Group-Focus Enmity Eating Away Europe’s Fabric
Pick up any German newspaper on any day of the week, and you will encounter occurrences and buzz words that reflect the pathological state that our society is in. Of course, you will encounter news about neo-Nazis, like the ones who set fire to the House of Democracy in the small town of Zossen near Berlin one year ago. The House of Democracy is a project set up by the citizens’ initiative “Zossen zeigt Gesicht” (“Zossen shows its true colors”) to combat racism, anti-semitism and right wing extremism. The instigator of the attack, a well-known neo-Nazi from the area, was recently sentenced to several years in prison. The building burned down to its foundations.
The killing spree of the neo- Nazi underground and its cell in Jena were also in the news recently. It left 10 victims dead, nine of whom were foreign born. The country is finally horrified. Since German reunification, neo-Nazi thugs have murdered 140 victims and injured, maimed and traumatized hundreds more who survived. But not until now has Germany’s Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich, a member of the conservative CSU party, spoken of right-wing terrorism.
20,000 hate crimes
Beyond the murders and beatings, I encounter numerous items in the newspapers related to events where no direct connection to the neo-Nazi scene is apparent. They are simply evidence of everyday brutality, or the everyday racism that finds expression in schoolyards, on the street or between rival fan groups after soccer matches. A handful of words appear in these stories again and again, and I collect them when I read the news each day. What do they have in common? They include words and phrases like “spiral of violence”, “harassment”, “masked demonstrators”, “culture of selfindulgence”, “fear-mongering”, “populism”, “coma-drinking”, “intimidation”, “brutality”, “inhibition threshold”, “hopelessness”, “social disadvantage”, “powerlessness”. Beyond the 20,000 crimes attributable to right-wing extremists every year, a figure that is continually increasing, people in our society are apparently driven by reflexes that are not directly political in nature. When people act on these reflexes, it is a sign of the breakdown of solidarity and the coarsening of our society.
The latest sociological research terms this “group-focused enmity”. This is a phenomenon that goes far beyond right-wing extremism. Right-wing extremism relies on violence as a means of intimidation. In Zossen and other small towns, this is immediately palpable. There are about 80 neo- Nazis in Zossen, a sizeable fraction of the approximately 1,000 violent Nazis and 10,000 fellow travelers in Germany. Based on numerous reports, we know that the willingness of the local police to intervene promptly has been lacking in individual cases. In many towns, where everyone knows everyone else, initiatives to combat right-wing extremism and racism feel like they are the troublemakers rather than the rightwing thugs who have a worldview that does not tolerate immigrants and perceives foreign cultures as a threat. That worldview, unfortunately, extends beyond the horizon of the right-wing extremists and into the center of society.
Taking stock
There is no doubt that this rightwing extremism, whether it exists in organizations or loose gang affiliations, is the toughest challenge facing Europe and, more particularly, Germany. The right-wing contagion is plowing across Europe, from St. Petersburg through Poland, Italy and Austria and on to Hungary. Almost no country remains unaffected – in Hungary a clerical-fascist regime that espouses repugnant anti- semitism and racism has taken root.
After ten years of fighting the rightwing extremism that has cropped up since the two German states were reunited, the organization that the former President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Paul Spiegel, and I founded, “Gesicht Zeigen” has taken stock. There is no doubt: right-wing extremism has taken hold in specific regions and among youth nationwide. The statistics from the Criminological Research Institute of Lower Saxony, which caused such uproar almost exactly one year ago, correspond to the results of the “Under 18 Election” conducted during the last parliamentary elections. Nationwide, the NPD received 4.2 percent support in the mock election by youth who had not yet reached voting age. The study in Lower Saxony showed that 30 percent of the 45,000 ninth-graders polled believe there are too many foreigners in Germany, and one out of seven youths has “highly xenophobic” attitudes.
Follow-up studies show that the right-wing fringe of society has very low levels of educational achievement. The success of the many initiatives in our country that combat right-wing extremism will depend on whether or not we succeed in containing and shrinking the recruiting grounds from which the right-wing movement derives its membership. Education and vocational training are critical success factors in this regard. This is an area that demands commitment from our entire society. A national summit could be helpful if policymakers, business leaders, the unions and the educational and cultural institutions participated in it. School psychologists, social workers, educators and local initiatives should also be represented at such a summit because they can report on the social reality in our country.
Education experts have calculated that we must invest up to 24 billion euros in schools in order to reach an investment of seven percent of GDP in education. That would bring Germany in line with the Scandinavian countries. It is two percent more than the Federal Government and the states currently spend on this sector. We need wellequipped schools that can provide for all children and help them create prospects for their lives, whether they have an immigrant background or not. It is never too late for that.