A Dream Dies in Germany’s Racist Hotbed

Amid the endless gray apartment blocks of this eastern coal-mining town, German history has come full circle.

Here the architects of East German communism, who came to power claiming to have the antidote to the scourge of Nazi racial hatred, tried to build the perfect socialist community a generation ago.

They planned a city of more than 60,000 that quickly eclipsed the modest farming village that had dominated the area for 500 years. They moved in miners to work the rich, brown coal seams nearby, imported Communist writers and artists to extol the manual work, and, by the early 1980s, had even brought in hundreds of foreign workers from Mozambique and Vietnam--ostensibly as a sign of international cooperation, but in reality, as a source of cheap labor.

Instead of a socialist paradise, the Brave New World of Hoyerswerda became a monument to appalling urban planning. The forced isolation of foreign workers during the Communist era, coupled with the turmoil of unification, left Hoyerswerda ripe for exactly what its planners believed it could never be--a recipe for ethnic violence.

A series of especially ugly attacks on foreigners by German skinhead youths spouting Nazi slogans has made the city’s name synonymous with racial hatred. Amid the wave of racially motivated attacks on immigrants and asylum-seekers that has swept Germany in recent weeks, none has drawn greater attention or caused more consternation than events here.

“Hoyerswerda has been branded as a symbol of hatred against foreigners,” lamented the city’s mayor, Armin Ahrendt, during an interview in his office. “We’ve said we are ashamed of what’s happened, but the damage is there.”

Stunned by the number of attacks, leading German politicians turned this week’s celebration of the first anniversary of German unity into a platform to plea for greater tolerance.

“Respect and tolerance is something we owe our foreign citizens,” Chancellor Helmut Kohl told his people in a unity day speech.

Hoyerswerda’s shame, which began just over two weeks ago, was triggered by a small band of radical German youths who successfully attacked an apartment building in which hundreds of Mozambican and Vietnamese workers lived.

In the days that followed, the youths, reinforced by similar-minded young radicals from elsewhere in eastern Germany who had heard of the initial incident, attacked another residence housing 230 foreigners, mainly from Africa and eastern Europe seeking political asylum in Germany.

Today, all but a handful of 1,100 to 1,200 foreigners have either been evacuated elsewhere by anxious local authorities or have fled. Meanwhile, police struggle to keep members of Germany’s left- and right-wing political fringes, drawn by events to the town, from doing battle in the streets.

As with similar attacks elsewhere in both western and eastern Germany, the assault on the foreigners’ housing here was launched by an extremely small band of radical German skinheads; police reports speak of 12 initially.

They are part of a disaffected minority of eastern German youths, many of whom appear to have chosen the infamous Nazi swastika more as a symbol of their own alienation than as an expression of political ideology.

But what worries political leaders here more than the possible rise of a large neo-Nazi movement is that neither the demoralized, understaffed local police, nor local residents seemed interested in protecting the foreigners.

Instead, many residents simply stood by in apparent approval, occasionally chanting, “Foreigners out! Foreigners out!”

“Only a few actively support what’s happened,” commented Frank Treue, editor of the town’s newspaper, the Hoyerswerdaer Dienstags-Blatt. “Most just keep quiet, much as they did during the (Communist) period.”

Locals admit that there is latent support for xenophobia.

Martina Kunde, director of the Albert Schweitzer Upper School, which is only 50 yards from the smashed windows of the foreigners’ apartment house, said a student hit by a rock during one of the early disturbances was greeted the following day as a hero by classmates who believed that he had been among the attackers.

She said student opinion is sharply divided on the issue and that attempts to talk with those who favored the attacks have made little progress.

“We can’t reach them,” she said. “Their views are coming straight from their parents at home.”

In large part, the mood here and elsewhere in eastern Germany is a legacy of the Communist era, a time when foreigners were largely isolated and resented by locals because they lived rent-free and had access to hard currency, Western goods and clothes.

“They were privileged,” said Treue. “They would run around with things that (East) Germans couldn’t even get close to.”

That these foreigners were invariably single men, who were often loud and drunk in their free time, merely added to this resentment.

“They were happy to see (the foreigners) go,” added Treue.

While local officials here hope for government money to redevelop the town center with a large recreation center and other communal activities that will inject a degree of civic pride and a greater tolerance for those few foreigners who remain here, the problem for Germany is far greater.

“Because we (in Communist East Germany) were unable to travel, we didn’t know other cultures,” said Manfred Stolpe, minister president of the eastern state of Brandenburg. “We’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”

Although the wave of attacks on foreigners have found a more overt degree of public sympathy among eastern Germans, who have had little previous exposure to outsiders, they have also found an echo among western Germans, fearful that the sudden influx of immigrants and asylum-seekers poses a genuine threat to their prosperity.

An estimated quarter of a million emigres are expected to seek asylum in Germany this year, according to federal Interior Ministry figures.

The unexpected strength of the right-wing, extremist Deutsche Volks Union (German People’s Union) which polled enough in last Sunday’s Bremen state election to enter parliament there reflects the increasing resentment against this influx.

While Germany’s right-wing extremists still lack any credible political voice similar in stature to France’s Jean-Marie LePen and rarely win more than 5% of the votes in elections, Germany’s troubled history is viewed by many as cause enough for worry.

Kohl’s Christian Democrats have already proposed to close loopholes in Germany’s liberal constitutional guarantees on political asylum that have allowed in thousands of foreigners seeking a share of the country’s economic prosperity.

“If those who are truly politically persecuted are to have a future in Germany, then constitutional change is vital to end the abuse of the basic right to asylum,” declared a party statement issued last week.

Sensing the public worry, opposition Social Democrats, who had long fought such changes, now no longer exclude them.

“Changes have to come,” said a party spokesman in Bonn. “At this point, nothing should be ruled out.”

Tyler Marshall was on temporary assignment in Hoyerswerda recently.