COLUMN ONE : Loads of Fun for Neo-Nazis : The German government is financing social clubs, discos and adventure trips for young right-wing extremists. Can this social experiment really curb their violence?

In the back yard of this city’s newest youth club, 21-year-old Rene is thumbing through a crude neo-Nazi newsletter with unabashed enthusiasm. He glances up long enough to smirk and hurl racial insults toward the cluster of apartment buildings visible through the fence, just inside Poland.

The invective is hardly surprising, coming as it does from a skinhead. The difference here, though, is that Rene has recently been put on the government payroll as a part-time youth counselor at the club.

And the club, also federally funded, is designed expressly for the enjoyment and entertainment of young, right-wing extremists like Rene, offering them not only a disco, gymnasium, hostel and billiards hall but also their own private office upstairs, where they are invited to tack up their racist posters and hang their fascist banners.

The project in Goerlitz, in the state of Saxony, is part of a bold social experiment quietly being played out across eastern Germany in what legislators, police and social workers describe as a last-ditch effort to curb violence by young extremists.

“We’re trying not to shut out these kids,” said Barbara Graf, of the Frankfurt-based International Assn. of Social Workers and Youth Workers. “There’s a tendency to just say they’re lost causes. But we can’t just shove them aside.”

Faced with a record number of attacks against foreigners last year by youth gangs at both ends of the political spectrum, the Bonn government has pledged $37.5 million through 1994 for projects aimed at stanching the bloodshed in the formerly Communist eastern region, where the potential for violence is seen as particularly high.

Rising unemployment, the virtual disappearance of state-subsidized recreation centers, uncertainty about the future and the sudden switch from life in a totally closed society to one with dizzying new freedom are all cited as reasons for the vulnerability of young easterners.

“They must reckon with a new value system,” said Angela Merkel, head of the Women and Youth Ministry in Bonn. “They must fully reorient their lives.”

To that end, Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s center-right government now finds itself financing dozens of social clubs, cafes and discos for aggressive skinheads, neo-Nazis, punks and anarchists. The youths will also be offered subsidized vacations to enhance cultural awareness. Public funds will pay for sailing trips, desert treks and bicycle tours around Europe.

Jurgen Fuchs, the Merkel aide overseeing the program, defends it as a sort of equal opportunity for neo-Nazis.

“Yes, yes, that’s it exactly,” he said, explaining that most of the ministry’s budget for youth programs goes to activities for “normal” youngsters, who ostracize the radicals.

And while many experts praise the unique effort, most seem to doubt it can accomplish much in the long run, unless the social problems feeding the racism--joblessness, housing shortages, unchecked immigration--are addressed.

“I fear this is a drop of water on a hot stone,” said Herbert Leuninger, head of Pro-Asyl, an advocacy group for foreign workers and asylum seekers. Leuninger warns that the violence could increase “100-fold” unless the country’s social ills are rectified.

The Federal Crimes Office has logged more than 1,000 attacks nationwide against foreigners this year alone, resulting in at least 130 injuries and one death. Last year, 2,427 incidents were reported.

Although the actual number of attacks is much higher in the western part of the country, “proportionally it’s higher in the east,” said Thomas Rindsfueszer, a Federal Crimes Office spokesman.

“When we bring them in and ask them, ‘Why did you do that?’ most of them say they don’t know,” he said. “Alcohol plays a big role. They usually show no remorse until they’re standing before the judge.”

There is no proof yet that the fledgling projects succeed in preventing violence, although the social workers overseeing them insist that “our kids” are no longer involved in the brutal beatings, arson attacks and wanton destruction by extremist gangs.

In Goerlitz, where about 150 extremists have arrest records, the police will keep a key to the new club where 15 skinheads already are being paid to help with renovations. Like most of the extremist clubs in the works, the Goerlitz building is a dilapidated house donated by the city; club members will be able to earn money renovating it only after they have already worked a certain number of hours for free.

“It’s clearly gotten quieter on the streets, but I can’t say that the club is the sole reason,” said Police Chief Reinhard Herwig, who recalls the mobs of extremists who hurled stones and bricks through the windshields of Polish cars crossing the border last year.

“You can’t rule out the possibility that having their own club will make them more political,” Herwig said, “but I think this is the right way. We’re concerned with peace and order, and we have to use all democratic means at our disposal to stop the violence.”

He too blames the whiplash transition from communism to democracy for the youths’ alienation.

“Everyone is confused,” Herwig said. “They can’t sort it out because they have so little experience in seeing the truth.”

But his sympathy has its limits.

“These kids have no right to go running around giving the Hitler salute in the streets, because they have no idea what Hitler’s fascism wrought on the world,” he said. “Our schools taught them all about the cruelty of fascism but little of its roots and causes. Germany didn’t invent fascism, but it surely perfected it.”

City elders are also leery that attempts to reach out to their troubled youth might backfire.

“If we find out that the club has become a Nazi nest, they’re out overnight,” vowed Dr. Joachim Richter, a physician who chairs the City Council’s youth assistance committee. Nevertheless, he is enthusiastic about the project and is convinced it can turn extremism into a passing adolescent phase instead of a hard-boiled political ideology.

“Maybe it is terribly idealist,” he admitted. “We have to tread slowly and carefully.”

Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal also feels that the skinheads and neo-Nazis should not be ignored, although they “are not representative of German youth or Austrian youth.”

