Germany Is Reunited; Nation Celebrates; a New Era Begins : Europe: A huge crowd cheers the moment at the Reichstag in Berlin. 'We want to serve the cause of freedom,' the country's president says.

By TYLER MARSHALL and TAMARA JONES

Oct. 3, 1990 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITERS

BERLIN — To the strains of a national anthem that once made the world shiver, a new European era began today: Germany reunited.

In several cities but especially here in the old and future capital, Berlin, Germans turned out to celebrate.

In front of the famed Reichstag, seat of the last all-German Parliament, a crowd estimated at several hundred thousand turned out to cheer the moment of unity.

They celebrated an era in which Germany again assumes its role as a major power on a continent no longer divided between East and West. They also celebrated the end of the post-World War II era that had lasted 45 years.

“Before God and mankind we are conscious of the tasks before us,” President Richard von Weizsaecker told the crowd. “We want to serve the cause of freedom in the world within a united Europe.”

A few minutes later, shortly after midnight, a giant red, black and gold German flag, spotlighted in the crisp night air, was raised slowly in front of the Reichstag to a peal from a replica of the Liberty Bell.

The crowd then broke into the national anthem:

Unity and right and freedom

For the German fatherland ;

Let us all pursue this purpose

B r otherly, with hearts and hands.

The words are the third verse, sung to the original music by Franz Joseph Haydn. But the first verse, which begins “ Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles “ is no longer sung in modern Germany.

Some in the crowd kissed, others cheered and still others popped bottles of champagne as they watched a half-hour-long fireworks display.

While the mood of the crowd was jovial, it was distinctly subdued in comparison with the explosion of euphoria that accompanied the collapse of the Berlin Wall last Nov. 9. The mood shift reflects the mixture of hope and apprehension in both parts of Germany as an awareness grows of the enormous economic and social problems that come with unification.

At one point, the security broke down as the crowd surged forward toward the main VIP stand shouting “Helmut, Helmut!” to Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who minutes earlier had become the new nation’s head of government.

Some on the stand reached down toward the crowd below. A few seconds later, a 20- to 40 - foot section of the railing snapped, and according to witnesses, several people fell six to 10 feet into the crowd. The moment was displayed to the startled crowd on a giant screen, but the camera quickly panned away to the Reichstag facade.

The orchestra played on. There were no confirmed injuries, and security officials quickly whisked the dignitaries away.

Among the threads of the midnight watershed:

Germany, defeated and divided after World War II, became whole, rejoining the ranks of the world’s fully sovereign nations.

East Germany, the former Communist German state of 16.4 million fashioned from the Soviet zone of occupation, ceased to exist five days short of its 41st birthday.

Berlin, divided for more than 40 years, 29 of them by an infamous 100-mile long wall and mined death strip, once again became both a unified city and the capital of a united Germany.

The rights in Germany held by the four victorious World War II powers--the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union and France--lapsed, ending one of the century’s longest formal military occupations.

A confident yet apprehensive German Federal Republic, known until now to most in the English-speaking world simply as West Germany, gained nearly 40% more land, 25% more people, 10% more economic power and a quantum jump in political power.

The midnight celebration of German unity came less than 11 months after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and, a few weeks later, the Communist regime that built it in 1961.

Whatever its difficulties, the new Germany is certain to assume a greater role globally. And although its leaders have rejected, at least initially, a Soviet proposal that Germany be made the sixth permanent member of the United Nations Security Council and shown reluctance in extending a German reach into far-off regions, it is certain to become the dominant voice in Europe almost immediately.

“In the past, nothing in the European Community ran against us,” Chancellor Kohl’s national security adviser, Horst Telschik, said in an interview published in the current issue of the German weekly news magazine, Spiegel. “In the future it will be even more the case that things will work only with us and not against us.”

Kohl, who becomes the first all-German chancellor since the collapse of Hitler’s Third Reich, was clearly elated.

“This is one of the happiest moments of my life,” he said in a nationally televised speech.

Kohl and his foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, were the most important German figures in the drive toward unity.

Lothar de Maiziere, the man who led East Germany during its six months of democracy and who now becomes a minister without portfolio in Kohl’s Cabinet, called it “an hour of great joy” and expressed few regrets at the passing of the East German state.

“It is the end of many illusions,” he said in his television speech. “It is a farewell without tears.”

In his speech, Kohl also referred to the darker chapters of Germany’s past and, as he has done frequently in the run-up to unity, tried to soothe anxious neighbors about his nation’s intentions.

“We Germans have learned from history,” he said. “We are a peace-loving, freedom-loving people. We want to be reliable partners and good friends.”

And at the United Nations in New York, West Germany’s ambassador, Hans-Otto Braeutigam, told a news conference just hours before unification, “Tomorrow will be for the German people a day of reflection and gratitude, but it will not be a day of triumph. We remember the victims of dictatorship in Germany, the victims of the Holocaust and the untold suffering of Jewish people.

