Germany Faces a Rising Tide of Intolerance

This dreary industrial city was once as renowned for its namesake hats as is Homburg, but nowadays its notoriety comes from a more disturbing cranial fashion. This is Germany’s skinhead capital, its center of neo-Nazi violence and nationalist hatred.

Ever since local thugs drove an Algerian asylum-seeker through a glass door last year and drank beer while he slowly bled to death in the stairwell, Guben has become the rallying point for fascist rabble and the focus of much soul-searching about disaffected youth and dysfunctional families.

Guben’s reputation as eastern Germany’s deepest wellspring of right-wing extremism lately has come in for fierce competition, with vicious attacks in city after city that have been chronicled in every gory detail by Germany’s ever-vigilant media. But the worst news is that statistics confirm what many in eastern Germany dismiss as an erroneous impression: that neo-Nazis are on the march in the depressed, formerly Communist east.

Here, and throughout the eastern regions that suffer 18% unemployment and have only half the per capita income of Germans in western areas, sociologists attribute the growing intolerance to the stress and disruption of former East Germans having seen their country, their ideology and their identity collapse with the Berlin Wall and dissolve with unification.

Of the 1,500 incidents of racial, ethnic or religious intolerance recorded in Germany last year, half occurred in the eastern states, whose residents make up only one-fifth of the population. That figure represents a 5% increase over 1998, but the more troubling trends are the perpetrators’ growing readiness to inflict bodily harm and their willingness to act in the open.

“Right-wing extremists used to try to preserve their anonymity but no longer. We know who the troublemakers are now, but that has done nothing to dissuade them,” says Joachim Speichert, Guben’s municipal youth and social affairs director. “The great majority of kids here are completely normal and don’t want to be lumped in with neo-Nazis, but the unfortunate thing is that they often are.”

Though now infamous for the killing of Algerian Farid Guendoul last year and shrill rallies of angry skinheads every few months, fewer than 150 of the 26,000 people in this city on the border with Poland identify with extremist factions, Speichert says, adding that the “hard-core” who are willing to use violence number no more than 30. But those who are not part of the problem say they are helpless to provide a solution.

A third of this city’s population has fled since unification, but unemployment nonetheless afflicts a third of those who stayed, Speichert says. “These are the new Germany’s forgotten people,” he says. “You have families where kids have no memory of their parents working.”

Foreigners Keep a Low Profile

But Germany’s past obliges it to address every vestige of hatred and intolerance to ensure that no regime like the Third Reich could ever again emerge here.

“Perhaps this is no more a problem here than in France or any other European country, but we have a history we must answer for,” says Ingo Ley, a heavily pierced and tattooed social worker deployed on Guben’s streets to infiltrate and influence the neo-Nazis. “No other country had Hitler, so right-wing extremism elsewhere doesn’t provoke the fear it does in Germany.”

Guben’s few foreign residents say they keep a low profile.

“I haven’t had any problems personally--maybe because I pay taxes. But I will never feel at home in Germany,” says Mahmut Aslan, a 22-year-old Kurd who has been here six years and runs a fast-food shop on the main street. “Guben is a place where outsiders are watched warily, maybe because it’s on the border.”

Sociologists point to the extreme changes that easterners have undergone in the last decade, rather than economic conditions alone, in examining the rise in right-wing violence.

“Hatred of foreigners among eastern German youths has little to do with their parents’ educational level or employment situation because it is also inexplicably high among families that are not in economic crisis,” says Dietmar Sturzbecher, a Potsdam University professor who directs an ongoing study of youth problems for the state of Brandenburg, which includes Guben.

East Germans received none of post-World War II recovery assistance and reeducation given to West Germans through the Marshall Plan, leaving successive generations unmoved by any guilt or sense of collective responsibility for Nazi crimes. One-party rule by the left stifled any dialogue concerning nationalist feelings, and enforced sharing of the socialist wealth saw much of East Germany’s best production shipped off to the Soviet Union or other ideological allies.

