The Germanys Waiting for the Magic Words

By JAMES O. JACKSON BERLIN

Technically at least, East Germany is still a sovereign nation. But that has hardly inhibited the leaders of West Germany's major political parties, who have been crisscrossing their neighbor's landscape on behalf of sister groups vying for victory in the country's first -- and perhaps last -- free elections on March 18. No one has campaigned with more gusto than West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who was in the city of Erfurt last week. When he was introduced as "the Chancellor of our German Fatherland," chants of "Hel-MUT! Hel- MUT!" rose from 100,000 citizens massed in the town square. "We are one Germany!" Kohl declared. "We are one people!"

Kohl's statements were not significantly different from those of other West German politicians. The latest polls show that 78% of West Germans and 75% of East Germans favor unification. But taken together with earlier actions, they fueled fears that Kohl may be pushing for unification too quickly, largely to serve his own political ambitions, while riding roughshod over the legitimate concerns of Germany's neighbors. In Warsaw, Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki renewed his demand last week for a direct Polish role in any international discussions over Germany's future. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev reluctantly agreed that the two Germanys had a "right to unity," but maintained that "our country should not sustain either moral or political or economic damage" as a result.

Most irksome so far has been Kohl's refusal to state unambiguously that a united Germany would lay no claim to land east of the Oder-Neisse line, which constitutes the present border between East Germany and Poland. When challenged, Kohl hides behind legalisms. His motives, however, are political: a vocal minority of the descendants of 13 million Germans who fled those territories after 1945 still lays claim to lands that are now part of Poland and the Soviet Union. Kohl needs their vote in West Germany's December election.

The Chancellor's stand has prompted unusual statements of concern from some close allies. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has complained that Kohl's behavior is "excessive." President Bush, who met with Kohl over the weekend at Camp David, let it be known in advance that he planned to press the West German to allay Polish concern on the border question.

Time and again, Polish leaders emphasized the depth of that worry. Last week Mazowiecki said Poland would prefer to have "only its own armed forces on its territory." But Polish membership in the Warsaw Pact, he added, "is important for the security of our borders." Bronislaw Geremek, parliamentary leader of Solidarity, puts it more bluntly: "The only way to change the border is war."

Kohl aroused similar anxieties two weeks ago when he snubbed East German Prime Minister Hans Modrow during a visit to Bonn. Kohl high-handedly announced that his government would hold back a $9 billion package of aid to East Germany until after the March 18 elections. In a speech to the East German parliament, an embittered Modrow declared that his country "will not enter a unified Germany as a beggar or wearing a hair shirt."

On the territorial question, Kohl's narrow argument is that, in the absence of a peace treaty after World War II, there still is a legal basis for the 1937 borders of the Third Reich. That area included about a third of present- day Poland and the Kaliningrad region of the Russian Republic. In fact West Germany has signed two treaties, one with Poland in 1970 that explicitly recognized the Oder-Neisse boundary and another, with 34 nations, that endorsed the 1975 Helsinki Accords, affirming the "inviolability of frontiers."

In refusing to speak the magic words Oder-Neisse, however, the Chancellor is driven by fears that right-wing members of his Christian Democrat-Christian Social Union coalition will drift away to West Germany's xenophobic Republican party, which won just over 7% support in European Parliament elections last June. Pressure is also coming from those still living and the descendants of Germans who were expelled from the lands east of the Oder and Neisse rivers -- Silesia, Pomerania and East Prussia. "We can understand that he has a genuine political problem at home," said a Western diplomat based in Berlin. "But playing politics with this issue at this time just stinks."

If Kohl is behaving like a brazen opportunist, he is also a shrewd master of political craft. As part of a "good-cop, bad-cop" strategy, Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher has been passing the word at home and abroad that the Chancellor's silence is less threatening than it appears. But Kohl should build on the international confidence earned through 40 years of exemplary democracy, not squander goodwill by playing small political games when the harmony of Europe is at stake.

With reporting by Ken Olsen/Bonn and Christopher Redman/Paris