The Germanys Modrow's Last Hours in Power

By JAMES O. JACKSON BERLIN

Hans Modrow, white-haired and weary, frowned at the legislators of the East German parliament last week and said, "I must say this plainly so it is clear which side has been pressing for hectic haste and spreading rumors. My government is neither ready nor empowered to enter a currency union with West Germany . . . You cannot rush it." The outgoing Communist Prime Minister went on to complain of West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl's sluggishness in guaranteeing Polish borders, and his insistence that a united Germany remain in NATO. "No German state has the right to ignore history," he said.

Strong words, but Modrow hardly uttered them from a position of strength. With most of Modrow's countrymen in favor of unification and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl handling the merger as if it were a one-man takeover, Modrow is finding it difficult to get anyone except perhaps his closest relatives to consider him relevant. And with elections taking place Sunday, the Communist Prime Minister of East Germany has less than a week to go in an office that may not even exist by this time next year. Hans Modrow, 62, is the lamest of lame ducks: outgoing leader of a vanishing state, standard bearer of a vanishing party.

History is filled with ironies large and small, but Modrow's present circumstances deserve more than a footnote in Eastern Europe's chronicle of change. In another age (say a year ago), Modrow would have been hailed as a Communist reformer of the first rank. As party leader in Dresden from 1973 to 1989, Modrow was no favorite of Erich Honecker's and his now discredited Politburo. Last June economist Gunter Hager sent a commission of 100 party hacks to snoop into the Dresden operation in hopes of finding a reason to drive Modrow out of the Central Committee. What they found was an incorrupt politician who worked hard, lived modestly and jogged six miles every day. "The Old Guard hated him because he was so unlike them," said Reiner Oschmann, deputy editor of the once mighty party daily, Neues Deutschland. "He did not preach water and drink wine, as they did." While Modrow built an admirably efficient electronics industry in Dresden, top party leaders feared his popularity and resented his failure to render the obsequious flattery that they had come to expect from underlings.

Many young, frustrated East Germans viewed Modrow as a potential Gorbachev of the G.D.R. "Everybody was waiting for the old men to go so we could start changing things," Oschmann said. "We thought of Modrow as one of those who would lead the change." Wistfully, he added, "We never dreamed it would happen this quickly and leave the party so far behind."

Modrow is admired partly because he remained in the discredited party when others were resigning en masse -- among them his close friend Wolfgang Berghofer, mayor of Dresden and, like Modrow, a reformer. But if Modrow had quit in January when Berghofer did, the government undoubtedly would have fallen. The result would have been chaos.

"He is playing a tragic role, but a necessary one," said Stefan Finger, campaign director of East Germany's Social Democratic Party (SPD), which is the main adversary of Modrow's Communist Party, now renamed the Party of Democratic Socialism. Although the SPD is favored to win East Germany's first free elections, its leaders praise Modrow. Said Finger: "We believe in this man's integrity."

So do most other Germans, East and West. A poll taken by a Leipzig sociological institute last month indicated that Modrow's once omnipotent party was favored by only 12% of the electorate, in contrast to a commanding 53% for the SPD, which is closely allied with West Germany's opposition SPD. But in the same poll, 52% named Modrow as the country's most trusted political figure, a startling result in a country fed up with Communists. By contrast, Ibrahim Bohme, the SPD leader and Modrow's probable successor as Prime Minister, scored only 15%. In West Germany another popularity ranking conducted by ZDF television gave Modrow a higher ranking than Kohl.

Carrying out his final duties as Prime Minister, Modrow knitted his brow more deeply than usual and told friends he would leave politics. But two weeks ago, duty summoned, and he agreed to head his party's ticket in Sunday's elections, virtually guaranteeing him a seat in East Germany's first democratically elected parliament. As leader of a small opposition party, Modrow may finally find his place in Germany.