Frustration Fuels Political Movement in Eastern Germany : Union: Committee for Justice insists it seeks to build bridges by giving east a voice. Others warn move could drive country further apart.

Amid a chorus of ominous warnings and bitter denunciations from national leaders, volunteers in a tiny office only a few hundred yards from the scars of the old Berlin Wall are working on a potentially explosive idea: a new regional political movement for eastern Germany.

Formed earlier this month in response to a growing frustration among eastern Germans at the absence of eastern voices in national decision-making, the movement--called the Committee for Justice--has been swamped with calls ever since, according to organizers.

“Our expectations were high, but the response has gone far beyond what we had hoped for,” said Erwin Hasselberg, 33, a university research assistant who runs the office and its volunteer staff of students and workers.

No serious student of German politics here sees the development as the seed of a Slovakian-style separatist movement that would eventually split Germany. Indeed, the movement’s leaders say their goal is just the opposite--to bridge the divide that separates eastern and western Germany by giving the east a voice.

But the very existence of such a movement stems from a rapidly deteriorating public mood that seems to be driving eastern and western Germans further apart nearly two years after unification.

“Many would say, and they are correct, there is a deeper divide now,” commented Guenter Gaus, head of West Germany’s diplomatic mission in East Berlin from 1974 to 1981 and now a respected political commentator. “I’m more pessimistic than I was.”

There are many other forces that deepen the existing rift.

In the east, the disillusionment has grown that the heady promises of a blooming industrial landscape, made by Chancellor Helmut Kohl and other Western politicians, have failed to materialize. Many feel deceived and resentful at often being treated as inferiors. They tend to view westerners with a deepening suspicion. One recent opinion poll discovered that eastern Germans believed the advertising in their own regional newspapers far more than ads on national television or radio.

But westerners, too, feel a powerful sense of frustration and resentment at the flow of events. They fear that the economic demands of rebuilding the east--now running at $70 billion to $80 billion annually--represent a bottomless pit that threatens their hard-won prosperity and the country’s political stability. Unity to them has meant higher taxes, higher inflation and demands that they curtail wage demands and work extra hours, if new social welfare measures are to be financed.

The Frankfurter Rundschau summed up the situation this way in a recent editorial: “Again in year two of unification, the terms east and west are not so much geographical expressions as they are descriptions of states of mind.”

Both states of mind are understandable.

Among easterners, demoralization flows from both the slow pace of economic recovery and a level of economic and social dislocation that has exceeded the most nightmarish scenarios.

In the past two years, nearly every second job in eastern Germany has simply vanished. From a relatively skilled work force of 9.5 million that East Germany brought to unification, 5.6 million are expected to remain by next year’s end. Real unemployment is well in excess of 20%, and those who once said optimistically that the east would need one to two years to reach western economic levels now talk in decades.

The disappointment is acute.

Declining public morale was captured in one recent poll by the Institut fuer Demoskopie Allensbach, which found that the number of easterners who considered themselves proud of their achievements since unity had plummeted from 38% last October to only 26% last month.

Many of the best and brightest have quietly given up.

German government authorities confirm that the westward migration out of eastern Germany, which was supposed to stop with the currency union two years ago, still continues at a rate of 15,000 to 20,000 people a month.

“They are mostly young men, (ages) 25 to 35 with their families,” commented Mathias Greffrath, editor of the eastern weekly, the Wochenpost. “They are the most vigorous and energetic people. If it goes on for a couple of more years like this, it will be too late because the skilled labor will be gone.”

Those who stay sometimes resort to desperate measures to find work. A national scandal erupted earlier this year when press reports revealed that women in the city of Magdeburg had submitted to sterilization so they could present themselves to potential employers as low-risk hires who would not get pregnant and quit or let children distract them from their work.

An added factor in this demoralization is a belief among easterners that unity has effectively excluded them from German democracy. Those who govern the country from Bonn remain a world away from the east’s problems, and no voice of consequence speaks for eastern interests at a national level.

