The New York Times, by Serge Schmemann

By Serge Schmemann

WEISSENFELS, East Germany, June 7— The currency union planned by the two Germanys for July 2 would seem the stuff of an Eastern European's fantasy: to wake up one morning with sheaves of real Western money to spend on kiwi fruit, a Mercedes or a weekend in Paris.

Indeed, when the East Germans wake up that day, their old East German marks, once as spurned abroad as Polish zlotys or Soviet rubles, will become West German marks, welcome everywhere.

The vast currency exchange ranks among the more extraordinary economic experiments in history. It has been the first big step toward German reunification, and speculation has been widespread among economists, politicians and ordinary people that so abrupt an introduction of cash and free-market forces could feed everything from a wild spending binge to large-scale unemployment as antiquated East German firms fail.

The promise and the danger of the project that the two Germanys are determined to complete seem reflected here in Weissenfels, an old Saxon manufacturing town of 38,000, But as far as Ingeborg Thau is concerned, by the time it happens it will not be anything so special.

For two months, Mrs. Thau and her husband have been selling kiwi fruit and other delicacies, supplied by a grocer from Stuttgart, from their small shop in the pedestrian zone in the shadow of the old castle. Used Mercedes sedans can be found here, too.

''As far as we're concerned, currency union has already happened,'' the matronly shopkeeper declared as customers ambled in much as they would in any town. ''People come in all the time now. They have D-marks, they can buy all these things. Why should there be an onslaught on July 2?''

Not everyone is cheerful about the coming changes. The town's largest employer is planning to lay off more than a quarter of its work force in July, and workers are demonstrating at the town hall.

Franz Endt, the director of the local savings bank, looks to July 2 with trepidation. ''I fear the worst,'' he said. ''I know how people think - what's in the pocket is in the pocket. If we open at 7, people will be lining up at 5.''

But most folks seem to agree with Mrs. Thau that there will probably not be a big shopping spree, and the reason is that currency union really began to happen from the moment it was debated.

Under the agreement reached between Bonn and East Berlin on May 19, as of July 2, each East German will be able to exchange 4,000 marks at a 1-to-1 rate and the rest of their money at a 2-to-1 rate.

Once Germans learned that they would be able to exchange Eastern marks for Deutsche marks at a 2-to-1 rate, the deed was effectively done. Knowing that it was only a question of time before East Germans had hard currency, West German salesmen, creditors and distributors swarmed through the countryside, offering everything from exotic produce to vacations, home-improvement loans and cars.

Wholesale Rejection Of Anything Eastern In fact, to wander through the pedestrian shopping zone is to wonder whether anything East German will be left by July. Shop windows alternate between announcements of drastic discounts on East German goods and colorful displays of West German food, clothing, cameras and watches.

East German shoes that used to sell for 110 marks a pair are on sale for 34 marks. East German Trabant cars, for which the wait was 15 years six months ago, are offered with rebates of 3,000 marks, and nobody will touch them. But on Zimmer Street, a salesman will let you drive off in a used Volkswagen today, with payments to start in July.

On Marx Square - soon to be Market Square again, as people always called it anyway - West German salesmen hawk carpets, T-shirts, videocassettes, bananas and leather purses. From the back of a rented van, men snap up color catalogues from the Beate Uhse sex shops, offering wares that were strictly forbidden in the East just a few months ago.

There are 20 such vans cruising East Germany, explained Gunther Reimers, a 26-year-old student doing this for a summer job. ''We want to remind people what they want to buy after July 2,'' he says with a grin.

The scenes are repeated in every East German city and town, and therein lie both the promise and the danger of the extraordinary experiment on which the two Germanys are about to embark. Seldom if ever has a country been offered so abrupt an injection of cash and goods.

The hope is in the speed with which the streets of towns like Weissenfels have already reacted to the promise of economic union, demonstrating the fundamental flexibility and efficiency of market forces.

The danger is in the wholesale rejection of everything East German, a trend that weighs heavily over a town whose biggest employer, the Banner of Peace Shoe Factory, intends to lay off 1,000 of its 3,700 workers in July and may not long survive beyond that.

One-tenth of the town works at the shoe factory, and many others at a nearby chemical plant whose fate is also unsure. Nobody knows what will happen - workers at the shoe factory have already held three warning strikes, marching on the town hall, and nobody can say how people will react once large-scale unemployment sets in.

But then, Weissenfels never had it easy under the Communists. The hilltop Augustusburg Castle, once the proud seat of the Dukes of Saxon-Weissenfels, stands eerily abandoned now, as do many crumbling houses below. Even among those eager for the future, there is a sense that things could not go on as before.

A Shoe Factory, But Few Customers The Banner of Peace Shoe Factory could well serve as a memorial to Communism, from its quaintly Stalinist name and antiquated workshops of crumbling red brick and rusted metal to its unwieldy production. The production lines have slowed to a crawl and the anxiety is tangible here.

''Everyone here is afraid,'' said Hannelore Zoller, a 56-year-old administrative worker who has been with the factory for 38 years and who had come by with three colleagues for a clearance sale. ''You may find us all on the streets by summer.''

''But it would not have been any different without currency union,'' interjected Siegried Friedrich, a colleague 20 years her junior. ''It would have broken down anyway. It was a breakdown of an economic system.''

Up through last year, the factory was producing 11 million pairs of shoes a year. But then in March, the cancellations began coming in. One major distributor sent a telex on April 11 canceling all orders as of April 12. Czechoslovakia and Poland both canceled their contracts.

''All in all, 60 percent of our contracts have been canceled,'' said Elke Merkel, the company spokeswoman. ''We're sitting on 10 million pairs of shoes.''

Willi Seitz, a West German consultant hired by the East German Government to find ways of salvaging the old factory, sat studying company books under a portrait of Karl Marx - ''our founder,'' he said.

Quietly, almost gently, he recited the hard facts: ''The West German shoe industry would only need to stretch production by 18 percent to cover the entire East German market. They're interested only in the distribution network. But even there, they could easily organize their own.''

The greatest problem with the Banner of Peace factory, he said, is its size, a legacy of an economic system that took as its credo the idea that bigger is invariably better.

''In West Germany, there are about 230 shoe producers with an average of 130 employees, each producing about 280,000 pairs of shoes a year,'' Mr. Seitz said. ''This factory has 3,700 workers and produces 11 million pairs a year. What you have here is a colossus that can hardly be slowed down once in motion, which is not flexible.''

Even if the shoes could compete with Western footwear in price, quality or appeal, he said, there was still a problem. After 40 years of looking at Western goods only through barbed wire, the Eastern Europeans are not looking back.

''What we have to fight is the psychological phenomenon that the East German citizen buys only Western goods, even if East German goods have the same quality,'' Mr. Seitz said.

Relearning Banking On a Western Model Lines form daily at the District Savings Bank. Some people come to make sure that their accounts are in order before currency union, some to exchange money in advance, some for the small-business or car loans already available through West German banks. Most come for information, to find out what will happen July 2.

All this is utterly, painfully new for Franz Endt, the 61-year-old bank director, sitting behind a desk cluttered with handwritten forms and stacks of leaflets describing housing loans, savings accounts, mortgages.

''We have to relearn our entire business,'' he said. ''That's the worst thing - all my knowledge, all my experience is hardly worth anything any more. I feel like a trainee. I have to learn new terms - I know what a 'share' is, we had some right after the war, but my assistants never heard of one.

''Before, we had only one rate for savings, 3.25 percent. It never changed, and there was no way to get more. Now I have room to maneuver, to give different rates to different clients for different periods, and it's completely alien to me,'' he said. ''We're in constant retraining - last week I was in Berlin, next week I'm in Berlin, people from West Germany come here, we send people to West Germany. It's all totally new.''

Out in the street, the uncertainty was evident in widespread hoarding of basic goods. At the HO Market, a state-supplied grocery store, the shelves were almost bare. ''People are buying like crazy,'' said Sylvia Herzog, the store director, who has worked here for 26 years.

Hoarding is not the only reason. Mrs. Herzog said she was told to get rid of all East German goods by July 2 to make room for a West German supplier. But when East German supplies did arrive, they moved fast.

''Nobody knows what the prices will be next month. Now they're low, and so people buy whatever they can store -sugar, flour, chocolate, spices, canned goods. This is where we usually keep sausages,'' she said, pointing to an empty refrigerated counter.

Mrs. Herzog said she had no idea what would happen to East German distributors or food manufacturers. One of her suppliers, specializing in food for diabetics, has already folded.

For all the buying and anxiety, the mood in town seemed curiously sedate. Again and again, people said that things could not go on as before, that a fresh start was the only way, that West Germany had the wealth and know-how to make things work. Many took comfort in the money they were about to receive. But nobody talked of going on a binge.

''I'm going to hold onto the money,'' said Miss Merkel at the Banner of Peace Shoe Factory. ''Nobody knows what taxes will be, what prices will be, what living standards will be like. They say rents will stay fixed until the end of the year. But they'll be at least doubled after that. So I'm going to hold tightly on to my 4,000. It's all too uncertain.''

Mrs. Herzog, at the HO Market, smiled when asked if she was anxious. ''On the contrary,'' she said. ''I can only hope it will all get better, that these shelves will be full again.''

Fresh Fruit And Free Enterprise At the Gothic town hall, Mayor Martin Neumann seemed as befuddled as anyone else. Perhaps more so - he was 36, an electrician by trade, and he had been in office only a week.

In his own case, Mr. Neumann, with a wife and three children, stood to exchange 14,000 marks at a rate of 1-to-1 - 4,000 for each adult and 2,000 per child.

''I know that personally I must not go on a spending spree,'' he said. ''I already have a car, a nice apartment.'' Then, after a pause, he added, ''I guess I would like to see the Alps in the autumn.''

