East Germany: The More Things Change . . .

By Bruce W. Nelan

Early next month the leaders of East Germany will gather on Marx-Engels Square to begin a three-day celebration of their country's 40th anniversary. Guest of honor at the speeches and parades will be Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, whose program of reforms has been dismissed as "unnecessary" by the aged, tradition-bound leaders who will be his hosts. If past birthdays are any indication, the East German speakers will proclaim how every day "the superiority of socialist society is clearly demonstrated."

Those lofty words, however, are hardly likely to clear the smog of despondency that has enveloped East Germany. Even before thousands of its most talented young people streamed to the West last week, the part of divided Germany that is still a dictatorship was clouded over with feelings of dejection and frustration -- the result of being held captive by a Stalinist government that refuses to change when the world all around it is changing.

A blend of Prussian thoroughness and Marxist ideology, the German Democratic Republic for decades provided the highest standard of living in Eastern Europe. Now the production machine has grown old and uncompetitive, and economic growth is less than 1% a year. The Communist youth daily Junge Welt asked last week what must be done to keep its citizens from being "lured away by shop windows filled with bananas." But it is not simply economic hardship in the East that motivates those who flee to the West. The refugees who arrived in West Germany stressed that it was the all-intrusive influence of the Communist Party on their daily lives that finally persuaded them to leave.

East Germans normally compare their lives with those of West Germans, but they are also well informed about events in the Soviet Union, Poland and Hungary. Their frustration has mounted as they watch those countries experimenting with glasnost and perestroika. But party chief Erich Honecker, 77, made it clear that such social and economic reforms will not be forthcoming. The authorities in East Berlin even took the unfraternal step of banning Soviet publications that carried "distorted portrayals of history."

Honecker and his colleagues are well aware that theirs is a rump state, legitimized only by the practice of what they call socialism. Hungary and Poland could dilute their socialism and still remain ethnic and national entities. But such experiments in East Germany, its leaders fear, would simply hasten the swallowing of their state by the larger Federal Republic next door. In the well-noted words of senior Communist Party ideologist Otto Reinhold, "What reason would a capitalist G.D.R. have for existing next to a capitalist Federal Republic? None, naturally."

It is the legitimacy and the very existence of the G.D.R. that Honecker is trying to protect by rejecting reform, though the impression he generates is more akin to paralysis. The air of confusion and impotence in East Berlin has intensified since he dropped out of sight on Aug. 14. Officially, he is recuperating from a gallbladder operation, but the whispers have grown louder that he has cancer. Even if Honecker's political life is over, his successor | is not expected to deviate from the status quo course Honecker has set. The consensus among the Politburo's 26 members (average age: 68) is that a refusal to change guarantees stability.

Honecker's most likely successors, veteran Politburo members Egon Krenz, 52, and Gunter Mittag, 62, who have been filling in for him at public ceremonies, are at least as conservative. The rise of either of them to the top job would mean no change from the present course. "They are signaling that the old line is the right line for the future," says Fred Oldenburg, senior analyst at the Federal Institute for East European and International Studies in Cologne.

In the pre-Gorbachev era, the Soviets could have been expected to step in and order some relaxation as an antidote to rising internal pressures. Now the Soviets have put themselves on the sidelines by vowing noninterference in the domestic affairs of Eastern Europe. In a report to the Kremlin that leaked in West Germany last week, Valentin Falin, head of the international department of the Soviet party's Central Committee, said the East German leadership had "sharply rebuffed" advice from Moscow but was "powerless" to deal with the crisis. He predicted that "hard-to-control mass demonstrations" would break out in East Germany by early next year.

Last week Mittag declared, "Nothing and no one will divert us from the course of doing everything for the well-being and happiness of the people." If East Germans are paying any attention, steadfast pledges like that can only increase the flow of emigres to the West.

With reporting by Clive Freeman/West Berlin and William Rademaekers/Bonn