are the people” to “we are one people.”

The collapse of the Communist Party last weekend has compressed the timetable for change. New elections are now proposed for May, rather than next fall, as had been anticipated. The debate on whether reunification is the best route to reform will become furious as new political parties seek to capture the issue for themselves. The best-organized opposition group, the Democratic Awakening, has already responded to the public mood by being the first major political grouping to openly support reunification. They have approved of West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s plan for reunification, calling it “worthy of consideration.”

If the question of reunification is postponed and the pace of reform falters, many East Germans will opt to wait it out in West Germany, rather than suffer through the transition in East Germany. The result could be an outflow of people from a reforming East Germany that equals or exceeds the earlier outflow from an unreformed East Germany. East Germans are impatient for change; more are coming to believe that the prospect of German-German reassociation leading to reunification could spare them the pain of reform currently suffered by the Hungarians and the Poles.

The urge for reform has been further accelerated by events in neighboring Czechoslovakia. It was in fact the Czech decision last Wednesday to abolish the constitutionally enshrined leading role of the Communist Party that prompted the crisis in East Germany over the weekend. In November, the wave of reform in East Germany triggered change in Czechoslovakia. Today, the momentum in each country has become mutually reinforcing, leading to a whirlwind of change that is sweeping through both countries with breathtaking speed--and is completely out of the hands of governments and diplomatic officials.

Reforms in Eastern Europe are now far outpacing reforms in the Soviet Union. The dynamic of change has shifted decisively to the smaller Warsaw Pact states. Mikhail Gorbachev facilitated these changes, but is he prepared for the impact that East European reforms are now likely to have on his own domestic situation? As East and West build down the division of Europe, a new division is appearing in the East: the gap between the tumultuous changes in Eastern Europe and the striking, yet suddenly less revolutionary--and less successful--reforms in Moscow.

There is great cause for euphoria in Europe today. There is also substantial cause for concern.