FRANKFURT -- As German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder sought to defend his economic policies in Parliament new data revealed an unexpectedly sharp rise of unemployment in the biggest euro-zone economy last month.

With weaker-than-expected retail sales data showing that private consumption is still very depressed and the number of corporate bankruptcies looking set to rise ever higher, there appears little hope for a turnaround on the German labor market soon.

Jobless figures published by the Federal Labor Office in Nuremberg showed the number of people claiming dole in Germany rose back above the politically sensitive level of four million to 4.026 million in November, a rise of 96,100 from October in raw or unadjusted terms, AFP reported.

And the jobless rate, which measures the number of people out of work against the working population as a whole, rose to 9.7 percent in November from 9.4 percent in October.

Unemployment usually rises in the winter months, anyway, as companies lay off workers due to the bad weather.

But separate seasonally adjusted data published by the Bundesbank showed that underlying unemployment is also rising.

The German Central Bank calculated that a total 4.161 million people were without a job in seasonally adjusted terms in November, 35,000 more than in October, and the jobless rate edged up to 10.0 percent from 9.9 percent.

Economists suggested that the increase may be because the extra workers taken on temporarily to clear up the catastrophic flood damage in eastern Germany in the summer were now being laid off again.

That was backed up by a regional breakdown of the data, which showed that the seasonally adjusted jobless total in the former communist East shot up by 26,000 to 1.434 million in November, taking the jobless rate up to 18.3 percent, while unemployment in the economically more important west rose by a more modest 9,000 to 2.727 million, equivalent to a jobless rate of 8.1 percent.

The Head of the Federal Labor Office, Florian Gerster, complained that the economy was simply "too weak to revive the labor market".

And other data released Wednesday offered little hope of an improvement any time soon.

Creditreform, which specializes in collecting information on businesses, economic research and debt collection, estimated that a total 37,700 companies would go bust this year, 16.4 percent more than in 2001.

And the ensuing financial uncertainty is taking a heavy toll on consumer sentiment.

Data published by the Federal Statistics Office in Wiesbaden showed that German retail sales fell by 1.1 percent in real, or price-adjusted, terms in October, bringing sales for the first 10 months down by 2.3 percent.

Last week, the Bag Retail Industry Federation had said it expected 2002 to have been the worst year for business since the end of the war, even if Christmas sales prove to be good.

In the meantime, Chancellor Schroeder sought to defend his government's economic policies in an hour-long speech in a budget debate in the Lower House of Parliament, the Bundestag, on Wednesday.