National Agenda : German Miners Tap Deep Vein of Workers’ Anger : Hunger strikers are martyrs for easterners upset over plant closures, layoffs and privatization.

In what used to be the busy cafeteria of the Kali-Bergwerk potash mines here, gaunt men now doze on narrow cots or play cards with trembling hands, pausing occasionally to accept flowers from well-wishers or to read the latest solidarity fax from Ireland or Colombia or Washington.

On the sheets of cardboard used as walls in this stale, makeshift dormitory, someone has painted a giant warning: “Quiet, Please! Hunger Strike.” This strike is anything but quiet, though.

A month into united Germany’s most dramatic labor standoff, the stakes are much higher than the 700 jobs the hunger strikers hope to save in this 85-year-old Thomas Muentzer pit, which is scheduled to shut down at the end of the year after a forced merger with a western German competitor.

Refusing all food until they have to be carried out on stretchers, two dozen miners and a handful of fasting sympathizers have become martyrs of an increasingly angry eastern German work force, and the consequences, experts warn, could be severe.

Other factories in the formerly Communist east are already threatening hunger strikes to protest plant closures, mass layoffs or privatization. Sympathizers have sent more than $100,000 in donations to the Bischofferode protesters, and an estimated 10,000 people turned out for a recent weekend solidarity rally in front of the plant’s gates in the rural Thuringian village near the former border with West Germany.

One trade unionist warns of a “flash fire” across eastern Germany, while western observers privately worry that the strike is a plot by the discredited former East German Communist Party to destabilize the impoverished region in the run-up to next year’s national elections.

“There are some indications this might spread,” said Ulrike Gruenrock, spokeswoman for the Berlin-based Treuhand trust, which was established after unification to privatize East Germany’s state-run industry.

Pointing to the growing bitterness, disillusionment and sense of betrayal in the struggling eastern region, a sociologist who researches unemployment remarked: “Much more is in play here than joblessness.”

The sea change is also evident in the government’s response to the relatively tiny uprising in Bischofferode--unprecedented capitulation. But the government’s astonishing promise of replacement “jobs for life” for the displaced miners is not enough.

“We want unity, and a single Germany,” said Rudolf Jendreck, a 50-year-old father of three who hadn’t eaten in two weeks, “but we don’t want a Germany like the one that is emerging now. We believe we can achieve something here.”

“Here” is a quaint, half-timbered village dominated by the bald, red mountain where 1,900 miners once toiled, burrowing nearly 20,000 feet into the earth for the fertilizer that was sold even during the Communist era to West European markets.

But citing a worldwide glut and a price collapse, the Treuhand decided that creating a German monopoly was the only way the potash and raw salt industry could survive at all. And Bischofferode was the price.

By merging the eastern potash producer Mitteldeutsche Kali AG with its western competitor, the BASF-owned Kali und Salz AG, the Treuhand has created a marriage of convenience that demands some sacrifice on both sides.

The westerners will have to trim about 1,700 jobs and the east will lay off 1,800, but five mines in the east will be able to stay open, with only the least profitable--Bischofferode--closing.

In exchange, the Treuhand, which is funded by the Bonn government, will sink 1 billion marks (more than $606 million) into the Kassel-based Kali und Salz for renovations--money that the embittered easterners say rightfully belongs to struggling eastern companies.

“There is a different mentality in east and west Germany about unemployment,” said Goettingen sociologist Berthold Vogel, who has researched joblessness in the eastern sector.

“In the former German Democratic Republic, joblessness is not so much an individual problem, like it is in the west,” he said in a telephone interview. “It’s more of a collective problem.

“There were big expectations in the east after 1989,” Vogel said. “No one figured on the consequences. These miners want what was promised--a free market. Now they’re discovering there are also cartels in capitalism.”

Indeed, keeping the eastern potash industry alive on its own would hardly set a precedent in Germany, where the Bonn government for years has heavily subsidized uncompetitive industries such as steel and agriculture.

And while Bonn’s offer of “replacement” jobs for the Bischofferode miners through 1995 was an unprecedented concession for displaced eastern workers, and the state government’s promise of jobs for life was even more astonishing, the striking miners insist that they want nothing more than the chance to compete in the free market.

“There’s no infrastructure here,” said Andreas Steinecke, a 30-year-old miner who at the time of speaking had gone without food since July 5, his gaunt frame shrunken from 160 pounds to 130. “The concept of replacement jobs is no good because we would just be strewn across other communities and taking away jobs from someone else there. We want guaranteed jobs for the 1,200 Bischofferode miners already laid off. There are 23,000 miners idle in Thuringia.

