E. Germans Look to Future With Hope--and Unease

The burghers in Weimar, the quiet city that recalls Germany’s cultural glory and political shame, share the feelings of their countrymen.

From the salt-sprayed Baltic coast and the spacious, lake-speckled farmlands of Mecklenburg to the depressed cities of Saxony and the rolling hills of Thuringia, East Germans are gingerly moving toward democracy--confused about the present, deeply unsure about the future.

But from the Elbe to the Oder rivers, and here in the city that was home to Goethe and Schiller and the ill-fated Weimar Republic, dozens of conversations suggest two certainties emerging among the people struggling to lift the 40-year yoke of communism:

Although the Communist Party still dominates the East German government, the party is nearly finished in this country, destined never again to exercise power after the first free elections, which were moved up by two months this past weekend and are now scheduled for March 18.

Reunification with West Germany is overwhelmingly favored here. The question is not whether, but when and how.

So most of the 16 million East Germans are looking beyond the Communist past and into a free-market future--and wondering what that future will mean for jobs and social benefits they have long taken for granted.

As Violetta Bertel of Weimar’s information office put it: “The mood is the same everywhere. People are against the Communist Party. They are for reunification. The question is whether it comes fast or slow.

“But people are afraid of losing their jobs in a competitive society,” she continued. “They know that everything is overstaffed, from auto plants to museums.”

Echoing Bertel’s sentiments on the future of the Communist Party, Waldemar Faarsch, a rugged 47-year-old shipyard worker in Rostock, pulled on a beer in a waterfront cafe and spoke for many when he said: “There’s no way now they could win an election. They may still be the biggest party, but they are very unpopular.”

As for German reunification, Rainer Frommann, councilor for the environment in the aptly named Bitterfeld, the most polluted city in East Germany, declared in his bare office: “A month ago, sentiment around here for reunification was 50-50. Today, it’s nearly 100%.”

Across East Germany, one can see the red, gold and black West German flag--a colorful symbol of the desire for reunification--hanging from construction cranes, from railroad switching towers and from scaffolding. There is no secret police to rip them down.

A Matter of Economics

There are few ideological reasons proffered for reunification. To most East Germans favoring a single Germany, it is a matter of sheer economic well-being. On visits to West Germany, they have seen the future, and it works--at least better than state socialism.

Only a relatively few intellectuals, clerics and party members continue to call publicly for a socialist East Germany, believing that socialism can still find a way to provide a better future.

But a construction worker in East Berlin put the opposition case this way: “We have 40 years of socialism, and it hasn’t worked. Enough is enough.”

And even Prime Minister Hans Modrow, in the first such statement by an East German government leader, called Thursday for the reunification of Germany as a neutral federation with a single government and a capital in Berlin.

Nevertheless, East Germany’s swiftness in discarding the carapace of communism has left people here realizing that reunification and free enterprise could mean a period of hardship.

That concern is registered not just in the major cities of East Berlin, Leipzig and Dresden, where most attention has focused, but in more out-of-the-way places on the Baltic Sea and the Polish border and in farm towns and hamlets.

Bobbing at the wharf in Warnemunde, a charming little harbor downriver from Rostock, sailors aboard the fishing smack Margarethe practice a little free enterprise by hawking freshly grilled herring fillets from the vessel to passers-by.

In the immaculate pilot house, Capt. Hans-Juergen Schneider, wearing the traditional Hanseatic black sailor’s cap, told a visitor: “We have a good job, a good life, a good standard of living. As a fisherman, I would like to see the country--or whatever comes after--join the European Community so that we can fish in other waters besides our own.

“The Communists are all washed up. Nobody wants them. No chance. Everyone here is sure that reunification will take place. The question is how fast.

Price May Go Up

“Economically, it’s difficult to see ahead. The government has been subsidizing the price of fish, and if we compete openly, the price will have to go up. The next government will have to solve this.”

The old province of Mecklenburg stretches across the north German plain, with overarching skies and sudden dark squalls howling in from the Baltic, which the Germans call the “East Sea.”

