Profile : Tireless German Champions Unpopular Cause: Foreigners : She has critics. But she insists, “The most important thing is to stand tall and not do what other people say.”

Cornelia Schmalz-Jacobsen was just a young girl in Nazi Germany, but the lessons she learned are guiding her work half a century later.

As a child in war-torn Berlin, she watched her parents rescue hundreds of Jews from the Nazi extermination machine, concealing them from authorities and ultimately helping many flee across the border with false papers.

Today, as the official advocate for Germany’s 6.5 million foreign residents, Schmalz-Jacobsen champions an unpopular cause in a country fed up with immigrants and searching for someone to blame.

“My parents showed me that you can live with ideas that are not in the mainstream,” she said from her Spartan office on the outskirts of town. “The most important thing is to stand tall and not do what other people say.”

A former opera student, journalist, Munich city councilwoman and influential political party official, Schmalz-Jacobsen, 58, now carries the awkward title of Federal Government Representative for the Interests of Foreigners.

The non-paying post makes her an adviser to Chancellor Helmut Kohl and gives her a highly visible platform to promote the rights of immigrants, asylum seekers, guest workers and other foreign residents, who account for about 8% of Germany’s population.

She is the third such representative since the tiny office was created in 1978, but her tenure comes at an extraordinary juncture for foreigners who have settled here. Since unification three years ago, there has been a meteoric rise in right-wing extremism, with anti-foreign sentiment--and deadly violence--at its core.

“I was raised with the idea that diversity was something positive, something beautiful,” Schmalz-Jacobsen told listeners on a recent radio talk show, recalling her parents’ open-door policy when she was a child in Berlin. “We must live more openly and with greater tolerance for how different people live.”

While her mother and father have been honored for their wartime heroism--both were declared Righteous Gentiles by the Israeli government--Schmalz-Jacobsen’s struggle with current-day German intolerance has garnered more mixed reviews and results.

Widely respected for her eloquence, dedication and indefatigable approach to problems confronting foreigners, she has also been vilified by critics who regard her mission as unpatriotic and subversive. Angry nationalists accuse her of diluting the German identity by advocating that naturalization rules be relaxed and that German-born children of foreign residents be granted automatic citizenship.

She has also been criticized, especially from within her own ruling coalition, for controversial proposals about dual citizenship. Fearful that a growing percentage of the country’s population is being denied democratic rights, she would do away with a longstanding prohibition on foreign residents holding two citizenships.

“This would raise all sorts of questions about loyalty,” said one government official opposed to the plan. “You cannot serve two masters.”

The restriction on dual citizenship rarely applies to people of German ancestry living abroad, since under German law descent “by blood”--not by place of birth--defines who is German. Schmalz-Jacobsen insists that the requirement is discriminatory and casts foreigners--many of whom have been born and raised in Germany--as second-class citizens.

“Many of our problems with immigrants today would not have arisen if we had allowed people who formed an integral part of our population to become Germans,” she lectured.

Experts say the change would be dramatic, opening the floodgates to citizenship applications from the country’s large Turkish community, many of whom were recruited to work in Germany in the 1960s and have no intention of returning to Turkey. Under the current system, few Turks become German citizens because of the arduous application process and their unwillingness to relinquish their native passports, which entitle them to inheritances and other benefits.

Schmalz-Jacobsen, stern faced and professorial, said opposition to her plan is rooted in a deep crisis of confidence among Germans, who for decades have been reluctant to express pride in their country for fears of comparisons to the Nazi past. Now, she said, they cannot understand why outsiders would choose to become German.

“We have difficulties with pride, and this is no small wonder, but somehow we have to come to grips with our own identity,” she said. “Why can’t we be proud of the fact that we have become a goal, that people want to become Germans, whether it’s for political reasons or economic ones.”

Despite such strong convictions, even supporters publicly bemoan the advisory nature of her post, complaining that she has little influence with Kohl and other members of his Christian Democratic Union Party. She belongs to the small Free Democratic Party--the junior member in Kohl’s governing coalition, and she does not enjoy Cabinet-level standing. Her predecessor, who was also a Free Democrat, quit the job two years ago, complaining that no one would listen to her.

