The Latest Camp of the SaintsrnGermany’s Immigration Problemrnby Joachim F. WeberrnTotal strangers hug one another. People dance for joy in thernstreets. Tears pour down their faces. It is Germany,rnNovember 1989. The Berlin Wall has fallen and for the firstrntime in decades people can move freely back and forth inrnGermany’s old capital. A people feels its solidarity, in therntruest sense of the word. Anyone who lived those hours inrnBerlin knows what lies hidden behind the abstract notion ofrn”nation.”rnAnother picture: the smoking ruins of a house where fivernmen died in a fire set by a disturbed German teenager, drivenrnby hatred for foreigners. It happened in Solingen in March ofrnthis year. This picture, too, went around the wodd, so fast thatrnit seemed the world was hungry for it. In fact, Germansrnlearned about “German hatred of foreigners” from reports inrnthe media. Millions of foreigners, people from every countryrnon the planet, have lived in Germany for decades withoutrnanyone hatching a plot to set fire to their houses. I have yet tornmeet anyone who expresses sympathy for the arson that tookrnplace in Solingen.rnIt was onlv when these activities led to discussions of the revivalrnof National Socialism and of a “Fourth Reich” that it becamernclear why they aroused such unmerited attention. On thernface of it, the comparison is faulty. In Hitler’s Third Reich, beforernthe outbreak of Wodd War II, no foreigners were persecuted.rnThere were plenty of foreigners, to be sure, the RussianrnJoachim F. Weber is political editor of Das Ostpreussenblatt,rna conservative weekly in Hamburg. This piece was edited andrntranslated from the German by E. Christian Kopff, a professorrnof Greek and Latin at the University of Colorado in Boulder.rnrefugees in Berlin who had been driven from Russia by Lenin’srnand Stalin’s communism or the Italian workers in the Volkswagenrnfactory in Wolfsburg who had been enthusiastically receivedrninto Germany. The people who were persecuted werernGermans, those with the wrong political opinions and those ofrnJewish ancestry. They did not look different from their non-rnJewish neighbors. They spoke the same language and actedrnalike. They had been assimilated in Germany for generations.rnThey were treated as different because of propaganda, thernideology hammered into people by the media, branding Jewsrnas bad people.rnPeople who speak of a general German hatred of foreigners,rnwith one eye on the Third Reich, are misguided and uninformed,rnso little has the one to do with the other. Gn the otherrnhand, there is no point in denying that there has been a growingrnirritation in Germany over the past year or two betweenrnsome foreigners who live there and part of the native-born population.rnWhat has caused this irritation?rnThe foreign population of West Germany before reunificationrnwith East Germany was about five million. In the pastrnthree years about two million have been added. One mightrnthink that in a country with a population of 80 million, itrnwould not make much difference whether there were five, six,rnor eight million foreigners. It is not an issue of numbers alone,rnhowever. Four-fifths of the foreigners come from various poorrncountries in Africa, Asia, and Europe. These people havernnothing in common with Germany. They do not share her languagernor culture. They all, however, have a “right,” the right tornstay in Germany by speaking a single word, “asylum.” Theyrnthen enjoy a de facto right to stay on German soil indefinitelyrnNOVEMBER 1993/19rnrnrn