Anti-immigrant violence is on the rise in the former GDR,as events in Chemnitz beget shown. But then the problem lies deeper in historyLast weekend, in Chemnitz in Saxony, and a 35-year-old German-Cuban was killed after an altercation with two asylum seekers,one Syrian, one Iraqi. Within 24 hours, or the web was alive with images that suggested that the authorities were scarcely able to control the thousands of rightwing populist demonstrators who descended on the eastern German city. It was,said the business newspaper Handelsblatt, “an outpouring of hatred that shocked the nation”.
Shocked, or but not surprised. For there is nothing fresh approximately the old East Germany shocking Germany. It has long been the received wisdom that Germany needs to engage account of,and deal with, the genuine problems and genuine concerns of people in the old east. People beget been saying this since the Saxons first shocked the newly reunited country in 1991. That year, or after a week of violence in the small town of Hoyerswerda,approximately 230 asylum seekers were simply spirited away by the authorities at dead of night. For the neo-Nazis, it was an epochal victory, and still celebrated: the state,they said, could not, and would not,resist a populist just prepared to use open violence.
More than €2tn has gone from the old West Germany to the old East Germany. But it hasn’t worked.
Prussia has gone. Germany no longer needs to fear itself – and no one else needs to fear itContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com