Crucial Distinction in Germany

President Richard von Weizsaeker recently reminded his fellow citizens that a key reason democracy failed in Germany in the 1920s was that there simply weren’t enough German democrats around to support it.

It has become especially clear in the last few weeks that a lot of ordinary Germans are determined that this devastating experience, which led first to the triumph of Nazism and ultimately to Germany’s wartime destruction and division, won’t be repeated in the 1990s. By the hundreds of thousands, Germans have taken to the streets in Berlin, in Munich last Sunday and in smaller cities to protest the racist violence that so far this year has taken 18 lives. The result has been a necessary reminder--to those German rightists responsible for the more than 1,900 anti-foreign and anti-Semitic acts that have taken place over the last 11 months and to a concerned world--that the great mass of Germans reject extremism and support democratic and humane values.

The protests are also having an impact on Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s government, which for more than 18 months has acted as if it believed that the spreading xenophobic violence and increasing activism of neo-Nazi and other extremist groups were only a transient irritation, rather than an ominous indication of deep-rooted political problems.

Kohl’s most direct response was to move to change Germany’s well-meant political asylum law, which has made the country a magnet for hundreds of thousands of foreign economic refugees. A legislative compromise on a new immigration law now seems to have been struck. Belatedly, the federal government is also starting to more closely monitor and control the activities of extreme rightist groups. The government’s reluctance to do so before was justified on the ground that Germany, conscious of its totalitarian past, must avoid engaging in any form of political repression. But defending democracy from those who attack its institutions and seek to undermine its foundations is not impermissible repression but legitimate self-preservation. The German people, most of them, may be ahead of some of their elected leaders in grasping that distinction.