TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/112392/1123020.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 9.5 KB | 191 lines

                                                                                GERMANY, Page 48

Foreigners, Go Home!


Racist youths have taken their violent hatred into the streets.
Stopping the rise of neo-Nazi fervor will require that Germany
grapple with the economic and social breakdown in the east.

By DANIEL BENJAMIN/BERLIN


    Dates of high significance fill Germany's autumn calendar,
none more freighted than Nov. 9. The day marked the third
anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 54th
commemoration of Kristallnacht, the Night of the Broken Glass,
when Nazi street gangs left the nation's synagogues and Jewish
businesses in flames and nearly 100 dead. The remembrances of
these moments of national euphoria and historic shame mix
uneasily -- never more so than this year, when the echoes of
that distant event drowned out those from the recent past.

    Germany's conflicts were on display at a demonstration
held the Sunday before the Kristallnacht anniversary, when
President Richard von Weizsacker tried to deliver an eloquent
appeal against hatred from behind a phalanx of police shields,
while leftist anarchists chanted "Hypocrites, hypocrites," and
pelted him with eggs. That denouement nearly obscured the
meaning of a day when 300,000 people had peacefully marched
through Berlin to show opposition to the wave of racism and
right-wing violence that has brought back ugly memories of an
earlier Germany. Ever since last August, when a mob in Rostock
besieged and burned a house for asylum seekers to the applause
of 2,000 bystanders, Germans have watched in growing dismay as
a xenophobic fever spread across the land. Right-wing
extremists, neo-Nazis and ordinary youths have committed 1,760
attacks, mainly against foreigners, this year. They have
desecrated Jewish cemeteries and memorials and set fires at two
former concentration camps.

    The scene in Berlin only reinforced the unsettling
impression that disorder is taking over the streets of Germany
and the country is unable to stop it. Although racism is not
just a German problem and comparisons with Hitler's
state-sponsored pogroms of the 1930s are greatly exaggerated,
the world cannot help asking why such behavior is happening
again.

    Since the attacks are occurring with far greater intensity
in the east, it has dawned on a hitherto complacent nation that
the formerly communist region is an economic and social
disaster zone that confronts all Germans with problems graver
than anyone imagined. The discontented have found an easy
scapegoat in the 1.4 million refugees from as far away as
Afghanistan and as near as Yugoslavia, most of whom have flooded
into the country during the past three years. Shut out of much
of the rest of the Continent, they gravitate to Germany because
its constitution guarantees asylum to all victims of political
persecution. Although less than 5% eventually win the right to
remain permanently, a laborious processing and appeals system
all but assures applicants a stay of a year or more.

    They live for the most part in squalid hostels and receive
no more than $340 a month in state assistance. But that has not
prevented the foreigners from being blamed by many easterners
for the problems of their much troubled region or from becoming
the focus of right-wing demonology. Many easterners are certain
that the newcomers are treated better than native Germans. "We
have enough unemployed. We don't need any foreigners here," says
Frank Tamaz, 30, of Rostock. "They take our jobs, and they take
our houses."

    As the antiforeign assaults mounted, Bonn remained
paralyzed by a debate over whether constitutional changes were
the solution. Chancellor Helmut Kohl's Christian Democratic
Union insisted that an amendment to curtail the right of asylum
was the only way to stop racial violence. After much internal
strife, the opposition Social Democrats seem ready to agree. But
a belated victory for Kohl will not erase suspicions that his
government has been more concerned with political gain and
bolstering its own appeal to a right-leaning electorate than
with law-and-order measures to end the strife in the streets.

    Why anyone would hurl a rock or a Molotov cocktail at
another simply because of differences of color or speech or
custom remains one of life's most dispiriting mysteries. But the
urge to violence can be located in a sociology of causes that
eastern Germany has in abundance. The main one is economic
collapse. When unemployment, forced early retirement and
make-work training schemes are taken together, roughly 40% of
the east's labor force is out of work; nearly 3 million jobs
have disappeared since unification. Although Bonn is pumping
more than $100 billion a year into the east, economic output has
shrunk to a third of its preunification level, and the
long-predicted rebound is not in sight.

