Germany: See No Evil, Say No Evil; Why can't Germans talk honestly about the hate in the east?

Byline: Stefan Theil (With Corinna Emundts in Berlin)

Germany's official motto for this summer's football World Cup is "The World Hosted by Friends." And increasingly, some Germans fear it might promise more than they can deliver. As the country gears up to present its best face to more than a million foreign visitors, a string of recent attacks on black and Turkish immigrants in the formerly communist East has reminded the public of an ugly, festering problem.

In April, two attackers allegedly shouting racist epithets beat an Ethiopian-born professor into a coma in Potsdam. In May, assailants beat a Turkish-German parliamentarian in the face and head with a bottle in the eastern outskirts of Berlin. Last week, a new government report on extremism confirmed that these were no isolated cases: violent right-wing hate crimes were up 25 percent in 2005--from 832 the year before, to 1,034--and continued to be a particular scourge of the east. Rural Saxony-Anhalt and Brandenburg, surrounding Berlin, showed a per capita rate of xenophobic attacks 10 times as high as a western state like Hessia. Adjusting for the far lower number of immigrants in the east, a foreign-looking person is about 25 times as likely to get assaulted in the east as in the west, says University of Hanover criminologist Christian Pfeiffer.

Yet what's really got Germans riled up? Not so much these sad and (to Germany's credit) much-reported facts. Instead, what set off Germany's latest "racism debate" was a public remark by a former government official lamenting the fact that there were areas in Brandenburg and other parts of the east where dark-skinned foreigners "might not make it out alive." The same week, an association of African-Germans in Berlin announced it would put out a list of "no-go areas" in eastern Germany for World Cup visitors. Both the ex-official and the council were howled down by a chorus of eastern politicians and media commentators. Their offense: "stigmatizing" the east.

Strangely, Germany's debate over racism seems to be less about racism than about what one is (and isn't) allowed to say about it. German intellectuals and politicians have long been uncomfortable asking the obvious question: why is it, precisely, that east Germany seems so ...