National Agenda : Rightist Ghost Returns to Germany : The national leadership seems paralyzed by the resurgence of violence and anti-foreigner sentiment. Local officials are left to go it alone.

More than anywhere, the contradictions of German history collide in this town of 60,000 souls.

Its list of prominent residents reads like a Who’s Who of European culture, with names like Goethe, Schiller, Bach, Strauss, Klee, Kandinsky, Zeiss and Gropius sprinkled through its past.

Yet this community that nurtured such enlightenment and gave refuge to the democrats who designed Germany’s ill-fated post-World War I republic also became the seat of the first-ever elected Nazi regional government in 1932 and was the first German township to ban Jews from its public baths.

The spot where Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once declared, “Let man be noble, helpful and good” today stands in the shadow of one of humankind’s most disturbing memorials: the infamous Buchenwald death camp, whose remains still haunt the town from the hillcrest above.

“Weimar has always been filled with contradictions,” said Michael Hugo, who works in the mayor’s office.

As a wave of xenophobic hate once again rolls through Germany, those contradictions still exist.

Last year, Weimar became one of the first German cities to take in refugees from war-torn republics of what used to be Yugoslavia. But a small hard core of extremist youths has launched sporadic attacks against some of the city’s 700-odd foreign residents and threatens more.

Today, the town awaits its first asylum-seekers--anywhere from 60 to 150 of the 368,000 foreigners who have flooded into the country so far this year--and authorities are worried.

“We expect trouble,” said Hugo, who looks after foreigners in the town. “Why should Weimar be different from anywhere else? It’s hard everywhere in the country and Weimar is no exception.”

How events play out here will say much for the country itself as German democracy is challenged by a ghost that many believed had been forever vanquished.

So far this year, the Federal Interior Ministry reports that more than 1,600 violent incidents have occurred nationally involving right-wing extremists. Those attacks have claimed 11 lives.

While Germany’s lurch toward extremism is a national phenomenon, the most serious attacks so far against foreigners have occurred mainly in the former Communist east. Pictures of Germans attacking the homes of Romanian Gypsies in the port city of Rostock in August were convincing evidence that the ghost of the German right was once again on the prowl.

That spectacle, and the steady drumbeat of xenophobic, anti-Semitic attacks since, have heightened social tensions, dismayed many Germans and left much of the country’s leadership in a kind of frozen confusion reminiscent of the early weeks of last year’s Persian Gulf War.

Now, as then, the reality of the unfolding nightmare seems to have overloaded the decision-making circuits.

Nowhere was this paralysis more strikingly visible than last Sunday as the country’s political leadership, along with a national television audience and most of more than 300,000 Germans who attended an anti-racism rally in Berlin, watched helplessly as their president, Richard von Weizsaecker, was pelted with fruit, eggs and rocks as he addressed the crowd.

With the violence aimed mainly against the thousands of southeastern Europeans, Africans and Asians who enter Germany each month simply by declaring that they seek political asylum, Chancellor Helmut Kohl pleads for opposition help to tighten the constitutional provision allowing entry to anyone claiming political persecution.

“If we don’t act now, we face the danger of a deep crisis of confidence about our democratic state,” Kohl said recently. “With considerable thought, I say, yes, a state of emergency.”

The opposition Social Democrats, whose support is needed for such a constitutional change, meet later this month to decide their position, but Kohl has already threatened other actions to stem the flow of foreigners if they fail to back him.

Aside from trying to curtail the influx of foreigners, however, national politicians of all shades have provided few other answers and precious little leadership.

The Social Democrats seem more concerned with other problems, while within Kohl’s center-right governing coalition, fear of losing voter support to the more extreme rightist parties that have begun to flower in the present atmosphere has prevented any visible campaign to counter the present xenophobia.

Sunday’s large demonstration in Berlin marked the first time Kohl has appeared at any such event. Even then, he remained barely visible and did not speak. Many of his more conservative colleagues stayed away completely.

