Derek Scallyreports on how casual racism is commonplace in German society.
Racism in Germany has many faces. The clichéd, ugly face resides in economically deprived eastern towns, where attacks on dark-skinned people are a depressingly familiar event.
Like last August when eight Indian men had to run for their lives and hide in an Indian restaurant in Mügeln in eastern Germany as a mob gathered outside, trying to break down the door while chanting "foreigners out!"
Another, equally ugly face can be found in surprising places. Last September, Germany's leading news magazine Der Spiegel ran a cover story on Chinese industrial espionage in Germany. The magazine appeared on newsstands showing an Asian woman peering through red blinds over the headline: "The Yellow Spies."
Four years ago, a German television sports commentator asked black German football player Gerald Asamoah in 2004: "If you had the choice, would you rather be black or white?"
The Mügeln attack attracted worldwide headlines, but was portrayed in many German media outlets as an unfortunate one-off, a moment of madness by a few small minds in a small town. The other two cases barely attracted any attention. Yet all hint at a racist undertone rarely discussed in German life.
In its 2007 report, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) recorded 18,142 incidents of racist violence in Germany in 2006, a rise of 14 per cent in a year. German anti-racism bodies speak of an average of 17 race-related killings here annually.
What statistics cannot collate are the common, daily humiliations of people who don't "look" German: being followed around by store detectives; hearing ape noises behind your back; being confronted with the word "Neger" which, unlike its English equivalent, has by no means been expunged from the German lexicon.
"I remember waiting for a friend in Leipzig train station when, for no reason at all, a man shouted at me 'Scheißnegerschwein' [ dirty nigger pig]," said Afro-German singer Patrice in a recent interview. "I looked over at the policeman nearby. He said nothing, just looked at me from head to toe with a look that said: 'And you are, too'."
BEFORE THE 2006 World Cup, an anti-racism organisation advised visitors from Africa and Asia to avoid certain areas of eastern Germany. The organisation was attacked by eastern politicians for tarnishing the region's reputation, ignoring the fact that Turks, Afro-Germans and others living here avoid eastern areas if at all possible. Not that casual racism is simply an eastern problem.
"I've had problems everywhere, Munich is the worst," says Anders Oldermeier, a Berlin-based musician with a German mother and Jamaican father. "I try to deal with it with humour or just walk away, otherwise it would really get to me. Mostly but not always, the incidents aren't life-threatening."
But for some, they are life-threatening. Like for Mozambique-born Alberto Adriano, kicked to death eight years ago in a Dessau park. Or Oury Jalloh, an asylum seeker from Sierra Leone who burned to death three years ago in mysterious circumstances while bound to a mattress in a Dessau police cell.
The issue of racism in Germany cannot be separated from the tortuous question of German identity and how it was hijacked by the Nazis 75 years ago.
In recent years, German civil society has worked hard to reclaim German identity and frame it in a positive sense. Yet in many heads, the notion of German identity is still linked to the idea of "German blood" - a concept that predated the Nazis, but one they perverted to horrific effect.
Jus Sanguinis (right of blood) served as the basis for German citizenship until eight years ago, when a supplementary Jus Soli (right of soil) was added.
"There is prejudice here based on the fact that your nationality and ethnicity are the same," says Yvonne Jacoby, a Dublin-based German-American who lived in Germany for six years.
"In America, your nationality is different from your ethnicity, so if I see someone from Pakistan or Mexico on the bus, I assume they are American. That's not the case in Germany." Anti-racism campaigner Anetta Kahane suggests that German history and its citizenship laws have bred a culture of "condescending racism", where "German-ness" is in the eye of the beholder.
"It's too much to expect people, eight years after bloodline was - halfheartedly - removed as the sole criteria for citizenship, to have changed their attitude to race," says Kahane, founder of the Antonio Amadeu Foundation, which tackles racism, anti-Semitism and extreme right-wing violence. "And politicians are even slower to change their attitudes."
For decades, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) of Helmut Kohl and Angela Merkel maintained that, despite 7.3 million foreign citizens residing here, Germany was "not a country of immigration". The party officially revised this view in its party programme last year.
It is in this context that CDU governor Roland Koch remarked earlier this month that Germany had "too many young criminal foreigners".
All agree it was a taboo-breaking moment in German politics, but there is disagreement over which taboo was broken.
Koch's supporters say it was high time a right-wing politician in Germany addressed the taboo surrounding youth crime among Turkish and Arab immigrant youth.
KOCH'S CRITICS, HOWEVER, saw in his remark another taboo being broken: the deliberate attempt by a mainstream politician to ignore the social causes of crime and instead make a populist, xenophobic suggestion that "foreigners" living in Germany are ethnically predisposed to crime.
Anti-racism campaigners warn against the temptation of simple solutions, whether about "foreigners" and crime, or of viewing racism in Germany simply as the preserve of poor people and those with extreme-right views.
"Racism is everywhere in Germany, even the way we play word games with it is a problem," says Manuela Ritz, an anti-racism counsellor who grew up in Mügeln in a mixed-race family.
"The word 'racism' is rarely heard in German discourse," she says.
Instead, other euphemisms abound, like "Fremdenfeindlichkeit" (hostility to foreigners) or "right-wing extremism".
"With terms like right-wing extremism, people can lean back and think 'well, that's not me'. But people who wouldn't consider themselves racist have images and phrases in their head that tend in this direction. That is the core of the problem."