German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier has spoken at a commemoration event to mark the anniversary of the xenophobic riots in the Rostock district of Lichtenhagen 30 years ago.
“What happened in Rostock is a disgrace for our country. Politicians bear a great deal of responsibility for this disgrace,” President Frank-Walter Steinmeier told a crowd gathered in the northern city of Rostock on Thursday.
The president blamed all of Germany’s political parties for using rhetoric that was laced with resentment in the early 1990s. But after the attack, the country waited a long time for authorities to offer a clear condemnation of the riots, he added.
For four nights in August 1992, a mob of rioters and right-wing extremists attacked a central reception center for asylum seekers and a shelter for Vietnamese workers in the Lichtenhagen district of Rostock, a former East German city. Local onlookers applauded, while the police were completely overwhelmed, and at one stage forced to retreat.
The lessons of Lichtenhagen should be taken to heart, Steinmeier said. The violence of that time, “that trace of right-wing terror, is unfortunately still there,” he warned. “The state must do everything possible at all times to protect each and every citizen against attacks.”
He thanked all those who for decades, often against great opposition, worked with the victims and remember the xenophobic attacks.
One of them is Hajo Graf Vitzthum von Eckstädt of Rostock’s anti-racism initiative “Bunt statt braun” (“Colorful instead of brown”) which fights against right-wing extremism and its breeding ground.
“I was shocked,” he recalls. “It was one of those excesses waiting to happen. The federal and state governments had failed.”
Rostock-Lichtenhagen was the first pogrom after the end of the Nazi reign of terror. For Vitzthum von Eckstädt, it’s clear that politicians in Rostock at the time didn’t just look the other way: “Politicians used the event,” he says.
Times of upheaval
Germany experienced turbulent times in the early 1990s. Helmut Kohl had ruled West Germany for ten years and then continued heading the government of reunited Germany. After the euphoria of German reunification in 1990, came the collapse of the East German economy. And then that of the entire East German society. At the same time, the country experienced a sharp increase in immigration. With the fall of the Wall, the Iron Curtain of the Cold War also fell: hundreds of thousands of people from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe subsequently moved to Germany.
But the atmosphere was heating up. Right-wing extremists — “skinheads” — were on the streets in both the West and the East. There were violent xenophobic attacks all over the country. “There was a lot of skepticism at the time against foreigners and immigrants, against Sinti and Roma,” recalls Hajo Graf Vitzthum von Eckstädt. “And the politicians at the time just let that boil over — because it was in their own interests.”
Helmut Kohl’s conservative government had been working for some time to drastically tighten German asylum law. This had been crafted after the Nazi dictatorship and World War 2 with a view to offering permanent and unrestricted protection to politically persecuted persons. And this was enshrined in the constitution.
Political observers speculated even then that the conservative federal government wanted to use the riots and protests to put pressure on the opposition center-left Social Democrats (SPD) to agree to a constitutional amendment restricting the right to asylum. The calculation was that the SPD would fear losing support and bow to mob hatred and political pressure from the streets.
Calculated racism?
In Rostock, politicians stood back and watched events unfold. In the months before the pogrom, Sinti and Roma from Romania were stranded in front of the reception center for asylum seekers in the Lichtenhagen district, in front of the Sunflower House, where Vietnamese workers lived.
The authorities were overwhelmed by the numbers, leaving the new arrivals to camp on the lawn in front of the facility. Hygiene was lacking, nobody set up mobile toilets, and the police attitude towards the Romanians was hostile.
Mehmet Daimagüler, the Federal Government Commissioner for Antiziganism, says the situation in Rostock-Lichtenhagen followed a tradition of discrimination against the Sinti and Roma in Germany. Also, he said, the murder of hundreds of thousands of them by Germans during the Nazi era had at the time never really been recognized. “Their persecution continued in other forms after the Nazi era.”
Reunification — not for migrants
Mehmet Daimagüler has been fighting racism and right-wing extremism for years. As a criminal defense lawyer, book author, and publicist. He, too, was shaken by the pogrom in 1992. “It cast a shadow over the joy of reunification.”
He experienced what many Germans from immigrant families reported: That the nationwide jubilation over reunification went hand in hand with a new quality of racism and hatred against the immigrants in society. “The reunification was by Germans for Germans, and we migrants were not part of it. We didn’t sit at any of the round tables — neither in the West nor in the East. We were treated the way we were seen: We were irrelevant.”
Immigrants in 1992 were still mostly labeled “foreigners,” even if Germany had long been their home and they had even been born here. Only those with German parents were seen as German. Daimagüler speaks of “blood law,” the ancient “ius sanguinis,”. Blood and soil (Blut und Boden) was the slogan expressing Nazi Germany’s ideal of a racially defined national body (“blood”) united with a settlement area (“soil”).
Source: DW