COLUMN ONE : Saying ‘No’ to Nazis in Germany : Shaken by rightist killings, the nation’s long-silent majority is starting to fight racism and anti-Semitism. The persistence of that effort will decide the nation’s democratic future.

In her velvet-collared maroon winter coat and polished black shoes, Gabriella Hardwig was on the march with her husband and two small children.

The family had driven 70 miles on a Sunday to take part in their first demonstration against right-wing extremism.

“The government has done too little, so we came to say something with our presence,” she said.

Klaus Eble, marketing director for the Berlin shoe retailer Schuhtick, helped write and place the company’s first-ever political ad, which appeared recently in the city’s newspapers.

“Here, in this spot, we expressly declare our solidarity with foreign residents, with religious minorities--especially those of the Jewish faith--with the handicapped, the old, the frail and all other groups who have been the targets of cowardly attacks in the past months,” read the ad in part.

Claudia Fromm, spokeswoman for the theater and opera company in the Ruhr city of Essen, decided together with other members of the company to project a slide against the curtain before last Sunday’s performance of the opera “Hansel and Gretel.”

“Without the cooperation of colleagues from 33 foreign countries, it would be impossible to raise the curtain for tonight’s performance,” the slide read, before concluding with a denunciation of xenophobia.

Hardwig, Eble and Fromm are three of a growing number of Germany’s vast silent majority who have begun to stand up and say “no” to the revival of right-wing extremism that presently grips the country.

In the arts, in business, in churches, in schools and among a variety of interest groups cutting across a surprisingly large swath of society, private, grass-roots initiatives have been launched in recent days to confront the issue and defend democracy.

It is an approach rarely seen in Germany. Here, the long, deliberate suppression of nationalistic emotions has blunted the sense of patriotism and national pride that so frequently drives Americans to activism.

“What we are seeing is something really unusual,” commented Juergen Friedrichs, head of the Research Institute for Sociology at Cologne University. “There have been local protests over local problems before, but nothing like this at a national level.”

Whether this collective effort continues and whether it is strong enough to turn public opinion into an effective weapon against the extremist violence remains unclear.

But what is clear is that it is here--among the silent majority--that the demise of Germany’s ill-fated Weimar Republic was sealed, and it is here that the future of its present democracy will be decided.

President Richard von Weizsaecker, one of the very few German political figures to actively and consistently oppose the extremist violence, reminded his people of this point in a speech last month.

“We must never forget why the first German republic failed,” the president said. “It was not because there were too many Nazis too early, but because for too long there were too few democrats.”

A month earlier, speaking on the second anniversary of German unification, Von Weizsaecker urged his countrymen to get personally involved in the fight against extremism, declaring that history demanded it.

“Or should it once again befall us that we look away or hardly see as helpless people are hunted down?”

For the moment, at least, the answer seems to be no.

Much of the present action appears to have been triggered by the shock that followed a right-wing arson attack last month in the northern town of Moelln that claimed the lives of three Turkish nationals, including two girls, ages 10 and 14.

That attack brought to 17 the number who have died in the estimated 1,800 known incidents of right-wing violence so far this year.

“This whole thing has become so big that it’s no longer possible just to sit and watch the nightly news,” said businessman Eble, who admitted that he had never before done anything political in his life. “We asked ourselves what we could do to give the public a bit of backbone, and the ad was the result.”

Other Germans are asking the same question and coming up with a variety of answers.

A large open-air rock concert featuring the Scorpions and other leading German bands, for example, is scheduled for Dec. 13 in Frankfurt am Main with the motto, “Today It’s Them, Tomorrow It’s You,” while the Munich city government recently published a survey concluding that without its foreign employees, the city simply wouldn’t function.

Posters have suddenly appeared in bookstores in several cities expressing solidarity with foreigners; on a recent weekend, players of the leading professional soccer club Eintracht Frankfurt took the field carrying banners against racism, while a group of Berlin university students who annually rent themselves out as Santa Clauses posed for a group photo with the sign, “Santas Against Nazis.”

German industry has also become involved, with several companies offering help for the families of the Moelln victims and launching their own awareness programs.

Heinrich von Pierer, chairman of Siemens AG, issued a letter to all employees last month urging them to become active against racism, and the Hoesch steel company’s trade union leadership recently organized a telephone network among employees to accelerate awareness of racist or anti-Semitic actions.

In Bonn, a coalition of religious, industrial and political groups jumped on an idea conceived by youth groups in Dresden and launched a national campaign that they termed “Action Courage.”

Organizers urge Germans to actively challenge xenophobic and anti-Semitic remarks, protect foreigners if necessary and wear on their lapels either a simple safety pin or a button sporting the word Courage to symbolize the commitment.

“We hope eventually to have half the population involved,” said Brigitte Erler, a Social Democrat and former member of Parliament who is helping coordinate the effort.

Widespread public indifference to the repeated attacks against asylum seekers--and even occasional applause from bystanders during assaults in formerly Communist eastern Germany--have been important factors in breaking down the social taboo against expressions of right-wing extremism that has existed in both parts of now-reunited Germany since the end of World War II.

“The Germans now accept as normal many things that just 10 years ago would have been unthinkable,” the leading news weekly Der Spiegel commented recently.

Among the examples the magazine cited:

* The absence of any challenge to young soccer fans who curse the referee with the words, “Jew to Auschwitz!”

* The trend reflected by residents of southern cities such as Mannheim and Heilbronn who increasingly refuse to ride in taxis driven by foreigners.

* A ditty sung in the bars of working-class Hamburg whose rhyming words note that the Christmas season is the time to burn a Turk.

Together with the new lure of rightist parties amid voter disenchantment with the country’s mainstream politicians, these attitudes have provided an atmosphere that encourages the violence. As a result, the actions of a few thousand ill-organized, mainly leaderless youths have shaken the foundations of German democracy.

“Sympathizers are an important part of what’s happening, and they can be influenced by public attitudes,” commented Friedrichs. “If they know that most are against what’s going on, they’ll start to drift away.”

There are signs that the growing new grass-roots mood has already diminished public tolerance for those sympathizing with the extreme right.

Many large department and record stores recently began withdrawing albums produced by so-called “brown bands”--the spearhead of a new, aggressively nationalistic German music whose lyrics exhort violence against foreigners.

Coupled with new government restrictions against the sale of such music implemented this week, the most popular of these records, by a group known as Boehse Onkelz (“the Evil Uncles”), dropped from No. 5 to No. 40 on national charts.

In Dresden, a city official long known by authorities to have anonymously telephoned police last June with the threat “Foreigners out or there will be a blood bath,” was summarily fired last week, and a leading Munich aerospace executive, Karl Dersch, was forced to tender his resignation after reports that he was fond of flying a controversial World War I German naval flag in his yard. The flag has become a symbol of right-wing radicals.

Juergen Schrempp, chairman of Deutsche Aerospace, said Dersch’s departure was necessary to protect the company’s reputation as well as that of its parent firm, Daimler-Benz.

For many, the key question now is how long the public activism can be sustained.

“What we now have to see is if this grass-roots movement goes on or stops after a couple of weeks,” Friedrichs said. “If it lasts, it could mark an important turning point.”

Christian Retzlaff, a researcher in The Times’ Berlin Bureau, contributed to this article.