“The best way to reduce the violence is jobs for young people,” he said in a telephone interview. “They don’t have political experience, and they will always run after someone who gives an answer for joblessness. If you leave young people alone, you only help the extremists.”

At the Goerlitz club, Mario, 15, sports a Hitler-esque haircut and spouts anti-Semitic propaganda as he chops wood for the elderly women next door. He would never dream of asking these two living witnesses what really happened during the war, or even his own grandparents.

“It would be too painful for them,” he asserts.

He would rather believe the underground neo-Nazi literature he reads.

“I support the Fatherland,” Mario declared. “What we want is our own territory of Silesia back, no jobs for foreigners and to fight against the Auschwitz lies.”

Petra Habel, a former vocational teacher hired to supervise the club and offer counseling to its members, makes no outward attempt to change Mario’s opinion.

Because the eastern region lacks qualified social workers, western experts have been assigned to oversee the various projects.

“They think of social work in a very traditional manner,” said Reinhard Koch, a University of Hannover social scientist supervising 13 projects in the state of Saxony-Anhalt. “They sometimes propose song groups or cooking lessons. I tell them they’re working with a very special group of kids and the activities have to have some relevance to their needs. They don’t need to learn Italian cooking.”

But accepting and relating to skinheads is proving difficult for the experienced westerners, since social workers traditionally are liberal or left-leaning and have little interest in or patience with right-wing radicals.

“At first they tried to provoke me with ‘Heil, Hitler!’ and so forth,” said Michael Wieczorek, a decidedly left-leaning social worker overseeing 30 eastern skinheads in an eastern Berlin housing project. “I didn’t react because I didn’t want to show them that they could get me all worked up. I see thousands of kids on the streets in the east, and they’re searching for channels for their aggression and scapegoats for their violence.

“They saw themselves from the very start as unification’s losers.”

In Goerlitz, the club members, ranging in age from 14 to mid-20s, already have planted a vegetable garden and begun decorating their office with anti-foreigner posters. Once it officially opens in September, the club will elect officers.

“It’s just a meeting place for kids,” said Habel. “This is a place where they can come clean their boots if they want.”

Rene views the club as a necessary retreat for skinheads. “Private clubs and discos throw us out,” he said. “Here we can play pool and listen to our own music.”

Neighbors complain that the club will destroy property values in the historic town where it is located; there have already been reports of drunken youths braying Nazi songs.

“You can hear every word,” said neighbor Helga Schoene. “They urinate in the garden. I’m not against the club--just not here.”

She and another neighbor, Helga Anders, complained bitterly about the telephone company workers busily laying a line into the club. “We applied for a phone eight years ago and still don’t have it, but the skinheads get one right away,” Schoene said.

In eastern Berlin, neighbors sent anonymous letters to newspapers complaining that the youths at Wieczorek’s government-funded skinhead club had thrown a raucous party celebrating Hitler’s birthday on April 20.

Wieczorek denied there was any such party and blames the negative reviews on old Communists living in the housing development where the skinheads run their club, Wurzel.

The skinheads under Wieczorek’s charge have been planting trees and flowers in the complex as part of a beautification program and have been pressed into service as school-crossing guards.

Wieczorek plans to spend part of the government grant to take some of the skinheads to Morocco this autumn for a three-week trek through the Sahara.

“It’s not tourism,” Wieczorek said. “It’s an adventure, not a vacation. Maybe through concrete contacts, they’ll change some of their prejudices. Lecturing them does no good. You have to show them.”

He plans to send two co-workers ahead to lay elaborate plans for a consciousness-raising “episode” in the desert. “Maybe, for example, we’ll stage an accident and put them through the experience of being in an emergency situation in a foreign country, where they will have to go to the nearest village and rely on strangers for help.

“We’ll document this with a hidden camera,” Wieczorek added.

He also is hoping to arrange for the skinheads to attend a Moroccan wedding so they can see beauty in a strange culture. Next year, Wieczorek hopes to arrange a field trip to Los Angeles, where the skinheads could “meet with different ethnic groups.”

Those involved in the projects readily admit that they are walking a fine line between neutralizing the extremist groups and inadvertently encouraging them.

“I’m not sure this strategy will work, but I’m hoping it will,” said Koch, whose projects include cafes, video workshops and photo labs. “This is an important first step.

“If we don’t care about these sorts of young people, I think they’ll stay in their groups, on the streets and the risk is much higher that some leader will come along and organize them,” he said. “I’m sure there will be a lot of criticism of these projects from abroad, because this is Germany and because people abroad, perhaps especially Americans, have a very particular image of the German right-wingers, mainly through TV.

“So people are going to say these are the new Huns; they’re coming again,” he added. “These people aren’t Huns and they’re not the new Nazis. They’re just using these provocative symbols to express protest against a society they consider very cold. They feel they are on the dark side of Germany.”

Wilhelm Heitmeyer, a University of Bielefeld professor who has written extensively about the right-wing subculture, feels that “it’s right to use all means to counter violence, but they’re underestimating the quality of violence there.”

The amount of money being invested in the eastern projects and the three-year time frame “are a joke,” he said.

Heitmeyer too wonders where the borders lie between helping extremists and encouraging them. “It’s a balancing act,” he acknowledged, “but there’s no alternative.”