''For years, for decades we led a life far from these things, and we have to make up for it now,'' the Mayor said. ''We have to catch up with 40 years of lacking things. But I think things will calm down after currency union. It will level out, and then maybe the salesmen on the Market Square will disappear one by one.''

But then Mrs. Thau, the vendor of kiwi fruit, might answer that this is already happening. Her own introduction to private enterprise began when a West German grocer from Stuttgart drove into town in March and laid out his produce on Market Square. Somebody at the town hall put him in touch with the Thaus, who had both worked for 20 years in the fresh produce section of a state-owned grocery. By April 1 they opened their private shop, and the man from Stuttgart now comes once a week to deliver supplies.

''The demand was huge in the first days, there were lines outside and we had to work all day,'' Mrs. Thau recalled. ''Now that there's so much competition, it's much calmer.''

It sounded almost a slogan for currency union.

By Serge Schmemann

BONN, June 28— Whenever talk in Bonn turns to Helmut Kohl, someone inevitably recounts how some rival, imagining Mr. Kohl to be a bumbling provincial politician, challenges the Chancellor head on, only to be left sprawled in the dust.

Mr. Kohl has heard the stories. At first, he said, they bothered him. Then he learned to stop caring. ''Now,'' he said with a broad grin, ''I actually enjoy them.''

Well he might. He still sags in the polls, he still attracts bushels of unflattering cartoons and jokes, and intellectuals still roll their eyes at the mention of his name.

The Unification Chancellor

Yet this same politician stands at the helm of his nation at the most critical juncture of its postwar history. On Sunday, the two Germanys will merge their currencies and economies, taking the first major step toward the unity that has been denied for 40 years.

Mr. Kohl was the prime mover for the monetary union, and he is now driving to hold the first all-German elections in December, and with them reunification. If his political instincts and his luck hold out, he looks likely to become the first Chancellor of a reunited Germany.

Some of it, of course, is luck. Neither Mr. Kohl nor any other West German politician anticipated or contributed to the events that led to the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the breach of the Berlin wall last fall.

Seizing the Moment

But it is hardly luck that brought the big Rhinelander to the pinnacle of German politics to begin with, or that guided his hand through the tumult that followed the opening of the wall.

Even his critics grudgingly concede his matchless instinct and mastery of politics, and he got where he is by systematically and painstakingly gaining and maintaining unchallenged control over his Christian Democratic party. If Mr. Kohl was not responsible for the dismantling of the wall, when the moment came he seized the occasion it with unerring instinct.

''I never had the hope to become this,'' Mr. Kohl said when asked about his chances of becoming Chancellor of a reunited Germany. ''Now I have the chance. It is not all clear that I will. It is a chance. I would like to, but not because I want to stand on a pedestal.''

Mr. Kohl really is not a man to dwell on pedestals. The story is told of an aide who tried to bolster the Chancellor during a particularly trying day not long ago by pointing out that he was ''making history.'' The Chancellor reportedly snapped, ''To hell with history.''

His is not a world of visions and dreams, but one of hard work and hard politics. He is in the midst of a fierce election campaign now, the most critical of his political career. The economic union of East and West that he has engineered for Sunday has gained him support and prestige, but the euphoria is rapidly waning as both countries begin tallying the costs. By autumn there may be heavy unemployment and dislocation in East Germany.

Sensing that the grand prize could slip away if he delays, Mr. Kohl has set off a determined effort to move the first all-German election - and so effectively reunification - to December.

Election Is a Gamble, But Also a Challenge

It is a gamble. So much has to be done by then, from aligning the widely disparate legal systems of the two Germanys to overcoming Moscow's pique at losing East Germany, a major military and economic ally, to NATO. The opposition Social Democrats, under their aggressive standard-bearer, Oskar Lafontaine, will be poised to pounce on every mistake.

But political struggle is Mr. Kohl's element. Churning along in a noisy helicopter between campaign appearances on a clear spring day, he studies a list of the people he will be meeting on landing in Duderstadt, near the East German border. The Chancellor is on a campaign swing to help the local Christian Democrats in the state of Lower Saxony.

The Puma helicopter clatters along the East German border, an ugly brown gash zigzagging among the green fields and the villages of red tile roofs and Protestant steeples. The healing of that scar has become Mr. Kohl's greatest opportunity and his greatest challenge. A nation, a continent is growing back together, shifting the Germans from the periphery of two hostile camps back to the heart of Europe. There is history in the making.

But the Chancellor has dozed off.

So Grand a Mantle, So Ordinary a Man

Many of Mr. Kohl's critics find it galling that so grand a mantle has fallen on a politician they consider to be quite ordinary. Why him, they ask, and not a patrician figure of moral authority like President Richard von Weizsacker, or an intellectual visionary like Helmut Schmidt?

But there are those who insist that it is precisely his lack of grand vision that has enabled Mr. Kohl to seize the moment, and that a pragmatic tactician may be more useful for the task at hand than a grand visionary.

''Mr. Kohl's great fortune lies in that great developments are not his doing,'' said Kurt Biedenkopf, formerly one of Mr. Kohl's closest advisers and secretary general of the Christian Democratic party, and now a professor of economics. ''He does not start with what should be. And because he has no concept, no ideology, he is better prepared to act.''

''He is the Chancellor in German postwar history who is the closest to the common man,'' said Hanns Joachim Friedrichs, West Germany's most respected television news anchor. ''He has an antenna, a sense for the handling of power, like very few people ever had. He has no vision. He's not part of a great debate. If I think of Kennedy, or the Great Society, he doesn't have that. But at day-to-day, he's an artist.''

That artistry was displayed after the Berlin wall came down on Nov. 9. Mr. Kohl sensed that the East Germans were not looking for some new form of reformed, benign socialism, but to share as quickly as possible in the capitalist prosperity of West Germany.

''He knew, and that's his grass-roots instinct, that the East Germans wanted their microwave now, and not in three years,'' Mr. Friedrichs said. ''He was the one who showed them the shortest route. He went for it, and they presented him with a great political success.''

In November, without advance notice to anyone, Mr. Kohl announced a 10-point plan leading to unity, breaking a taboo by setting an actual timetable for what until then had been a vague national aspiration. Then in February, when the Social Democrats seemed headed for a landslide victory in East Germany's first elections, he put together a conservative coalition and plunged into the campaign to win a stunning victory.

Soon after, in his boldest stroke, Mr. Kohl announced the plan to unite the economies and currencies of the Germanys by July 1. And no sooner was that deal sealed than he began maneuvering to move unification to December, less than 13 months after the wall came down.

But however keen his instinct or sweet his successes, Mr. Kohl has never managed to win the sort of adulation enjoyed by Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher or President von Weizsacker. Polls consistently show him trailing in personal popularity, and there is a library of Kohl jokes in which the Chancellor is depicted as a dummkopf.

The Target of Jokes, He Gets the Last Laugh

A typical joke has Mr. Kohl and Mr. Genscher arriving two hours late to a meeting. ''The electricity went out, and I was stuck in the elevator,'' the Foreign Minister grumbles. ''I know, I know,'' the Chancellor says. ''I was stuck for two hours on the escalator.'' He looks bad on television: he is too large, too stiff, his accent down-home Rhine country. He starts so many sentences with ''Let me say with all clarity'' that mimics routinely use the line.

He has never been directly elected to a state or federal office. Under the West German electoral system, officeholders are chosen either by direct balloting or from a list compiled by their party in proportion to the votes cast for that party. Mr. Kohl has always been elected ''from the list,'' never as an individual.

His party is the Christian Democratic Union, the right-of-center grouping that has governed West Germany, alone or in coalition, for 28 of its 41 years. Mr. Kohl has been its chairman for 17 of those years and Chancellor for seven and a half, and to him the two jobs are largely indistinguishable.

Perhaps they have to be. Lacking in magnetism or personal popularity, lacking any notable skills or achievements outside politics, Mr. Kohl would be a nonentity if he were not the active chairman of his party.

''The party is his life,'' said Mr. Biedenkopf, a close political ally of Mr. Kohl's from 1968 until they parted ways in 1977. ''It's where his roots are. He'll never admit it, but he feels he owns the party.''

The Chancellor dedicates a prodigious amount of energy to the party. Calls from party officials are said to take preference over those from foreign leaders. He spends hours on the phone daily, keeping in touch with every far-flung strand of the party.

''I am the real party leader,'' Mr. Kohl said. ''It's not an honorary office where I hover over the waters. I care for the party. People in the party come to me. Everyone in the C.D.U. knows who the chairman is. I have been party chairman for 17 years now, longer than anyone else. I can go to the party congress and people may complain, but at the end of the day they ask, 'Who cares more about the party than he?' ''

Fiercely Loyal, And Also Just Fierce

He never forgets an ally, and he demands an unwavering loyalty from his advisers and staff. His ''kitchen cabinet,'' - the people with whom he meets at the start of every working day and who have virtually unrestricted access to his office - is made up of people who have been with him for many years.

They include Horst Teltschik, his foreign policy adviser, who was originally recruited by Mr. Kohl in 1972. Wolfgang Bergsdorf, a speechwriter and media adviser, has been on the team since 1973. Eduard Ackermann, a political adviser, and Rudolf Seiters, now the Chancellery chief of staff, have worked with Mr. Kohl since 1976.

Standing guard at the door to the Chancellor's office and attending all the staff meetings is his secretary of 27 years, Juliane Weber, a tough-talking woman whose personal devotion to the Chancellor is the stuff of Bonn gossip.

He is fiercely loyal to his supporters, but those who betray him are certain of retribution. Party insiders still speak with awe of the fall of Heiner Geissler. A longtime adviser whom Mr. Kohl had made secretary general of the Christian Democrats, Mr. Geissler tried a year ago, at a time when the Chancellor was suffering in the polls, to gauge support for a change in the party leadership. The Chancellor gave no sign of displeasure until late August, when he abruptly dismissed Mr. Geissler and scattered his allies with a large show of party support.

