Why Kohl Has Been Soft on Right-Wing Groups : Germany: Fear of reviving memories of repression in Third Reich and East Germany has made Bonn hesitant about getting tough with racists.

As the appalling violence against foreigners continues in Germany, public opinion has swung behind Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s belated decision to curb neo-Nazi groups, irrespective of how the government ultimately deals with the issue of asylum-seekers. But neither the government crackdown, brought on by the firebombing murders of three Turks in the North German town of Moelln, nor the widespread public protests against right-wing violence can mask the lack of national consensus on two fundamental issues. Where is the proper boundary between protecting individual civil liberties and ensuring domestic security? And what is the definition of a German?

The German Basic Law, written in 1949 under U.S. tutelage, is unambiguous. Article 1 states: “The dignity of the individual is inviolable. It is the duty of all state authorities to respect and to protect it.” Article 3 goes on to forbid discrimination on the basis of gender, origin, race, language, religion or political beliefs. Paragraph 131 of the Criminal Code on “inciting racism” forbids written or verbal attacks in a manner that would violate U.S. law under the First Amendment.

Governments have leeway in enforcement of laws, however, and the memory of the Third Reich’s horrors and the contemporary example, until 1990, of East Germany’s Stasi-dominated regime often tempered Bonn’s zeal to restrict unsavory individuals’ actions or to violate their privacy. Except in suspected cases of threats to German democracy, government wiretapping is forbidden.

In several states of former East Germany, public revulsion of Stasi thuggery has led to a not atypical Teutonic overreaction. The reluctance of the authorities to intervene in last summer’s pogrom against foreigners in Rostock had as much to do with these inhibitions--and that many rioters were better equipped than the police--as it did with supposed sympathy with the Molotov cocktail-throwing mob. The behavior last month of Berlin police in letting leftist rioters crowd the podium and pelt President Richard von Weizsaecker with eggs and stones was part of this anti-authoritarian syndrome, raised to levels of absurdity.

Yet, historically, there has been no consistent pattern of government behavior. Critics of Bonn’s passivity pointed out that the socialist-liberal government of Helmut Schmidt did not hesitate to use the legal system to suspend some civil rights to suppress leftist Bader-Meinhof terrorists of the 1970s. But many feel extreme actions were taken against those left-wing radicals because their targets were other Germans, while the government’s recent temporizing behavior was because the skinheads’ victims were foreigners.

Now, in yet another swing of the pendulum, virtually all the banned parties in Germany are right-wing. The assorted neo-Nazis are the primary clear and present danger to democratic society, yet the remnants of the communists have also not forsworn violence. There is suspicion that elements of the Party of Democratic Socialism, the successor to the East German Communist, played a role in the hugely embarrassing Berlin riots of last month, but the PDS sits in the Bundestag, so it is handled with restraint.

There are also interesting state-to-state variations in the anti-foreigner violence. While attacks in wealthy western states, like North Rhine-Westphalia and Baden-Wuerttemberg, have mirrored the xenophobia in the impoverished former-communist eastern states, affluent Bavaria has seen relatively less disorder. There are no simple explanations for this, but perhaps the willingness of the Christian Social Union Bavarian government to use police power to preserve order has played an important role.

The connection between foreign asylum seekers and right-wing violence is itself hotly disputed. Economic and social problems involved in German reunification have contributed significantly to the unrest. Society’s losers do not need Turks, Gypsies, Vietnamese or Africans as scapegoats for their rage, but their presence is handy. The more inventive and pathological types even have no trouble brewing anti-Semitism where there are next to no Jews. What is especially galling about the tragedy is that the foreigners have become a political football. Many people accuse Kohl and other Bonn politicians of having implicitly blamed the victims in order not to offend the perceived feelings of constituencies.

No objective observer would minimize the burden that the influx of 500,000 asylum-seekers this year has put on Germany. The nation is absorbing masses of refugees, including from war-torn Bosnia, while most of the rest of Europe stands idly by. The European Community must come to grips with the problem by assigning the refugees fairly to all 12 member states.

Yet Germany’s situation, while now the most extreme in Europe, is hardly unique. Switzerland, for example, has a higher percentage of foreigners among its permanent residents.

Meanwhile, in the United States, in addition to the annual quota of 700,000 legal immigrants, an estimated 1.5 million Latin Americans enter illegally each year, with numerous illegal entrants from Asia as well. The total is a higher proportion of the country’s population than in Germany. Yes, we are a far larger country, but most immigrants settle in densely populated urban areas like Los Angeles, Miami and New York.

The real difference between Germany’s and America’s relationship to foreigners lies not in numbers but in philosophy and racial attitudes. Despite all of America’s publicized interethnic tensions, with few exceptions immigrants know that probably they--and certainly their children--can become American citizens. The opposite is true in Germany. Second- and third-generation foreigners have almost no chance of attaining citizenship, as the case of two of the Turkish firebombing victims poignantly illustrated.

Von Weizsaecker has called for creation of an U.S.-style immigration quota system in conjunction with a reform of the much-abused asylum law. Kohl and most other politicians have rejected this. The chancellor has stated that Germany is not a land of immigration, forgetting the telephone book of Berlin, which is dotted with Huguenot names from the 17th and 18th Centuries, or Ruhr cities that boast large populations descended from 19th-Century Polish immigrants. The annihilation of Germany’s Jewish citizens, once among the most assimilated communities in Europe, should not obscure earlier periods of integration. Above all, the Holocaust should not be implicitly, or unwittingly, seen as evidence of an incurable German failing to forestall future immigration.

As the Berlin Wall was falling, the noted leftist German philosopher Juergen Habermas wrote that his country might be approaching a post-national identity. What a difference three years make. Today, the segment of German society that identifies itself as “European” sees its ideal slipping away in the post-Maastricht confusion, and recently several conservative intellectuals have attacked the idea of multiculturalism for Germany.

While multiculturalism now seems normal to most Americans, it has come about gradually, with wrenching adjustments. We above all people should be sensitive to the fact that countries cannot change fundamental public policies overnight. Nonetheless, in holding on to an essentially racial definition of nationhood, Germany is not only unintentionally providing a pretext for violence by xenophobes but is also bucking the tide of history, at least in Europe and America.

The pressures of Eastern Europeans fleeing economic woes and the exploding demographic bomb of North Africa will impel Western Europe, Germany included, to adjust its ideas of cultural homogeneity and, hence, its immigration and naturalization policies. The problem for Germany is that, until it realizes it must adjust, its inner stability, its carefully cultivated democracy and its position in Europe and the rest of the world will continue to suffer.