“Our memory will not turn blind, our responsibility will remain, and it will be the duty for my generation in Germany to pass on that responsibility to our children and grandchildren,” he added.

On this day, there were signs that such messages were more than lip service.

At the Arndt Upper School (high school) in the Berlin suburb of Dalhem, history teacher Harald Krieger, 54, told an assembly of 300 students between ages 12 and 16 about his own experiences of being pulled to school assemblies to celebrate the German victories over France and the Low Countries in World War II, and how, after the Nazi collapse, he was forced to beg for food with a tin cup.

“This is not an hour to celebrate,” he told his students. “There is no one on the stage, there is no need to sing the national anthem. It is a time to reflect about what is happening.”

When asked moments before he addressed the assembly what message he wanted the students to take away from the assembly, Krieger said simply, “To be modest; to be afraid to imbibe the alcohol of nationalism.”

Earlier Tuesday, arsonists torched two Berlin department stores and a bank in overnight attacks that a police spokesman said appeared to be a far-left protest against unification. Police arrested two suspects.

Leftists had threatened to disrupt the ceremonies, and thousands of police were deployed throughout the city. In the Kreuzberg neighborhood of western Berlin, violence flared shortly before midnight as a few hundred youths threw stones, Molotov cocktails and iron bars at police and smashed a bus stop shelter, public telephones and shop windows. One police officer was stabbed, police said, but no serious injuries were reported.

The all-German flag raised at midnight unfurled within yards of much of Germany’s checkered past. The Reichstag building of 1894 that served as the backdrop to today’s ceremonies was the seat of the ill-fated Weimar Republic and later the scene of the mysterious Feb. 27, 1933, fire one month after Adolf Hitler became chancellor. The fire served as Hitler’s pretext to force a law allowing his government to make laws without legislative approval. It was also the place where Soviet troops planted their victory flag in the dying days of World War II.

Nearby stood the 200-year-old Brandenburg Gate, which became a symbol both of Berlin and, because of its proximity to the Wall, of Germany’s division.

To the west rises the giant victory column commemorating Prussian victories over France, Austria and Denmark in the second half of the last century, and to the east lies the site of the bunker where Hitler spent his final hours in May, 1945, before Germany’s most humiliating defeat.

The final day of the divided Germany began with the last meeting of the Joint Allied Command that has administered the western part of the city in monthly meetings since it first began its work in July, 1945.

Although the Soviets withdrew from the command in 1948 and never returned, signs inside the Kommandatur building remain in Russian as well as French and English. On the wood-paneled walls of the main conference room, there were photographs of the three Western Allied commanders as well as one of Maj Gen. Alexander Kotikov, the last Soviet commander to attend a meeting in 1948.

The Soviet pullout from the command would eventually lead to a full-scale blockade of the city and a Western airlift to keep it alive and take Europe into the depths of the Cold War.

Buglers trumpeted a final salute as first the French, then the American and finally the British flags were lowered by honor guards for the last time.

In a farewell letter that the three commanders delivered in person to Berlin Mayor Walter Momper, the Allied Command noted: “Today the world looks on Berlin and sees a triumph of freedom and the human spirit.

“The Berlin which we leave will be whole and free,” the letter concluded.

The three commanders joined Momper and former West German Chancellor and West German Mayor Willy Brandt for celebrations at the city hall.

Kohl commented on the Allies’ role in his televised speech Tuesday night, saying that unity would not have been possible without them.

“They all stood by us in troubled times,” he said, “and for decades safeguarded the western part of Berlin.”

There was no similar ceremony to mark the Soviet military command’s handing over of jurisdiction over East Berlin. About 370,000 Soviet troops remain on German soil, their gradual pullout scheduled over the next four years under a negotiated agreement between the Soviet Union and the Germans.

De Maiziere, in his television speech, said Germany is “standing on the crest of a new era.”

“We are leaving behind a state which called itself democratic without being democratic,” he said, referring to East Germany’s formal name, the German Democratic Republic.

He urged Germans to “respect each others’ ideals, even when you don’t share them.”

“The end of an ideology that was a bitter disappointment to so many should not lead to the belief that all ideals should be destroyed,” he said, referring to communism.

At a Tuesday evening concert in East Berlin filled with symbolism, conductor Kurt Mazur led the Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig in an emotional performance of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.

Mazur himself had been instrumental in preventing a potentially horrific clash between street protesters and Communist authorities in Leipzig last Oct. 9 at the height of the revolution. He is said to have persuaded local police commanders to ignore orders to open fire on the demonstrators.

While East Germans eventually managed to carry off the Germans’ first-ever peaceful revolution, consolidating this achievement in a prosperous and united country is expected to be extremely difficult.