The Fatherland Beckons to Ethnic Germans Throughout Eastern Europe : Immigration: Half a million have already returned to Germany. For the countries involved, it’s a disaster.

Hands folded, the little family matriarch lifted her head slightly and began to count.

There was her husband, her son, his wife and their three children. There was another son, a daughter and seven more grandchildren.

“We’re all going together,” concluded Lydia Stahlbaum, who works in the office of the local collective farm in this town in Kazakhstan. “I think we will be in Germany by spring.”

A second daughter is already there, and she and her husband sent back a glowing account of life in Germany. “The Red Cross met them at the airport and gave them what they needed,” Stahlbaum said. “Even in the airplane, the atmosphere was very different.”

The Stahlbaum family, and most others in this dusty Central Asian agricultural community 2,000 miles southeast of Moscow, are among the estimated 3 million ethnic Germans scattered throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union who now have the opportunity to return to their homeland.

Stemming their departure poses one of the great challenges to those trying to build a stable post-Cold War Europe.

For unlike other Eastern Europeans who dream and search for surreptitious ways through the many legal hurdles to the West, ethnic Germans face few such barriers. Their right to join relatives is guaranteed by the German constitution.

Since the mid-1970s, more than half a million have done just that, most of them in the two years since the collapse of the Iron Curtain.

In the Soviet Union, ethnic German community leaders say that between 600,000 and 1 million are in the process of applying to leave.

Horst Waffenschmidt, state secretary in the German Interior Ministry, estimated current immigrant arrivals from the Soviet Union at about 13,000 per month.

The movement is a disaster for Europe’s affluent West as well as its poorer East.

For Germany, their arrival adds to social strains in a country already overflowing with refugees. For Eastern Europe, their departure means the loss of their strong work ethic and generally higher level of technical skills, one more economic blow as the region struggles to emerge from the debris of communism.

The problem is centered in the Soviet Union, where roughly two-thirds of the ethnic Germans in the former Soviet Bloc live. The possible solutions center on the restoration of an autonomous German republic in southern Russia along the Volga River.

Following a series of high-level meetings, Bonn and Moscow are said to have agreed in principle on the restoration of the republic, and German Interior Ministry officials said last week that Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin is expected to formalize the accord during a visit to Bonn late this month.

“Both sides have agreed to go ahead,” said Interior Ministry spokesman Franz-Josef Hammerl.

Germany has already set aside $60 million to help finance the revived Volga Republic.

The Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of the Volga Germans, created during V. I. Lenin’s final days in early 1924, was dissolved by Josef Stalin in the wake of the 1941 Nazi invasion. Stalin deported most of the Germans to forced labor camps in Central Asia and Siberia.

Despite angry protests by the Volga’s mainly Russian population at reports of a restoration, Yeltsin favors the idea as a way to draw back Germans and revive agricultural production in a region that was once second only to the Ukraine as a Soviet breadbasket.

Such a republic would also be a magnet for German investors, who are already the Soviets’ most important source of Western capital.

“If Yeltsin does this, he’ll be smart,” said Irina Ostroukh, a specialist on the country’s German minority at the Soviet National Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Ethnology and Anthropology in Moscow.

The fact that the ethnic Germans have had other offers is just part of a broader change in the Soviet Union, where their image has been transformed from second-rate outcasts to a desired elite.

Looking at the potential benefits of efficient German farmers whose very presence could lure foreign investment, Mayor Anatoly A. Sobchak recently invited ethnic Germans to take land around St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad).

Others have talked about offering them land in Kaliningrad, an area that was once East Prussia. But Poland and Lithuania are said to have quietly resisted the idea, which would once again sandwich them between two German populations.

A national conference of ethnic Germans in Moscow in October considered other ideas but endorsed the Volga republic option.

Leaders of a prominent Moscow-based German minority interest group called Rebirth view a revived Volga republic as the only alternative to mass emigration.

“Without it, we will perish as a minority here,” predicted Yakov Maurer, a member of Rebirth’s governing board. “The German problem in this country would resolve itself” with emigration.

Maurer predicted that restoration of an autonomous German republic along the Volga would quickly draw an estimated 300,000 ethnic Germans to the region--nearly three-quarters of the earlier republic’s German population.

But interviews with scores of ethnic Germans and local government officials in six communities in the republic of Kazakhstan, where roughly half the German population resides, suggest that such estimates are wildly optimistic and that even restoration of the Volga republic would probably not be enough to halt large-scale emigration.

The reason, in part, is that insecurity drives the exodus.

As a minority that suffered greatly in both world wars and was denied access to its culture during much of the Cold War, the ethnic Germans are understandably suspicious about uprooting themselves again merely to move to another part of the Soviet Union.

“Now is the time of (Soviet President Mikhail S.) Gorbachev, and we feel ourselves free,” said Lydia Stahlbaum. “But what if a new Stalin comes and we are once again labeled fascists, what then?”

In the village of Krasykut, 15 miles to the south, Alexander Eckhard, a 62-year-old invalid, put it more bluntly: “I can’t understand why anyone wants to go to the Volga. We’ve already been thrown out of there once.”

A mistaken belief held by many rural Russians that the ethnic Germans are remnants of the invading forces from the two wars has helped fuel ethnic prejudice.

In fact, the first Germans came to Russia at the invitation of Catherine the Great--herself a German--in the 18th Century. She wanted to settle the country’s sparsely populated southern regions as a buffer against expansionism from Central Asia.

Later, Germans also settled in the Crimea, the Ukraine and the Caucasus.

But by far the most powerful force pulling Germans back to their ancestral homeland is a seemingly endless chain of family links. The departure of a single family member--usually a child who has married into an emigrating family--commonly pulls all direct relatives in its wake.

Ostroukh recalled visiting a Soviet-German family in western Germany whose move began four years ago with a single couple. By last summer there were 18 of them.

Strong family ties tend to offset any worries, especially among the elderly, of resettling in a “homeland” that, in reality, is anything but. The climate, culture and rhythm of daily life in Central Asian farm villages such as Neukronstadt are as alien to Germany as the confusing mixture of Russian and a barely comprehensible German dialect spoken here.

Still, the westward exodus continues, altering the shape of communities they leave and the ones to which they go. So far, official efforts to stem the tide have failed.

In the large industrial city of Karaganda, attempts to implement German-language instruction in schools have been undercut by the emigration of suitable teachers. In the village of Ushtobe, eight miles to the southeast, virtually all the German children were gone by the time authorities set up a German kindergarten.

“I’m realistic,” said Islam Togaibaev, chairman of the Karaganda regional government. “We’re not winning this process.”

Those who monitor developments nationally concur.

Ostroukh predicted that a Volga republic would draw perhaps as many as 80,000 ethnic Germans in five years, while others would remain in small, self-contained communities.

Here in Neukronstadt, Konrad Kaib, the director of the local school, running through a list of relatives--six brothers, a sister and an array of spouses and children--said: “We will all go.

“The question is no longer whether people leave. The only question is whether they go sooner or go later.”