Germany

...Anarcho-Nazis do not coordinate their actions according to any overarching strategic plan...

...Skins get soused, listen to racist "Oi" rock and taped Hitler speeches, and hunt down or burn up foreigners in an alcoholic haze...

...These circles aspire to a renewed tradition of German hegemony in Central Europe...

...Perhaps more disconcerting is a recent poll that revealed that 7 percent of the population is skeptical that either of the two major parties can solve "political problems in Germany...

...Jurgen Habermas fears that since 1989 conservative intellectuals have "celebrated a 'departure' from the old Federal Republic...

...The wave of violence has also severely damaged relations with Turkey, already strained last year when the use of German arms shipments against unarmed Kurdish demonstrators caused a major political scandal and the resignation of Germany's armaments minister...

...El 418 • DISSENT...

...Hundreds of hate crimes have been reported since the Solingen murders, and for the first time, Turkish residents rioted...

...The contrast with President Richard Von Weizsacker, who told a memorial service in Cologne that the murders of MOlln and Solingen are not "unconnected, isolated outrages," but are the product of "a climate created by right-wing extremism," could not be more conspicuous...

...The wreath-laying at Bitburg showed the world that Kohl is a consummate master of what might be called symbolic dissonance: the coded message in the political gesture totally overshadows and negates the countereffect of manifestly rightthinking public discourse...

...And even those words were calculated to underscore their "foreign" status, including that of children born in Germany...

...Kohl also came close to excusing the attacks by claiming they were motivated by the plight of "asocial" youths, who, he said, exist everywhere...

...One barrier to the success of any change in the citizenship law is the widely held perception that unlike other "European" minorities, Turks intransigently resist cultural integration, and as Muslims are "the most foreign of the foreigners...

...To be sure, Social Democratic party (SPD) voters are more strongly behind this idea, but even conservative voters are evenly divided...

...The newsweekly Der Spiegel, in a cover story following the Solingen murders, proclaimed that "the German Turks are a showcase for miscarried—because it was never desired—integration...

...Most important, such a revision would redefine what it means to be a "German...

...In June, Turkish headlines asked "whether the German people will bathe the world in fire and blood for the third time in this century...

...The threat to democracy comes more from the challenge that xenophobia poses for German national identity...

...He foresees a growing polarization between those who date the important caesura as the Federal Republic's pro-Western, anti-nationalist, and democratic identity after 1945, and those who consider 1989 as a decisive turn toward "secret fantasies of the new/old European great power Germany...

...A unified Germany would officially include diversity, and many Germans are not ready to unmake the traditional nation-state ideal that they feel was denied to them until only yesterday...

...In the town of Aschaffenburg, Turkish youths reacted with a violent attack on the political headquarters of the Christian Social Union...

...Naturally, any alteration in the German law would also entail significant changes in voting patterns, probably in favor of the Social Democrats...

...Nightly arson attacks have become epidemic, and neo-Nazi skinheads bolder and more lethal...

...For this reason, the upcoming debate about German citizenship promises to further dramatize the core question of what it means to be German today—after 1989, and a half-century after 1945...

...They must petition for asylum status before entering the country, and they can now be (and already are) refused entry at borders and airports...

...For critics like Augstein, cultural "integration" is equated with "assimilation" rather than political equality...

...This past spring all three major parties collaborated on a series of amendments that in effect dismantled the constitutional guarantee of right of asylum (Paragraph 16...

...Since the end of May strong appeals have been issued from all parties to alter Germany's 1913 ethnic citizenship law written at the high tide of pre-World War I nationalism (see Dissent, Spring 1992...

...Still unclear is whether this would also mean granting citizenship retroactively to everyone born in Germany, which would automatically encompass several generations still classified as foreigners...

...Social distinctions among Turkish Germans have widened...

...Both the liberal Free Democratic party (FDP) and the Social Democrats have already proposed new draft legislation...

...Nor has Kohl taken the key step to accepting a change from current racial definition of citizenship jus sanguinis (literally blood law) to the territorial jus soli accepted by most Western nations...

...Only six months later, in the wake of the arson that left five women burned to death on May 29 in Solingen, a prosperous West German industrial town, such optimism is as scarce as a lone foreigner on most German streets after dark...

...Claus Leggewie, a Giessen political scientist, fears that "the more they feel themselves rejected by the Germans, the better the prospects for nationalist and Islamic Fundamentalists who reject every kind of integration...