Just as Mr. Kohl's appetite for politics is enormous, so is his appetite for the German staples. He dotes on hearty German meals of pork, potatoes and kraut, and he is known to send out his driver for that German favorite, plum cake with whipped cream. Every year at Easter he heads for a spa in the Austrian Alps, where he undergoes a rigid regime of dieting - a Lenten discipline, he says, that is as important for his soul as for his body. His hobbies include raising tropical fish and collecting rare minerals.

In short, he is very much one of the respectable, hard-working, heavy-eating, leisure-loving, thick-set, prosperous burghers among whom he grew up in Ludwigshafen, a Rhine River port and chemicals center of 162,000 people.

He still heads down there every chance he gets, to a ranch-style house he built in a new suburb, to join old friends like the Rev. Erich Ramstetter, the local Roman Catholic priest who presided over his wedding and baptized his two sons, for a sauna or a Sunday walk. His idea of relaxation, Mr. Kohl says, is to stop by a farm and pass the time of day with the farmer.

Up from the Rubble Of the Postwar Years

Born on April 3, 1930, Mr. Kohl was old enough to experience the horror of World War II but too young to serve in it. As a child he helped comb the rubble of bombed buildings for victims. His older brother, Walter, was killed by a falling electric pole during a raid.

In the last year of the war, Mr. Kohl was inducted into a Nazi program to send children from bombed cities into the countryside. He was sent to Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps, where his job was to open barrels of artificial fog to be used during bombing raids.

By all accounts, Mr. Kohl's remaining adolescence was entirely ordinary. He was not a particularly good student, and he was fond of practical jokes. Old school buddies told how he sneaked into a girls' boarding school one night, or how he got up at a hotel in the middle of the night and changed around all the shoes waiting to be cleaned.

While he was a teen-ager, Mr. Kohl became involved in politics. His father, a functionary in the municipal government, was a founder of the local Christian Democratic organization, and at 16, Mr. Kohl was already active in setting up the local chapter of the youth wing.

Founded immediately after the war, the Christian Democratic Union became the party of small businessmen, civil servants and churchgoers. Under men like Konrad Adenauer, the first postwar Chancellor, and Ludwig Erhard, the architect of West Germany's ''economic miracle,'' the Christian Democrats governed West Germany for the first 20 years, alone or in coalition, laying the foundation for the country's Western orientation and its combination of free-market economics and social net.

This was the natural home for a petit-bourgeois Catholic family. ''My inability to be a socialist came to me with my mother's milk,'' Mr. Kohl says.

It was in Ludwigshafen that Mr. Kohl married Hannelore Renner, a Protestant from Silesia, with whom he has two sons. One graduated from Harvard College last year and is studying law in Mainz. The other is a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Mr. Kohl went to the University of Heidelberg, where he earned a doctorate in history. Parallel with his studies, Mr. Kohl became ever more active in politics. He was elected to the Ludwigshafen City Council. Before long he was a major voice in the Christian Democratic organization in Rhineland-Palatinate state, and by 1953, at only 23, he was elected to the state party leadership.

That was the first of many times that Mr. Kohl would be the youngest in a political post. At 30, in 1960, he was the youngest member of the Rhineland-Palatinate state legislature, at 33 the youngest floor leader, at 39 the youngest state premier, at 43 the youngest chairman of the Christian Democratic Union and finally, in 1982, at the age of 52, the youngest Chancellor.

Rising to the Top, Step by Step by Step

But colleagues from his early years recalled that Mr. Kohl was never a natural. His first major speech in the state legislature in 1960 was so bad that his adversaries thought he was politically finished. It was not the last time his adversaries were proven wrong. After Mr. Kohl lost his first stab at the Chancellery in 1976, Franz Josef Strauss, the head of the conservative Christian Social Union in Bavaria, declared: ''He will never become Chancellor. He is totally incapable. He lacks the basic elements of character, intelligence and policy. He lacks everything for this office.''

About that same time, Mr. Kohl sat down to a dinner with some friends in Mainz. After a long discussion, he took out paper and pen and jotted down, ''I want to become Chancellor.''

He achieved the goal in October 1982, when the small, liberal Free Democratic Party of Hans-Dietrich Genscher shifted its support from the Social Democrats to the Christian Democrats.

That brought to power the coalition of Christian Democratic, Christian Social and Free Democratic parties that has been in power ever since.

Mr. Kohl bridles at the perception that he is short on vision.

''This is complete nonsense,'' he said. ''Who has a better vision here in the Federal Republic? Who? I know no better concept than the one I represent: European unification, because in 10 years we will write 2000 and not 1900, and this country and this continent will have a chance in the year 2000, and beyond, only if they are united. O.K., there is the vision.''

''Politics,'' he said at another point, ''is more than dealing with issues.'' It also requires ''a compass'' of principles.

''My compass,'' he said, ''is liberty, peace, social justice, unity in Europe and Germany. My compass also says, to an almost emotional degree, friendship with France, friendship with the United States.''

Whether this amounts to vision remains an point of debate. But none of his adversaries deny Mr. Kohl a fundamental faith in the West, in a free market, in democracy, in European unity.

Goal for the 90's: A 'Normal Country'

Mr. Kohl was at the end of an arduous day. He had been to Hanover, he had campaigned by helicopter around Lower Saxony and was on his way back to Bonn, reclining in a small jet. What is his vision, he was asked, of Germany 5 or 10 years from now?

After a long pause, Mr. Kohl replied: ''That things will normalize. That's the most important thing for us, that we become a wholly normal country, not 'singularized' in any question.''

It seems a modest dream. Mr. Kohl presides over a nation that in 40 years has risen from destruction and disgrace to an impressive level of prosperity, achievement, democracy and even wisdom.

But ''normality'' has evaded it until now. As long as Germany was divided, as long as it marked the line between East and West and ceded a portion of its sovereignty to allies who stationed huge armies on its soil, it remained a marked nation, a people doing penance.

Now, with unity, the Germans stand on the verge of rejoining the family of sovereign nations, to recover their honor, to become ''normal.''

''Yes, that we simply don't stick out,'' he repeated with a decisive nod. ''That's the important thing.''

By Serge Schmemann

HELEZNOVODSK, U.S.S.R., July 16— The Soviet Union and West Germany agreed today to let a united Germany join NATO and to lift virtually all other remaining barriers to German reunification.

The breakthrough was announced at this spa in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains by President Mikhail S. Gorbachev of the Soviet Union and Chancellor Helmut Kohl of West Germany after two days of talks marked by unusual displays of harmony and confidence.

Making no effort to conceal his jubilation, Mr. Kohl told West German television, ''This is a breakthrough, a fantastic result.''

A Hope for 'Prolonged Peace'

Mr. Gorbachev, who opened the news conference on the accord with a promise of ''interesting news,'' declared, ''We are leaving one epoch in international relations, and entering another, a period, I think, of strong, prolonged peace.'' [Excerpts from the news conference are on page A8.] The agreement, announced after talks in Moscow and at a mountain hideaway, ends months of maneuvering and sparring between Moscow and the West over German unity. After Moscow's initial resistance to Western demands that a united Germany remain in NATO, a variety of formulas were proposed to enable the Soviets to withdraw from East Germany with dignity and some assurances for their economic and military security.

In the accord, Mr. Gorbachev effectively agreed to surrender all of the Soviet Union's remaining claims as an occupier of Germany and to renounce any restrictions on Germany's sovereignty, including its right to join whatever alliance it prefers.

Plans for Broad Cooperation

Mr. Kohl said he had told Moscow that a united Germany would seek to become a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

In exchange, Mr. Kohl said, the Germans agreed to negotiate a treaty with the Soviet Union covering all aspects of their relations - political, economic, military, cultural and scientific. No details were immediately available, but officials said the treaty would include provisions for wide economic and technical cooperation.

The Soviet-German agreements make it virtually certain that the Germanys will be able to hold all-German elections and to reunite formally by the end of this year.

The Germans also agreed to restrict the future German military to 370,000 troops, compared with about 667,000 now for the two German armies combined. West Germany currently has about 494,000 active forces and East Germany, 173,000.

The Germans also pledged to allow Soviet troops to remain on East German territory for a three- to four-year transition period. Mr. Kohl said Germany would help pay for the maintenance and the withdrawal of the 350,000-strong Soviet force, and that American, British and French troops would remain in Berlin until the Soviet troops had withdrawn.

The Germans further agreed that no NATO troops, nuclear weapons or German forces assigned to NATO would be deployed on what is now East German soil during the transition period, and probably not afterward.

'Special Responsibilities'

''We were unanimous that on the key questions we achieved a far-reaching success,'' Chancellor Kohl said at the press conference. ''This breakthrough was critical because both sides are aware that the historic changes happening in Europe, Germany and the Soviet Union place special responsibility on us.''

The arrangements were designed to satisfy Moscow's concerns over the strength of a future Germany and the problem of repatriating a large military contingent for which the Soviet Union has neither barracks nor jobs.

Officials said details of the agreements would be worked out at various forums, including the ''two plus four'' talks among the Germanys and the World War II Allies, scheduled to resume on Tuesday in Paris, and the Vienna talks on reducing conventional arms in Europe.

Mr. Kohl said the Soviets had agreed to conclude the series of two-plus-four talks in time for a meeting of the Conference on European Security and Cooperation in November, at which European countries, the United States and Canada will effectively give international endorsement to Germany's reunification.

The agreement marked a major personal triumph for Mr. Kohl, who sat throughout the press conference with a broad grin across his face. Two weeks after achieving the monetary and economic union of the two Germanys, Mr. Kohl now faces an unobstructed home stretch toward unity.

A Personal Rapport

The two-day display of his personal rapport with Mr. Gorbachev, underscored by the invitation to join the Soviet President in his native regions in southern Russia, seemed certain to strengthen further Mr. Kohl's already strong chances of being elected the first chancellor of a reunited Germany.

