ANALYSIS / WHAT PRICE UNITY? : As Tensions Rise, Rush Is On to Make Germany 1 Nation

Political tensions over the speed of unification are building in Germany and seem likely to plague the process after the state treaty governing the currency, economic and social union comes into place next month.

On one side, Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s ruling center-right coalition is pushing to implement further measures and complete the political unity as quickly as possible after the treaty takes effect July 2.

Members of Kohl’s Christian Democrats now talk of possible all-German elections--an event that would crown unification--as early as the end of this year.

To a considerable extent, this urgency is linked to domestic political imperatives.

Kohl wants an all-German election before the memory of last November’s dancing atop the Berlin Wall is blotted out by complaints about the cost of unity in West Germany and the unemployment lines that will form in East Germany after the currency union and the start of the country’s multibillion-dollar economic overhaul.

But Kohl and those around him are also driven by their own sense of history and by the haunting fear that the mercurial political mood in Europe might suddenly shift to Germany’s disadvantage, undermining the present nervous international consensus for unity.

Moscow’s stiffening position on a united Germany’s membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the growing troubles of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev have only added to the government’s sense of urgency.

“We don’t know what the world will look like in three months, six months or nine months,” the Christian Democrats’ parliamentary leader, Alfred Dregger, summed up earlier this week.

On the other side, however, a resistance to this speed has begun to build in West Germany, and has been taken up as a cause by the main opposition Social Democrats.

There are even signs that some East Germans are growing unsettled by the speed. An opinion poll published earlier this week by the Leipzig-based Central Institute for Youth Research indicated 40% of the 1,800 East Germans questioned believed unity was coming too quickly, although an equal number wanted unification this year.

Some political observers believe that once East Germans trade in their little-wanted ostmarks for convertible deutschemarks, the urgency for political unity will diminish.

Meanwhile, polls in West Germany indicate a majority of the West German population now believes the pace is too fast.

Fewer than one in three West Germans say they are prepared to absorb financial sacrifices to achieve unification.

Although the Kohl government-- and many independent economists-- are counting on the private sector to finance a major part of the huge costs of unification, Bonn already has set aside a special $70-billion German Unity Fund. It could have to spend up to $30 billion in public money during the first year after the currency union to offset unemployment, retrain East German workers and revive an infrastructure on the verge of collapse.

For the West Germans, whose economic wonder and subsequent prosperity have been based on the cardinal rule of never venturing into the unknown, the currency union already is seen as a leap into uncharted waters. To make this leap in such haste has unsettled many.

A nagging sense of collective self-doubt that seems to bubble to the surface in East Germany at times of difficulty and uncertainty now also is visible in some parts of West Germany.

In a speech in Bonn on Wednesday to the German-American group Atlantik-Bruecke, the president of the West German Parliament, Rita Suessmuth, took up the theme, chastising those afflicted with what she termed kleinmut --a faintheartedness.

“I see it as sad that we only talk of problems and not opportunities,” she said. “We always achieve more than we think we can.”