TWO German men were jailed this week for an attack last June on three black Britons – construction workers – which left one of the victims paralysed from the neck down. The two men, it was reported, admitted to mixing in neo-Nazi circles and to shouting racial epithets at the Britons. They were imprisoned for five and eight years respectively.
A second trial is underway in which a German youth is charged with murdering another British worker: he is said to have tied the worker to his car and dragged him for more than 8km.
These instances of anti-foreigner, and more specifically racial, violence erupt in Germany from time to time.
They are all the more repugnant because they occur in the country which not much more than 50 years ago perpetrated mass murder on a stupefying scale.
It is because of that history that the official response to racial violence is so significant and so welcome. Germany is today among the world’s most prized democracies and dare not allow manifestations of neo- Nazism to go unchecked.
There was, however, another report from Germany this week. It said that plans to name a street in Berlin after the late German-born actress, Marlene Dietrich, are being angrily opposed by local residents.
They say Dietrich was a “traitor to the fatherland” and “non-German” because she left in the 1930s and went to Hollywood. Even more than that, during World WarII she sang for American troops.
In contrast, said the report, her sister had worked at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and her brother-in-law ran a cinema for the German army.
In the Germany of today we would have hoped that Dietrich would have been honoured and praised for her behaviour. Instead, according to the report, many older residents have never forgiven her for turning her back on the Third Reich.
With that sort of attitude still current no wonder that Germany is afflicted by the excrescences of neo-Nazism. With grandparents, and perhaps parents, carrying these anti-Dietrich sentiments no wonder that some Germans periodically wander the streets giving vent to xenophobic fury.
How to counter it? The older generation are probably beyond hope and regeneration. It is to the youth that Germany must look – and the existence of neo-Nazis among them is a dismaying indication of a failure in the educational and social system.
There is a lesson in this for us in South Africa, as much as for any other society which has suffered the plague of racial and ethnic hatred and the monstrous consequences which can flow from it.
The fostering of togetherness and acceptance of others, irrespective of skin colour, religion or gender, must start at an early age and must be built into the fabric of society. It starts with the revising of schoolbooks and curricula to remove racist poison and stereotyping.
A vital element is that the country’s leaders must be the role model for all through their words and deeds – and at least in this respect South Africa is setting the pace for the world.