“Certainly we understand that there will always be jobless, but there shouldn’t be so many,” he said. “Every third workplace in production in the former GDR (German Democratic Republic) has been destroyed.”

With about 13,000 state-run enterprises to sell, liquidate, privatize or simply close after unification, the Treuhand after three years is down to the last couple of thousand “units.”

“We very often find a very emotional reaction in the east,” Gruenrock said in a telephone interview. “There is still a feeling there that the government and public are somehow responsible for providing jobs for life. . . .

“You can’t reintroduce the conditions of the GDR’s planning committees and still have a market economy,” she added.

Forty potential investors worldwide were contacted about buying Bischofferode owner Mitteldeutsche Kali AG before the Treuhand trust decided on the merger, according to Gruenrock.

A late bid by a western German entrepreneur who promised to save the operation was rejected when “it became quite clear that Bischofferode wouldn’t survive over three weeks without Treuhand money,” Gruenrock said. The investor wanted $100 million from the Treuhand in exchange for a $1-million cash outlay, she added.

By then, the Bischofferode miners had already staged a 100-day occupation of their pit and had sent busloads of protesters to Berlin, Bonn and Kali und Salz headquarters in Kassel to protest.

The fasting miners in the canteen camp regard the whole affair as yet another attempt by the affluent and arrogant west to overrun a naive and struggling east.

“They treat us like their colony,” declared Steinecke.

It is a refrain often heard by embittered easterners, who face staggering unemployment and uncertain futures after 40 years of guaranteed jobs for life under the corrupt Stalinist regime that collapsed with the Berlin Wall nearly four years ago.

Particularly hard-hit is the state of Thuringia, where the official unemployment figure is 15.4%, and the unofficial rate hovers around 40% when temporary government work programs and part-time jobs are factored in.

But the melodrama being played out in Bischofferode, like most of the angst- ridden struggles of easterners and westerners to form a single German society, is multilayered.

Alongside the greetings in crayon from kindergartners in the strike camp are scores of faxes, telegrams and letters of support, mainly from the Communist Party and Marxist-oriented groups.

“This is no longer an economic discussion, but a political discussion,” acknowledged Gruenrock of Treuhand.

In the last national elections, in 1990, Chancellor Helmut Kohl was reelected on a wave of unification euphoria, with his conservative Christian Democratic Union scoring its biggest wins in the east.

The Harz Mountains, where Bischofferode sits, is, like Kohl, deeply Catholic, and the Christian Democrats claimed more than 90% of the vote in the region. Now, anti-Kohl banners hang on the iron gates of the Bischofferode plant.

When the Wickert polling institute in the west recently asked 2,426 Germans whether Kohl could be trusted to assure replacement jobs for the 700 Bischofferode miners, 61% replied “no,” and the number soared to 84% in Thuringia.

“Bischofferode is the first shot fired in next year’s campaigns,” said one western official close to the dispute, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “The feeling is that the strikers would have accepted the offer of jobs for life if the Communists hadn’t gotten their hooks in.

“The fundamental problem in unifying the two Germanys is that the two halves of the country essentially speak two different languages,” the official said. And the Communists “still speak the language of the people in the east.”

“In the GDR, work was guaranteed until the day you died,” said hunger striker Udo Wippich, a jobless 48-year-old Jena optician who joined the fasting miners out of solidarity.

“I have to live with capitalism now,” he said. “We have to change this society. Not go back to socialism like it was, but just make life more secure. If we triumph in Bischofferode . . . there’ll be a wave like you can’t imagine.”

For now, the miners while away the hours playing cards, listening to music, chatting and painting banners.

“I was painting a poster this morning but I had to quit because it exhausted me,” Steinecke said. “The boredom is the worst. I listen to CDs, mostly heavy metal music, and I try to read, but I can’t concentrate.

“In the beginning, the pain was really bad. On the third and fifth day, I had a stomachache and terrible headache. But by the eighth day, any feeling of hunger just disappeared,” he said.

None of the hunger strikers plans to starve to death. Anyone who collapses or shows signs of serious trouble is sent to the hospital by a doctor who visits twice daily, and a new striker takes the absent one’s place.

“We have only our health and our bodies to fight with,” Steinecke said, “nothing more. This is really our last chance to make them pay attention to us.”