Fires in The Night

For German right-wing radicals, the incendiary of choice is the Molotov cocktail. Instead of hitting their target and burning out, however, the ones hurled two weeks ago in Rostock have continued to spray sparks across Germany: at week's end, more than 150 attacks on asylum-seeking foreigners had been registered since the mayhem began. In Ketzin, 10 miles from Berlin, 44 Auslander barely escaped with their lives when the building they inhabited was razed by torch throwers. Official calls for special police powers to confront the skinheads and neo-Nazis did not seem to deter anyone. Although there was no breakdown in civic order, the attacks reached to the front door of the government: right-wingers threw fire bombs at a house of asylum seekers a mile from Chancellor Helmut Kohl's Bonn office.

While the shelters burned, however, the politicians continued to fiddle. In principle, a move to change Germany's liberal asylum laws is closer, since the opposition Social Democrats agree that a constitutional amendment is needed. In fact, most of Bonn's energy went into fighting over SPD charges that the government has deliberately dawdled on processing and deporting unworthy asylum seekers to keep the pressure on for the legal change.