A-Infos (en) Neo-Nazis Carving Out Fiefs in Eastern Germany

[Tom Burghardt <tburghardt@igc.apc.org>]

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     NEO-NAZIS CARVING OUT FIEFS IN EASTERN GERMANY
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     The New York Times
     February 8, 1998
     http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/world/
 
     By ALAN COWELL
 
     ANGERMUENDE, Germany -- The football-sized rocks crashed
through the window of Holger Zschoge's ground-floor apartment on
the night of Jan. 30 while he was sleeping.
     
     The next day, the youth club he supervises for teen-agers
who oppose neo-Nazism was firebombed. A few days earlier,
authorities tore down a wooden hut alongside a sports field here
because it had been used as a secret meeting place for young
rightists, complete with swastikas and banners emblazoned with
the runes of Nordic myth.
     
     Not surprisingly, Zschoge, a 35-year-old schoolteacher, has
come to conclude that right-wing extremists from this small,
bleak town in eastern Germany are mobilizing for an onslaught on
people like him from what Germans call the "alternative scene" --
a loose and ill-defined coalition of leftists, foreigners and
others who view themselves as apart from German norms.
     
     Increasingly, though, Zschoge is not alone in his analysis.
Across the former East Germany, sociologists, politicians and
local residents say, a neo-Nazi wave is building on the spoiled
hopes of Germany's unification, drawing as much on nostalgia for
the clear-cut conformism of Communist dictatorship as on the
equally unambiguous nationalism and racial exclusivism of Nazism.
     
     Styling themselves, moreover, as freedom fighters --
paradoxically in the tradition of leftist guerrilla warfare --
young neo-Nazis are seeking to establish what they call "national
liberated zones," drawing their tactics from a five-page
manifesto that circulates on the neo-Nazi Thule Net computer
site.
     
     "We must create the space in which we exercise real power,
in which we are capable of imposing sanctions -- that is, we
punish deviants and enemies, we support comrades in the struggle,
we help fellow citizens who are oppressed, marginalized and
persecuted," the manifesto declares.
     
     Of 6,400 violence-prone neo-Nazis estimated to be in
Germany, according to Interior Ministry statistics, 3,700 -- more
than half -- live in eastern Germany. In the first six months of
1997, moreover, the police recorded 4,829 crimes committed by
neo-Nazis -- 353 of them involving violent attacks. Just over
half the attacks on foreigners were in the former East Germany,
according to these figures, despite the much smaller eastern
population of 17 million and the much smaller proportion of
foreigners there.
     
     Predominantly in their teens, though some are even younger,
these jobless or school-age skinheads boast their own emblems
like shaven heads and paratroop boots, and even their own heavy
rock music. Drawn largely from the huge, anonymous housing
projects of the old East Germany, many espouse the anti-American
views expressed in songs like that of one rightist rock-band
called Tonstoerung, meaning "sound-jamming": "USA, we don't want
you/USA, we don't need you here."
     
     After 65 years of dictatorship -- first under Hitler, then
under the Communists -- and after more than seven years of
widespread disillusion with the fruits of reunification, social
workers say, extremist, right-wing ideology offers young people a
nationalistic vision of superiority that translates frequently
into violence.
     
     And, they say, at a time when teen-age violence is rising in
many parts of Europe, this new ground swell of neo-Nazism is
markedly different from the wave of extremist arson attacks on
foreigners that marked the first three years of unification.
Then, rightist rage was directed primarily against the Turks and
other foreigners who make up 9 percent of Germany's 82 million
population.
     
     Now, the drive for so-called liberated zones divides towns
like this into rival fiefs of left and right.
 
     The railroad station here, for instance, is considered
off-limits by many of those who frequent the Alternative
Literature and Info Cafe -- the youth club Zschoge set up four
years ago in a low building adorned with Che Guevara and
anti-Nazi murals. Intended as refuge from neo-Nazism, it is now
virtually a bunker with boarded-up windows covered in steel mesh
to shield against firebombs and with an iron grille over the
door.
     
