PERSPECTIVE ON MARTIN LUTHER KING : The Long Reach of a Legacy : A German rock star fighting neo-fascism finds timely inspiration in his American hero’s reflections on racism.

It wasn’t until I left East Berlin that I discovered Martin Luther King. As a rock ‘n’ roller who was born and came of age in East Germany, I was sure that the fall of the Wall would mean the birth of freedom. Instead, it meant the virtually immediate rebirth of nationalism. Appalled, I moved to Paris in 1990, at the age of 19, where my new friends turned me on to Dr. King.

Inspired by the spirituality of his writings and the reality of his social activism, I wore an “I Have a Dream” T-shirt during a performance with my band at a show in Cologne last September. One reviewer, who like many Germans is ultra-defensive about criticism of Germany, took note of the shirt, the net shorts I wore with it, and my anti-fascist politics, and sneered that I came off like “Martina Luther Porno.” It is an epithet I wear with pride.

Martin Luther King makes sense to me, to begin with, because the former East Germans in the reunified Germany today are decidedly second-class citizens, much like American blacks were and are in America.

More to the point, I revere King for the uncanny specificity with which his reflections on America in the 1950s and ‘60s apply to the dire situation in Germany today. His denunciations of violent Southern racism, genteel Northern racism and government indifference to both resonate very strongly today in the face of daily right-wing terror, the sluggishness of the response to it by the government and the clergy and the demonization and forced expulsion (for the second time this century!) of the gypsies.

For example, consider the language employed by Manfred Ritter, a regional court official for the Christian Democratic Union out of Anspach. Referring recently to the gypsies, Asians and other asylum-seekers in Germany, he said: “Comparisons with a plague of grasshoppers which leave a desert wherever they infiltrate are not exaggerated. The solution can only be the systematic shielding of Europe from developing-world immigrants.” That statement reeks of Nazi-style racial supremacy.

The widespread belief throughout Germany that all of its current problems are due to its liberal immigration policy rather than its deeply rooted nationalism remind me of the time that King quoted Hitler (in “Mein Kampf”) on the mechanics of fascism: “By means of shrewd lies, unremittingly repeated, it is possible to make people believe that heaven is hell--and hell, heaven. . . . The greater the lie, the more readily it will be believed.”

What’s most impressive about King to me, though, is his notion that there are values higher than state law. So what if the ongoing German repatriation of the gypsies to Romania is entirely legal? Wrote King: “We must never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal.’ It was ‘illegal’ to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. But I am sure that if I had lived in Germany during that time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers even though it was illegal.”

It is precisely this intellectual clarity and moral courage that is missing in Germany now. Yes, the government has organized several anti-fascist rallies during the past couple of months, but the skeptic in me notes that these rallies didn’t occur until after 1,800 violent attacks against foreigners in 1992, which resulted in terribly embarrassing international headlines for Germany, which in turn moved a number of foreign business concerns--including notable American banks--to cancel plans to invest in Germany.

I’m convinced that the government, because it didn’t move to squash rightist violence until forced to, is complicit in those 1,800 attacks. As Gunter Grass recently pointed out: “The most dangerous thing is, we have (skinheads) in government. They are nicely dressed with beautiful hair. . . . They speak well. But they think the same way as the young kids who shave their heads and carry swastikas and demonstrate. They encourage these ideas and these brutal actions.” Here’s King, in a similar situation: “The intolerably slow pace of civil rights is due at least as much to the limits which the federal government has imposed on its own actions as it is to the actions of segregationist opposition.”

I will admit that I believed in the promises of jobs and prosperity that were waiting for all of us just as soon as the Wall came down, and that I am disenchanted with “capitalism” as it is currently being practiced in Germany. But I am hardly nostalgic about “communism” as it was practiced in East Germany. I like King’s notion of a synthesis of the two: “The good and just society is neither the thesis of capitalist nor the antithesis of communism, but a socially conscious democracy which reconciles the truths of individualism and collectivism.”

In order to realize this synthesis in America, King proposed “a revolution of values.” “When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered,” he wrote. “A civilization can flounder as readily in the face of moral and spiritual bankruptcy as it can through financial bankruptcy.”

I have a dream of just such a socially conscious democracy taking root in Germany today, replacing the society currently defined by the giant triplets of nationalism, xenophobia and racism. I have a dream that one day a new Martin Luther King will spring up on German soil, just as the spirit and example of a 16th-Century German named Martin Luther was transfigured in the form of his African-American namesake in the 20th Century.

Meanwhile, dreams aside, I keep my eyes on the headlines. Last weekend, there were Nazi attacks on foreigners in three different cities in the new reunified German republic.