Calendar 1991 has seen the largest spree of racial violence in Germany since the early Nazi era, mostly in the newly integrated and economically ravaged east. Federal police say that right-wing extremists now commit more crimes each month in eastern Germany than they once did in a whole year. But the response in Bonn, and throughout western Germany, has been little more than a collective shrug. Preoccupied with the crushing economic burdens of unification, German leaders seem unprepared to contend with repulsive reminders of the country’s dark past.
Eastern Germany’s neo-Nazis embrace causes dear to Hitler–a greater fatherland, racial purity, anti-Semitism–but they have seized a new scapegoat: foreigners, who are accused of stealing jobs that would otherwise go to east Germans. In Wittenberge, a town 78 miles northwest of Berlin, neo-Nazis threw two Namibian guest workers from a fourth-floor balcony, badly injuring them. In Dresden, an immigrant from Mozambique was killed when neo-Nazis hurled him from a streetcar. With so many attacks against foreigners on Berlin subways, the city’s transportation commissioner has urged blacks not to use certain lines of public transit. And Africans aren’t the only victims. When Polish tourists came to celebrate the recently opened border at Frankfurt an der Oder, they were pelted with stones. In the city of Zittau, neo-Nazis attacked a home for young victims of Chernobyl, children sent there by their parents to escape radioactive fallout. As usual, the xenophobia is irrational: foreigners constitute less than 1 percent of eastern Germany’s population.
So far, Bonn has been strangely silent. Earlier this month Liselotte Funcke, the federal commissioner for foreigners’ affairs, resigned to protest the government’s apathy and warned, “Germany’s social peace is in danger.” Police have made some arrests among the estimated 1,500 to 2,000 hard-core neo-Nazis but are often accused of looking the other way-even sympathizing with heavily armed youth gangs. Earlier this year police in the city of Eberswalde simply stood aside as armed thugs attacked four Africans with baseball bats and chains, killing one African.
Although they condemn the violence, sociologists are quick to offer rationalizations. They mention that unemployment has reached 50 percent in some eastern cities and that a society held in check by 12 years of Nazism and 40 years of communism is naturally intolerant and vulnerable to extremism. “The collapse of the old authority structures means there’s a tremendous vacuum for young people,” says Heinrich Sosalla, Magdeburg’s director of social services. “In the past year they’ve seen their parents lose their jobs, their teachers being replaced, their political leaders put on trial. They are desperate for some sort of new authority.”
For some, that translates into nostalgia for Nazism-especially among disaffected young men between the ages of 15 and 25. “They purified Germany of everything that was un-German,” rhapsodizes Peter, a 17-year-old construction apprentice from Dresden and a self-described “fascho.” Dressed in black jeans, jackboots and a bomber jacket adorned with a Waffen SS pin, Peter is a Hitler Youth for the ’90s, down to his dark blond hair clipped short on the sides and the single long forelock. “Gassing all those people was bad,” he offers. “But at least under Hitler everyone had work and Germany was clean. It wasn’t all so bad.”
Last month a passive crowd of Dresdeners gathered to watch Peter and 1,200 other neo-Nazis march through the city’s downtown streets. Banging drums and shouting “Sieg Heil, " they commemorated the death of one of their leaders. “I can’t believe these are all bad kids,” said Gerhard Walther, who observed the demonstration. “But we have to convince the youth that democracy, despite all its difficulties, is better than what we had before.”
Dissent- even the most objectionable kind-is an inevitable product of democracy. But so is tolerance. “The east has given us a glimpse of the Germans we used to be 50 years ago. The authoritarian state taught people only to command and obey,” says Barbara John, a Berlin city commissioner. “Compromise and accommodation are unfortunately not yet part of the political culture.” The question now is whether the rest of Germany will confront the mounting violence and its ugly implications or revive an old habit of looking the other way.
