Foreigners, Go Home!

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 hospitable to 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.