It's not Weimar all over again: the strengths of German democracy.

Anyone who watches the news knows the picture of Germany in the last year. Young men clamoring rowdily in the street at night. Rocks, bricks, Molotov cocktails. An apartment building leaking flame from a broken window. One thug after another scurries up to hurl in his offering as neighborhood residents, some applauding, stand by. Cut to the inside of the building, where foreigners huddle in terror, flinching at the sound of breaking glass. Back outside, the thugs raise their arms in a Hitler salute.

Oh no, you think. Here the), go again.

In the here-they-go-again scenario, these skinhead thugs play the role of SA storm troops; Turks and gypsies play the Jews; right-wing politicians like Schonhuber (leader of the Republikaner party) play little Hitlers; and passive German onlookers play... well, passive German onlookers. Drawing on memories of a fathomless Nazi atrocity, this scenario is both plausible and vivid; but, having lived in Germany for the past two years, I'm convinced it isn't accurate. What follows is by no means an attempt to downplay the horror of German xenophobia--seven foreigners died in violent attacks here last year, including a tenyear-old Turkish girl killed along with her grandmother and aunt in the firebombing of a house in the town of Molln--but rather to widen the lens a little, to add some other images to the terrifying and violent ones.

One way some commentators get the picture wrong, both in Germany and abroad, is by framing current German unrest in the context of the 1919-33 Weimar Republic. The comparison suggests the anarchic breakdown of liberal democracy, and contributes to what the Washington Post called, in a recent editorial, "a suddenly revived international impression of Germany as a lawless and racist land where foreigners... are unsafe and unwelcome." Bonn, however, is no Weimar. The foundations of democracy in today's Germany are rock-solid, the constitution of 1949 commanding public avowals of respect across the spectrum of political parties. In Weimar, democracy was a terrified rabbit beset on all sides by armed hunters and attack dogs. Almost no one stood behind it--not the industrialists, not the army, not the police or the aristocracy or the church. In fact, the very creation of the Weimar government out of the humiliation of World War I was seen by many to be synonymous with treason; not only agitators like Hitler, but generals like Ludendorff, the great heroes of the nation, cynically regarded its social-democrat leaders as the "November criminals" who with a "stab in the back" had allegedly sold Germany to the French devil at Versailles. Imagine General Schwarzkopf going on "Donahue" and "Oprah Winfrey" and pouring contempt upon the president, the Congress, the Supreme Court, and the U.S. Constitution, and there you have Weimar. A palpable longing for authoritarianism arose from all corners. "The trafficking of parliament and parties," wrote none other than Thomas Mann in 1920, "leads to the infection of the whole body of the nation with the virus of politics....I don't want politics. I want impartiality, order, and propriety."

Second, there's nothing today like the economic desperation of the '20s, when Germany, caught in the suffocating grasp of Versailles's massive reparations, tried to wriggle its way out through irresponsible monetary policies and touched off an inflation unparalleled in world history. Hand over the future to a venomous demagogue who called openly for "a dictatorship brought through the sword"? Well, when a sack of potatoes costs 10 million marks, and money for shopping has to be carried around in baskets, such ravings may not seem so risky. Today's Germany, on the other hand, presents its citizens with a cradle-to-grave security guarded by Olympian financial institutions so notoriously sensitive to fiscal instability that the rest of the world perpetually screams for them to loosen up a little. To an American, Germany in the '90s seems startlingly riskaverse, its citizens as much so as its Bundesbank. Lives are lived carefully, far back from the edge. (A German acquaintance of mine, hearing me tell of an American friend--a father of two young children--who had quit teaching at age forty-three to try something else, shook her head and commented, "If he were in Germany, his life would be over.") The point is this: Germans know that their reputation abroad is being damaged by the violence against foreigners here, and--all moral questions aside-- this damage is a risk they're not willing to take. It's a little bit like the David Duke phenomenon; when crunch time came, the majority of Louisianans saw not only the moral repugnance of a Duke governorship, but the business costs as well.

Finally, however, the most crucial difference between Germany then and now lies in what one might call civic discourse. As the political culture of Weimar, torn and twisted by radical uncertainties, grew more and more perverted, so did its public discourse--the range of things available to be said and ideas to be thought. It's still shocking to go back to Hitler's speeches and hear how undisguised the hatred in them was: already in 1922 he was telling interviewers about his plan to build "gallows and more gallows... where the Jews will be hanged, and will stay hanging, until they stink." Human nature may be mysterious, but the mechanisms by which its darker mysteries can be brought out are not. Germans in Weimar were taught that Jews were dangerous, evil, and dirty--a Nazi intro course in hate that turned out to be a prerequisite for the later advanced course of the Holocaust.

Today, however, Germans are getting--and giving--different lessons. The campaign against Auslanderfeindlichkeit (literally, "foreigner-hostility") is an effort of humane propaganda spectacular in its breadth. There are benefit rock concerts and candlelight parades in city after city--hundreds of thousands of Germans publicly demonstrating solidarity with foreigners (Germany, in fact, accepts more political refugees than all of the other European nations combined). Everywhere you turn you see a billboard or a tee-shirt featuring the favorite slogans: "My Best Friend Is a Foreigner" or "We Are All Foreigners." On TV sports programs, top German athletes are recruited alongside pop groups to sing campfire-like ballads about loving your neighbor. Panel alter panel, talk show after talk show, agonizingly takes up the theme of the Ugly German ("How Ugly Are We?" the titles ask). Children in schools paint pictures against xenophobia. Politicians and clergymen exhort. The most popular TV series sends its hero, a charismatic high school history teacher, into action against the local right-wing villains. In the lobbies of movie houses, on the walls alongside escalators in department stores, hang photos of somber-looking Germans in a "Citizens against Xenophobia" series. There you are, cruising up the moving stairs toward the Men's Department, when suddenly you come face to face with "Jurgen, 28, Citizen against Xenophobia."