Bavaria’s Minister President Max Streibl, for example, dismissed the event as “window dressing.” Bielefeld University social scientist Wilhelm Heitmeyer, one of the country’s most respected authorities on youth attitudes, also blamed other pillars of German society, including churches, trade unions and schools, for failing to condemn the attacks more forcefully.

“There is a general paralysis on this issue that amounts to a tacit acceptance of violence,” he said in an interview. “It’s dangerous.”

The stance of Germany’s political leadership is in sharp contrast to the quick French reaction in May, 1990, to the desecration of a prominent Jewish cemetery. There, President Francois Mitterrand and virtually every major political leader in the country joined a protest of 80,000 in Paris less than a week later.

Indeed, of all Germany’s leading personalities, inside or outside of politics, only Von Weizsaecker has made conspicuous, high-profile visits to foreigners’ homes and repeatedly preached the need to fight actively against racial hatred.

“It’s not enough just to call the police and then leave everything else to the authorities,” he told a national television audience last month. “We, each and every one of us, are called upon to protect our . . . democracy. Or should it once again come to the point where we either look away or fail to notice as helpless people are hunted down?”

The text of his speech Sunday repeated that theme, but few were able to hear his words amid the chaos.

With little help from above, local officials here, as in hundreds of communities across Germany, struggle to keep an uneasy peace.

Some efforts are innovative, such as a soccer tournament Hugo arranged late last year between foreigners and right-wing extremist youths, or periodic ethnic cooking fests.

In a more controversial move, the city now provides clubhouses and limited funds to both right- and left-wing extremist groups to keep them off the streets. The money lasts as long as the domestic peace.

“It’s preventive,” Hugo said. “The alternative is to exclude them completely and then they are beyond our control.”

While Weimar has remained quiet since the Rostock riots, a dangerous social brew of indifference, confusion, resentment and alienation bubbles beneath the surface.

For the majority of residents, the fate of foreigners living here is irrelevant as the townspeople struggle to keep their own lives together in the midst of the social turmoil that unification has brought to much of eastern Germany.

“They worry about work, about paying the rent and the collapse of public transportation, not about foreigners,” said Britta Hinkel, an editor at the local office of the Thuringen Allgemeine newspaper.

Here, as elsewhere, it is a small number of mainly young people in their teens and early twenties, sullen and cut adrift from their social moorings, who see foreigners as the root of their problem.

They want them out.

A few hundred yards from statues of Goethe and Friedrich Schiller that grace Weimar’s town center, a group of disaffected young Germans gathered recently at a small bar that has become their haunt and vented their frustrations to a visitor.

With the disintegration of East Germany, they were visibly lost--without role models, without values and without direction, estranged from those western Germans who they were convinced now controlled their lives.

They appeared to have retreated into a kind of rootless nationalism in which both foreigners and government had become the enemy.

Only one, 16-year-old Sabine, had ventured outside the country. “It was awful,” she said of her two weeks in Spain. “They were all German-haters.”

While three of the four who sat around a small table drinking beer said they had work, none had their own dwelling. A house being renovated to take asylum-seekers was one object of their anger.

“They build houses for foreigners, but not for us,” said Steffen, 18. “We’ve been betrayed by everyone. Nothing has changed. It won’t take long for what happened in Rostock to happen here.”

The others agreed.

The young Germans also agreed that Hitler’s treatment of the Jews had some lessons for the present situation. “Maybe not to that extreme, but something in the same general direction,” said Mario, 21.

None said they had personally attacked foreigners, but Mario said that just uttering the words, “bang, bang” when he passed one on the street was enough to make the person get out of the way. “They get off the sidewalk for you.”

They professed mistrust of authority of all types and said only some of the “small parties” seemed to offer solutions.

The western-based, extremist National Democratic Party and the German People’s Union recently established branches in the town, and a former Communist youth leader named Thomas Dienel last April founded a similarly rightist German National Party. So far, however, none has generated significant membership.

