Arson Attacks on Foreigners No Longer Big News in Germany : Media: The incidents have become so common that only those involving fatalities rate headlines.

If mentioned at all, they are usually the last item on the evening news and pass with about as much impact as the weather report that follows.

They are the arson attacks against foreigners--a phenomenon virtually unheard of in the years before unification but one that has become part of life’s background noise in democratic, reunited Germany.

Since the deaths last May of three Turkish girls and two women when their home in the western city of Solingen was set on fire, the domestic news agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA) has reported 28 similar attacks throughout the country.

The only difference in the 28 incidents is that no one died.

In the most recent of these, a Lebanese family was burned out of its home last Sunday in the small town of Herzogenrath near the Dutch border. Five family members were treated for burns in a local hospital, then released.

The attack rated six sentences on the DPA domestic news wire, plus a brief mention on one of the country’s two national television networks’ main evening newscasts.

“There’s a fatigue effect, much like Bosnia,” said one of the agency’s senior domestic news editors, Kristina Freitag. “These things are terrible, but they’ve become routine.”

To be sure, when foreigners die in such attacks--as they did in Solingen and last November in the northern town of Moelln--the issues of xenophobia and the need to control a violent, extremist right are catapulted into the political limelight.

But between such dramatic occurrences, the problem smolders largely unnoticed.

For the month of May, in addition to Solingen itself, official figures show 96 people were injured in attacks by right-wing extremists.

Occasionally, the government moves against right-wing groups.

Thursday, police in six German states raided the homes of members of the neo-Nazi group Deutsche Alternative, an organization formally banned last December.

On the same day, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Authorities also launched proceedings against 14 people for producing and selling extremist literature that promoted anti-Semitic and racist ideas.

But organized groups with money do not make up the heart of Germany’s problem of violence against foreigners.

Although these groups help create a broader atmosphere in which xenophobia can survive, the disorganized, spontaneous nature of Germany’s violent right makes it an elusive target for authorities to confront.

A report on right-wing extremism published recently by the Saxony state government sketches a portrait of violence against foreigners that tends to begin spontaneously, usually among teen-age males who, after having been drinking, search for a target in their own area.

According to the report:

* All but 55 of the 1,244 suspected of involvement in right-wing hate crimes during the past two years were male.

* Two-thirds of all suspects were younger than 18.

* Nearly half had been drinking before taking part in the crime.

* Nine of every 10 crimes occurred less than 12 miles from the suspects’ homes.

* Only one in five suspects was jobless or had dropped out of school.

* Less than 2% had more than a 10th-grade education.

* Four out of five were first-time offenders.

* Fewer than three in 10 expressed any firm rightist ideological sentiments.

“That most of the youthful suspects are not just dropouts, people on the social fringes or occasional extremist skinheads, but come from the middle of our society will have to be considered in plotting our future strategy,” said Saxony’s Interior Minister Heinz Eggert in presenting the report.

The youthful nature of the criminals presents its own problems for law enforcement authorities trying to infiltrate the milieu that spawns much of the extremist violence.

In the state of Lower Saxony, for example, a federal law officer complained to a German reporter that there were no trained agents young enough to slip into the rightist, skinhead scene--and even if there were, German law forbids agents to speak to anyone younger than 18 without first obtaining parental permission.

One of those arrested for the Solingen attack was 16.