So is Germany Racist or Not?

So is Germany Racist or Not?

The debate in Germany about where dark-skinned tourists can feel safe during the World Cup -- and where they can't -- continues to rage two days after a former government spokesman warned African visitors against traveling to provincial towns in the eastern state of Brandenburg. Also: How should Europe respond to the disintegrating security situation in the Palestinian terroritories?


The media uproar didn't surprise Uwe-Karsten Heye.
Two days after a former government spokesman caused a furor in Germany by saying out loud what most Germans believe in private -- that non-white World Cup fans should probably keep out of certain provincial towns -- the debate is still on German minds. "There are small and medium-sized towns in (the eastern state of) Brandenburg, as well as elsewhere, which I would advise a visitor of another skin color to avoid going to," Uwe-Karsten Heye said on Wednesday in an interview on German public radio. "It is possible he wouldn't get out alive."

Since Heye is a known personality -- a former spokesman for the German government under Gerhard Schröder and now head of an anti-racism outfit called "Show Your Color" -- politicians in Brandenburg howled that his comments had irresponsibly tarred a large and complex eastern state as a breeding-ground for neo-Nazism. Heye retreated slightly under fire on Thursday, saying he didn't mean to focus on Brandenburg, but German papers on Friday morning have ridden to his defense.

"The scandal is that non-Germans or non-white Germans can hardly go near these places without personal risk," writes the leftist Die Tageszeitung, " -- not that (Heye) has criticized this fact." Brandenburg's Interior Minister, Jörg Schönbohm, "believes such places don't exist," and some people in the debate have suggested the uproar was nothing but a left-wing campaign to drag the "(east) German image through the mud," the paper writes. "It is not. A 2005 report by Brandenburg's Office for the Protection of the Constitution lists 17 places where extreme-right groups are active and spontaneously attack anyone who looks different from them. The report was presented by Schönbohm. This amnesia ... is a phenomenon of the World Cup."

The left-leaning Berliner Zeitung agrees. Anyone who fails to admit a problem with racist attacks in Brandenburg as well as other parts of Germany, the paper writes, "either doesn't know the real situation or wants to cover it up." From there, though, the editorial moves in a peculiar direction. Heye answered a straight question on the radio about World Cup visitors from Africa traveling in Germany. The paper uses the debate to lament that Germany's mainstream media has also encouraged "a dim-witted anti-Islamism" that hurts delicate negotiations with Iran. "The tendency is impossible to miss: All of Islam and the entire Muslim community are coming under suspicion of at least sympathizing with terrorists and suicide bombers." Calling Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a "Mullah-Hitler," moreover, "not only downplays the Holocaust and insults millions of Hitler's victims, it also maligns anyone who wants a peaceful solution (with Iran)."

The center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung sticks closer to the controversy. Its editorial page includes a short profile of Heye that traces his career from journalist in West Germany to speechwriter in the 1970s for then-West German Chancellor Willy Brandt to "one of (Gerhard Schröder's) closest advisers" by 2002. The paper notes that Heye lives in Brandenburg. "The reactions he has touched off won't have surprised this media man," the paper writes. "And after the first wave of outrage, more supporters are piping up. The Amadeu Antonio Foundation estimates that a higher proportion of victims have died of far-right violence in Brandenburg than in other state since reunification in 1990. Relatively few people live in Brandenburg (compared to other German states), and, above all: not many foreigners."

- Michael Scott Moore, 12:30pm CET

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