Two years of escalating attacks on “foreigners” in Germany have pounded at the question, Who is a German? According to the 1913 immigration law, which still applies, those who can prove German lineage, such as descendants of 18th-century German immigrants to Russia, are quickly accorded citizenship; immigrants like the Turkish “guest workers” of previous decades, and even their children born in Germany, face hurdles that have kept most of them classified as foreigners. Biology, not residency, is the crucial test. “Nowhere has blood flowed so heavily into the law as in Germany,” says Cornelia Schmalz-Jacobsen, the government ombudsman for foreigners.
The Solingen killings didn’t end the violence. Late last week a Turkish family was burned out of its home in Hattingen-and police suspect arson in the destruction of a Turkish restaurant in Konstanz. Shamed by such attacks, many Germans say their country can’t truly be a democracy without a broader concept of citizenship. Initiatives to change the laws languish in Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s coalition government, which has so far sought to appease anti-foreigner sentiment instead of confronting it. When skinheads attacked a hostel for asylum-seekers in the east German town of Hoyerswerda in 1991, the government moved the foreigners out. In Rostock last August police stood by while skinheads set fire to another refugee dormitory. After the arson attacks moved to former West German territory and turned deadly, the government focused on rescinding the constitutional guarantee of asylum-a liberal provision to pay Germany’s debt to other nations that had accepted refugees from Nazism. Parliament passed the new asylum law just before the Solingen murders, prompting an alliance of political groups to charge that the reversal “has been taken by the right-wing scene as a go-ahead signal for an ethnic cleansing of Germany.”
In practical terms Germany could no longer afford to keep its doors open to the asylum-seekers, who were arriving at the rate of a thousand a day. But the government’s failure was in focusing only on trying to keep newcomers out, without taking corollary measures to end discrimination against “foreigners” already in their midst-especially the 1.8 million Turks, who were invited to fill jobs in Germany and have no connection with the asylum-seekers. Blithely ignoring the total 6.4 million foreign residents in Germany, Kohl insisted that “Germany is not a country of immigration.” For Turks and others, this means no vote, no jobs in the civil service or police-and institutionalized discrimination.
With a backlash against immigrants gathering momentum in places like France and Britain, Germans insist their problems are being overdramatized, distorted by the lens of history. But there is a crucial difference. For all their racial conflicts, the French and British generally acknowledge the concept of a multicultural society; most Germans do not. “Nothing has changed in their attitudes towards people of different cultures,” says Cologne University sociologist Erwin Scheuch. “Britain and France are former empires, but Germans are entirely European. Anything outside of Europe for them is close to Mars.”
Bonn hasn’t tried to change that mind-set-a lapse that has also led it to downplay the neo-Nazi threat. The official line is that antiforeigner attacks are a police problem, not a political one. Last week police arrested a 16-year-old neighbor of the Turkish family in Solingen for allegedly setting fire to their house after shouting “Heil Hitler”; three more suspects were arrested, but authorities are reluctant to see any broader issue. Eckart Wertebach, president of the Constitutional Protection Office, described the skinheads responsible for such actions as “loose groups of drinking buddies who meet occasionally, decide on their terrible deed on the spur of the moment and then go and carry it out.”
Equal rights: The violence may further polarize Germans and Turks, hobbling the first modest steps toward integration. “We Turks can take a lot, but this is the last straw,” said Vural, 22, standing outside the burned-out house of the victims last week. “From now on, we’ll take to the streets and meet the neo-Nazi groups with violence. It’s the only solution.” Still, thousands of Turks and Germans demonstrated peacefully last week, and Turkish activists insist they want a political solution. The key: dual citizenship, giving Turks equal rights in Germany without forfeiting their ancestral ties.
Kohl, typically, has been passive in addressing the Turks’ demands. He floated the idea of a “transitional” dual citizenship last month but didn’t follow up. His response to the Solingen murders was to issue press releases; he didn’t speak out on TV or attend the funerals-and his spokesman’s disdain for “condolence tourism” further antagonized the Turkish community. But despite opposition from the right-wingers within his coalition, Kohl faces mounting pressure to change the arcane citizenship rules. Even members of his own Christian Democratic Union are pushing him to exercise the leadership that has been lacking. If he persists in pretending nothing is wrong, Kohl may allow the ghosts of Germany’s past to wreck its future.