With its fishing and agriculture, the north is relatively more prosperous and content than the south of East Germany, the area that was the focus of most of the popular demonstrations that toppled the Stalinist regime of Erich Honecker last October.

But astute farmers recognize that the state cooperative enterprises are over-staffed and that reductions will be necessary to compete in a free market.

Siegfried and Marianne Neumann are tall blonds who live in a cozy house with their daughter, Dana, 17, and son, Lars, 14, in the farming hamlet of Vorbeck. German farmers tend to live in villages and walk or drive to their fields, rather than living in farmhouses on their land, as is usually the case in the United States.

Offering a visitor a pre-lunch glass of pink sparkling wine, Siegfried Neumann said he grows grain, hops, potatoes and turnips and raises cows and pigs on the 8,600-acre state cooperative.

“There is insecurity here because we are not sure about the future,” he said. “As everywhere, we have too many people to make the farm economically effective. We could do better with 20% less people. But this means dislocation. And reunification will mean some companies will go bankrupt.

“I spend one day a week in West Germany, in Schleswig-Holstein, talking to farmers and market people there. We could build up trade with the West, but a lot has to be done. We need modernized machinery.

“Like everywhere else, nobody is sure what’s going to happen. Everyone wants reunification as soon as possible. We are flying the West German flag around here.”

As to whether he considers himself East or West German, Neumann said with a grin, “I am North German.”

Like those in farm families everywhere, Neumann faces the prospect that his children will leave the farm for city life.

In contrast to life under Honecker and his hard-line predecessors, Neumann said, there is now variety to Vorbeck’s political scene. “We have all the parties represented in our town, but everybody knows each other, so the mood is calm.”

His wife added: “There is no support for the Communists. The remaining members here quit the party just yesterday. There’s nothing left of them. We also have representatives from the opposition groups--but they don’t seem to have a program.”

The opposition’s lack of a coherent program was also cited by Petra Stiller, a city librarian in Frankfurt, on the wide, sluggish Oder River which, with its tributary, the Neisse, forms East Germany’s postwar border with Poland.

“Most of the new groups don’t seem to have programs, so we don’t know what to make of them. But we certainly won’t elect the Communists,” the jeans-clad 29-year-old said.

“Most people want change and are interested in uniting with the Federal Republic (West Germany). They hope change will give them a better life economically. They want a higher standard of living and things in the shops.”

On the touchy question of Poland’s postwar borders, she said: “My grandparents came from east of here, land which is now Poland. But I don’t want to go back there and see no reason that it should be part of Germany again.”

Pleased by Restoration

She is delighted that the town leaders are getting around to restoring churches and some public buildings damaged in World War II, rather than tearing them down and building high-rises.

Would she leave for West Germany?

“I think that all of us here have thought of going to the Federal Republic, but I have three children, and it is not easy to get a job or an apartment. I will wait to see what happens in the elections.”

That theme was taken up by others. Some officials predict that unless the March election produces democratic results, as many as 3 million more East Germans will head west, joining the 344,000 who fled there during the upheaval late last year.

The vast majority of those who left--their departure, in effect, detonating the downfall of the Honecker regime--came from the depressed, industrial areas of Saxony. They were mostly younger people with valuable skills, people such as mechanics and health workers, the population segment that the country can least afford to lose.

The mass departures left some communities without basic services. There were reports of hospitals without sufficient nurses, troops pressed into service as deliverymen and drivers of public transportation.

“If the . . . election is seriously disappointing,” commented an East German editor who has traveled widely, “hundreds of thousands more young, able workers will leave for West Germany, and we will eventually become a nation of older pensioners, with nobody left to pay for our pensions.”

Even now, there are many who are not waiting. According to news reports, between 2,000 and 3,000 East Germans are moving to the West each day.

South of Frankfurt lies the region of the Sorbs, a Slavic people who settled along the Neisse and who now are a minority in the area between Cottbus and Bautzen, with town and street signs there in both German and Sorbian.

This is also the area that produces half of the country’s electricity and 80% of its urban natural gas. But the power generation comes from burning brown coal, or lignite, which emits noxious sulfur dioxide fumes.

