Non-Communist East German Premier : Reform: Another Christian-Democrat elected president of Parliament.

East German deputies got their first taste of parliamentary democracy today as they designated the country’s first non-communist prime minister and asked him to form a government.

They also voted in a Christian-Democratic Union Party member as Speaker at the inaugural session of the country’s first freely elected assembly.

Shortly after the opening ceremony, deputies elected Dr. Sabine Bergmann-Pohl as president of the Parliament. The East Berlin physician is a member of the conservative Christian-Democratic Union, which with 163 seats is the largest party in the assembly.

The first ballot this morning did not give any of the candidates an absolute majority. Bergmann-Pohl received 214 votes in the second ballot.

The Volkskammer then designated Christian-Democratic Union leader Lothar de Maiziere, 50, as the country’s prime minister and asked him to form a government.

De Maiziere, whose party won the March 18 election, said he is prepared to accept the challenge. Talks are under way and a deal with the runner-up Social Democrats and other smaller parties is close to being concluded.

The procedure contrasts sharply with the activities of the previous Parliament, which had been little more than a rubber-stamp institution during the four decades of Stalinist rule that ended with the ouster of the hard-line communists last fall.

Many of the 400 deputies, including leading members of the Party of Democratic Socialism--the renamed communists--attended an ecumenical church service before the ceremonial opening of the Volkskammer, the East German Parliament.

Among the delegates at the service in the downtown Gethsemane church were outgoing Communist Prime Minister Hans Modrow and Gregor Gysi, the leader of the PDS, which has 66 parliamentary seats.

The March 18 electoral victory by the three-party, conservative Alliance for Germany was widely seen as an endorsement of West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s blueprint for unification.

Several deputies said they expect the life of the new-style democratic Parliament to be short and that the role of a still-to-be-formed, broad-based government will be largely restricted to passing legislation needed for reunification.