Mr. Gorbachev treated Mr. Kohl with an intimacy that no other Western leader has enjoyed with the Soviet President. The two traveled together on a tour of Stavropol, which was long the Soviet leader's home, and then spent the night in a lodge in Arkhyz, a resort in the Caucasus Mountains.

''Our talks were very candid and marked by understanding and personal sympathy,'' Mr. Kohl said. Mr. Gorbachev said the discussions had been conducted in ''the spirit of that well-known German word, 'realpolitik.' ''

German and Soviet officials agreed that the breakthrough was made possible by the series of meetings of Western leaders in recent weeks, including the European Community session in Dublin, the United States-Soviet summit meeting in Washington, the gathering of the seven leading industrial powers in Houston and above all, the NATO summit meeting in London. In these meetings, the officials said, the West effectively agreed to eliminate the vestiges of the cold war and to consider ways to help Mr. Gorbachev's program of perestroika.

''We could not have reached this agreement without the context in which the visit took place,'' Mr. Gorbachev said. ''In recent months we've had tens of summit meetings, at which all these burning questions touching on the fundamental changes in Europe were discussed.''

NATO Meeting Was Turning Point

He specifically referred to the NATO summit in London this month, in which the alliance formally agreed to a reconciliation with the Warsaw Pact, to restructure NATO thoroughly and to invite Mr. Gorbachev to address it. NATO leaders also gave Mr. Kohl the go-ahead to set a specific ceiling on the size of a unified Germany's forces in his talks with the Soviet President.

''We received an impulse from London, the last meeting of NATO, where important and positive steps were made,'' Mr. Gorbachev said. ''We do not say we applaud everything. Far from it. But a movement began, a historical turn in the development of this very important organization.''

NATO's decisions enabled Mr. Gorbachev to tell his nation that Moscow was not giving up positions won through the sacrifices of World War II, but moving to a new stage of cooperation and development.

In comments clearly aimed at his audience at home, the Soviet President tried to argue that a united Germany's membership in NATO would have advantages. ''Whether we want it or not, the day will come when the reality will be that a united Germany is in NATO,'' he said. ''And if that is its choice, then it will still make formal arrangements to cooperate with the Soviet Union, and that's to our advantage.''

Both Mr. Kohl and Mr. Gorbachev gave credit to their Foreign Ministers, Hans-Dietrich Genscher and Eduard A. Shevardnadze, who met at least eight times in recent weeks to hammer out the agreement.

The Message: Unity

The two ministers left directly from their meetings here for Paris to attend the ''two plus four'' talks. Interviewed on West German television while en route to Paris, Mr. Genscher declared, ''The message of Moscow is: Germany will come together this year.''

Although the agreement involved a major Soviet concession, it was viewed as a personal success for Mr. Gorbachev, a reflection of the new authority gained through his triumph last week over hard-line forces at the Communist Party congress.

German officials have long believed that Mr. Gorbachev is eager to cultivate relations with a united Germany as the centerpiece of his campaign to revamp the Soviet economy and open it to the West. They have also felt that he was hampered in those efforts by the resistance of Communist hard-liners ranged behind Yegor K. Ligachev.

''He made it clear in private conversations that he now felt cleared for a major reform effort,'' one senior official said. He said the German offer of a comprehensive treaty played a major role in satisfying Mr. Gorbachev that the Soviet Union would not be locked out of the new Europe that is taking shape with Germany at its heart.

Mr. Gorbachev emphasized repeatedly today and on Sunday that the two Germanys are Moscow's largest trading partners in their respective camps, and that a united Germany is therefore destined to play a major role in the Soviet Union's economic future.

Many of his statements at the press conference seemed intended to allay a widespread feeling at home that Moscow is abandoning the security and influence for which 20 million Soviet citizens died in World War II.

''They accept that the Germans, bearing on their shoulders the lesson of history, a dramatic, traumatic history, have in both their states reached certain conclusions,'' Mr. Gorbachev said.

''They have shown in their postwar history that they are for democracy, that their policy is that no war should arise from German soil, that they are open to cooperation with other nations. Without this nothing could have happened.''

By Serge Schmemann

MOSCOW, July 17— It will long be debated who won and who lost when Mikhail S. Gorbachev gave his blessing to the reunification of Germany.

Some will argue that the Soviets were humbled, others that Germany took its first step out of the West. Still others will invoke history, recalling previous Soviet-German pacts with muddled legacies: - Brest-Litovsk, Rapallo, Molotov-Ribbentrop.

But it was probably the Soviet President himself who gave the closest approximation of the realities behind the agreement announced Monday in the Caucasus spa of Zheleznovodsk, when he said that what he and Chancellor Helmut Kohl had practiced was that old German game, Realpolitik.

Election Boost for Kohl

Through two days of unusual chumminess in the sylvan setting of the northern Caucasus, Mr. Gorbachev virtually insured the election of Mr. Kohl as the first Chancellor of a reunited Germany, and in the process he gained probably his most important ally in the flagging campaign to revive the Soviet economy.

Mr. Gorbachev is an acknowledged master at Realpolitik, the politics of expediency. Much of his career, and much of his legend abroad, have been built on what amounts to making virtue of necessity, on recognizing the inevitable and claiming it for his goal.

And that was largely what he did with Mr. Kohl. According to Germans familiar with the process, Mr. Gorbachev recognized that he could do no more than delay the unification of Germany as a member of NATO, and that there was no question that the Soviet forces there would have to withdraw. It also looked increasingly likely that Mr. Kohl, a firm Atlanticist, would end up the first Chancellor of the reunited Germany.

Against this, Mr. Gorbachev weighed the fact that a united Germany held the key to his program of perestroika, the stalled campaign to stoke and Westernize the Soviet economy. The two Germanys, he noted more than once, are already the Soviet Union's largest trading partners. Together they hold the key to the Soviet Union's economic future and to its continued presence in Europe.

True, the Germans had made clear that no more billions in hard currency were immediately forthcoming. But the West had pledged in Houston to keep the question open, and the Germans were prepared to cooperate in phasing and financing the return home of the 380,000 Soviet troops in East Germany.

Ready for a Major Treaty

Moreover, the Germans were prepared to sign a major treaty on all facets of German-Soviet relations, with contractual guarantees of scientific, technological and commercial cooperation.

Finally, at the NATO summit in London earlier this month, the Western powers lifted a major obstacle when they agreed to terminate the adversarial character of the alliance, inviting the Warsaw Pact to sign a nonaggression statement and inviting Mr. Gorbachev to Brussels.

The choice seemed obvious. But by Soviet and German accounts, the real hurdle was domestic - the resistance of hard-liners in the Soviet Communist Party, who had found in German unity the one issue on which they thought they could rally popular opposition to Mr. Gorbachev and perestroika.

In an impassioned speech to the party congress that ended last week, Mr. Gorbachev asked the delegates whether they were prepared to stop German unity with tanks. In a key test vote last Thursday, the conservative standard-bearer, Yegor K. Ligachev, mustered barely a sixth of the delegates.

It was on that day, German officials said, that Mr. Gorbachev invited Mr. Kohl to add a southern side trip to his Soviet itinerary. The way was clear, and the Soviet leader apparently wanted to waste no time in securing Mr. Kohl's, and Germany's, good will.

Thrusting aside all reservations, he accepted the German package virtually intact, NATO membership and all, and he lavished on Mr. Kohl a welcome no other Western leader has enjoyed. Emulating the homey touch that has become increasingly popular in Western summits, Mr. Gorbachev took Mr. Kohl to his native southern Russia and to a mountain hideaway.

The Time of His Life

Mr. Kohl could not conceal his glee. All through the press conference at Zheleznovodsk, he sat with a broad grin. Meeting with the press in Bonn today, he acknowledged that he had not expected so broad an agreement - at best, he said, he had expected Mr. Gorbachev to agree to the NATO membership.

''These last 24 hours were among the important experiences of my life,'' the Chancellor said.

The haste with which Mr. Gorbachev dispatched the German question left diplomats surmising that he intended an equally swift assault on the economy now that Mr. Ligachev and his resistance to a market economy were subdued. German officials involved in the negotiations said Mr. Gorbachev repeatedly spoke of plans for such an offensive.

At his news conference in Bonn today, Mr. Kohl said Mr. Gorbachev ''made it clear especially in private talks - and it's not indiscreet if I quote him here - that the way of the Soviet Union into the future must be a pluralistic way, not only in politics, but especially in economic preconditions.''

Mr. Kohl is also no slouch at politics, and much of his career, like Mr. Gorbachev's, has been made by his instinct for the popular mood. He was among the first to sense that the fall of the Berlin wall would begin a process ending in unification, and he was quick to claim the process as his own.

Mr. Kohl also sensed that Mr. Gorbachev's problem was largely political, and with his Foreign Minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, he worked hard to persuade the Western allies to soften their stance toward Moscow, and to demonstrate that Germany was a potential boon, not a threat.

Not Just 'West Germany'

''It is interesting to see that the opinion comes through in Moscow now that it is useful, and not damaging, to have good relations with Germany,'' Mr. Kohl said in Bonn. ''I say Germany here consciously.''

Realpolitik, it seemed, had triumphed for the moment. It was not without precedent. From the time of Peter the Great, the Russians have looked to the Germans for technology and organization, and thousands of Germans migrated east to serve in the army and economy of the Russian Empire.

Yet the very effort Mr. Gorbachev and Mr. Kohl required to achieve their breakthrough underscored their awareness of the lingering pall that a more recent history of brutal conflicts still cast on all Soviet-German relations.

The pains Mr. Gorbachev took to seem friendly with Mr. Kohl were not solely intended to court the future all-German leader. They were also needed to demonstrate to the Soviet peoples that their President was prepared to accept a German as a personal friend.

