TRANSITION / LIFE AFTER COMMUNISM : Political Echoes of a Shattered Past Haunt E. Germany’s New Democracy

Students at Humboldt University pass the plaque reminding them that Friedrich Engels, co-author of the Communist Manifesto, studied here, and then they face another reminder of East Germany’s Communist past--the words of Karl Marx, etched in gold on the landing of the ornate marble staircase. The inscription reads:

“Philosophers only interpreted the world differently; what is important is to change it.”

Communism may have officially collapsed months ago in East Germany, but its totems remain everywhere--evidence of a kind of ideological life after death that haunts East Germany’s fledgling democracy as it journeys toward unity with West Germany.

This lingering afterlife reflects a political void, so far filled only by a vague German nationalism that powers the drive toward unification.

West Germans may debate unity in dry terms of added value tax and deutschemark inflation, but for their East German cousins it means “We are one people.”

“The real question is how to pick up the pieces without losing your pride,” said Juergen Kocka, a professor of history at the Free University in West Berlin. “It makes (East Germans) unpredictable.”

As East Germans attempt to pick up the pieces, the extent of what remains from the past ranges from the startling to the invisible, from the ludicrous to the sinister.

The Communist national flag with its hammer and compass insignia still flies throughout the country, in plazas and over factories bearing the names of countless Communist heroes.

The same insignia was emblazoned on the parliamentary chamber earlier this month as East Germany’s first non-Communist government was sworn in, a move that formally completed the revolution.

Or did it?

The new prime minister, Lothar de Maiziere, didn’t think so. He forced an embarrassing delay by refusing to swear loyalty to the East German constitution--the Communist constitution.

After 30 minutes of confusion, a compromise was reached, under which he and his government swore allegiance instead to the East German people.

That the Communist constitution remains in force underscores the benign nature of East Germany’s political transformation from dictatorship to democracy.

“It’s the disadvantage of a peaceful revolution,” noted Bonn University historian Karl-Dieter Bracher. “Not everything gets swept away.”

Such collisions of past and present permeate everyday life.

A new exhibit at the prestigious Museum for German History in East Berlin, for example, displays a large section of the Berlin Wall as if it were some artifact from a bygone era, yet most of the 100-mile-long wall is still very much in place.

The infamous State Security apparatus, known as the Stasi, may have been officially dismantled, but small groups remain active. At the anti-fascist memorial on the city’s main thoroughfare, Unter den Linden, the honor guard still goose-steps to and fro.

Only the crowd reaction has changed. Youngsters often laugh spontaneously--a response showing that without the backing of raw state power, the goose-step becomes ridiculously ungainly.

Only gradually have the symbolic props of Communist rule begun to fall away.

The people of Karl-Marx-Stadt, East Germany’s fourth-largest city, decided in a referendum last week to restore the city’s old name, Chemnitz. The plaque outside the country’s main trade union headquarters here commemorating the “hero workers” who built the Berlin Wall in 1961 has quietly disappeared.

The first tentative reviews have begun of the four decades of Communist rule and the 12-year Third Reich.

Earlier this month, East Germans were told for the first time that they share responsibility for the Holocaust. Then they learned that Soviet occupation forces probably killed thousands of German internees in the first years after World War II.

Other potential disclosures lurk in the central archives in Potsdam.

And as change begins, even the smallest of life’s once-solid reference points blur.

Readers of the Communist Party newspaper Neues Deutschland had barely adjusted to advertisements promoting such heresies as private entrepreneurship when they got another shock. After being teased for four days by clever but ambiguous ads, they learned the identity of the sponsor--American evangelist Billy Graham.