Compassion vs. Nationalism in Germany

...The Serbs we met all had pistols...

...Paul Oppenheimer, poet-in-residence and professor of comparative medieval literature and English at the City College of the City University of New York, is currently a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Germany...

...Such problems would be a bruising test for any democracy...

...Smartish boutiques and 16th-century timbered houses in the old quarter, restored years ago from World War II air raids, suggest a commercial rakishness...

...The world-famous antimilitarist novelist Erich Maria Remarque was born here, a fact many are proud of...

...The Northwestern town, too—which has its own occasional problems with neo-Nazi criminal attacks—hardly seems the place one would find today's war-battered victims...

...Their "arrival," a far more complex affair than the assimilation of East Germans fleeing the Communist regime in years gone by, has come amid a bitter western German recession that has closed factories, escalated unemployment and grimly increased the number of homeless across the country (estimates run as high as 800,000...

...Ranging from 10 to 13 years old, they fled with surviving family members after being blasted from their villages by Serbian artillery...

...I had Serbian friends...

...We [she, her sister, her uncle, and her aunt...

...There are now 6.5 million de facto immigrants among its 80 million people...

...Attacks on refugee homes and the homes of Gastarbeiter are frequent in both western and eastern sections of the country...

...In fact, my nationality is still a problem...

...As of mid-January, the Federal and local police had recorded a total of over 19,000 neo-Nazi criminal acts of all kinds dating from reunification, including at least 30 murders, assaults, arson, desecrations of Jewish cemeteries, and other types of vandalism...

...Still terrified, she had fled with her mother and brother just six weeks ago...

...But those living in the East had no time at all...

...Then we escaped by car to Kosovo, to my uncle...

...For me, German culture is only one among many, and it is important to teach respect for other cultures as well...

...The guns, one realizes as one meets these children, have represented more than Serbian terror for the sake of conquest...

...Serbian nationalism, whose traumatic effects Anke Fedrowitz and Karl Kassenbrock battle daily, preens itself less as a patriotic movement than a game of brutal power politics and group superiority...

...In a recent interview with one of the chief Norwegian negotiators of the Declaration of Principles on Palestinian Self-Government signed in Washington by Israel and the PLO, I asked whether peace could soon be expected in Bosnia...

...I could hear the shooting...

...This policy has drastically reduced the number of newcomers, and there are signs that further measures may be taken against immigrants already here...

...This applies whether the applicant lives on German soil or not, and with the crumbling of the Soviet Union has led to a flood of often scorned Russian asylum-seekers...

...One group sets fires while the other holds candles...

...Professionals like Anke and Karl are treating the victims of a foreign nationalism while their country confronts a growing infatuation with the same toxic passion...

...They do not really understand what has happened to them...

...Maybe someday things will get better," she says...

...Many abused women, unable to go on, commit suicide in the combat zones or even in the refugee camps, where as outcasts they become easy prey in an atmosphere of lawlessness...

...They actually said, in Bosnian, 'Your mon-ey or your life.' We pretended that we didn't understand them, but they took our money anyway...

...Here they have found an atmosphere of trust—and they know that I know their parents...

...Karl Kassenbrock is another teacher of German, at nearby Camp Lagerfeld, where up to 700 Bosnian refugees at a time have been housed in extremely cramped quarters...

...The crippling reality is that with reunification the Germans have not so much crossed borders as watched while borders crossed them...

...We were shooting at them...

...They feel a tremendous hatred for the Serbs," says Anke...

...She is shyly pretty and says little...

...This year will also mark the 200th anniversary of the death of another famous Osnabrucker, the jurist and historian Justus Moser, who championed the legitimacy of the views of individuals and ordinary people in the 18th century, and whom Goethe praised as "incomparable...

...Nowadays she works chiefly with two new immigrant groups: Russian children of German descent, who are permitted to claim German citizenship, and the Bosnian victims of nationalistic-religious rage...

...Ironically, the massive, tawny buildings that today serve as a place of immigrant rehabilitation once billeted Prussian Army soldiers, then functioned as a Nazi military base...

...I myself come from a [postwar] generation that faced difficult problems simply because of its nationality," she says...

...The Muslim children find it inexplicable that the people they had known all their lives could come after them with guns...

...The men who came along lay on the floor...

...As Bade comments, they themselves became the tests...

...After the bus, we walked almost 20 miles...

...In part this is because, more than ever in modern times, Germany has become a nation of intermingling cultures...

...Thus current economic and political troubles, along with the nightmares of the Bosnian children, hide behind a precarious affluence and sophistication...

...At a time when recently reunited Germany makes the front pages for nationalistic skinhead and neo-Nazi violence, this is an equally important story about its people...

...To be sure, the 64 million people living in the West had 45 years to recover from the War and, in some sense, prepare...

...During a debate on the rights of political asylum-seekers, held at Osnabruck University on January 26, Bade remarked that with the killings of three Turkish-German residents in the neo-Nazi arson attack at Molln, "a shock went through the Republic...

...There is little about the school Anke teaches in to indicate its unusual mission...

...I went home...