On and on goes the crusade. In Stuttgart recently, taxi drivers undertook a day-long sympathy strike. Picture a stretch of the autobahn closed to all other traffic, just a tremendous stream of yellow Mercedes taxis tooting their sympathy for foreigners! The government, meanwhile. has cracked down hard on right-wingers, banning skinhead and neo-Nazi groups, raiding apartments and bars where they hang out; when a recent paper announced a "nationwide crackdown on rightist bands," it meant rock bands, skinhead musicians who have suddenly found their concert permissions revoked, their recordings confiscated. Private companies are also hyper-alert to charges of insensitivity. Recently a top corporate executive was fired--fired-- when it was discovered he flew the old German imperial flag (not the Nazi flag, but the Kaiser's flag) at his house.

To be sure, there's a worrisome side to this campaign; in their zeal to enforce politically correct attitudes, both politicians and the press seem willing to deal recklessly with civil liberties, blithely calling not merely for the banning of right-wing groups, but i*or revocation of their basic political rights, including the right to vote. And there's a ludicrous side as well. Surrounded by such an orchestration of earnest good will, you sometimes get the feeling that all of Germany has been turned into a sixth-grade civics class. As in a Woody Allen film, you expect to see a giant teacher-mother figure looming over your shoulder, a National Scold, telling you to be good or else!But the point remains: as a commitment to addressing a dangerous social ill, the German crusade against ethnic hatred dwarfs anything America is used to putting on. Take our campaigns against AIDS, illiteracy, domestic violence, alcoholism, and drugs; bundle these together, multiply time and resources by ten, and then you have something like the current German effort. It's simply civic education on a scale unimaginable in the United States--a project that begins to resemble the moral equivalent of war.

We Americans are outraged by the violence against foreigners in Germany. This is appropriate; the prospect of mobs firebombing refugee hostels is a horrifying one. And yet often our outrage has an air of extreme innocence, as if the very existence of cruelty is a continual revelation to us. Recently, newspapers here published an open letter to the German people from a high school teacher in Olathe, Kansas. "I would like to bring friends and students 10 Germany next summer," Jason Sargent wrote. "How can I do that now'?... Will they be hurt'? Can you guarantee their safety'?... Have you learned nothing from your past'? Can this hate happen again?"

The tricky thing about outrages is that, like mountains or pointillist paintings, they are easier to discern at a distance than up close. We express horror at the picture of neo-Nazi skinheads giving the Hitler salute, but what about the KKK marchers in their white robes? Mr. Sargent anxiously inquires about safety; but what about the staggering crime and violence of our own streets? What about the German tourist murdered recently in front of her small children in Miami, or the Japanese exchange student killed last year in Louisiana, blown away when he approached the wrong house while looking for a party and was mistaken for an intruder'?

The British historian A.J.P. Taylor maintained that America's optimistic world view--its faith in its own goodness, its cheerful advocacy of international reconciliation--was made possible in part by the ruthless simplifying of its own homefront, specifically by the near-extermination of Native Americans. "American high-mindedness and self-righteousness," he wrote, "have been bred out of a dark past." Have we learned anything from our past? While it's true, and disturbing, that monuments to victims of Nazism have been repeatedly vandalized here in Germany, what's perhaps even more remarkable is that they exist in the first place, How many monuments to the victims of slavery does one see in the United States? How many monuments to the Native American victims of Euro-American expansionism?

The collection of all the monuments ever built by nations to victims of their own misdeeds would fit in a very small space; and most of them would be German. In comparison to Americans, Germans spend a great deal of time worrying about their past. (They have yet another whopper of a word for this process of coming to terms with the past--Vergangenheitsbewaltigung. ) Within weeks of sending off his open letter, Jason Sargent received over five hundred letters back from Germans--an avalanche of anguished reflection upon the questions he'd raised. Is there any other country in the world whose citizens would do this? In Germany, a corporate executive is fired for flying the old imperial flag at home. In Georgia, meanwhile, the state government still flies the Confederate Stars and Bars. And what if African'Americans say that the flag is a perpetual reminder of their enslavement?

But A.J.P. Taylor' s remark about America's past not only offers a bracing corrective to our high-mindedness; it also suggests that the proper background against which current German realities should be measured is not that of the American paradise, its woods eerily emptied of Injuns, but rather of the Balkan slaughterfield, where each day contending factions enact their ancient and murderous grudges. Can the ethnic hatreds and suspicions unleashed by the dissolution of cold-war restraints be rooted out, or blunted, or redirected, by public and civic policy? There's no sure answer; but if acknowledging the problem, and talking about it, and committing vast resources of time and money and energy can do anything-if they can--my bet is that they will do so here, in Germany. Far from signaling the collapse of civil order and the prelude to a new fascism, the current unrest in Germany--or, rather, the country's response to its unrest--strikes me as the West's best stab at mustering the resources of liberal democracy against powerful nationalistic forces that are working everywhere to undo it.