The demonstration was not lost, at least on two decorated war veterans who met the two leaders. Mr. Kohl said he had been particularly moved by a comment one of them made to Mr. Gorbachev: ''It is good, Mikhail Sergeyevich, that you talk to the Germans, so that our grandchildren will not experience what was in our time.''

By Serge Schmemann

MOSCOW, Sept. 12— And yet the ''Treaty on the Final Settlement With Respect to Germany,'' to give it its full title, arguably had a significance akin to agreements familiar from every high school history text -the Versailles Treaty of 1871, from which a united Germany first emerged; and the Potsdam conference of 1945, from which the Germans emerged severed in two.

Now, after 45 years, the victorious allies were finally resolving the ''German Question'' and putting an end to the last formal remnants of occupation.

The Price of Full Sovereignty

They were restoring full sovereignty to a nation that had savaged Europe a half century earlier. In exchange, the Germans were renouncing all claims to ancestral lands east of the Oder and Neisse Rivers lost to Poland and the Soviet Union, restricting their military and pledging that hereafter only peace would emanate from German soil.

More broadly, the European powers were laying the groundwork for a new European order, with a potent, wealthy Germany at its heart. Perhaps more clearly than any previous event, the treaty demonstrated the retreat of Communism from Europe. Not only the West German mark had gone East - the full Western package of liberal democracy, free-market economy and the North Atlantic alliance were being voluntarily accepted by the bankrupt rump of the ''first state of workers and peasants on German soil.''

Yet it was probably the first modern peace treaty that took pains to leave no winners or losers. The Germans, in fact, were insistent that it not be called a ''peace treaty'' at all, to underscore that it had been achieved in peace. In 1871, by contrast, a united Germany was proclaimed by Bismarck after a war against France, and in 1945 the victors had met in the midst of the smoldering ruins of the Third Reich.

'Without War, Pain or Strife'

But this, Chancellor Helmut Kohl declared, was ''the first unification of a country in modern history achieved without war, pain or strife.''

The statement invited a quick knock on wood, but it did reflect what the six signers - the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France and the two Germanys - all agreed had been a harmonious and creative negotiation.

Secretary of State James A. Baker 3d said the process had created a ''new lexicon of openness, cooperation and partnership,'' and he went out of his way to praise Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze of the Soviet Union.

The very harmony of the process was one reason why the signing of the final settlement could not attract as much attention as economic turmoil or military tension. Despite some 11th-hour haggling on technicalities and the price the Germans would pay the Soviets, the ''two plus four'' negotiations never really developed suspense.

The talks, moreover, were not really the locomotive or even the key to German unity. It was really the momentum to reunification touched off by the breach of the Berlin wall and the collapse of Communism in East Europe that had finally compelled the old Allies to resolve the nettlesome ''German Question.''

Forcing the Pace

In the end, the forces that brought Nazi Germany to its knees and partitioned it 45 years earlier often seemed to be pushed toward a settlement at a pace that they neither set, nor really liked.

The Soviet Union, which had, through its own internal reforms, directly empowered the East Germans to shed Communism, found itself especially uneasy at the prospect of losing its premier foothold in the West, and much of the real bargaining was over how to disentangle the Soviets from their enormous commitment to East Germany.

The solution was both bizarre and Solomonic. The Soviet Union was given four years to withdraw its army from Germany, and in the interim the Germans would help pay for the force and finance new housing for the troops when they return home. NATO forces would stay out of East German territory, though they would maintain garrisons in Berlin.

Mr. Gorbachev tried to put a positive twist on the situation, saying that the Soviet troops were now ''representatives of a friendly country.'' Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher of West Germany was more blunt: the $7.5 billion deal, he said, was ''the price of unity.''

Credit for Gorbachev

It was not a cynical comment from Mr. Genscher. He had been among the first to recognize the promise for Germany held out by the soviet policy of ''perestroika,'' or openness, and the large majority of his countrymen shared his view that Mr. Gorbachev was the true midwife of German unity, and deserved a reward.

Military-political technicalities dominated the immediate discussion of the treaty. But if this served to obscure the historic dimensions of the accord, it also underscored its major virtue -that for once in their history, the Europeans were shaping a new order without bloodshed or trauma.

The negotiators seemed to tacitly agree from the outset that to humiliate the Russians or to frustrate the Germans would only undermine European security, and the main challenge of the negotiations became to find ways of avoiding either pitfall.

The initial breakthrough was the decision at NATO's summit meeting in July to forswear any aggressive intentions and to extend a hand of cooperation to the Soviets. That cleared the way for the next major step, the Soviet-West German summit talks at which Mr. Gorbachev and Mr. Kohl agreed on a face-saving way for the Soviets to extricate themselves from East Germany while maintaining influence in European affairs.

The ''new European security order'' that both East and West have now declared as their goal, in which the two alliances would be replaced by a single conflict-resolving mechanism based on the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, is still a long way off. It will be four years before the last Soviet troops leave East Germany, and both Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union still face great upheavals.

But by making history as quietly as they did, by signing a treaty without undue debate and controversy, the authors of the Moscow treaty may have shown that shaping a new order does not necessarily require a major upheaval.

Correction: September 14, 1990, Friday, Late Edition - Final Because of an editing error, a front-page article yesterday about the German unification treaty's place in history mistranslated the Russian word perestroika. It means restructuring; the word for openness is glasnost.

By Serge Schmemann

BAD HARZBURG, West Germany— It is once again a pleasant 30-minute drive from Bad Harzburg to Wernigerode through a classic German landscape of wooded mountains and half-timbered villages. The two towns share a common heritage: people used to speak the same dialect and were reared on the same legends of the Brocken, the nearby mountain where witches dance on Walpurgis Night.

On Oct. 3, the two towns will again be part of the same country. But for 40 years they stood on opposite sides of an all-but-impregnable divide, each at the fringe of a different world. New generations grew up in Bad Harzburg facing west, and if they turned to the east at all it was to show tourists the fences, tank traps, watchtowers and unsmiling guards of the East German border. In Wernigerode, people came under a paternalistic police state, secure and protected as long as they never ventured into the three-mile-wide security zone to reach the land beyond.

Now, on the verge of reunification, the people of the two towns, and of the two Germanys, look on one another and their impending union with mixed and troubled feelings.

Here are views from each town, as reported by The New York Times's Bonn bureau chief, Serge Schmemann.

Westerners Protect What Is Theirs

Everybody here has stories of the euphoria last November, when the border at Eckertal, a few miles to the east, suddenly fell open.

''At first it was a small hole, and they kept chipping away, and then the first Trabi drove through,'' Heinz Sinkemat, the deputy city manager, recalled. Tears and sparkling wine flowed freely, and people from both sides were seized with feelings of kinship and pride.

Now, with unity just weeks away, the residents of Bad Harzburg look to their Eastern neighbors with something of the condescension and irritation that a comfortable burgher might feel toward a poor relative come to stay.

Mr. Sinkemat said that at first, when visitors from East Germany took their first stunned walks along Herzog Wilhelm Street, the elegant pedestrian mall of this resort town, so-called Westies pitched in to buy groceries or trinkets for Ossies - or Easterners, sometimes also referred to as Zonies, the more derogatory name derived from the Soviet occupation zone in which they lived.

But before long, people began to gripe about the traffic and the sputtering Trabant sedans, about the East Germans clogging supermarket lines, about the cost of unity. Recently, Mr. Sinkemat said, an East German with a full shopping cart angrily turned to complaining West Germans behind him and shouted, ''We waited in line for 40 years. Now you can wait.''

Stereotypes have hardened. To hear people on the street, the Easterner dresses shabbily, acts timid, overruns discount stores, works badly and has a rude Saxon accent. He wants to have all the television sets, cars and washing machines for which the West Germans worked for 40 years, and he wants them now.

''They think that because they haven't had anything for 40 years they can demand it all now,'' said Karin Lutz, a 48-year-old jewelry salesclerk. ''They want to have everything in one day if possible. You just want to say to them, you can't be lazy and stand around here, you have to build up your country and not rely on the West so much.''

The Toll of Communism

Mrs. Lutz would probably acknowledge, as most people do at some point in a conversation, that the people ''over there'' are relatively poor not because they were less industrious, but because of Communism.

Yet the sight of Easterners in their trademark stone-washed jeans hauling washing machines and refrigerators while West Germany pays out billions to keep their economy afloat seems to foster indignation among people who have achieved so exemplary a level of security and prosperity through thrift and hard work.

Some say that at the core of West Germans' attitude is a basic satisfaction with their life and resistance to changing it. For West Germans, reunification seems more duty than joy, and that duty is to assimilate East Germany quickly into the Federal Republic with as little change as possible.

Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, a West German author, critic and editor who lives in Munich, said a reluctance to change explains why much of the public enthusiasm for unity has been in East Germany, not West Germany.

''I haven't seen a single rally in this half where flags were waved, no public meeting that can be described as patriotic, jingoistic, as happened in East Germany,'' he said. ''People accept unity, maybe welcome it, but there is no trace of euphoria. It's a marriage of convenience.''

A recent poll in the news magazine Spiegel found that 29 percent of West Germans were either ''rather opposed'' or ''very opposed'' to unification. The poll showed that 67 percent of West Germans accepted that unity would require sacrifices, but only 38 percent were willing to make them.

How long such attitudes survive probably depends on how rapidly East Germany becomes economically viable. But early predictions of a second ''economic miracle'' have given way to pessimism as the disintegration of the Communist economy becomes more apparent. As many as four million East Germans may be unemployed by year's end, and experts now say it will take 10 to 15 years for them to reach Western living standards.

'A Lot of Class Conflict'

Most West Germans have also accepted that their taxes will rise to pay for reunification, though Bonn denies there will be an increase. While the booming West German economy should prove up to the task of restoring the East, Germans are known as a people who place a great premium on stability and security.

