In July, a bomb attack in the western city of D sseldorf set off sirens of alarm. It wounded 10 immigrants from the former Soviet Union, seven of them Jewish. On the eve of the 10th anniversary celebration of German reunification earlier this month, three separate incidents of anti-Semitic vandalism seemed deliberately timed to mar the national festivities. And just this week, a Senegalese immigrant was beaten and kicked at a streetcar stop by four young men in the eastern town of Magdeburg. Peter Hay is a distinguished German-born law professor who divides his time between teaching at Emory University in Atlanta and the University of Dresden in eastern Germany's.
Citizens appear to be taking that message to heart.
Skinhead violence is not necessarily a topic Germans volunteer to talk about with a visitor. In an e-mail message just before the incidents that marred Germany's reunification celebration, Rita Wuebbeler, a German native who runs an Atlanta firm specializing in training people of different cultures to work together, expressed her alarm at the news from her homeland. The German government is responding forcefully. The money, with matching funds from the European Union, will be used to promote anti-racism programs in schools and factories. A week earlier, lawmakers took the unusual step of pleading publicly with the 85,000 Jews who live in Germany not to leave the country.