Low-Profile Protestant: Nation’s Last Leader? : East Germany: The Christian Democrat gains support with an anti-Stalinism stance, not political charisma.

Politics is a reluctant fourth career for Lothar de Maiziere, the quiet Christian Democrat in line to become the last leader of East Germany.

De Maiziere, 50, is the white-whiskered churchman whose party led the moderate-right Alliance for Germany to stunning victory in East Germany’s first free elections.

Inexperienced as a politician and ineloquent as a speaker, De Maiziere never took center stage during the brief campaign.

The diminutive candidate would walk unrecognized through crowds of East Germans who came to hear West Germany’s Christian Democratic chancellor, Helmut Kohl, campaign for his sister party in the east.

Even Kohl’s wife drew more applause at at least one rally than the bland candidate himself.

But De Maiziere is credited with purging the East German Christian Democrats of hard-core Stalinists after he took over the party chairmanship in November from Gerald Goetting, who now faces corruption charges.

By aligning the party with two newly formed parties--the German Social Union and the Democratic Awakening--de Maiziere was able to win vital support from Kohl’s forces.

Kohl himself made six campaign appearances in East Germany.

Born near what became the West German border in a town called Nordhausen, De Maiziere is the son of French Huguenot immigrants.

Even as a teen-ager, De Maiziere belonged to a circle of friends whose frequent philosophical discussions about the church and East German society brought them under official suspicion.

“I was suspected of being a counterrevolutionary,” De Maiziere told one interviewer.

He joined the Christian Democrats at 16. One of four satellite parties in the Communist-dominated National Front that ruled East Germany, the Christian Democrats for decades aligned themselves with the hard-liners.

But the low-key De Maiziere never actually became a counterrevolutionary.

Raised a strict Protestant, De Maiziere was a gifted violist who played in the respected Radio Symphony Orchestra Berlin and other orchestras until nerve inflammation in his arm forced him to quit in 1975.

At the age of 35, De Maiziere embarked on a new career, studying law at Humboldt University in East Berlin.

He combined his devotion to the church and his commitment to justice when he graduated, becoming a human rights lawyer and, he once said, “the only Christian attorney in (East) Berlin.”

He defended the church and its members against the Stalinist government and did legal battle for conscientious objectors against military conscription into the Communist National People’s Army.

A lay church official, De Maiziere served as a deputy prime minister in the caretaker coalition of Prime Minister Hans Modrow, the reform Communist he is now poised to replace.

De Maiziere is married and has three daughters.