In one of her most visible setbacks, Schmalz-Jacobsen was powerless last spring to stop passage of a divisive new asylum law that slammed shut the door on most refugees. It ended Europe’s most generous asylum policy, adopted four decades ago to atone for the crimes of the Third Reich but viewed today as a costly ticket for freeloaders from abroad.

“Her position is not strong enough,” said Herbert Leuniger of Pro Asyl, an immigrants rights group based in Frankfurt. “It is not her fault, but we need a ministry for immigration issues.”

Schmalz-Jacobsen acknowledges the frustrations of her job, particularly since it carries no authority to introduce legislation or even demand a Cabinet hearing. She has been able to sidestep some obstacles only by virtue of her unusual double role in Bonn: She is also an elected member of the Bundestag, the lower house of Parliament, which gives her privileges not formally associated with her foreigners post.

The awkward status of her position has forced her to go directly to the public with her ideas, appearing on radio talk shows and television newscasts, writing newspaper commentaries and making personal appearances across Germany and around the world.

But her public crusade has not always made her popular with her coalition partners, who are clearly uncomfortable with the volatile issue of foreigners’ rights with an election year approaching.

After calling a press conference to unveil a new citizenship proposal last February, Schmalz-Jacobsen was unceremoniously summoned into the office of a prominent Cabinet minister, who made it clear that her suggestions were not appreciated. Indeed, many of her ideas have been more warmly received by the opposition Social Democrats--a predicament she acknowledges with some embarrassment but tactfully prefers not to elaborate upon.

As evidence of her sometimes contentious public persona, Schmalz-Jacobsen offers sheaves of hate mail, including numerous threats on her life, some in unnerving detail. She confesses that it is sometimes difficult to dismiss the correspondence out of hand, but she refuses to be paralyzed by it.

“Every time I am on TV, it gives people ideas, and they write hateful letters,” she said. “In their eyes, I am foreign too because I try to help foreigners.”

In her quest to learn something from everything, she saves the letters in large sacks she calls “poison envelopes” and ships them to a university in Berlin, where they are being analyzed by the psychology department.

“After a while I stopped throwing them in the waste basket because I think it’s worth knowing that such things exist,” she explained.

Divorced twice and the mother of three grown children, Schmalz-Jacobsen works long hours at her two jobs. In addition to attacks on her policies, she is occasionally criticized in the media for allegedly being too cool and distant, or for being overly concerned with her appearance.

But when the pressure gets great or the criticism particularly hurtful, she need only look to her parents--particularly her mother--as a source of strength. Even though both are dead, she still views them as her “shining example” of how to lead a good life, she said.

An agricultural specialist, her father had been assigned by the military during World War II to run a large Polish farm, where food was raised for the German Army on the Eastern front. It was there that he helped Jewish workers, hiding them in farm dormitories and eventually removing their names from the official roster so they could escape unharmed.

Her father sent some of the Jewish women to Berlin, where her mother looked after them and helped them find household work. One of the women she sheltered was having an affair with Schmalz-Jacobsen’s father, but her mother protected the woman nonetheless.

“She told the girl, ‘Look here, I know what’s going on. Don’t be afraid. I don’t like it, but you are safe here,’ ” Schmalz-Jacobsen recalled. After the war, her father divorced her mother and moved to the United States, where he married the woman.

“My mother never did forgive them. But she wouldn’t allow somebody to be killed. She was a very strong woman. I think that’s tremendous.”

Biography

* Name: Cornelia Schmalz-Jacobsen

* Title: Federal Government Representative for the Interests of Foreigners.

* Age: 58

* Personal: Daughter of couple who rescued hundreds of Jews from Nazi extermination. Former opera student, journalist, Munich city councilwoman and influential official of the Free Democratic Party. Divorced twice. Mother of three grown children.

* Quote: “I was raised with the idea that diversity was something positive, something beautiful.”