No Happily Ever After in the Fairy-Tale Town of Moelln : Extremists: Arson attack shatters quaint veneer of town where Turks, Germans had coexisted peacefully.

This quaint medieval town with its narrow cobblestoned streets and well-scrubbed faces is the stuff of storybook Germany.

Surrounded by sculpted lakes and a rolling northern countryside, it is at the same time a backdrop for Hansel and Gretel and a model of the clean, tidy order that western Germany’s post-World War II economic success has brought to small communities throughout the land.

” . . . a perfect blend of ancient and modern,” sums up a glossy tourist brochure produced by the town.

But to the shock of Moelln’s 17,000 upstanding citizens and much of the world outside, this perfect blend is flawed.

Down one of the town’s picturesque little lanes, between two carefully painted homes, stands the proof. It is the charred facade of a three-story house--an eerie, empty building where an arson attack last month claimed the lives of three foreigners--a 51-year-old grandmother and two girls ages 14 and 10--members of a Turkish family that had lived there for years.

The incident stands as the worst of all the more than 2,000 attacks carried out by right-wing extremist German youths so far this year, an ill-organized orgy of violence that has resurrected memories of the country’s Nazi past.

Two local men, one 25, the other 19, subsequently confessed to the crime.

The house they firebombed deep in the night stands out in the glare of day as an ugly scar on Moelln’s otherwise perfect facade.

It is a blight that confronts even the town’s most self-satisfied burghers with a hard, unavoidable truth that something in their midst went drastically wrong.

In many ways, the events here stand as a metaphor for much of western Germany.

Indeed, the fact that so many western Germans were affected by Moelln helps explain both the dramatic shift in the national public mood and the sudden flurry of government action to curtail the extremism.

The attack shattered an illusion nurtured by both the powerbrokers in Bonn and the majority of those who live in the stable, smug west: that the revival of right-wing extremism was mainly an eastern problem flowing from the social chaos and ignorance that followed the collapse of East German communism.

It also shocked the country out of an idea that some Germans liked to murmur privately: that the attacks were somehow not so tragic because they were directed mainly against asylum-seekers, people widely seen as transient, opportunistic and freeloading outsiders trying to catch a free ride off the sweat of hard-working Germans.

The attacks were certainly distasteful, these Germans stressed, but they at least helped do the job politicians had failed to do: slow the influx.

More than anything else, this gradually broadening mood of subtle, tacit approval, reinforced by long months of government inaction, enabled the violence to thrive virtually unchallenged.

Finally, here in Moelln, that violence crossed a new threshold--claiming for the first time as victims members of Germany’s large, long-established Turkish minority, whose work helped produce the country’s famous “Economic Miracle” more than a generation ago.

One of the victims, 10-year-old Yeliz Arslan, was born in the town. The fact that, on the day of the attack, both Yeliz and her father, who was also raised here, remained foreigners both under German law and in the public mind reflects the narrow definition of “German” and the extreme difficulty experienced by outsiders in penetrating mainstream German society.

Since the attack, Klaus Ehmcke, the director of Yeliz’s elementary school, and other teachers have struggled with how to explain the girl’s death to her schoolmates.

They also are working to reassure foreign children, who for two weeks were too frightened to return to school in large numbers.

But with few answers themselves, the teachers have done much the same as others in Moelln--search their souls.

In the course of an hourlong discussion, Ehmcke tried, and failed, to recall instances of tension between the town’s 650 Turks and local Germans.

Neither could Police Chief Hans Jaeger, or Ernst du Maire, who runs the local foundry that first imported Turkish labor at the end of 1960s, or the Turks who like to gather at the Tea Room in the heart of the old town, sip hot drinks and read newspapers from back home.

“We felt secure here,” said Mehmet Yildirim, 30, who, like his father before him, works at the foundry and whose own 6-year-old son marks the start of the third generation of Turks in Moelln. “We trusted people. We knew everyone and they knew us. We had no problems.”

By an unspoken agreement, even the town’s seven or eight known hard-core skinheads did their trashing elsewhere.

Mayor Joachim Doerfler had watched tension grow and violence flare elsewhere in Germany but was confident that Moelln was immune.

“I somehow had the feeling we were atypical,” he said. “I thought we were better integrated than elsewhere.”

But in the quaint, content world of small-town Germany, “integration” is a relative word.