The youths’ comments and apparent lack of any broad pull by extremist parties seemed to support the analysis by officials at the regional Office for the Protection of the Constitution that much of the right-wing violence is spontaneous, with little or no central control.

“The lack of any organization makes it hard for us to gather information,” said Gerhard Heuer, a retired Bonn civil servant, now working as an adviser in the Thuringia state Interior Ministry. “We’re talking about people, 16 to 26 years old, who basically drink, hang out and decide what they are going to do.”

To the foreigners living here--either students at the prestigious colleges for music and architecture, or so-called “guest workers” left over from the Communist era--what they do is frightening.

Jesus Valdez, a 28-year-old Cuban who arrived here five years ago and works as a welder, said he has had to buy a car because his wife and children no longer feel safe on public buses.

“The mood has gotten worse,” he said. “Not only here, but everywhere in Germany.”

Some social scientists claim the Kohl government’s failure to assess the social implications of unification has led to a series of crucial policy failures.

“It was a great, dramatic mistake by western politicians to look at unification purely in economic terms,” Heitmeyer said. “No one ever considered how to keep the eastern society together.”

The collapse of east German industry also claimed sports clubs, kindergartens and other social services that were part of the large eastern industrial combines, a development that basically cut adrift youths whose lives had been shaped by an endless series of group activities.

But right-wing extremism is not restricted to the east. In western Germany too, extremist youths have attacked asylum-seekers’ homes and desecrated Jewish cemeteries, although such acts unfold against a very different backdrop.

There, unity has not brought social turmoil, but a nagging, unsettling fear that the prosperity gained by decades of hard work is suddenly threatened. Westerners have watched $100 billion annually flow east, paid a 7% tax surcharge last year to help finance unity and have been told more tax increases are to come.

As the country’s economy slows and industrial giants like Daimler-Benz announce job cuts, and as public housing waiting lists grow longer, indignation over the influx of asylum-seekers also grows. Among the complaints is that asylum-seekers are often put in accommodations that German families have long waited for.

It is a small minority that actually carries out the attacks against foreigners. In a 1991 report, the Federal Interior Ministry placed the number of right-wing extremists in Germany at around 40,000--double the figure of 10 years ago, but still a tiny fraction of the population.

However, sympathy for the actions of this minority has grown sharply.

A study carried out by the Emnid research organization found that since last December, the number of Germans who expressed “understanding for right-wing radical tendencies as a result of the foreigner problem” rose from 24% to 35%.

The stunning success of the extreme rightist Republikaner (Republicans) in state elections last May in Baden-Wurttemberg only underscored the public mood. With 10.9% of the popular vote, the party had more than twice the minimum needed to enter the legislature of that southwestern state.

A poll published last week indicated that the Republikaner would win nearly 20% of the popular vote today.

“There’s a shift toward the right at every level of German politics,” claimed Christian Kas, chairman of the Republikaner in Baden-Wurttemberg state. “There are also certain problems in our society, such as the asylum-seekers, that the main parties have ignored.

“We pleaded for a change in the asylum law three years ago and now that people are throwing rocks, the main parties are trying to push our proposals through the back door,” he said.

In the city of Pforzheim, nestled in one of the most affluent regions of all Europe, 35 miles northwest of Stuttgart, nearly 19% voted Republikaner last May.

“The richer the area, the harder it is to give something up,” explained city government spokesman Michael Strohmayer.

Many within Kohl’s coalition are moving further to the right as they scramble after, rather than try to turn, public opinion.

“We need to return to our conservative, Christian roots,” declared Claus Jaeger, a Christian Democrat parliamentarian from Baden-Wurttemberg and co-founder of a discussion group within his party whose aim is to strengthen its right wing. “Voters have started to lose trust in us.”

Times researchers Petra Falkenberg, Christian Retzlaff, Reane Oppl and Ulrich Seibert contributed to this article.