...Either that, or they have looked on in frequent distaste as borders cunningly moved away to scoop up lots of funny-thinking strangers from the East, most of whom knew precious little about democracy...

...Germany begins to look like a nation of pyromaniacs," he quoted an observer as saying...

...Unlike Bosnian Muslims and the traumatized Muslim war-children of Osnabruck, the Croats do not qualify as genuine victims of political and religious oppression...

...The war in Bos-nia, despite the recent truce around Sarajevo, is continuing on its grisly course...

...And it echoes in government camps across the country's 16 Lander, or states, where 350,000 refugees, the vast majority of them Croats and Bosnian Muslims, including thousands of traumatized youngsters, have found temporary shelter from the ongoing slaughter—or murderous "ethnic cleansing"—conducted in the name of Serbian nationalism...

...Another reason is the controversial 1993-enacted change in the Grundgesetz, Germany's basic constitutional law, restricting immigration for the first time in the history of the postwar Federal Republic...

...Isabella, who is 13, has been in Osna-briick for a year and a half...

...It is only right that I commit myself to working against nationalism, and against the hatred that springs from it...

...A Gypsy, with nervous, dark eyes, he fled his home in the Bosnian town of Abazi a year ago...

...The reason," explains Anke, "is that she and the others have seen this disgusting nationalism firsthand...

...Local traditions undoubtedly help...

...My brother and I were put in a school in Zagreb, my mother in a home for refugee women...

...Newly arrived political asylum-seekers must now come directly from a country where their lives and freedoms are threatened...

...The horror stories of the youngsters he knows could be Kenadi's, Minka's or Isabella's—the deceptive experience of growing up with Serbian friends, living side by side among Serbs and non-Muslim Croats, only to discover that friends had suddenly turned into enemies...

...All spent months on the run in truck convoys and cars, or languishing in camps, before reaching safety in Germany...

...One reason is Germany's "blood inheritance" law of citizenship, dating from 1913, which was broadened in 1975 to permit anyone with only a German mother—rather than two German parents—to acquire a passport...

...Most immigrants, no matter how long they have been in the country...

...We worked and played together...

...Then Serbian soldiers took our house, drove us out...

...Yet if there are thousands like her who suffer no discrimination, and who can count Germans among their friends, other thousands, if not millions, lead ghostly lives without clearly established legal rights...

...Anke, not atypically, remains clear about her past and her goals...

...If the Serbs had spotted the men, they would have killed them...

...They were allowed time to cultivate two generations' worth of democratic tolerance...

...It's simple...

...her parents had already left for Germany] spent two days hiding, without water, using candles in the cellar because there was no electricity...

...Anke's classroom, where she teaches them their new language and a bit about their host country, marks their first point of renewed contact with civilized society...

...This volatile combination of circumstances fuels nationalist feelings and inflates the hostility directed at refugees and more traditional immigrants...

...And incidents involving those perceived as weak, namely asylum-seekers, immigrants and the physically helpless—the lame, blind, old—have dramatically increased over the past year...

...But when asked if she would like now to return to Bosnia, she shivers...

...Some weeks ago, for instance, it was announced that up to 100,000 Croats can expect repatriation by April...

...Growing up in this Lower Saxony town during and after World War II, she has devoted much of her life to atoning for the Nazis' unspeakable crimes...

...Minka, who is also 12, is Muslim...

...In effect, it has meant admitting and somehow caring for 16 million virtually bankrupt new citizens from the East...

...If they come from some third country, they will be turnedaway...

...She is remarkably softspoken about what it was like to see her universe disintegrate before her eyes: "I was at school...

...The devilish question, for Anke, Karl and so many others in Germany, is whether the teaching can be accomplished in time...

...I haven't faced any discrimination in Germany," she says...

...They've already lost everything...

...Moreover, it is no longer an exaggeration to say that with the nearly complete collapse of suppressive ideologies such as Communism, nationalism appears once more to be rearing its ugly head worldwide...

...Not multiplication...

...Rejected at several border-crossings, she and her relatives were finally admitted into Germany because her parents were waiting for her...

...Their prospects, experts such as Professor Klaus J. Bade at Osnabriick University's well-known Institute of Immigration Studies point out, are by no means rosy...

...We went by bus...

...The lights burn late these nights at the municipal theater, where one of Mo-ser's plays is being staged...

...My parents belonged to the National Socialist Party, and that is the legacy I drag around with me...

...As Ignatz Bubis, chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, noted acidly in an address delivered in Osnabriick two months ago, the neo-Nazis and their sympathizers characteristically respect uniforms and authority but enjoy humiliating the weak...

...Happy shouts ring out across the schoolyard...

...It became clear for the first time that not only were unpopular refugees becom-ing victims, but also native-bom 'foreigners.' "Bade was dismissive of the candlelight parades organized against racism last year in many German cities, finding them farcical...

...Some men arrived and told us that war had broken out...

...Just with the idea of something taken away...

...Not addition...

...Meanwhile, regardless of the ominous rival growth of German nationalism, places like Osnabruck make a difference...