The landscape is characterized by massive power plants next to deep open-pit mines with enormous Rube Goldberg-like machines that claw away at the earth for coal. In the absence of brisk winds, a pall hangs over the area, and the leaves of trees are often coated with gray dust.

To entice workers to live in towns along the power belt such as Hoyerswerda, newly constructed, spacious apartments are offered; roomy living quarters are rare anywhere in East Germany.

‘My parents came here to work when I was 16,” a former resident of Hoyerswerda recalled. “They liked the idea of a big flat. But some nights I would wake up and could hardly breathe. The landscape was devastated by the mines. They used to tell us the fumes were not poisonous, but now we know better.”

The deepest pollution band stretches from Cottbus through Dresden and Karl-Marx Stadt and Meissen--a traveler might wonder how it is that beautiful porcelain, Meissen’s trademark, could be fashioned in such a glum environment--to Leipzig, Halle and Bitterfeld.

Here, too, are massive open-pit mines and the smoke-spitting factories that produce brown coal briquettes used for heating in the rest of the country--and so contributing to nationwide pollution.

The depressed state of the south, East Germany’s rust belt, was an important reason for the anti-government feelings that welled up in Leipzig and Dresden. Similarly, the Communist central government under Honecker allowed the inner cities to rot while building sterile and boring high-rise apartments farther out.

Construction materials and manpower were diverted to East Berlin to shine up the capital for its 750th anniversary in 1987 and again two years later for the 40th commemoration of the founding of the Communist state--all to the anger and despair of provincial officials.

Further, much of the infrastructure was allowed to run down. As a railroad worker named Manfred Grothmann put it: “The railways are in a desolate state. They electrified much of the system a few years ago but forgot about the roadbeds.

“They’ve got electric engines, but they have to go slow because of the poor condition of rails and ties.”

A friend of Grothmann, Ingo Mann, added: “What’s the answer? We’ve got to get a new government and help from the Federal Republic to rebuild industry and clean up the environment. Pretty soon, we’ll all be one country, so why not get started now?”

In Erfurt, the hilly capital of the Thuringia region, one almost gets the impression that the Germanys have already been reunited: West German visitors are a common sight in the striking city, with its twin Protestant and Roman Catholic cathedrals, its 14th-Century bridge over a branch of the Unstrut River, and houses and shops built atop the structure.

It was in Erfurt that Martin Luther, years before he sparked the Protestant Reformation, decided to become a Roman Catholic monk; he translated the Bible from Latin into German at nearby Wartburg Castle, laying the foundation for modern German.

“I’m happy to see all these people,” said barman Frank Lein, pouring an espresso into a gilded cup in Erfurt’s Erfurterhof Hotel, outside which were parked dozens of West German cars. “It could mean new life for the town. But really, reunification is the only way out of this crisis. Our great hope is that it will come this year.”

Less than 20 miles east of Erfurt is Weimar, near which lie a major Soviet helicopter base and the former Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald--which drew its name from the beech forest surrounding it and which is now a national memorial. On a rare clear day, the Buchenwald bell tower can be seen for miles around.

Weimar itself maintains the homes of the poets Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Johann von Schiller and the composer and pianist Franz Liszt. And it boasts a small but elegant central mall--although most of the town, like everything else in East Germany, is rundown and in need of a coat of paint.

Weimar has freshened up the city theater, where the constitution was adopted in 1919 for Germany’s ill-fated Weimar Republic.

Sitting behind her desk, city official Bertel, who advises visitors on Weimar’s history and importance, commented: “People don’t believe in reforming socialism here. It had its chance and failed. Some people in middle and old age are disappointed that socialism didn’t work. They devoted their lives to it--in vain.

“Right now, we don’t know who to vote for,” she added. “There are so many opposition groups saying so many different things.”

Living in Weimar, Bertel said, has made her particularly aware of the fatal flaw of the Weimar Republic: too many parties and not enough governmental discipline--a situation made to order for the collapse of fragile democracy and the rise of Adolf Hitler.