Political Grudges

Various issues mobilize Germany’s right, but most are linked to xenophobia. * European unity: The extreme right-wing parties argue against further European Community political or monetary integration--especially the latter, which would end the German currency, the deutschemark, a symbol of the nation. This position has widespread popular support. * Unemployment: The real jobless rate is between 25% to 30% in the east, and the far larger western economy is slowing. Rightists claim foreigners are taking jobs that belong to Germans. * Housing: Major cities have acute housing shortages, brought on by the influx of foreigners plus the continuing migration of eastern Germans to jobs in western cities. The right-wing political solution is to stop the influx of foreigners and expel many already here. * Taxes: Germans already coughed up a 7% tax surcharge in 1991 to help finance unification, and new tax hikes are rumored. Rightists point to the amount of social welfare money that goes to foreigners.

A WEEK OF HATE

In a recent week, at least 60 demonstrations and physical attacks were directed at foreigners in Germany. A blow-by-blow account:

* Aug. 29-30 Rostock. Right-wingers attack and burn apartment blocks housing mainly Romanian Gypsies. Holzhausen. Tent camp is set ablaze. Markkleeberg. Molotov cocktails are thrown into a camp housing 200 Gypsies. Eisenhuettenstadt. Central collection center for hundreds of asylum-seekers is set on fire. Spremberg, Luebbenau, Cottbus, Oschersleben, Stendal, Salzwedel, Genthin, Soemmerda, Eisenach, Neubrandenburg, Greifswald, Wismar, Darmstadt, Bad Lauterberg and Saarlouis. Smaller incidents. * Aug. 31 Cottbus. 150 youths attack asylum-seekers’ camp. * Sept. 3 Ketzin. Extremist youths burn down barracks housing asylum-seekers. Hohenschoenhausen (northern Berlin suburb). Two youths try to set a house with asylum-seekers in it on fire, but device fails to ignite. Oschersleben, Blankenburg. Buildings housing asylum-seekers, along with two cars, are torched. Northeim. Turkish family and two Gypsy families are attacked. Bad Krozingen. Building housing asylum-seekers is set on fire. * Sept. 4 Eisenhuettenstadt. Camp for asylum-seekers is attacked but is defended by police. Luebben, Biesenthal. Smaller installations housing asylum-seekers are attacked. Leverkusen. Molotov cocktails are thrown at cargo container used as kindergarten for children of asylum-seekers. * Sept. 5-6 Hohenschoenhausen. Police fend off people trying to attack a hostel where foreigners live. Eisenhuettenstadt, Prenzlau, Gueben, Cottbus, Kremmen, Gandow and Luebbenau. Police repel potential attackers from homes where foreigners live. Eisenhuettenstadt. Camp for asylum-seekers is defended by police and border patrol troops. About 100 people reportedly cheer attackers. Prenzlau. Molotov cocktails hurled at building housing asylum-seekers. Public buses attacked. Cars burned. Gueben. Extremist youths hurl rocks at building housing foreigners. Lychen, Wittenberge and Wittstock. Police disperse potentially violent crowds expressing anti-foreigner sentiments. Koblenz. Molotov cocktails are thrown at Vietnamese nationals. One is seriously injured. Chemnitz. Barracks for asylum-seekers is attacked. Ecklingerode, Bad Langensalza. Incendiary bombs are thrown at homes of asylum-seekers but fail to ignite. Wanzleben, Wernigerode, Mansfeld, Hettstedt and Gelnhausen. Police defuse potential confrontations between locals and foreigners. Greifswald, Usedom and Ueckermunde. Facilities housing asylum-seekers are attacked. Bonn. Gunshot is fired through window of asylum-seeker’s apartment. Engelsberg. Facility housing asylum-seekers burns down, injuring three. SOURCE: Times researchers

MORE IMMIGRANTS ... Number of people seeking asylum in Germany has more than doubled since 1990. Figures exclude ethnic Germans returning from Eastern Europe. 1990: 152,021 1991: 238,568 1992 (first 10 months): 368,536 Source: German Interior Ministry