''There's going to be a lot of class conflict,'' Mr. Enzensberger said. ''Poor relations and rich relations are never on the best of terms, and there's a lot of resentment boiling up here.''

Wolfgang Scholl might dispute that. He owns the Bad Harzburg Volkswagen dealership, and the opening of the Berlin wall has doubled his business. ''We used to be on the edge of the world, and now we're at the center of Germany,'' he said. ''We've had to hire four more people, and it doesn't look like it's ending. Our customers are now exclusively East Germans.''

A Commercial Bonanza

The boom has also embraced large supermarkets and stores selling electronics and household appliances. Hotels are full year-round with Western Europeans who want to explore the East, especially the Harz Mountains, from a comfortable Western base.

But beyond commercial ties, personal contacts have been limited. Until last fall, Bad Harzburg maintained a museum at the border, where busloads of schoolchildren and tourists were shown exhibitions about the fortifications and the division of Germany. A platform outside allowed visitors a look at the no-man's land, the guard tower and the East German houses just inside, whose residents never acknowledged the waves or shouts of the Western tourists.

Elke Rohrbeck, a 26-year-old clerk at Town Hall, used to work there on weekends. But now that the border has opened, she rarely heads east.

''A lot of Zonies come over here,'' she said, ''and we're slowly getting used to them. It takes time to get used to their Saxon dialect. It's like a foreign country there, sort of like Bavaria.''

In the Old Days

It was not always so. Hans Schmidt, 79, a retired teacher, was raised in Halberstadt, which fell to East Germany after the war, and he remembers driving over to Bad Harzburg for a dance in the old days. The region was a lively place, popular with aristocrats who came to take the waters and with intellectuals for whom Brocken Mountain, featured in Goethe and other works of German literature, was something of a cultural Mecca.

Yet even Mr. Schmidt said he now feels alien in the East. ''I wouldn't call it hatred, but something remains in the head of someone almost 80 years old,'' he said. ''The youth might be establishing contacts quickly, but for us it'll take a long time to have normal, unprejudiced contacts.''

WERNIGERODE, East Germany— Henny Berner still remembers the humiliation of her first business trip to West Germany last spring.

As director of the new Deutsche Bank branch here, she was invited to a luxurious hotel in Neustadt for a seminar with new managers. At their first breakfast, Mrs. Berner said, she overheard West Germans commenting on the East German cars parked outside.

''They were saying, 'How can anyone from East Germany dare to stay at a hotel like this,' that they would rather help Afghanistan or Africa than East Germany,'' she said. ''Even now, every time we hear West Germans talking about unity, it's always, 'What will it cost?'

''We're second-class citizens, and it won't stop on Oct. 3,'' she said. ''It will really start on Oct. 3. We're helpless here. We all studied Russian, and we suddenly need English. I spent 10 years studying economics, and I've had to learn the free-market economy in a three-month crash course.''

Burden of Being East German

Mrs. Berner's story was one of many illustrating the growing sense among East Germans that they are facing a long stretch as second-class citizens in a united Germany. Nobody wants the clock turned back, but for many, the long-awaited unity has proved a mixed blessing: the open borders and West German marks have brought cars, travel and freedom, but they have also brought home the poverty of the East, and with it a loss of confidence.

Only a few miles from the West German border and graced with a stunning castle and lovely half-timbered houses, Wernigerode has drawn tens of thousands of Western visitors since the border opened last November. They prowl the winding streets, visit the castle and hike in the surrounding forests. But most return to spend the night in Bad Harzburg or one of the other West German resorts on the other side of the border, leaving Wernigerode little of their spending money.

At the same time, Wernigerode's electric-motor factory, the biggest local employer, has laid off many workers and put others on ''zero hours,'' a common East German arrangement in which employees are paid full salaries but do no work. The deal is considered a gimmick devised by Chancellor Helmut Kohl to conceal soaring unemployment rates until the all-German elections in December. Many workers suspect that after that, West German subsidies will dry up and many East German factories will die.

The Reality of Unemployment

So far, the official unemployment rate here is only 3.3 percent, but more than a third of the work force is on short hours, and some local officials expect the rate to reach 40 percent to 50 percent by next spring.

The experience of Wernigerode is shared, in varying degrees, across much of East Germany as it braces for formal union with the West. After 40 years of dreaming about the promised land beyond the strictly guarded three-mile security zone along the border, they had welcomed the fall of the Berlin wall with patriotism and hope.

Yet early on, the dream began to sour. The first waves of West Germans flowed over not to embrace their long-suffering kin, but to buy up cheap East German goods and food, emptying towns like Wernigerode.

Monetary union in July gave East Germans the West German mark. But the currency only underscored their poverty and new dependence, and their rush to buy Western goods only accelerated the disintegration of East German industry and agriculture.

From Bad to Worse

With unity at hand, a poll by the news magazine Spiegel found that 78 percent of East Germans said they will remain second-class citizens ''for a long time''; 21 percent expected to have the same rights as West Germans.

Asked how they viewed their economic situation, 80 percent of the East Germans said it was bad or very bad, and only 1 percent said it was good. Asked the same question about West Germany, 93 percent said it was good or very good; no one said it was bad.

Yet the poll also found that few East Germans blamed the West for their problems. Asked to identify the source of their troubles, 67 percent said it was 40 years under the Communists. Only 4 percent blamed the West German Government.

The poll seemed to confirm a sense picked up from conversations around Wernigerode that East Germans felt less a resentment of rich Westerners than an inferiority, tinged with guilt at the Communist system with which they had learned to cope.

The repression of the old dictatorship was harshly evident along the border. To approach within three miles required a special permit, and to approach within 500 yards yet another. Informants were everywhere, and border guards patrolled day and night.

From Atop a Mountain

The power of the old order is dramatically evident atop the nearby Brocken, the highest mountain in the Harz range and the setting for many German legends. It is here that witches dance on Walpurgis Night, and where Mephistopheles led Faustus. The mountain was traditionally a magnet for hikers, but after the war the Soviet forces made its peak into a heavily armed post, bristling with antennas, towers, radar and barbed wire.

The mountain is open to visitors again, but the shriek of powerful winds blowing through the Soviet equipment atop the magic mountain seems to confirm that the dark forces of the past have not yet been exorcized.

The Rev. Gottfried Werther, pastor of the town's main Protestant church, St. Sylvester, said that many more parishioners were turning to him with problems. Mr. Werther was active in the demonstrations last fall that led to the collapse of the Communist Government, but like many other leaders of the original popular movement, he is unhappy at the direction things took.

The Poorhouse of Germany

''They gave us currency union, but not social unity as they had promised,'' he said of the West. ''Of course, we are very happy to be rid of the Communists. We have no reason to complain there, but there were hopes that should not have been awakened. Now we will have to be the poorhouse of Germany for a while, and this is the start of a minority complex.''

Mr. Werther said Chancellor Kohl had asked all churches to ring their bells on Oct. 3. But he declined, arguing that it was not proper for the church to celebrate for the state.

Yet when asked directly, most citizens of Wernigerode said they probably would celebrate unity.

''Certainly there are fears and complexes,'' said Rita Ahrens, a town official. ''But the feeling of being one unified nation is overwhelming.''

At a crowded, smoke-filled pub near the electric-motor factory, Klaus-Dieter Fessel downed another beer. He had been on zero hours for several weeks now and expected to be laid off soon. He is 43 years old and has no idea what would happen next.

Yes, he agreed, unity is an exciting prospect. ''It's just that we didn't want it to be so harsh,'' he said.

By Serge Schmemann

On the eve of German unity, large crowds have been drawn to a major exhibition in West Berlin devoted to Otto von Bismarck, the original architect of German unity.

It was the Iron Chancellor who first united the Germans into a state 120 years ago ''by blood and iron.'' But organizers of the exhibition are quick to note that it was planned before the Berlin wall came down, and that the intention is only to provide a ''moment of critical reflection,'' not to suggest parallels.

The disclaimer is understandable. The period of unity ushered in by Bismarck, from 1871 to 1945, was the most terrible in German history, and its legacy was to make ''German nationalism'' into a fearsome specter at home and abroad.

A Subdued Mood

Such reflections alone might be enough to explain the subdued mood, almost anxiety, among the Germans on the threshold of a reunion that in West German mythology, at least, had been the premier goal of the nation.

It is also true that another round of euphoria may simply be too much to expect after 11 months of regular ''historic moments'' in the Germanys and across Eastern Europe, even if this may be the most historic moment of them all.

Besides, the more tangible elements of unity - the opening of the border, economic union - have already happened, and Germans on both sides have begun to feel the economic and social costs of the undertaking.

Faced with the prospect of higher taxes, West Germans grumble about the ''Ossies'' as a drain on their prosperity. The East Germans, facing swelling unemployment, rankle at their lot as second-class citizens in a state they fought to join. By any measure, things will get worse before they begin to get better.

A Family Affair

Cynics may argue that such hand-wringing is innate in the Germans, that unification is actually taking place with exemplary Teutonic orderliness. This is, after all, a family affair, and all the grumbling and anxiety will not prevent some heady emotion and jubilation at the Brandenburg Gate when unity comes at 12 A.M. on Wednesday.

Yet the apprehension is tangible, and at its core lies a sense that becomes increasingly apparent browsing through the displays of Bismarck's life and times: neither Bismarck, nor the Weimar Republic, nor Hitler's Third Reich provide signposts for the Germany waiting to be born.

There are not many who fear that the new German Reich will revive the militance or aggressive nationalism of its predecessors. The conditions are far different, and the new Germany is being formed on the basis of a Federal Republic that has shaped a reliable democracy and a formidable economy that has found an identity and security in the West. It is a Germany that has accepted permanent limits on its military, that has forsworn all claims to former territories, that has pledged fealty to European unity and the Atlantic alliance.