Despite the passage of a quarter-century and the budding of a third generation, Turks and Germans in Moelln tend to go their separate ways.

“We live more next to one another than with one another,” Ehmcke admitted.

Family and religious pressure tends to keep younger Turks--especially girls--close to home.

Germans seem content not to mix.

As a consequence, despite their long presence, not a single individual of Turkish heritage is in a position of authority in the town, either in Doerfler’s city administration, in Jaeger’s 21-person police force, on Du Maire’s management team or on Ehmcke’s teaching staff at the elementary school.

Such distance left little ammunition to counter the message of the political right that if Germany were just left to the Germans, its problems would be resolved.

Those sentiments led the good people of Moelln to cast more than 8% of their votes to the extreme-right-wing and openly xenophobic German People’s Union in the Schleswig-Holstein state election last April.

The figure was above the 6.3% state average--itself enough to bring the radical right into the state’s legislature for the first time since 1971.

In the months before the attack, residents heard politicians complain about foreigners abusing the country’s liberal asylum laws, watched television news footage of young Germans firebombing foreigners’ homes in cities such as Rostock and reflected on the government’s inaction.

The mood of tacit intolerance seeped into the town.

“It was a feeling that, if you reacted negatively to foreigners, you were somehow on the right track,” Ehmcke said.

At some point, Ehmcke speculates, the mood may have infected the shy, introverted 19-year-old Lars Christiansen, one of those who has confessed to the crime.

Christiansen, according to police, used his own bright yellow car to carry out the attack and took few precautions to conceal his identity.

“For me, the question is whether he thought anyone would really disapprove,” Ehmcke said.

Although Christiansen had flirted with the skinhead scene, local police said he was only on the fringe.

Police Chief Jaeger used the words “nice young kid” in describing Christiansen to a visitor.

Jaeger and others familiar with the case believe that Christiansen at some point came under the influence of a tougher, more dedicated xenophobe named Michael Peters from a village east of Moelln. Peters has also confessed to the attack.

The confessions stunned the town almost as much as the attack itself.

It was bad enough that three people died so horribly; the fact that local residents were involved has been virtually impossible for most townspeople to digest.

“Never in my wildest dreams did I think anyone here could do that,” Mayor Doerfler said.

Jaeger couldn’t recall a killing in Moelln during his 25 years in the police force.

“That kind of thing doesn’t happen here,” he said.

Locals at the Alter Zoll, a bar and guest house on the city’s southern fringe, blamed it on the social tensions that accompanied the fall of communism and the opening of the East German border, only seven miles east of the town.

“All that garbage is coming over here now,” commented one, while another reminded listeners that Peters had flunked out of school and was long pegged as a misfit.

A third customer questioned the role of Christiansen’s parents, speculating that they might have failed to rear him properly.

According to civic leaders, the initial shock galvanized the town in grief, with nearly half the community taking part in a spontaneous, silent procession through the streets only hours afterward.

But with the arrests and confessions, the emphasis seemed to shift to suppressing discussion of the event rather than trying to come to grips with it, Doerfler said.

“Some now say that those two kids couldn’t have done such a thing, that it must have been the Turkish mafia,” Doerfler added. “They are closing their eyes.”

Within the town’s Turkish community, young men say the attack has awakened them to a new reality.

“These (German) people are not honest,” said Ahmet Ergen, a 27-year-old commercial trader raised in Moelln. “They smile to your face, but when they are among themselves, then it’s a different story.”

Ergen said that some Turkish families who were in the process of buying homes in Moelln are now worrying about whether to go ahead, while others are considering returning to Turkey.

“We’re afraid, mainly for the women and children,” he said. “It’s not as if they were coming up to us in the street and punching us in the nose. They come in the night and throw bombs through the window.”

Meanwhile, civic leaders have embarked on efforts that somehow might bridge the gap between Turk and German that existed well before the killings.

Doerfler, for example, talks of converting the Arslan home into a German-Turkish cultural center where young people from both communities can meet.

During a visit to the town shortly after the killings, Turkish Ambassador Onur Oymen talked about making Moelln a national center for Turkish-German understanding--an idea Doerfler applauds.

“We’ve got to get across that no great differences separate these communities,” the mayor said. “People in this town have to learn that being a foreigner is not a contagious disease.”