Anti-foreigner sentiment appears to have little to do with fears that outsiders will take German jobs. Less than 2% of eastern Germany’s population is non-German, and most are asylum-seekers who are prohibited from working while their claims are being considered.

“Most of these kids have had no personal contact with foreigners, but still they openly express resentment toward them,” says Sturzbecher, whose research shows that nearly one-fourth of eastern youths express resentment of non-Germans. “This results from our having focused too long on preaching against the ethical and moral aspects of foreigner hatred instead of recognizing that it is a problem and dealing with it.”

The annual report on right-wing extremism released in May by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which includes domestic intelligence, estimates that there are about 9,000 neo-Nazis in the country: They are mostly in the east but also include alienated youths from western Germany’s struggling blue-collar cities. In regions such as the Ruhr River valley, where thousands of miners and heavy-industry workers have long languished on the dole, Turks and other “guest workers” who provide the bulk of services have become scapegoats.

Guben has emerged as a skinhead flash point because of its post-World War II division, when peace treaties awarded the more prosperous half of the city east of the Oder River to Poland. With the fall of the Iron Curtain and Poland’s economic rapprochement with former enemies in Germany, some Guben residents whose families lost farms, homes and businesses in the division now see their property as having been purloined by the Poles.

Violence Touches Almost Every Town

Visa-free border crossings are allowed over a footbridge connecting this city center with its severed twin on the Polish side, Gubin, but the daily commerce has done little to unite the populations.

Neo-Nazi incidents afflict almost every town and village in eastern Germany, with even the Brandenburg backwater of Angermunde, population less than 10,000, having suffered six episodes of right-wing violence this year alone.

“This anti-foreigner sentiment makes no sense at all,” observes Angermunde’s baffled mayor, Wolfgang Krakow. “There are hardly any foreigners here, and the only ones we see are the Poles who are providing people here with the chance to buy cheap liquor and cigarettes.”

Journalist Sabine Erdmann echoes others with an eye on the rising hostilities in the east, warning that the right wing is venting against a widening circle of enemies.

“It’s not just against foreigners. It’s against those on the left, against the rich, against anyone who has done a little better for himself,” says Erdmann, a writer for the newspaper Maerkische Ortszeitung. “Kids hear the complaints of their parents at home and transmit them through the schools. That is where the intolerance is growing, which makes it all the more frightening.”

Several prominent German leaders lately have appealed for more determined action by the open-minded majority to halt the spread of the far right’s poisonous message. Wolfgang Thierse, head of the federal Parliament, has called on fellow easterners “to show more civil courage.”

“We want to stop this. We would like to challenge the neo-Nazis who are giving our cities a bad image. But it’s dangerous. We have to be reasonable and heed our fears in the presence of a right that is so dominant and aggressive,” says Angermunde student Michael Skowasch, 19. “We can’t be expected to act with a degree of courage we can’t feel.”

Stephanie Prean, 15, says good kids are afraid to walk the streets of eastern towns and cities after nightfall for fear of taunts and hounding by the neo-Nazis.

Researcher Sturzbecher claims that he detects, among the moderate majority, increasing impatience with the far right’s tainting of the east’s image. He applauds the sentiment as a hopeful sign that the mainstream might be gearing up for more effective involvement in the issue.

“It has to come from the grass roots,” he says. “It’s not a problem the police or the government can solve.”

Some fear a looming clash between the skinheads and the small numbers determined to take back their streets. Those concerns were given weight last month when the constitutional protection office reported that it had uncovered weapons caches in raids on neo-Nazis, indicating plans for organized terror.

“What has saved us from a convergence of these fringe groups and the broader anti-foreigner sentiment is the absence of any leader who could unite what are very fractured forces,” says Speichert, expressing gratitude that no German politician on the far right has the charisma and oratory skills of Joerg Haider, the founder of Austria’s Freedom Party. “But that is scant protection. A Haider could emerge here tomorrow.”