Leading Article: Legacies of Germany's past

GERMANY is not the only country with racial problems. It is not even the only West European democracy with racial problems. Almost at the same time as five Turkish women and children were being murdered in Solingen, two dormitories for North African immigrants were being burnt down in Rome. France has had regular outbreaks of violence against immigrants. In Britain last year there were 7,780 racial assaults, including several murders, according to official figures that are probably too low.

In almost any society under stress, foreigners and minorities are liable to be made scapegoats by unscrupulous politicians and social misfits. Immigration becomes a factor when it overstresses a society's powers of absorption. Two factors, however, make Germany special: its geographical position and its past.

Paradoxically, the desire to break with its past after the Second World War helped to create fertile soil for the neo- Nazi thugs of today. With praiseworthy idealism, Germany wrote the right of asylum into its constitution and denied its border police the right to turn anyone away. That did not matter while its eastern frontiers were sealed by the Cold War, and when its booming economy could absorb millions of foreign workers - although many were badly treated even then. It matters now because, with the frontiers open and the economy in recession, floods of economic migrants have been attracted by these asylum laws. Last year there were 440,000 applications. Compare this with Britain's 50,000 immigrants a year and wonder at last week's ill-informed outburst by Winston Churchill. The Germans are lucky they have no mainstream politicians like him.

But their response has been weak and slow, partly, again, because of the past. Their politicians, particularly on the left, clung to their well-meaning liberalism when it had ceased to be realistic. Helmut Kohl remained so afraid of offending the right wing that he failed to condemn earlier racial murders with sufficient conviction. So tension was allowed to build up. By the time the government reacted last week with laws designed to separate genuine asylum- seekers from economic migrants, it appeared to be responding to violence, and may actually have encouraged the murderers in Solingen.

It is Germany's unavoidable fate to live under the suspicion that its past is not quite dead. Murders that in other countries would be treated as evidence of contemporary malaise acquire in Germany the added dimension of historical resonance. Fortunately, modern Germany bears little resemblance to the Weimar Republic in which Hitler rose to power. It is a prosperous democracy bound into the Western alliance and the European Community. But its Nazi past remains a reference point for its underclass as well as for its liberal politicians, often warping the attitudes of both.

It also clings to one bad legacy from the past by maintaining the concept of Germany as an ethnic community, making it hard for foreigners to become full citizens and easy for them to be treated as outsiders. It should now move towards a redefinition of itself as a community held together by citizenship, not race. Ethnicity is not a sound base for statehood.