E. German Leaders Meet Opposition Activists : Europe: And party boss Egon Krenz and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl review ways to forge closer ties during a 20-minute telephone conversation.

East German Communist officials met Thursday with opposition activists, including two founding members of the outlawed New Forum.

It was the first contact between the Communist Party and New Forum, and it seemed to reflect at least tacit acceptance of the organization by the Communist regime.

In another policy reversal, the new East German leader, Egon Krenz, talked for 20 minutes by telephone with West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. They discussed ways to forge closer links between the two Germanys.

During the recent refugee crisis, involving the flight of tens of thousands of East Germans to the West, Krenz’s predecessor, Erich Honecker, had refused to talk with Kohl. The chancellor had urged the East German regime to introduce political and economic reforms.

According to sources in Bonn, Kohl and Krenz agreed Thursday to develop a continuing dialogue. They were also said to have decided that Kohl should send a special emissary to East Berlin to talk with officials about the flight of about 120,000 East Germans to West Germany.

The party chief in East Berlin, Guenter Schabowski, met with Jens Reich and Sebastian Pflugbeil, two of the founders of New Forum, who now say they have 26,000 followers.

Reich told reporters afterward, “We will see, but I would say cautiously that I have a positive impression.”

In Dresden, meanwhile, party leader Hans Modrow met with a group of dissidents and other citizens. The city’s mayor, Wolfgang Berghofer, who attended the meeting, said later: “The time of conformist silence is over. We all carry the responsibility for ensuring that this change will not become a mere slogan or label behind which everything carries on in the old style.”

A Protestant church official reportedly said at the Dresden meeting that last May’s local election was widely regarded as fraudulent, and the official criticized the police for brutality in breaking up demonstrations in Dresden early this month.

After the two-hour meeting in East Berlin, Reich of New Forum said that Schabowski, who is a member of the Politburo, told them he does not have the authority to reinstate the organization, which was outlawed last week.

Reich, a molecular biologist, said Schabowski promised an investigation into New Forum’s complaints of police violence in breaking up demonstrations.

“He very vigorously conveyed the impression to us that this is a real intention of a turn, of change, and not merely a tactical move,” Reich said, adding that the talks were “open and constructive.”

He said that he and Pflugbeil, a physicist, “presented New Forum’s concepts and ideas,” which include free elections, unrestricted travel abroad, freedom of the press and an end to official privilege.

In another development in East Berlin, the official lawyers’ association called for changes in the criminal code, for a new law restricting police powers and for the removal of prisons from the control of the Interior Ministry.

In a statement published by the official news agency ADN, the lawyers admitted that they had only themselves to blame for not speaking out earlier against the injustices of the regime.

They said they support multiple-candidate elections and impartial vote-counting.

East Berlin’s Mayor Erhard Krack asked “citizens interested in dialogue” to air their views at a public meeting Sunday. The party newspaper Berliner Zeitung, reporting this, said the meeting’s theme will be “open doors, open words.”

Also in East Berlin, Jungwelt, the newspaper of the Communist youth organization, published an interview with an East German family of four waiting in Warsaw to flee to West Germany.

“Why are you leaving your home?” the interviewer asked.

“We were restricted in everything we did,” the mother was quoted as saying.

This kind of exchange has appeared many times in the Western press but never before in the East German news media.