     "There are situations to avoid," said Nicole, an 18-year-old
high-school student who declined to give her full name. Even
among her school classmates, she said, "The right is in the
majority." Some young leftists and local journalists say they
believe tacit support for the rightists spreads into more
official strata. When the cafe was firebombed, the police did not
even open a docket to investigate the incident.
     
     "We certainly avoid the railroad station," said another
18-year-old, willing to be identified only as Stefan. The reasons
are clear: last November, for instance, a 16-year-old girl was
beaten to the ground by five other young women who ended their
attack by stubbing a lighted cigarette in her face, residents
said.
     
     "What is happening here is unfortunately nothing unusual,"
said Annegret Klatt, a police spokeswoman. Another police
official said this town was like many others in the surrounding
state of Brandenburg. "There is not a single town that doesn't
have swastikas turning up or a banner being seized." the official
said.
     
     With a national election looming in September, it might be
thought the neo-Nazi wave in eastern Germany should be causing
some concern to the politicians in Bonn. In some eastern states,
notably Saxony and Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, the right-wing
National Democratic Party says it is recording its fastest
growth. And in towns like this, where a Soviet war memorial
offers a reminder of the old socialist days of artificial full
employment before unification in 1990 wrought 25 percent
joblessness -- twice the national average of 12.6 -- the seeds of
discontent are all too visible.
     
     "People have discovered an identity as nationalists because
there's nothing left of their old identity except that they are
Germans," said Anetta Kahane, from a state-financed organization
that seeks to help foreigners cope with racism. Thus, while
rightists regard themselves as repositories of those same values
claimed by Hitler -- industriousness, cleanliness and racial
superiority -- the left and foreigners are called parasites who
feed on the Aryan Volk: "Zecke Verrecke" -- death to the ticks --
has become the rightist battle cry.
     
     Unlike young people in western Germany, whose education
drums home an anti-Nazi message, moreover, young easterners are
more conditioned by the old East German propaganda that denied
historical responsibility for the Third Reich. "That means there
are fewer inhibitions" about espousing the neo-Nazi cause, Ms.
Kahane said. Not only that, Germany's prohibition of Nazi emblems
and propaganda make the extreme right a natural focus of revolt.
Even in the former East Germany, said Ms. Kahane, herself an
easterner from the small population of Jews there, rebellious
teen-agers adopted neo-Nazi totems.
     
     The mass unemployment that followed the dismantling of the
East German economy means that some young people have come to
associate the arrival of Western values with disgruntled, jobless
parents and a society that is going nowhere. And 40 years of
Communist dictatorship created a conformist society ill-equipped
to deal with new challenges.
     
     "In the West there is an important layer of society who
would say they were against this," said Zschoge, referring to
neo-Nazism. "That layer is missing here."
     
     Indeed, said Stefan Graubner, a social worker in Eberswalde,
12 miles west of here: "There is no parental image of how to
succeed. People know at 18 that they won't make it."
     
     Goetz Aly, a prominent historian of the Nazi era, wrote
recently in the Berliner Zeitung that opinion surveys indicated
that 80 percent of eastern Germans opposed the presence of
foreigners in their land -- even though the proportion of
non-Germans in eastern Germany is around 1.8 percent, far lower
than the national average of 9 percent. Echoing Maoist theory of
guerrilla warfare, he wrote that, "The radicalized right-wing
fish frolic in the warm waters of open or shamefully hidden broad
public approval."
     
     Such assessments do not, however, seem to have intruded onto
the agenda of the politicians in Bonn, where the euphoria of
German unification that once won Chancellor Helmut Kohl vigorous
support has dissolved into a long-haul, unwelcome slog through
impenetrable difficulties that few in the West anticipated,
neo-Nazism included. Neither government nor the opposition has
made neo-Nazism an issue for the September election.
     
     "They think that if they deny it for long enough, it will go
away," Ms. Kahane said.
 
     Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
 
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