    The classic symptoms that accompany unemployment --
depression and a sense of powerlessness -- beset much of the
eastern region. Deep down, a lot of the anger is really at
western Germans for shutting down factories and farms, but
easterners are reluctant to say so. Instead, says Michael
Wieczorek, a Berlin social worker, the foreigners become
surrogate targets.

    The root of the trouble, says Bernd Wagner, a former
eastern police official and an expert on right-wing radicalism,
is the severe dislocation of eastern society: in addition to
unemployment, housing is in short supply, rents have tripled,
crime rates have skyrocketed. "To say that solving the asylum
problem will solve the far-right problem is complete nonsense,"
says Wagner.

    It is among the east's disoriented youth that the trauma
goes deepest. Virtually every family counts at least one member
out of work, and the expectation of ever finding a decent job
is slim. The institutions for transmitting values have been
upended. The relationship between adults and adolescents has
been shaken by the rapid shift from communism to capitalism.
Explains Britta Kolberg, a social worker in east Berlin schools:
"Kids see parents who were convinced socialists and are now 100%
supporters of the new society. They have turned around so
completely that there is a general mistrust of grownups."

    The structure of everyday life has been destroyed. Schools
have been reconfigured to match an alien western system;
communist youth organizations have been disbanded; many of the
clubs that were a standard feature of young people's lives have
been closed. Says a social worker: "Kids hang out in the street
all day, and eventually they have to find something to do --
bashing foreigners is the sport they choose."

    Under the communists, east Germans lived a highly
regimented existence. Into the postunification vacuum has
stepped the far right, which offers its own ideas of order. To
many, the restoration of order means in part a Germany without
foreigners, and that appeals to a significant minority. Enrico,
a 15-year-old Berliner, describes himself as right-wing and
disgusted with Bonn's "miserable policies." He says he finds the
Third Reich an attractive model: "O.K., everything wasn't
exactly right then, but there was order in Germany. Then there
were just Germans in Germany. I don't like the way Germany looks
now."

    Disaffection has helped spread extremist organizations
throughout the country. Membership of radical groups has grown
to 40,000 nationwide, up 25% since 1990, and three-quarters of
those are considered ready to commit violent acts. No sign has
been more frightening, though, than the crowds that have cheered
on the rioting hooligans. Says sociologist Wolf Lepenies: "I'm
not at all surprised that 100 or 200 would attack an asylum
house. I'm more worried about the passive mob."

    Ernst Uhrlau, chief of the Hamburg bureau of the Office to
Protect the Constitution, fears that the rightward turn is more
serious than many suspect. He predicts "more nationalism, less
tolerance and a greater sense of radicalization." Hate crimes
throughout Germany increased more than fivefold in 1991, to
1,483, compared with 1990, and this year's tally will run even
higher. Uhrlau is worried that a wave of ultra-right terror
could lie in the future -- a campaign as powerful as the
left-wing violence of the late 1960s and '70s.

    Police have begun cracking down on the organized far
right. But focusing on the hard core will be of limited value
if nothing is done to make the environment less hosto its
subversive message. The state has to re-establish its authority
by deploying the full force of the law against those who commit
or condone violent acts. That will require training and
motivating the demoralized and ill-equipped eastern police
forces, and taking action against officials who seem to
sympathize with thugs. Speedier justice and stiffer sentences
are also needed. It took until September of this year to
conclude a trial for a hate crime -- the killing of an Angolan
man -- that took place in November 1990. None of the defendants
were sentenced to more than four years' imprisonment.

    Above all, the federal government needs to find more
effective economic strategies to ease the hopelessness that
afflicts the young in the east. And Bonn will have to stop
treating the violence as a public relations problem. In seeing
xenophobia and racism for the evils they are, the Kohl
government can begin to follow the lead of the hundreds of
thousands who gathered peacefully in the streets of Berlin.