...Kassenbrock is youthful, warm, committed to his work with over 100 of the 5,000 to 6,000 war-children the German government decided to bring out of the most devastated parts of Bosnia on special trains, starting in July 1992...

...I saw the shooting," says Kenadi, who is 12...

...Nor does this war stop at the German frontier...

...The reason...

...None has arrived speaking German...

...Posh restaurants and elegant 12th-cen-tury churches, likewise rebuilt from the rubble of Alliedbombings, leaven the winter-gray air...

...Tika works as a translator at the recently set up Osnabriick Home for Refugee Women...

...Most are Muslims rescued from the 22month-old genocidal war that continues to eat away at their homeland a few hundred miles to the south...

...We hid in our cellar—my grandfather, me, my father, my mother, my sister—for two days...

...Tika herself, though a native, is not a citizen...

...Glass cases show off puppets and a model of a Neolithic village...

...it is not about confiscated Muslim houses as much as confiscated spirits and lives...

...After escaping with their families to Croatia," he points out, "many children were beaten up by Croatian teachers in Croatian schools...

...Native children, meeting in adjacent classrooms, appear unaware of the exiles in their midst...

...I have a new Bosnian passport," she notes, with a trace of the worry of the ultimately stateless person whose future may depend on defeating the politics and militarism of hate...

...No one there wants peace...

...I'm happy to be here...

...I saw them coming, their guns...

...The former Yugoslavia has in fact become a broadly watched test case, as has Germany itself, of the spreading phenomenon's distressing potency...

...Its 50-odd residents, flown in from camps in Bosnia and Croatia, receive counseling and assistance in finding work...

...I could see the shells falling...

...You notice that these children have an odd difficulty with subtraction," Karl told me...

...On the other hand, for some Osnabruckers, especially those middle-aged and older, World War II is not part of some fossilized past but a fierce memory that moves them to compassionate action...

...Simultaneously, the situation of immigrants in Germany is blurred by bizarre laws that tend to camouflage nationalist ambitions...

...There seems small chance at present of defeating the hate at all...

...either feel dubious about becoming citizens or have little chance of doing so...

...Isabella, like Minka, is Muslim and once had Serbian friends...

...His answer was an emphatic "No...

...Tika K., a 19-year-old Bosnian Muslim born and brought up in Germany (her parents came here as Gastarbeiter 23 years ago), offers a less gloomy perspective...

...Following widespread objection, this proposal was partly retracted, leaving an air of uncertainty about the total number who will be sent back...

...For even though acts of violence carried out by skinheads and other neo-Nazis have dropped by one third since 1992, there is unhappy evidence that their tactics have merely shifted...

...Having witnessed the atrocious, several of the children are still in states of semi-shock...

...Since reunification, the very presence of these Auslander, or foreigners, as many still call them—though thousands were born here or have lived here for years—has become a catalyst for nationalist smears and neo-Nazi violence...

...Bade regards these crimes as the tip of a nationalist, anti-immigrant iceberg...

...We fled when we heard on the radio that the Serbs were killing people...

...For the Germans they have proved lashing...

...Anke, for instance, has been teaching German for over 15 years to the children of Turkish Gastar-beiter, or guest workers...

...Some were herded out at gunpoint...

...Religious and territorial rivalries, together with desires for revenge—some running back four centuries, others rooted in atrocities committed under the Nazis during World War II—have turned into a daily apocalypse...

...They have revealed a calculated hatred that the children are fully aware of...

...Indeed, her aunt is a Serb...

...A few lapse into sudden tears or aggressive outbursts...

...These children need someone who understands them, whom they can trust," says this spirited, attractive teacher of the dozen Bosnian refugees in her charge...

...Amajor cause of Germany's conflicted attitude toward immigration, however, is reunification itself...

...We had food and candles there, because we knew they would come...

...The Remarque Yearbook and War and Literature, journals published at the university, solidly promote the writ-er's antiwar passion through criticism and research...

...The refugee home in Osnabruck was created to save a few of the stigmatized survivors...

...All were victims of abductions and rapes by Serbian soldiers, then were totally rejected by their families because of the ghastly experience, compounding their trauma...

...Minka's reference to her erstwhile Serbian friends underlines the peculiar agony of a conflict in which families as well as friends have been torn asunder by primitive passions tamped down for decades...

...The extensively reported murderous raids at Molln and Solingen in 1992 and '93, resulting in seven deaths, were simply the most perverse expressions of widespread brutality...

...After months of Anke's patient coaxing, he has tempered his crazed outbursts and begun to describe his experiences...

...Although there are 10,000 jobless among its population of 155,000, reflecting a deep recession that has thrown almost 4 million Germans out of work nationwide, Osnabriick is relatively prosperous...

...The teachers' struggle to heal the wounds inflicted by the Serbs, to soften the cruelty with kindness, is complicated by Germany's own wrenching nationalist problems...

...Tika is not so much an exception as a success story in a culture that desperately wants more success stories, and that is doing battle, often courageously, with itself...

...As in schools in London, Chicago or New York, the hallways display posters announcing art exhibits and jazz concerts...