http://www.f-r.de/english/401/t401004.htm
'NEO-NAZISM IN GERMANY ALIVE AND KICKING'
Experts warn of right-wing revival in old east
By Bernhard Honnigfort
Weimar - Four weeks ago a flier was making the rounds in the East German town of Gera (in the province of Thuringia) - the right-wing 'Gera Brotherhood' was targetting youth education experts from the German Trades Unions' Association (DGB). Two weeks later they indirectly called on their supporters to assault a protestant vicar.
Then just three days ago, neo-Nazis carried out an attack on a Muslim house of prayer.
"It is high time something was done," said the chairman of the Gera DGB, Dietmar Haertel.
Right-wing extremism in Germany is not limited to these three incidents, nor to just one district. "I know what it's like when you drive home from a meeting late at night escorted by cars full of skinheads," says Haertel. The trades unionist is by no means an isolated example.
According to the Berlin political scientist Richard Stoess, from Gera in the east to the Hamburg suburb of Elmshorn in the west (where other trades unionists have likewise been the target of neo-Nazi harrassment), right-wing extremism in Germany is "alive and kicking." At a meeting of the Thuringia State Centre for Political Education in the city of Weimar on Wednesday, Stoess warned against the popluar misconception that right-wing groups' poor showing in both local and national elections indicates the curse of right-wing extremists had been banished.
A poll conducted in autumn 1998 showed that 14 per cent of all adult Germans had "extreme right-wing leanings" - 13 per cent in the old west and 17 per cent in former East Germany.
Although "Wessis", a nickname for inhabitants of the former West Germany, were obviously not "immune" to right-wing radicalism, said Stoess, there were indeed discernible differences between the old and new states of the united Germany in this respect.
In the west, the radicals were organised into parties such as the DVU or the Republicans, he explained, whereas in the east, rightwingers were less organised but were more militant and inclined to violence.
Only 18 per cent of the German population lives in the east yet in 1998, half of all assaults by rightwingers were committed in the former communist part of the country. 43 per cent of all militant neo-Nazis live in the east.
Stoess cannot explain this geo-political divide and so far, attempts to analyse the phenomenon have produced nothing but vague supposition. He noted that in western Germany, in contrast to the east, there were very few examples of city districts or squares which rightwingers would describe as "nationally liberated zones".
In the east it was a very different scenario altogether. There, "liberated zones" were very common, he said, as were communities which served to reinforce some skinheads' beliefs that they were a force acting on behalf of the German people.
Stoess' research shows that a drastic change of political tack occured in the mid-nineties. Until 1994, right-wing extremists in western Germany had achieved better election results than their eastern German counterparts. Since 1998 this trend has been reversed.
"There has been a transfer from west to east," says Stoess.
He believes that until 1995 the eastern Germans were on the whole very optimistic but in the latter years of the decade some of them "broke away". Ten per cent of eastern Germans could now be said to have rejected the system. "That is an amazing statistic," he said.
Heinz-Gerd Jaschke, from the Berlin University for the Administration of Justice and Management, took the opportunity of the Weimar meeting to warn against the belief that right-wing parties and extremists could be brought under control by prohibitive legislation.
"The politics of abolition is purely symbolic and cannot solve real problems," he said, a reference to the banning of eleven groups in the aftermath of rioting and assaults in Hoyerswerda in the early nineties.