Wolfgang Thierse, deputy leader of the main opposition Social Democrats, said that the period since unification had taught easterners and their representatives in Bonn an important lesson: No one would help them but themselves.

He predicted that eastern members of Parliament would become more aggressive, even crossing party lines to form ad-hoc coalitions to pursue regional interests, if necessary. Citing a parliamentary vote last month in which 188 mainly eastern legislators joined to back a bill that would shift the Supreme Court from the western city of Karlsruhe to its pre-World War II seat of Leipzig, Thierse noted, “We’ll see more of that.”

But others question Thierse’s optimism.

They note that even in their own region, easterners today have less of a say in their own affairs than they did on the day of unification.

In the past year, the number of eastern minister-presidents (governors) among the region’s five states slipped from four to two; the only voice of stature among the remaining two--that of Brandenburg’s Minister-President Manfred Stolpe--was sharply diminished by accusations that he had worked for the East German Ministry for State Security, the Stasi.

“The east Germans feel they are misunderstood by the main national politicians, and, yes, forgotten,” Stolpe told a regional eastern newspaper recently.

The initial response to the Committee for Justice appears to confirm this. Although it is steered mainly by two eastern political figures with highly checkered images--Peter Michael Diestel, the publicity-hungry former interior minister in East Germany’s only freely elected government, and Gregor Gysi, the head of the retooled Communist Party--the committee has discovered a constituency for its message that the main political parties have lost their way.

“Our movement is looking for a new way,” Hasselberg said.

He said the committee plans to build a base that will lobby existing parties and key politicians on important issues. INFAS, an opinion research company, predicted that such an eastern German movement could draw up to 30% of the eastern vote, if it developed into a non-party electoral alliance.

Predictably, the committee’s goals and its personalities have only hardened attitudes among westerners, who see it, in part, as an expression of ingratitude for what could be called the world’s biggest development program. They are quick to note the sacrifices, including a doubling of the national debt by 1995, higher interest rates and higher inflation.

“Isn’t $100 billion being sent to the (eastern) states year after year? Hasn’t one had to pay higher taxes and be overwhelmed by calls to stop spending and save?” sputtered the newspaper Stuttgarter Zeitung in an editorial about the new committee. “Instead of the understanding and justice that the committee hopes to promote, it can very easily generate rejection and division and make the wall in our heads even higher.”

A prominent founding member of the committee, eastern author Stefan Heym, was punched in the face while standing in the lobby of a Cologne hotel after being recognized by a local resident.

While Kohl has refrained from commenting on the new committee, others among his leadership have been swift to condemn it. For example, Friedrich Bohl, his head of Chancellery, called the committee’s formation “dangerous demagogy,” while the Free Democrats’ general secretary, Uwe Luehr, dismissed the committee’s founders as “people who never renounced socialism.”

The comments underscore an increasing western impatience that is especially noticeable in the German trade union movement, whose western-dominated leadership has been forced by government financial constraints to trim wage demands. In an interview, newspaper editor Greffrath recalled that, while attending the annual convention of the Union of Public Servants and Transport Employees in Nuremberg last month, he was confronted with what he described as a mood of “open disdain and hate of easterners who were endangering the standard of living and culture in the west. Indolence and aggression is growing on both sides.”

Many of those who applauded Kohl for his brilliance in steering the two Germanys toward unity now criticize him for failing to rally the nation to the task of consolidating that unity. “Everyone knows it can’t go on like this,” said Greffrath. “He’s got to make a ‘blood, sweat and tears’ speech.”

Whatever happens, there are those who are convinced that the strains of unity will change both Germanys permanently.

“There is no doubt that democracy and the nation-state will survive, but it will change,” predicted Gaus. He said events of the past year had only reinforced his conviction that the demands of the east would permanently reduce what he calls an abnormally high level of affluence in western Germany.

“What’s happening is a normalization,” he said. “Not necessarily the kind of normalization you would want to have, but unavoidable just the same.”