Blood and Politics (40 page)

By the time of the Pulaski event the number of hard-core white power skinheads had grown from 350 in a few major metropolitan areas to 3,500 from every corner of the country. Thousands more young white people dressed the part, emulating their brave contemporaries. Still, the numbers were small. The total number of white nationalist cadres had
drifted up from about 15,000 in 1980 to slightly more than 20,000, with about 150,000 sympathizers who bought publications or attended meetings. It was still a relatively insular ideological epiphenomenon, however, and not yet a mass-style movement.

Mass and weight are different physical properties, however. The movement’s mass may have been small, but its weight was increasing, primarily because of gravitational forces outside its control. Principal among these forces was the centrifugal breakup of the communist bloc in Eastern Europe and the end of the Cold War.

German reunification, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the First Persian Gulf War change the geopolitical alignments upon which anticommunism and American national identity were hung during the post–World War Two era. New forms of nationalism—racial, ethnic, and religious—assert themselves. In the United States a new white nationalism is born.

February 12, 1990.
Leipzig, Deutsche Demokratische Republik. A strange quiet bounced across the tracks of the
Hauptbahnhof
. Everyone politely waited his turn to step down off the train and into the long concrete corridors out of the station. Not a soul pushed or shoved. No graffiti covered the gray walls. No dozed-out druggies or homeless women wrapped in rags and newspapers sat in the corners. One young entrepreneur, stationed at the end of a long, empty shadow, illegally traded currency: ten
Ostmark
for one
Westmark
, more than three times the official rate. He knew that the Ostmark and East Germany were already dead, even if the official burial was months away. Once the site of the Soviet bloc’s premier manufacturing exposition, Leipzig now sat at the center of a political maelstrom that belied the tranquillity of its train station.
¹

During the previous summer and fall, mass rallies of nonconformist intellectuals, artists, and clergy had protested the regime’s tyrannical powers with candlelight vigils in the streets. Long before ultranationalists or anyone else dared defy the secret police, these dissidents spearheaded a prodemocracy movement that had spread across East Germany. During the same months a parallel drive by tens of thousands of East Germans had pushed into the brightly neon-lit streets of West Germany. Eventually the combination of open protest and mass defection forced the East German authorities to open the Berlin Wall on November 9. Like almost every date and place in German history, November 9 has at least two meanings. In 1938 it was
Kristallnacht
, the pogrom that marked in blood and glass the beginning of German Jewry’s physical destruction. In 1989 it marked the end of the Berlin Wall as a dividing point between Germans, East and West. The Brandenburg Gate changed from a nearly forgotten Prussian military monument hidden behind miles
of concrete wall to the scene of a freedom festival broadcast live across the globe.
²

This Monday night in February, a noisy crowd of thirty thousand elbowed its way into the plaza by Leipzig’s Opera House. Clumps of people made a mad grab at carloads of brightly colored posters and literature from West German political parties. One stack of Christian Democratic Union newspapers was yanked from the hands of a young woman. When it fell to the ground, the crowd pushed her out of the way and snatched the papers. Just as quickly, many of these same papers were discarded and trampled underfoot, as the crowd surged toward the next new bundle. Banners that had previously read
WIR SIND DER VOLK
, meaning “We are the people” (and should be able to rule ourselves), became
WIR SIND EIN VOLK
, “We are one people,” and
DEUTSCHLAND EINIG VATERLAND
, “Germany United Fatherland.” The movement for basic civil liberties and human rights in East Germany had morphed into a nationalist demand for unification of the two German states.
³

Standing uneasily at the edge of this crowd, a small band of the early dissident intellectuals circulated typewritten half sheet leaflets. Where were all these people during the summer of 1989? one asked. Democracy was more difficult than shopping for new shoes, another said glumly. But the crowd paid them scant attention now. These intellectuals wanted free expression, but they didn’t relish paying for it in the capitalist marketplace. And they didn’t fully endorse unification. As the black, red, and gold West German flags replaced the pale glow of candlelight vigils, the protest leadership had shifted out of their hands.

Across the plaza, stern young men circulated, distributing flyers from an anti-immigrant party,
Die Republikaners
: “
Sozialismus ist Beschissmus
,” a play on words that translates roughly as “Socialism is Shitism.” At that point, the Republikaners were still illegal in the East. Amazingly, not one of these circulars was discarded that night. Several older women handed out booklets proclaiming that the “six million” were a “legend,” as well as flyers advertising a speech the following night in Dresden by a well-known Holocaust denier, David Irving.

On the steps of the Opera House, lit against the nighttime darkness by television cameras from around the world, speaker followed speaker as the crowd waited uneasily to begin its march through the streets. Representatives from the main West German political parties were followed by a speaker from the marginal National Democratic Party. “There are too many Turks in Germany,” he complained. The German Democratic Republic (East Germany), he said, actually occupied
Mitteldeutschland
, or Middle Germany. In this revanchist description, the
provinces under Russian and Polish sovereignty since 1945 were in fact the real eastern part of Germany. Obviously, if a new Germany had tried to reclaim these territories as part of its unification process, a conflict with Poland in particular would have been inevitable. But the crowd greeted his claims in the same manner as they greeted all others.

