PERSPECTIVE ON GERMANY : A Legacy of Hate Revives in the East : Young neo-Nazis spout Third Reich slogans and attack foreigners. Fascism is becoming fashionable again.

They love swastikas and hate foreigners. Clad in black leather jackets and combat boots, carrying clubs, knives and gas pistols, they roam the streets of Dresden and Leipzig shouting “Sieg Heil” and “Germany to the Germans.” They’re young. They’re ugly. They’re frightening. They’re neo-Nazis, and they seem to multiply by the week. In the last few months, neo-Nazis, sometimes joined by skinheads and hooligans, have attacked Turks and Romanians, Vietnamese and Gypsies in eastern German cities, hurt several Polish tourists severely by throwing bricks at them, and booted a black man out of a streetcar. The man, a “guest worker” from Mozambique, died from his injuries.

Delighted by their own violence and satisfied by their success in antagonizing the public and getting media attention, these coarse and vulgar Stormtrooper miniatures celebrated Hitler’s birthday last month with mass parades. Rattling on about the German “master race” and the “Auschwitz lie,” they long for the return of the “paradise” of the Third Reich.

Fascism is fashionable again, and National Socialism, with its easy brand of mindless brutality, is the perfect expression of the moment by disillusioned fanatics in former East Germany. Again, we hear many young men bragging that they are “proud to be a German” and “willing to kill and to die for Germany.” Sound familiar?

It’s not 1933 but 1991. Germany is unified again, all 78 million citizens of it, and it isn’t prosperity and happiness over the much wanted and celebrated event of the decade that dominates the mood of the moment, but gloom, anger and desperation. It doesn’t look as if the ugly duckling East Germany will soon turn into a beautiful swan.

Unemployment in the east is approaching 1.5 million. The people who didn’t flee or move to western Germany are dirt poor and they feel deprived and betrayed by the sweeping promises that Chancellor Helmut Kohl made so enthusiastically and generously only half a year ago. The heartfelt embraces and champagne for the former “brothers and sisters in the zone” gave way to a hard-nosed and selfish no-nonsense attitude by the western Germans. “We worked hard for what we’ve got; now you do the same” is a common feeling among the wealthy Wessis, who now see their eastern cousins as a bunch of greedy, lazy bums who care for nothing but money to buy loud clothes, fast cars and any luxury item they can get their hands on.

Into this dismal situation a new breed of neo-Nazis brings unwelcome attention to a past that proves time and again its power to sneak up on the national conscience like a slasher in hiding--and to lash out. Nazi ghosts and Holocaust nightmares have long gone underground in the minds of the Germans, but they can’t be shaken off completely. Germany’s good name--its proud postwar achievement of hard work and good behavior with relatively few setbacks--seems tainted, raising eyebrows and fears about the rise of a Fourth Reich.

Neo-Nazis make sure they’re visible; they thrive on their visibility and the strong reaction to it. The fear and disgust they extract from angry citizens is for them a sheer delight. The police act helpless; people turn away, try to avoid the hordes of young men with killer looks in their eyes. But the Nazi boys are there, and it hurts to see young Germans caught in an imitation of their grandparents’ deadly sins, a legacy I personally haven’t totally recovered from (and I was born after the war).

There is an especially dangerous situation in Germany right now that has helped to escalate the sudden outburst of hatred toward foreigners. The former German Democratic Republic had many foreign “guest workers,” mainly from Eastern Europe, Vietnam and Mozambique, in its large industrial towns. East Germany wasn’t exactly an integrated, multicultural melting pot, but the foreigners were tolerated. Now that unemployment has skyrocketed, they have become exotic invaders who could be “stealing” a German’s job. The sight of dark skin, unruly black curls or slanted eyes and the sound of incomprehensible languages naturally turned many a German, already predisposed to xenophobia, into an uninhibited racist.

For the confused, uprooted eastern German youth who have grown so mistrustful of systems and statesmen, promises and praise, the new situation is even harder to grapple with. Their childhood organized by communism’s iron fist, (not unlike the Hitler Youth), they had no chance for individual development and achievement--or for rebellion or fun. They have only one thing in common with their western German peers: They, too, haven’t been told enough about the shameful past. The Nazis and the Holocaust--also sorrow and pity, guilt and repentence, not to mention complicity--had been successfully tucked away under the deafening, pounding propaganda of the supposedly Nazi-free (a miracle), socialist, anti-fascist “workers’ and peasants’ state” of the D.D.R.

Today’s neo-Nazis are mostly a bunch of rough, undereducated, brutal working-class machos (there are virtually no female neo-Nazis) who are looking for a scapegoat for their miserable lives. (Of course, there are also white-collar Nazis who stay in the background and donate generously to the cause.) The wish is to simply dismiss them as a bunch of misfits on the loose, but they are not to be taken lightly. They meet in groups, in secret, and take their movement very seriously. They have arsenals of illegal weapons, which they plan to use on day “X.” In their “group evenings” with their “comrades,” they sit in rooms decorated with Hitler posters, drink themselves into a stupor with beer from swastika-adorned glasses and entertain themselves with ugly tirades against “Jewry” and inferiority-driven banter about the “purity” of the Volk and Germany’s future.

The appeal of Nazism is obvious. It’s famous, it’s graphic, it’s dangerous. And its emulation is not unique. Everywhere, people who want to hate look for the language of horror and fear, borrow the symbols and adopt the manner of the most abominable cults and loathsome acts known to mankind--and also the most unmistakable ones. National Socialism, with its strong, sinister and symbolic-laden ideology seems a natural choice; Nazi fetishes, slogans and symbols long ago stopped being a purely German fascination; this is is aptly demonstrated by the many neo-Nazi and other supremacist and hate groups in America and elsewhere.

In Germany, Nazi ideology on a small scale survived two postwar generations, showing itself over the years in many disguises--or no disguise at all--from the cautious, inconspicuous “leftover” Nazis of the early 1950s, to the blatant bashers of students and liberals of the 1960s, to the small right-extremist parties of the 1980s (which don’t gain much more than 2% of the vote these days).

The often-expressed surprise about the irrepressible existence of Nazi ideology is surprising in itself. Why should Germany be better than the rest? In every country there will always be remnants and traces of extraordinary eras, ideologies, beliefs and philosophies long after they seem to have disappeared, if they once were strong and welcome enough to be supported by a majority of the people and also reflected aspects of a national character.

Many an era looks better in the forgiving light of nostalgia. The terror regime of the Nazis isn’t one of them. That young Germans manage to find some inspiration and hope in a dictatorship that produced nothing but genocide and devastation can’t be their fault alone. Something in the way they’ve learned (or, rather, not learned) about human suffering, compassion and apathy must have gone dead wrong. The last two generations must have passed on to their offspring some euphoria and secret master-race glory from the time of mass slaughter. The answer to 57 years of continuous dictatorship in East Germany and to the all-German sins of omission and repression is here: neo-Nazis, shameless and shocking, as if there never were cattle cars and SS men, no mountains of emaciated dead bodies, no smoke from Auschwitz’s crematories, no legacy to be ashamed of and no reason to be careful.

The lessons are ready to be learned again: History haunts even the generations who think they have nothing to do with it. The other lesson is: Silence kills.

Let’s not raise our young with the lie that they are unburdened by the legacies of generations past. That wasn’t true for my generation, or my parents’--not for any generation that has had its wars, its genocides, its victories. Not then and not today.