http://www.iht.com/IHT/TODAY/TUE/IN/guben.2.html
Paris, Tuesday, July 18, 2000 Riddle of East German Extremism Skinhead Violence Shows an Increase in Areas With Few Foreigners
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- By Carol J. Williams Los Angeles Times Service ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- GUBEN, Germany - This dreary industrial city was once as renowned for its namesake hats as Bad Homburg is, 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 rightist extremism has lately come in for fierce competition, with vicious attacks in city after city that have been chronicled in 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 former Communist East.
Here and throughout the Eastern regions, which have 18 percent unemployment and only half the per capita income of West Germans, sociologists attribute the growing intolerance to the stress and disruption of East Germans having seen their country, their ideology and their identity collapse with the Berlin Wall and dissolve with reunification.
Of the 1,500 incidents of racial, ethnic or religious intolerance recorded in Germany last year, half occurred in the Eastern states, although they make up only one-fifth of the population. That figure represents a 5 percent 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.
''Rightist extremists used to try to preserve their anonymity, but no longer,'' said Joachim Speichert, Guben's municipal youth and social affairs director. ''We know who the troublemakers are now, but that has done nothing to dissuade them. 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.''
Although Guben is now infamous for the killing of the Algerian asylum-seeker, 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, said Mr. Speichert, adding that the ''hard core'' willing to use violence numbered 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 reunification, but unemployment nonetheless afflicts a third of those remaining, Mr. Speichert said. ''These are the new Germany's forgotten people,'' he said. ''You have families where kids have no memory of their parents working.''
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,'' said 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 rightist extremism elsewhere doesn't provoke the fear it does in Germany.''
Sociologists point to the extreme changes that Easterners have undergone in the past decade, rather than economic conditions alone, in examining the rise in rightist violence.
''Hatred of foreigners among East 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,'' said Dietmar Sturzbecher, a Potsdam University professor who directs a study of youth problems for the state of Brandenburg, which includes Guben.
Under Communist rule, East Germans got none of the recovery assistance and re-education provided 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 on 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 sentiments appear to have little to do with fears that outsiders will take German jobs. Less than 2 percent of Eastern Germany's population is non-German, and most are asylum-seekers who are prohibited from working while their claims are being weighed.
''Most of these kids have had no personal contact with foreigners, but still they openly express resentment toward them,'' said Mr. 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.''
Neo-Nazi incidents afflict almost every town and village in Eastern Germany, with even the Brandenburg backwater of Angermuende, whose population is about 10,000, having suffered six episodes of rightist violence since the start of this year.
''This anti-foreigner sentiment makes no sense at all,'' said Angermuende'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.''
Several prominent German leaders have appealed lately for more determined action by the open-minded majority to halt the spread of the far right's message. Wolfgang Thierse, head of the federal Parliament, has called on fellow Easterners to ''show more civil courage.''
''We want to stop this,'' said Michael Skowasch, 19, a student from Angermuende.
''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. We can't be expected to act with a degree of courage we can't feel.''
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 agency reported that its operatives had uncovered weapons caches in recent raids on neo-Nazi strongholds, indicating plans for organized terrorist factions.
''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,'' said Mr. Speichert, expressing gratitude that no German politician on the far right had the charisma and oratorical skill of Joerg Haider of Austria's Freedom Party. ''But that is scant protection. A Haider could emerge here tomorrow.''