Across Germany, a United Front Against Extremists

Tens of thousands of Germans on Saturday protested the growing violence against foreigners on the eve of a huge anti-racist rally in Berlin.

At least 40,000 people took to the streets in Stuttgart to protest the government’s plans to curb the right to political asylum enshrined in the German constitution.

Conservative politicians blame the asylum provision for attracting a record influx of immigrants and sparking off social tension.

Speakers at the rallies said the government plans were intended to divert attention from its failure to deal with the problems of unification and the growth of far-right violence.

“We won’t accept these scapegoat politics,” Juergen Peters, a spokesman for the IG Metall union, told a rally in Hannover in western Germany. “The government wants to blame its inadequacy on foreigners and asylum-seekers.”

At least 15,000 people rallied in Hannover and 1,000 in Darmstadt near Frankfurt--all under banners protesting rightist violence. Protests also took place at Brandenburg, near Berlin, as well as Dachau, Kassel, Mannheim and Betzdorf.

The wave of violence has claimed 11 lives this year in hundreds of attacks on asylum-seekers and shelters.

Today’s rally is intended to demonstrate Germany’s united stand against the far right and to counter perceptions that many Germans are neo-Nazi sympathizers.

Organizers said about 100,000 people, including Chancellor Helmut Kohl and President Richard von Weizsaecker, were expected to take part in the Berlin rally.

But some on the left are refusing to associate with Kohl’s center-right government.

Archconservative Bavarian politicians shocked the government by criticizing today’s rally instead of joining it, even though Theo Waigel, head of the Bavarian Christian Social Union, is finance minister in Kohl’s Cabinet.

The party published a resolution condemning all violence against foreigners but refused to change its position on today’s rally.

“It’s not a matter of demonstrating but of taking action,” the Christian Social Union said, urging measures to restrict the flow of foreign asylum-seekers.

Speakers at Saturday’s rallies harshly criticized the Bavarians.

The timing of today’s rally is controversial because it will take place on the eve of the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Nazis’ 1938 Kristallnacht, when Jewish synagogues and businesses were attacked and burned.

German Jews fear that neo-Nazi violence, which has included the desecration of Holocaust memorials, is eroding the postwar taboo on anti-Semitism.

But Ignatz Bubis, leader of Germany’s Jewish community, said the anti-Semitism surfacing this year should not be likened to the Nazi era. He told German radio that under Hitler, anti-Semitism had been state policy.

“Today it is the mob which ignites something and practices violence, not the state,” he said.

Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel has sought to rescue Germany’s image abroad, and his government has had to fend off accusations that it was appeasing neo-Nazis by trying to curb immigration.