...Kohl himself told parliament in early June that he would approve a change provided that acceptance or rejection of German citizenship came after a five-year period in which dual status is permitted...

...This time, however, foreign reaction was so negative, especially in the Turkish press, that Kohl and other leading politicians quickly reversed course...

...Yet cultural assimilation is greatly inhibited by the absence of civil rights...

...Alongside those who favor adaptation and integration, there is also a marked revival of Islamic fundamentalism evident in radical anti-Western groups like the "Party of God...

...Politicians focused not on the violence and the skinhead milieu, but on panicky scenarios of Germany being "flooded" by impoverished minorities abusing Germany's liberal asylum law as a pretext for immigration...

...The specter of Los Angeles on the Ruhr haunts Germany...

...No law prevents discrimination in housing or employment...

...The ruthlessness of the M011n and Solingen assaults, and the nightly arson attempts that followed, demonstrate that the patent failure of politicians to set reasonable goals for immigration (Germany has no statutory immigration law) or to extend citizenship to foreign residents was nothing short of disastrous...

...Most are under eighteen, and only a few (including one twentythreeyear-old arrested for the Solingen murders) are connected to far-right organizations...

...Among the 1.8 million Turkish-Germans there is a wide spectrum of attitudes towards integration, especially among those born in Germany...

...According to Der Spiegel, the number of Turkish-owned businesses has increased to thirty-five thousand, and employment in the upper ranges of the labor market is impressive...

...Though poverty still exists among recent arrivals, the days of the "gastarbeiter" (guest workers) at the bottom of the social ladder are in the past...

...Parliament placed harsh restrictions on applicants, who must come from countries specifically designated as persecutory...

...Rudolf Augstein, the magazine's editor, rejects dual citizenship as a "magical cure" and insists that Turks should either become Germans or remain Turkish...

...The foreign press was quick to point out the obvious discrepancy between pious statements of regret and the constitutional curbs on asylum voted by the German parliament...

...A solid majority of Germans believe that foreigners should be given the right to vote in municipal elections and, surprisingly, most now also support the granting of dual citizenship...

...Studies show that many first- and second-generation young people would opt for dual citizenship, even if it meant incurring anger from their tradition-bound parents...

...Helmut Kohl's refusal to attend the funeral of the Solingen victims in Turkey spoke more loudly than his banalities about Germany remaining a land that is "open, hospitable, and above all friendly to foreigners...

...No one can say for certain if the new law, ratified only days earlier, sparked the new wave of violence...

...Nor is there any guarantee that such a reversal in self-identity would curtail rather than encourage the racist fringe...

...Membership in "organized" far-right extremist groups is estimated at sixty-five thousand and sympathy for the violence does not seem to be increasing...

...Modern nationhood, however, does not require a standardization of beliefs, attitudes, and literary references...

...But the rare unity shown by the three major parties in exclusively curbing asylum seekers while ignoring the issues of citizenship and civil rights of foreigners living in Germany made clear to even the dumbest skinhead that politicians were bowing to antiforeigner sentiment...

...The cool reaction of the "political class" to the steadily escalating antiforeigner violence since the 416 • DISSENT Politics Abroad first attack on a hostel in Hoyerswerda in September 1991 sent the message that there would be no massive police intervention as was used against the "Red Army" terrorists in the late 1970s...

...Younger people seem especially torn between the moral commitments that many Germans self-consciously adopted after the collapse of Nazism, and the climate of ethnic particularism and national self-assertion evident throughout Europe...

...Yet if Turks remain "foreign until now," the causes lie as much in political as in cultural attitudes...

...Even with these constraints, the Turkish minority in Germany has demonstrated remarkable economic success, and in some respects is typical of West Germany's postwar ethos with its exaggerated emphasis on family ties and work as laudable virtues...

...Augstein's definition of citizenship recapitulates the nineteenth-century ideal of the "cultural nation" with its homogeneous linguistic and historical traditions...

...Such pessimistic progFALL • 1993 • 417 Politics Abroad noses are self-serving and self-fulfilling...

...Although some have lived in Germany all their lives, foreigners still cannot vote or hold civil service positions—including teaching, police, sanitation, or postal jobs...

...Demonstrations and candlelight marches of hundreds of thousands against racism and xenophobia seemed to prove that Germans overwhelmingly reject neo-Nazi violence and far-right appeals to racial hatred...

...Despite its savagery, contemporary neo-Nazism remains a marginal phenomenon...