KOHL BECOMES GERMANY'S LONGEST-LASTING CHANCELLOR : FOOD-LOVING, HIGH-TAXING BURGHER TAKES PLACE AMONG TITANS.

Byline: Alan Cowell The New York Times

Helmut Kohl, who presided triumphantly over Germany's reunification in 1990, has become his country's longest serving chancellor since Bismarck, who first fused the land 125 years ago.

Thursday, Kohl set the record as postwar Germany's most durable leader, surpassing Konrad Adenauer's 14 years from 1949 to 1963, when Germany was rebuilt from the ruins of war into a European powerhouse. But even in his moment of triumph, he was beginning to pay a price for longevity in office.

A central gamble of Kohl's 14 years in office - his decision to cushion the pain of reunification with unparalleled financial largess - has produced mixed results from the staggering $600 billion in subsidies, incentives and aid poured into the former East Germany in the past six years.

The spending proved politically expedient for Kohl's electoral fortunes, but many economic analysts now say it was half-baked, tying Bonn to years of taxes and budget commitments that conflict increasingly with Kohl's vision of European unity forged in fiscal restraint.

Kohl himself disarmingly acknowledged at his Christian Democratic Party's recent congress in Hanover that adding up the sums is not pleasant. And in an earlier speech marking the sixth anniversary of reunification, he finally admitted that fusing the two Germanys would take much longer than the five years in which he had once expected to turn eastern Germany into a place of ``blossoming landscapes.''

``The picture that Mr. Kohl painted in 1990 was too colorful and was not based on facts and figures,'' said Christian Jacke, Leipzig's economics director. ``The five years have gone, and people are asking: Where are these beautiful landscapes?''

The 66-year-old Kohl's record-setting anniversary has inspired much musing about how a provincial politician fond of eating solid food and postponing decisions took his place among Germany's titans.

Kohl has not publicly discussed his political longevity in great detail, and he declined to be interviewed for this article. Those who chart his success, including even his adversaries in eastern Germany, point to his political prowess, a weak opposition and Germans' general satisfaction with the stability that has followed the fall of communism.

``There's a conservative way of thinking,'' said Lothar Tippach, the leader in Leipzig of the Democratic Socialist Party, the successor to the East German Communists. ``So the people say: We want stability, peace, no huge changes. We've had enough huge changes here already.''

But when they contemplate the fruits of reunification, many Germans still find it hard to look beyond a curtain of increasing bitterness. Easterners tend to see westerners as exploiters, and westerners regard the east as an unworthy sinkhole for their tax money.

Up to 35 percent of eastern Germans in towns like Dessau, 40 miles north of Leipzig, are without real work. Eastern German productivity is only half of the western level. Most worrying of all, a culture has taken root that puts subsidies from Bonn at the center of political and economic life.

``Without subsidies and incentives, there'd be no investment at all,'' said Hans-George Otto, the mayor of Dessau.

In 1990, Kohl acted with uncharacteristic boldness to reunify his country, welding the two uneven sides of Germany with his decision to swap worthless East German marks for rock-solid Deutsch marks at a rate of one to one.

Overnight, eastern Germans living for three generations under dictatorship - Hitler's, then the Communists' - were propelled into a competitive western society that few could absorb.

Politically, the decision was probably inevitable and adroit. Such was the eastern German clamor for the coveted currency that Kohl saw no other options. But economists shuddered at the implications of long-term commitment to an eastern economy distorted by huge injections of money that it could not earn.

For all the advances that have been made in roads, telephones, wages and prosperity in eastern Germany, a visitor's primary impression is of landscapes blossoming with idle construction cranes, emblems of a building industry that has peaked, and contradictions.

Wage levels in the east have risen to 75 percent of those in the west. Eastern Germans are slowly beginning to produce and buy their own goods instead of importing virtually everything from the west.

CAPTION(S):

Photo

Photo: KOHL