A cure for Germany's race hate

'The country needs more foreigners, not fewer, if only to help treat the Germans' terrible fear of the unknown'

In times such as these, when far-right street thuggery grabs the headlines almost every day, Germans are inclined to panic and blame anyone but themselves. Indirectly, the foreigners get the blame for their own beatings. As small-town mayors in the East often explain publicly whenever some dark-skinned person is thrashed on their patch: in that particular vicinity, at that precise moment, the victim was simply asking for it.

In times such as these, when far-right street thuggery grabs the headlines almost every day, Germans are inclined to panic and blame anyone but themselves. Indirectly, the foreigners get the blame for their own beatings. As small-town mayors in the East often explain publicly whenever some dark-skinned person is thrashed on their patch: in that particular vicinity, at that precise moment, the victim was simply asking for it.

This is an extreme version of recent events in Germany, of course, but even the horrified liberal majority tends toward a consensus that sees foreigners as agents provocateurs. The public thinks there is a critical mass of immigrants in Germany. When that is reached, social conventions melt down and the spiral of violence begins.

From this diagnosis it is not difficult to leap to the conclusion that Germans, namely the Nazi-leaning 10 to 30 per cent - depending on who is counting, and how - must be protected from further exposure to aliens. This reasoning dictated previous knee-jerk reactions to any upsurge of far-right violence. When asylum-seekers' homes burnt - in former East and West Germany - in the early Nineties, the politicians responded with draconian laws to deter refugees and deport the ones already here.

From the legislators' point of view, the new asylum regime has proved extremely successful. Immigration is not on the increase; only talk about immigration. Yet asylum-seekers' homes are ablaze again. And some politicians are suggesting that it is time to raise Fortress Germany's drawbridge.

The argument is a fallacy. Germany needs more foreigners, not fewer, if only to help cure Germans of their fear of the unknown. The thesis that the natives rise in revolt when they are being swamped by alien hordes is simply not borne out by the statistics, which in fact show that neo-Nazi violence is worst in places with the lowest percentage of foreigners.

Top of the hit parade of far-right thuggery is the eastern Land or province of Saxony-Anhalt. Foreigners account for a measly 1.7 per cent of the population. Yet you are twice as likely to be roughed up here for speaking with a strange accent or sporting curly hair as in Hamburg, a seething melting-pot notorious for banditry, porn, drugs and every other conceivable vice. In Saxony-Anhalt, the neo-Nazi German People's Union (DVU) easily entered the regional parliament two years ago with a thumping 13 per cent of the vote (although it must be admitted that even in Hamburg the far right came close to breaching the 5 per cent barrier need for parliamentary representation).

The top five slots in the chart illustrating far-right violence are occupied by the new Länder, the old East Germany, with foreign populations that do not exceed 2.3 per cent. In any normal place, that figure would be described as "negligible".

Bottom of the chart is Saarland, bordering France, an unhappy region with a troubled history and high unemployment, featuring derelict or soon-to-be-closed coalmines and abandoned steelworks. Saarland's share of foreigners is 8.2 per cent, just below the national average; its xenophobic violence is but a tiny blip.

Despite its economic woes, though, and a documented tradition of fervent patriotism, Saarland has something the chart-toppers lack. It is a region where Germans have lived for centuries cheek-by-jowl with foreigners, in this case the French, and concluded that the experience is not all bad.

The rest of the country, rendered homogeneous by Hitler's efforts, has been on a steeper learning curve since the war. The Gastarbeiter (foreign workers) of south-east Europe and Turkey started arriving in West Germany in the Sixties; unwanted immigrants from more distant corners of the globe flooded in during the Eighties and the Nineties. Dark skin has therefore been visible on Western streets for a decade or more. A black person is unlikely to be stared at these days in Düsseldorf. In Leipzig, in the East, such a spectacle might bring traffic to a halt.

Hermetically sealed in their communist paradise, the people in the East were not exposed to alien ways. Not counting the Soviet soldiers, who rarely ventured beyond their barracks, the closest the natives came to strange-looking people was on the beaches of Hungary and Bulgaria. Even 10 years after the tumbling of the Berlin Wall, the average East German's knowledge of the outside world, and consequently their tolerance toward strangers, remains lamentable.

The mayor who suggests a black man should have known better than to stroll down the streets after dark has a point. You do not even need to be black to "provoke" a reaction. If you look different, you are a stranger and therefore a threat. At the campsites of Mecklenburg on the Baltic coast, for instance, "West" German tourists have attracted the attentions of the baseball-wielding mob. In Frankfurt an der Oder, on the Polish border, all 22 foreign scientists working at an EU-funded research institute have suffered racist abuse in the streets. The victims are predominantly white, hailing from as culturally menacing nations as Britain and Spain.

The level of ignorance is brilliantly summed up by a cartoon that appeared recently in Berliner Zeitung, a paper that knows the East better than most. The cartoon shows Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and an aide puzzling over a map by the road somewhere on his current tour through the region. Behind the bushes lurk two skinheads with swastika tattoos. "Look," says one skinhead to the other. "Kanaken." ("Coons.")

These people need help. They need to be immunised against xenophobia, in the same way that other nations in western Europe have been in the past decades. The treatment? Give them lots of foreigners to look at, to co-exist with.

Naturally, it would take huge courage for any politician to stand in front of the German public and advocate more immigration. The current coalition of cosmopolitan Greens and ambivalent Social Democrats ran into problems when they tinkered with the nationality law. No longer is "Germanness" defined as a racial attribute; nor is the new definition as generous as originally intended. A populist campaign mounted by the opposition Christian Democrats and a series of electoral defeats suffered in its wake put paid to that.

Now immigration is on the agenda again, as the government and industry grapple with a shortage of computer experts. The mere offer of 20,000 "green cards" to Indian and other specialists landed Mr Schröder in more hot water. In the (western) Land of North Rhine-Westphalia, the Christian Democrats fought - and lost - an election with the appetising slogan "Kinder statt Inder" ("Children instead of Indians").

But there is no alternative. Germany's population is falling; soon there will not be enough Germans to fund the high pensions that are taken for granted. Until a few weeks ago, there seemed little else to do in the next two years than tackle the unwieldy pension system. Suddenly, the neo-Nazi scourge has pushed itself to the top of the agenda.

There will never be a better moment to tackle its roots and open Germany to the world, as Mr Schröder has always promised to do. By all means teach the youth of eastern Germany about Auschwitz, drive the black-shirted thugs off the streets, do more to defend the victims and ban the parties that incite racist violence.

But that is not enough. The Schröder government must get started on the long-awaited immigration law, do more to integrate the foreigners already in Germany and, above all, spell out to Germans at last that they are not some kind of beleaguered ethnic group in the middle of Europe. Let them find out that they are just like everybody else. Mr Schröder: tear down that wall.