A Readiness to Confront the Past

Perhaps more important, the West Germans, at least, have shown a readiness to confront their past. The bitter ''historians' dispute'' of the 1980's delved into the cardinal question of responsibility for Auschwitz and all it stands for, and it concluded with President Richard von Weizsacker's declaration that ''Auschwitz remains unique. It was perpetrated by Germans in the name of Germany.''

''The time of marching armies in Europe is over,'' said Vernon A. Walters, the United States Ambassador to Bonn. ''This is the smallest Germany in 1,000 years, and the richest and the furthest West. It is a nation that has learned it doesn't need space to be rich.''

The Surprise of Unity

Yet it is also true that unity has come to Germans by surprise, long before any expected it, before they had sorted out where they were headed.

The bloodless upheavals of last fall have nurtured their own myth, that the Germans were brought together through the ''peaceful revolution'' in East Germany and the ''democratic choice'' of its people.

In fact, the original demonstrators chanted ''We are the people'' and demanded a reformed socialist state, and the vote that threw them into West German arms was less for unity than for the German mark. It can also be argued that West Germany's push for rapid monetary and political union was less due to a yearning for national unity than a panicky attempt to block the flood of East Germans threatening to overwhelm West Germany's cherished social security system.

In any case, it is clear that unity is coming not as the end of a search for a new German identity, but more as the beginning.

At one extreme, embodied in the pronouncements of the writer Gunter Grass, the process is viewed with open alarm. From this perspective unification is nothing more than the violent subjugation of a fledgling democracy and the start of an ''irrepressible expansionism.''

''I wish I could share the feeling that we are now practically harmless,'' Mr. Grass wrote in the French left-wing daily Liberation. ''But when I weigh up the process of German unification, it re-arouses all my fears.''

Objections From the Young

Objections have also come from a younger generation of West Germans who grew up with few feelings of kinship for the East Germans, and unconvinced that unity has any practical value.

''Just when we thought we had come to terms with our existence and knew at least in rough terms what it's going to be like in the future, out of the blue a mid-life crisis descends on us in the disguise of German unity,'' the popular 40-year-old West German writer Patrick Suskine wrote recently in Spiegel.

Such open objections, however, are overshadowed by the broad acceptance of unification as a German duty, and at best as the beginning of the restoration of health to the nation.

Many intellectuals initially skeptical about unity have found a certain reassurance in the absence of flag-waving nationalism, violence or bitterness.

Theo Sommer, editor in chief of the weekly Die Zeit, said such skepticism fed a determination that the new Germany not become overbearing or self-centered again.

''I think there is no 'hurrah' patriotism, no nationalism, no orgy of chauvinism,'' he said, ''but rather a certain diffidence and apprehension about the future, and I think that's a better mood to enter unity than flag-waving.''

Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the rough-hewn politician who has cajoled and maneuvered Germany toward rapid unity, probably speaks for a silent majority of Germans when he declares that his greatest hope for a united Germany is simply that it will become accepted as normal.

''I think it is possible, even probable, that the Germans will now find this inner balance that is characteristic of the casual self-confidence of other European nations,'' the Chancellor said in a recent interview.

Resuming the Process of 1848

Behind such hopes is the notion that the Germans are finally resuming the process of nation-building raised in the failed uprisings of 1848, when the German colors of black, red and gold were first raised and rebels fought for a unified Germany under a constitutional, parliamentary government. Once again, some argue, unity is rising from below, breaking ground for a new, shame-free patriotism.

However, the more immediate problem is how to manage the merger of two disparate states and peoples. While the cost of unity is probably the major source of grumbling, most Germans seem confident that West Germany's wealth and organizational genius will bring East Germany into the fold soon.

East Germans, for their part, have felt spurned and neglected by the rich Western kinsmen. ''The countless embraces at the wall were fired by alcohol, and ended that way, in headache, broken glass and broken bones,'' wrote the East German writer Rolf Schneider. ''Ever since then, the man from the West has appeared to the G.D.R. Germans as someone perfectly equipped with the strange character of a man-eating shark, 'Carcharodon carcharias,' as the force behind rising rents, eviction orders, as an arrogant know-it-all, as a babbling salesman.''

Such initial stereotyping and complexes, however, may be only another example of the angst and self-searching that is inherent in the culture. One indication that the clash of East and West may not be all that critical is that it has also found its way into the repertory of East German satirical cabaret, a Berlin tradition that thrived even under the Communists.

At the Kartoon, a two-week-old cabaret in East Berlin, one skit has a West German chicken proposing a joint venture to an East German pig. ''Let's make ham-and-egg sandwiches,'' proposes the chicken. ''Wait a minute, that means I'd have to die,'' protests the pig. ''Hey, it's not my fault you can't make eggs,'' says the chicken.

A Central Role, Ready or Not

Carnivorous and powerful as the ''Wessies'' may appear to the ''Ossies,'' the question is still open whether the Germans can handle the influence and power they will gain through unity, whether they can overcome their image as economic giants but political midgets. With every announcement of another troop withdrawal by the superpowers, it becomes evident that the Germans are destined to play a central role in the new Europe, ready or not.

The recent debate in Bonn over whether to join in the military action in the Persian Gulf demonstrated that the Germans are still squeamish about military force. Yet Mr. Kohl and his Foreign Minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, have shown an increasing readiness to play a role in global politics.

As these and other aspects of German and European realignment swirl through the press, even nations less given to worry would be forgiven bouts of apprehension. But for reformed skeptics like Mr. Sommer, the debate is a source of assurance.

''The point to make is really that we don't know some of the answers yet, and that's a positive thing,'' he said. ''At least we're not goose-stepping where angels fear to tread.''

By Serge Schmemann

WEST BERLIN, Oct. 1— The two Berlins and the two Germanys began the final countdown today to the moment, at midnight Tuesday, when they will drop the ''East'' and the ''West'' from their names and once again become a single nation with a single capital.

The autumn air was heavy with anticipation as tens of thousands of visitors poured into Berlin - all but formally reunited in the 11 months since the Berlin wall was breached, and its subways, streets and currencies were merged - for the huge reunion party planned to start with the raising of the black, red and gold flag by the Reichstag.

Large-scale police reinforcements also converged on the city, including several hundred paramilitary border guards, to keep watch against violence threatened by the Autonomen, the anarchic radical bands that have disrupted previous civic events in West Berlin.

A Symbol Then and Now

All around the Reichstag, the battered home of former German parliaments that has stood as a symbol of German longing since it burned in 1933 at the dawn of Hitler's dictatorship, men worked to set up a new flagpole and speaker stands and to prepare the grounds for the politicians and people who will proclaim the new German state at the stroke of midnight.

It was here that the last Kaiser, Wilhelm II, abdicated in 1918, and it was over the brooding, neo-classical ruins of the Reichstag that Soviet soldiers raised their flag in May 1945 to proclaim the capitulation of Berlin. It was here, too, in 1948, during the blockade of West Berlin by Communist forces, that Mayor Ernst Reuter appealed to the world, ''You peoples of the world, look upon this city.''

The division of Berlin left the building - restored inside but still bullet-scarred on its exterior - abutting the Berlin wall, and generations of Western politicians stood on its eastern balconies to express their indignation.

Still Bonn For Awhile

Now, back at the center of what will once again be the capital of Germany, the Reichstag will be the backdrop for the official reuniting of the Germanys and the site of the first sitting of the all-German Parliament on Thursday -- though the Parliament will then return to Bonn until a newly elected legislature determines its permanent new home.

The moment of unity will be preceded at 11:55 P.M. by the ringing of the Liberty Bell at the Schoneberg Town Hall, a copy of the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia that was given to West Berlin.

Then at midnight, seven young athletes each from East and West Germany will raise a 540-square foot flag while the national anthem is played, including the refrain, ''Unity and justice and freedom for the German fatherland, for that let us all aspire.''

The flag and the anthem are both those of West Germany, as will be the formal name of the new state - the Federal Republic of Germany - since under the conditions of union, East Germany will accede to West Germany as five new states in the Federal Republic. By the same logic, the West German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, will become Chancellor of all Germany, and the West German President, Richard von Weizsacker, will become the head of state for the entire country.

The capital will formally return to Berlin, though most ministries and Parliament will continue to work in Bonn at least for a while, and the Government has left it for the parliament that will be elected on Dec. 2 to decide what will move and what will stay.

Once the flag is raised, the celebrations will really begin, with half an hour of fireworks followed by concerts from 16 separate stages built on both sides of the Brandenburg Gate. Officials lifted a ban on firecrackers for the night.

Some Leaders Demur

Mr. Kohl had hoped to have the leaders of the Allied powers, including Presidents Bush and Mikhail S. Gorbachev, lead the celebrations, but they signaled their reluctance and the idea was canceled.

The moment of unity is being preceded and followed by a steady progression of formalities required to conclude 40 years of division of the Germans into two states and two cities.

In New York today, foreign ministers of the two Germanys and the four World War II victors formally signed documents suspending all Allied powers over Germany, thus restoring full sovereignty to the new Germany. The action was taken because the formal ''two plus four'' treaty will come into effect only after it is ratified by all the powers.

Berlin, which has technically been maintained under direct Allied control since the war, will be formally set free on Tuesday, when the four military commandants go to the Schoneberg hall and relinquish their responsibilities to Walter Momper, the West Berlin Mayor who at midnight will become the Mayor of all Berlin.

Kohl Overwhelmingly Elected

In Hamburg today, the Christian Democratic Union of Mr. Kohl held a congress at which it merged formally with the East German Christian Democrats, following the earlier mergers of the Social Democrats and the Free Democrats. The convention re-elected Mr. Kohl as party leader by 98.5 percent.

Lothar de Maiziere, the East German Prime Minister, who will become a Minister Without Portfolio in the all-German Government, seemed emotionally shaken during the proceedings. He said that membership in the East German Christian Democrats had been ''the only alternative to the Communist Party if you did not want to withdraw from public life.'' 

