COLUMN ONE : Germans’ Wish Is a Command : The nation finds great comfort in its rules and regulations--even the anarchists issue guidelines. Woe to the person who disrupts ‘quiet time’ or mows the lawn on Sunday.

With the hour approaching midnight, the residential intersection of this sleepy market town seemed deserted as a lone pedestrian began to cross.

Suddenly, out of the darkness came a cyclist, who, instead of avoiding the pedestrian, nearly ran him down, shouting as he sped past, “I’ve got the right of way here!”

In a nation where the daily rhythm of life is shaped not so much by courtesy and common sense as by a seemingly endless set of official rules and regulations, the pedestrian had committed the cardinal sin: By failing to yield to the bicycle, he had violated the German sense of order.

“Order,” goes a German saying, “is half of life.”

For those not born into the culture, it seems even more.

Indeed, for outsiders, the German penchant to organize, regulate and control the routine things in life and then package them in a carefully detailed set of government ordinances is as bewildering as it is frustrating.

It is a land where stray dogs and jaywalkers don’t exist, where even anarchists issue guidelines and where a recent survey found that homemakers spend more time cleaning the family house than their counterparts in any other European country.

The complexity of the rules and occasionally the outright resistance of foreigners in adhering to the demands of such a tightly controlled life generate a low-grade friction that frequently hampers their integration into the society.

Among other things, integrating means getting in step with:

* The Immissionschutzgesetz (Emission Protection Law), which, among other things, is the principal guardian of Germany’s afternoon “quiet time”--that period between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. when the very young and the very old are napping. Any noise above 25 decibels, measured behind a closed window, is forbidden under this law during these afternoon hours, as well as between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.

* The 19-page Nachbarrechtsgesetz (Neighbor’s Rights Law), which sets rules that govern relationships between neighbors. For example, it decrees that throughout Germany, hedges more than two meters high must stand at least one meter back from any property lines, while hedges under two meters can grow to within 50 centimeters of the boundary. To avoid any confusion, a separate list in the same law sets other minimum distances ranging from 50 centimeters to four meters for 12 other varieties of shrubs, vines and trees.

* The Personenstandsgesetz (Vital Statistics Law), which gives bureaucrats at the local public records office the right to veto a parent’s choice for the name of a newborn child if they decide that the name doesn’t clearly indicate the child’s sex.

* The infamous Ladenschlussgesetz (Store-Closing Law), which sets retail trading hours nationwide. On weekdays, no store may open before 8 a.m. or remain open after 6:30 p.m.--except on Thursdays, when 8:30 p.m. is the closing time. On most Saturdays, everything must shut by 2 p.m. and stay that way until Monday at 8 a.m.

Anyone out of milk on a Saturday evening is out of luck until Monday morning.

Bakeries--along with hotels, gas stations, airports, railroad stations and flower shops--fall under a list of exceptions to Germany’s strict retailing hours, and those wanting fresh bread, for example, can get it as early as 6:30 a.m.

But woe to the baker who starts baking before 4 a.m. He or she could face prosecution for violating the Nachtbackverbot (Night Baking Ban).

While quirky rules exist in many countries--European Community bureaucrats spent months working on the legal definitions of what constituted a cucumber--the real difference in Germany is that they are taken seriously.

A special local government agency, known as the Ordnungsamt, or Order Bureau, enforces these and other similar laws.

According to Peter Schmitz, head of the Ordnungsamt in Bonn, there are roughly a thousand such regulations on the books in Germany that dictate everything from how a chimney is cleaned to rules controlling animal protection.

Their reach seems all-embracing.

Mowing one’s own lawn on a Sunday afternoon, for example, could violate three laws simultaneously--one banning such work on a holiday, a second banning afternoon noise and a third that sets specific noise limits for lawn mowers.

Violations, usually first reported by neighbors’ complaints before they are followed up by Ordnungsamt staff, can lead to fines ranging from $13 to $650.

Some social scientists trace the powerful German desire for order back to the turmoil of the 17th Century and the Thirty Years’ War, in which roughly half the population died.

