Leipzig Mayor to Free Protesters; More Talks Due

BONN —  The mayor of Leipzig, East Germany’s second-largest city, agreed Thursday to release all prisoners arrested after recent massive demonstrations who had not been involved in violence, Protestant church officials reported.

The officials said that Mayor Bernd Seidel met Protestant official Friedrich Magerius to search for a way to curb the largest public protests in recent years, some of which have ended with assaults on demonstrators by police.

Broader talks will be held today, the Protestant sources said. The discussions are expected to involve local Communist officials, church activists and members of mushrooming new citizens’ groups that are urging political and economic reforms.

Neither the government nor church sources suggested how many people had been arrested during the several days of demonstrations, which coincided with the visit of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev to East Berlin to mark the 40th anniversary of the founding of East Germany.

On Wednesday, East Germany’s ruling Politburo, under Communist leader Erich Honecker, indirectly expressed a willingness to open discussions with citizens on the need for a more liberalized society. At the same time, there were indications in Dresden that the city’s Communist mayor wished to talk to protest leaders there.

The 21-member Politburo, in its first declaration on the issue since thousands of East Germans began fleeing their country earlier this year, declared that such talks would be in order, as long as the socialist basis of the state was not questioned.

On Thursday, chief government ideologue Kurt Hager, interviewed by West German television during a visit to Moscow, conceded that the Communist Party had to examine why more than 45,000 East Germans--most of them young--have fled illegally to the West in the last three months. Almost double that number have emigrated legally this year.