At 5 P.M. Tuesday, Mr. de Maiziere will preside over the last session of the East German Parliament, and then over a ''celebration of unity'' at the Schauspielhaus concert hall, at which Kurt Masur will conduct Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

For all the scheduled celebrations, the day of unity was not being met with enthusiasm across the West German spectrum.

The anarchists, with their tendencies to violence, posed a direct threat. But many other groups planned peaceful demonstrations to counter the official jubilation.

A 'Day of Meanness'

To most Germans, the demonstrations were part of the inevitable price of holding major events in Berlin. West Berlin has always been celebrated for its vibrant counterculture, and its people have rarely resisted a chance to march and demonstrate.

The most original was scheduled by an organization calling itself the Bureau for Unusual Events. Organizers declared Unity Day ''The Day of German Meanness'' and scheduled a demonstration at which they would proclaim an ''Autonomous Republic of Utopia.'' Following West Germany's model, they intended to offer Germany the right to accede.

In East Germany, union remains a matter of some bitterness for the Communist Party, reformed and restyled the Party of Democratic Socialism, and for the citizens' movements that sprang up around the Protestant churches a year ago.

The Party of Democratic Socialism had planned a rally titled ''Adieu G.D.R.,'' but canceled it after the police said they could not guarantee security. The New Forum and various citizens' movements announced that they would hold a requiem on Wednesday at the Gethsemane Church, one of the major centers of the popular revolution a year ago. Some Protestant churches in East Berlin declined a request to ring their bells on unity day.

Diplomats and Generals Involved

Unity will also mean the uniting of all the Western diplomatic missions in East and West. The United States Ambassador to East Germany, Richard Barkley, will formally cede his post at midnight Tuesday, and Vernon A. Walters, the Ambassador to Bonn, will become Ambassador to all Germany. The embassy, however, will remain in Bonn for now, with the East Berlin mission as a branch.

Though the Allied commanders will formally cede their responsibility for the city, reduced contingents of American, French and British troops will remain in West Berlin as long as Soviet troops remain in East Germany. The arrangement was reached after Bonn signed an agreement with Moscow agreeing to let the Soviets withdraw their forces over three to four years.

At unity, the armies of East and West Germany will merge, temporarily forming a formidable force of 530,000 - 430,000 from the west and 100,000 from the east. The force will be reduced over four years to an all-German army of 370,000, the limit to which West Germany has agreed.

By Serge Schmemann

FULDA, Germany— The two watchtowers stand vacant and silent now, the fence between them ripped and the cracked concrete sprouting sharp-thorned hawthorn.

Their confrontation seems all the more obscure in the beauty of a golden autumn afternoon. The wind whistling through the broken panes brings snatches of a tractor chugging across a distant field or the bark of a dog from the tile-roofed village nestled in the hills.

Otherwise nothing moves. Like Shelley's "Ozymandias," whose "two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert," the watchtowers seem to rise from the forests and fields like monuments to forgotten rivalries and vanished empires.

A scant year ago, heavily-armed men stood in these towers day and night training sophisticated military optics at each other and reporting every move they saw. This was the front line of the cold war, the trip-wire of World War III, where the border between East and West crossed the fabled Fulda Gap, the ancient invasion corridor through which the Soviet Army would try to punch if Moscow chose to challenge the West.

On the western side, men of the United States Army's 11th Armored Cavalry stood at what they called the "frontier of freedom" with the latest in American armor and electronics.

'It Can Be Confusing'

On the other, East German border guards sat watching and photographing the Americans, but even more their own countrymen, who occasionally tried to rush the formidable fortifications at the risk of their lives. Behind the hills to the east, the Soviet Eighth Guards Army manned the periphery of what was still the threatening Soviet bloc.

Master Sgt. Robert McCord still remembers the strange feeling when the "enemy" first came over. "It was unnerving to see an East German officer, whom I clearly recognized from the cameras, walking through Fulda," he said. "That was in December -- he'd been on border patrol in the morning, and came over to shop in the evening."

More recently, he said, Soviet officers have begun to come over, some in full uniform. "It can be confusing -- you develop the perception that this is the enemy, and suddenly he's in your back yard," he said.

Even more disorienting is that the East German soldiers are now allied German soldiers, and their Soviet-made equipment is now on the Western side. "All your life you train to defeat these tanks, and now they're yours," said Sergeant McCord.

The sergeant also remembered the first time he stepped over the border himself. Before the wall came down, the border was the front line, and to cross it was to violate everything the 11th Armored was trained to avoid.

Visits to the 'Other Side'

"We always had strict exercises on not crossing the line. We practiced this, we showed this to our people -- here's the line, don't cross it," he said, drawing an imaginary line through the ground. "So when I did it the first time, I felt I was doing something immoral. It was a very strange feeling."

Sergeant McCord and his German-born wife now visit regularly on the "other side," and friends from there visit them. A newly paved road crosses the former line near Observation Post Alpha.

The 11th Armored is still here at full strength, but the patrols along the border stopped in February, and the officers have been careful since then to keep their tanks and radars "over the horizon" from the former border. The mission now is basically to stay as long as the Soviets stay, and that is likely to take four to five years.

The 11th Armored has had about 4,500 soldiers in Fulda, part of a 60,000 strong force in Hesse, the German federal state on whose territory the Fulda gap lies.

The Americans in Fulda face the 60,000 Soviet troops of the Eighth Guards Armor, stationed around Weimar in the former East Germany. The Soviet soldiers, unlike the Americans, never patrolled the inner-German border themselves, but left the patrolling to the East German border troops.

All in all, 250,000 American soldiers are stationed on former West German territory, 60,000 of whom are likely to be withdrawn over the next four or five years. The number of soldiers of the 11th Armored will not be cut. A Tinge of Longing

The Soviet troops in what was East Germany total 350,000. Under a German-Soviet agreement signed last week, the Soviet forces will have left Germany by the end of 1994.

The 11th Armored and its 10,000 soldiers and dependents are not among the Americans being withdrawn from Germany. "The 11th A.C.R. will probably be the one to turn out the lights if the United States leaves Germany," Sergeant McCord said.

Though no one says so openly, the reduced mission grates on the career soldiers, especially when many of their comrades are tasting front-line service in Saudi Arabia.

"There's no sense having a bulldog if you don't let it bite once in a while," said Command Sgt. Maj. Richard Morgan at regiment headquarters at Fulda with a tinge of longing.

But if the American troops seem a bit disoriented by the sudden disappearance of the border that used to define their mission, at least they can claim that the broken fence and empty towers are "evidence of mission accomplished," as the commanding officer here said in the unit's newspaper. Stories of Officers' Wives

On the eastern side, the evidence is of a mission abandoned. The Soviet soldiers are still there, to be sure, but the fearsome guardians of the empire now peddle their service hats, insignia, even their weapons. Officers scour the flea markets to stock up on bargains before they are shipped back, and their wives demonstrate to remain abroad.

In Gotha, a city with a large garrison of the Soviet Eighth Guards Army 55 miles northeast of Fulda, Germans eagerly share the latest rumors about the "Mushkote," as the Russians are popularly called.

At the "Moscow" restaurant in what used to be "Friendship House" near the Soviet barracks, a group of German teachers tells of Soviet officers' wives at a nearby garrison who have been leaving their husbands and looking for Germans to marry. They tell of an acquaintance who bought a Kalashnikov assault rifle for $460 and a pair of pistols for $175 each.

The information cannot be verified, but what is obvious is that the old awe of the Soviets has changed to disdain and pity.

"They're starving," declared one of the teachers, Rupert Kober, to nods from his colleagues. "If you come here in the morning, you'll see that they've ripped up their roof timbers and have burned their furniture because they have no more fuel."

"The Russians are not especially loved or hated here, but everybody's happy they're leaving," said Achim Bosel. "Except one man -- there's a farmer here who's been getting gasoline from the Russians by the tankload for decades and selling it cheap. I haven't had to use a gas station for years. Nobody could touch him, because they assumed higher officers were involved."

Withdrawl Would Be Welcomed

The feelings are different over in Fulda. Here, the "Amis," as the Americans are known, are 10 percent of the population and account for a considerable chunk of the economy. Many live in homes rented from Germans, and about 500 local residents work for the United States Army. In all, the American military pumps about $8 billion annually into the German economy and creates jobs for about 170,000 Germans.

Still, a poll last April by the Allensbach Institute, a conservative polling organization, showed that the number of Western Germans who welcomed the American withdrawal was growing. As reported in the weekly newpaper Die Welt, 49 percent of those questioned welcomed the withdrawal. A year earlier, the figure was 38 percent. In 1982, it was 21 percent, and in 1962, 12 percent.

But then the presence of the "Amis" or the "Mushkoten" hardly means what it used to when the Germanys were the bristling focus of the East-West confrontation, when O. P. Alpha was a front-line enclave where American soldiers moved about in full combat gear and visitors came for a glimpse of the trenches. The gates have been padlocked for some eight months now, and mushrooms sprout at the cracked edges of the basketball court.

The birch cross outside the front where an East German died long ago trying to flee is still there. But there is also a new enclosure of posts and white canvas set up by an unidentified peace group. On it asign pledges to turn "this point of East-West confrontation" into an education center "for demilitarization, the preservation of the environment, social justice, a decrease of government and worldwide solidarity."

The heavy iron fence along the former border is now riddled with gaping holes. Beyond, massive concrete slabs still lie angled to prevent East Germans from crashing through the barrier in trucks or tractors. But hawthorn bushes have sprouted in the track that followed the border.

The old East German tower, 100 yards from O. P. Alpha, stands sprayed with graffiti. Tangles of wires hang from the walls, and the windows from the observation room at the top have been smashed. But the view of the broad scar that was the border zigzagging into the distance still inspires awe: how great was the effort, and how swift its undoing. Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.