GENERATION EXECRABLE

By R.Z. Sheppard

ADOLF HITLER AND HIS JACKbooted cohort had Horst Wessel and Wagner's Teutonic blood-music to get them in the mood. Former neo-Nazi hooligan Ingo Hasselbach and his Doc Martens--style head bangers had Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols.

History repeating itself as farce? We should be so lucky. If the 27-year-old Hasselbach's autobiography, Fuhrer-Ex (Random House; 384 pages; $24), demonstrates anything, it is that Germany's small but venomous neo-Nazi movement, along with supporters in Austria and the U.S., can tap the same depths of irrationality that possessed Central Europe 60 years ago. Past and present reminders of that madness now reach us with context-blurring frequency. Contemporary television images of skinheads tattooed with swastikas and the firebombed houses of Germany's Turkish immigrants regularly cross paths with rerun footage of Brownshirts rampaging in the 1930s. Have the unholy dead returned to inhabit new bodies? Hasselbach's zombie-like voice, preserved to creepy effect by American co-author Tom Reiss, can almost make you think so. "As he lay on the ground, Frank and I kicked him in the neck, in the stomach, in the face, in the skull...and I was thinking, as I kicked, Sure, his bones are breaking beneath my feet."

Notions about the banality of evil are severely tested by Hasselbach and his former comrades. A repulsively fascinating character named "Bendix" digs up World War II battlefields so that he can commune with the skeletons of fallen German soldiers. Clerks and metal workers by day turn into street brawlers and arsonists at night. For nonviolent recreation some play a kind of anti-Semitic Can You Top This: a gaunt Nazi nostalgist goes by the nickname "Auschwitz"; a rich Austrian patron of the movement paints a Star of David inside his toilet bowl; a distributor of Holocaust-denial material jocularly offers his customers a computer game called Concentration Camp Manager.

By contrast, Hasselbach manages to come across as clean-cut, if a bit excessive. One reason is that nature has constructed him media-ready. Six feet six inches tall, blond hair, blue eyes, He was promoted by colleagues as an "Aryan poster boy," though a hipper, less political audience might conclude that he resembles a hardbitten David Bowie. That star quality was recognized early, in the communist German Democratic Republic where Hasselbach was born. In 1987 and 1988 he was twice jailed by the G.D.R. for publicly insulting the government. Pumped up in prison with the Nazi ideology and war stories of a former Gestapo officer who was a fellow inmate, he returned to the streets to establish the "Movement of the 30th of January," so-called to commemorate the date in 1933 when Hitler took power.

Hasselbach expanded his activities in post-Wall Berlin, where he organized attacks on rival anarchist gangs and foreign residents. In the early 1990s--about the same time he began questioning his choice of careers--Hasselbach found what he calls a new "father figure." He was a French-based German filmmaker who, in the course of making a documentary titled Profession Neo-Nazi, inspired the now weary 25-year-old Hasselbach to renounce his past.

But as laid out in this record of sociopathology, Hasselbach's conversion seems less a moral rebirth than simply the end of an unpleasant, unpromising stage of life. Part of this can be blamed on the book's remorselessly deadpan style. Part is owing to the narrative's unnerving emotional detachment, "an awful condition I still fight against," he admits. Understandably Herr Hasselbach has much from which to detach himself.

--By R.Z. Sheppard