Others, however, say it is a more recent phenomenon, a product of Germany’s belated nationhood and subsequent need to catch up to France and Britain, already well into the Industrial Revolution.

“Because we were divided so long, there was a real need to create a relatively strong order so we could catch up,” said historian Karl-Dieter Bracher. “This isn’t something that is stamped into the national character; it’s only five or six generations old.”

However old the habit may be, it is deeply ingrained.

A leaflet distributed by a group of Berlin anarchists before a recent street rumble with police dutifully listed what those wanting to riot should carry with them in case of arrest: a valid ID, car registration, pencil and paper, a pint of water and something to eat. Women shouldn’t forget to carry extra birth-control pills and sanitary napkins, the leaflet noted.

Schmitz says that in recent years, as Germans have become more affluent, they have become increasingly aware of the laws that shape much of their lives. As a consequence, the volume of complaints filtering into his office has gradually increased.

“I’m old enough to remember the immediate postwar period when everyone worked together and wanted to help each other,” Schmitz said. “Now, people just want to assert their rights.”

Indeed, for many Germans, this network of laws and ordinances has become a central guidepost through life.

Passengers on a Bonn municipal bus recently were treated to several minutes of entertainment as a frail, elderly woman and a handicapped young man waved their officially stamped special bus passes at each other in a fight over who had the right to the lone seat reserved for the physically disadvantaged.

Schmitz noted that in the past three years, his office has closed down four children’s playgrounds and a tennis court in the city for part of the day after neighbors complained that noise levels violated the Immissionschutzgesetz.

“Tennis isn’t a sport normally played by rowdies,” he explained. “But, you know, the blip, blop, blip, blop--it disturbed people.”

Germans’ growing preoccupation with enforcing their rights has at times exasperated government leaders, who see it as part of a larger reluctance to sacrifice for a greater community good.

“People are so obsessed with their rights under the law that they’ve forgotten what generosity to others is all about,” government spokesman Dieter Vogel commented in the context of a discussion about the reluctance of many western Germans to help their eastern cousins rebuild the economically and socially devastated former Communist region.

But in many ways, Germans see the carefully protected social order as an important buffer that shields the very foundations of the nation’s successful, yet still vulnerable, democracy.

After all, Germans are quick to recall, it was a failure to deal with social disorder that undermined the country’s first democratic experiment, the Weimar Republic, in the 1930s.

While disorder may be personally aggravating on one level, on another it is seen as a danger to the common welfare.

A foreign student in Bonn recalled the experience of watching two other foreigners cross against a red light and hearing a German waiting at the same crossing mutter to his female companion, “That’s the way it starts.”

While not a main cause of the present xenophobic attacks in Germany, the inability of foreigners to slip quickly and willingly into such a tightly controlled environment does bring its tensions.

One American who had just moved into a new home in Bonn thought the knock on the door was a welcoming neighbor and then found that it was an official from the Ordnungsamt. The trouble, it seemed, was the new resident’s daughter: Part of her piano practice was extending into the afternoon quiet period; could he please see to it that this didn’t happen again?

Schmitz noted that in mid-1990, Bonn provided hotel accommodations for groups of between 100 and 200 Gypsies who began arriving at the city’s main railroad station from eastern Europe.

“They urinated in the gardens, were personally not very hygienic and generally evoked anger among those (Germans) living nearby,” he said.

Searching for answers as to why foreigners had not become better integrated into German society, Joachim Doerfler, mayor of the northern town of Moelln, where three Turkish nationals died in a right-wing arson attack last month, said in an interview: “We Germans have to organize everything. The better the organization, the happier we feel. It could be that foreigners don’t fit into this.

“This is not a live-and-let-live society,” he added.

But last month, one of Germany’s highest courts seemed to draw the line on German order.

A federal appeals court ruled against a resident of the southern town of Ingolstadt who had demanded the “deportation” of frogs from a local pond because their nocturnal croaking exceeded legal noise limits.

For environmental reasons, the court ruled, the frogs could stay put.