Rifts in Germany Scar National Psyche : Unity: The real danger to the newly unified nation is from the left, not from the far right. Festering east-west problems, far from resolved, continue to fracture the country.

WASHINGTON — It was not a good week for Germany. Showing a remarkable ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, the police and organizers of last Sunday’s mass march in Berlin against racism and hatred of foreigners allowed a few hundred radical anarcho-leftists to crowd the podium; pelt President Richard von Weizsaecker with eggs, tomatoes, stones and paint-bombs, and cut off the public-address system as he vainly tried to speak.

What could have been an uplifting spectacle instead revealed, on live television, one of the deep and often violent fault-lines in German society. Ironies abounded. Most of the attacks on foreigners and the desecration of Jewish cemeteries and Holocaust memorials that the 300,000 marchers were protesting against had been perpetrated by right-wingers--yet the disrupters were leftists showing their disdain for the vacillating policy of the country’s politicians. They shouted “hypocrite!” at Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who is widely criticized for lack of leadership on the issue of asylum, but it was von Weizsaecker, the lonely, outspoken advocate of brotherhood who was the target of their missiles.

The most recent polling data does not offer much comfort to the thousands of Germans of goodwill. The Infas Institute of Bonn asked 3,000 Germans if there had been some good under the Nazis, and 32% said “yes.” Moreover, 28% of those in western Germany and 26% in the east said the Jews themselves had been partly responsible for their mistreatment in the Third Reich.

In all fairness to Germany, however, it must be emphasized, first, that a strong majority of its citizenry is solidly democratic, and, second, that its racist minority is hardly an anomaly in an increasingly xenophobic Europe. There is no German equivalent of popular right-wing demagogues like France’s Jean Marie LePen or Austria’s Joerg Haider--or even Louisiana’s David Duke.

What is deeply disturbing, however, is that the upsurge in hatred in Germany, both violent and passive, promises to continue to grow as the economy slides into recession and the Bonn politicians fail to come to grips with the problem of asylum and immigration. The result of the coming deliberations of the main political parties may be a giant passing the buck to the European Community in Brussels to work out a coordinated refugee policy.

Three years after the breaching of the Berlin Wall, a mood of depression has descended upon both halves of Germany. There is a widespread feeling that the government is overwhelmed by the rush of events, unable, on the one hand, to forge a consensus on the refugee issue and, on the other, to meet the lofty expectations of German unity.

The latter problem, if less visible to foreigners, is more insidious and strikes at the heart of German identity. Redressing the enormous economic, environmental and psychological damage wrought by four decades of communism in the former East Germany has proven to be far more difficult, and expensive, than most people ever dreamed in the euphoric days of November, 1989. Kohl has been widely chastised for having minimized the cost of unification in the 1990 national election campaign but by recent U.S. political standards, his raising of taxes in 1991 and his new program calling for still higher taxes to finance the integration of the five new states can only be called courageous.

Yet, if anything, the east-west polarization has intensified. Western Germans--the Wessis--resent the massive transfer of their wealth eastward, while their eastern compatriots--the Ossis--complain of a western arrogance that borders on colonialism. Such tensions are exacerbated by the new phenomenon of mass unemployment in the east and by the economic slowdown all over Europe, including western Germany. Recently, the bellwether corporation Daimler-Benz canceled plans for a $650-million Mercedes truck plant near Berlin--the latest in a series of investment reversals and reductions in the east by giants like Krupp and Volkswagen. The fact that most eastern Germans are living better than before and, by world standards, belong to the privileged, offers little solace to many people who feel adrift.

Moreover, as with the refugee problem, the Ossi-Wessi relationship cannot escape the burden of German history. Just as the memory of Nazi genocide hovers over Bonn’s expulsion of Romanian asylum seekers, most of them Gypsies, the continuing revelations from the East German Stasi secret police files poison east-west integration. Twice in the past few weeks, I have experienced this dynamic.

At a dinner for one of the few eastern German members of Bonn’s governing coalition, the guest of honor criticized the post-communist civil-service review commissions for their assumption that there are Stasi-informant skeletons in the closet of every eastern German institution. A western German Washington correspondent interjected that surely there are many such skeletons. The eastern politician lashed back that the journalist was ignorant of conditions in the former East Germany. Unwilling to be dismissed, the western newsman politely but firmly rephrased his question. The mutual misperception was total--the eastern politician convinced of the journalist’s unsubtly and arrogance and the journalist assured of the easterner’s defensiveness and provincialism.

A few days later, I was dumbstruck by the news that Professor Hanns-Dieter Jacobsen, chairman of the political science department at the Free University of Berlin, had been arrested and charged with being a Stasi spy in the West since 1968. The indictment was supported by details of a code name, monthly payments and even special canisters for microfilm. Jacobsen, a respected 48-year-old political economist, had been a colleague of mine when he was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington and had spent two periods at Harvard.

The quintessential Atlanticist, Jacobsen was the proverbial “last person on Earth” that his German colleagues or I would have suspected of treason. His arrest has unleased a torrent of soul searching at the Free University. While calls were made for a presumption of Jacobsen’s innocence, 39 of the 45 professors in his department, to remove any guilt by association, formally asked to be investigated by the same civil-service commissions decried at my Washington dinner. One professor likened the investigation to a necessary AIDS test.

East-west antagonisms will remain high with the opening of the manslaughter trial in Berlin of former East German leader Erich Honecker, charged with issuing the shoot-to-kill order at the Berlin Wall. It has provoked fresh debate about the legality of proceedings and the wisdom of pursuing aged and ailing individuals who appear no longer a threat to society.

Every country has its rifts, be they economic, social, ethnic or regional, and Germany’s should not be exaggerated.

The unified country of nearly 80 million remains by far the strongest economic power in Europe and, as a result, one of the community’s political leaders. But the very fact of Germany’s increased strength--and its troubled history for much of this century--understandably make its European neighbors and its friends in America concerned at the growing signs of unrest.