Approximately two hundred skinheads roamed the plaza, distributing leaflets from far right parties and bullying foreign reporters and television camera crews. With their black bomber jackets and shaved heads they matched their American counterparts in both style and ideology. Only the jacket patches differed. “
Ich bin stolz ein Deutscher zu sein
” (I am proud to be German), they read. Several dozen clambered to the top of the Opera House with a banner declaring
FOREIGN TROOPS OUT
, a radical demand at that time but later part of the unification pact. When the march finally started out of the plaza into the streets, the skinheads started chanting, “
Deutschland erwache, Jude verrecke
” (Germany awake, Jews perish). A small group of marchers responded to the chants by blowing stadium air horns in protest, but otherwise the skinheads went uncontested.
⁴

As the march reached its conclusion, the crowd dispersed into the dark streets and the night became quiet. A few
Polizei
reappeared in the plaza, and others took posts inside the train station. Foreign journalists earned a quick glance at their passports as they boarded the midnight express to the West, but otherwise the once-feared East German police state now seemed curiously inert as a revolution swept it aside.
⁵

East and West Germany had been the quintessential symbols of the geopolitical order. At the end of World War Two, Allied victors had dismembered the Twelve Year
Reich
and redrawn the borders of Europe in the process. Those provinces of the German Reich not reallocated to the surrounding countries were divided into four zones of occupation: French, British, American, and Soviet. As tension mounted between the Soviets on the one side and the Western powers on the other, two different states were created in 1949: the Federal Republic of Germany in the West and the German Democratic Republic in the East. Berlin, situated in the provinces under Soviet control, was divided and at the center of Cold War contention. The Wall, built in 1961, had become a sign of the division of Europe between communism in the East and capitalist democracies in the West.

After the Berlin Wall fell, the East German state followed, a first step in the unraveling of the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe. West German parties such as the Christian Democratic Union and the Social Democrats developed large branches in the East. Stores in Leipzig, Dresden, Halle, and East Berlin became stocked with products from the West,
everything from Sony sound systems to soft toilet paper. The West German deutsche mark became the official currency in the East. And then on October 3, 1990, the lands formerly known as the German Democratic Republic became part of an expanded Federal Republic.
⁶

The skinheads, Holocaust deniers, and anti-immigrant racists in the streets of Leipzig that night became a prominent feature of the new Germany. For
Ossis
(East Germans), they seemed little different from the sudden presence of superior consumer goods. They (wrongly) assumed skinheads were manufactured only in the West and imported into the East. The
Wessis
, on the other hand, assumed skinheads were products only of unemployment and hard times in the East. Both were wrong. Skinheads in Germany did emerge first in the West during the 1980s, just as they had in the United States and other countries after they had spread from the United Kingdom, and they reached the East long before unification. These white power skinheads shared a common revolutionary zeitgeist. Like their American counterparts, they embraced Hitlerian symbols, such as the swastika and the stiff-armed salute. And far right and ultranationalist parliamentary parties in Germany eagerly sought them as recruits.
⁷

Anti-immigrant fevers had also existed in West Germany prior to unification. The foremost parliamentary party on the far right had been the Republikaners, which polled ninety-four thousand votes and won eleven seats to West Berlin’s city parliament in the January 1989 elections. Franz Schönhuber, the Republikaners’ most visible spokesman, personally linked present-tense racism to that of the forbidden past by writing a book that favorably recounted his stint as an SS officer during World War Two. Undeterred by this association with Hitlerism, his party won two million West German votes in the June 1989 elections for the European Parliament.
⁸

The path from the Republikaners to the ruling party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), was traversed quickly. The CDU adopted much of the Republikaners’ anti-immigrant program, deporting refugees and changing the post-Hitler constitution that granted liberal asylum rights. In addition, militant ideological youth gangs known as
Kameradenschaften
prowled the cities—East and West—in search of the homes of
Ausländers
, or foreigners. (Third-generation ethnic Turks, born in Germany like their parents, were still considered “foreigners,” and the government had not yet allowed them an immediate constitutional right to citizenship.) The youthful arsonists stood only a flaming petrol bomb
outside the mainstream, and for several moments it seemed as if all Germany would be engulfed in the flames of burning refugee hostels.
⁹

Old-fashioned racial nationalism swept across Germany like a whirlwind from hell. When the graves of playwright Bertolt Brecht and his wife, Helen Weigel, were defaced with the epithet
Jude Sau
(Jew pig), Brecht’s family left the graffiti up as a warning. For a brief moment, a wave of candlelight protests marched against murder and mayhem. Otherwise, the barrier between polite society and barbarism collapsed more quickly than the Berlin Wall itself. Here, at this time, the reconsideration of German national identity took center stage. If a reevaluation of values was to take place, then a reexamination of the Holocaust did not trail far behind.
¹⁰

By constitutional law the Federal Republic officially annexed the German Democratic Republic on October 3, 1990, marking for history the end of the post–World War Two period. During this postwar period, East Germans had been told that their state was the legacy of antifascist resistance, and they felt unburdened by the past. West Germans, on the other hand, had felt as though they were being punished for crimes committed during the years they euphemistically referred to as the “Hitler time.” After occupation by Allied armies, NATO troops had been deployed, and the American military and intelligence established command centers. The loss of territories to Russia and Poland had been compounded by the separation of families on either side of the East-West line. Children felt burdened with the acts of their fathers and grandfathers, who, they were told, had fought for a criminal regime. It was their homeland that had plunged the world into a war that had cost fifty million lives, including those of six million Jews. Holocaust Memorial Day became a national holiday set on the day Soviet troops liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp, officially intertwining national identity with “Auschwitz,” which became the idiomatic term for the persecutions, concentration camps, and industrial murder that constituted the Holocaust. Could any expression of German nationalism ever be untarnished by these crimes once done in its name?
¹¹

The desire to escape the onus of the past extended from machinists laboring in the Ruhr Valley to politicians at the summit of international prestige. The Bavarian prime minister had vowed, “We must once again become a people that does not walk with the stoop of a convict of world history.”
¹²