LANDIS MACKELLAR

Ausländerfrei!
The Hoyerswerda Pogrom, 1991

The main force driving German politics today is immigration and the resulting large foreign-born or first-generation native-born immigrant population. With the flourishing of Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD), the grovelling to the right of the venerable Christlich Demokratische Union (CDU) and collapse of the socialist and liberal parties, Germany has entered into a new political era; one in which extreme right-wing views have become normal, at least so far as immigration is concerned. Whether the new political constellation will prove stable or not is an open question, but a taboo has been broken, as it has in neighbouring Austria. 

With this in mind, it is interesting to revisit what the French call the banalisation of anti-foreigner sentiment.  This commentary describes the event that brought inchoate völkische rage; what Collège de France sociologist François Héran recently called a fonds commun de xénophobie, out of the shadows and into the daylight – the Hoyerswerda pogrom of 17-23 September, 1991.[i]

The Hoyerswerda episode remains little known – displaced in collective memory by the August 1992 event which sent German extreme right-wing violence up the international media pop charts – the anti-asylum seeker riot in Rostock (Mecklenburg-Pomerania, several hundred hard-core perpetrators, perhaps 3,000 townspeople abetting). And by the steady dribble of more individualized and narrowly targeted, but deadlier events. Mölln (Schleswig-Holstein; November 1992), three Turks dead and nine injured when their houses were firebombed. Solingen (North Rhine-Westphalia, May 1993), five Turks dead and 14 injured. In recent memory, the October 2019 synagogue shooting in Halle (Saxony-Anhalt, two dead, several injured), the murder of Angela Merkel’s Willkommen asylum policy defender, the CDU politician Walter Lübke (Hesse, June 2019), and others. One would have to consult Wikipedia for an enumeration, and that would be to miss the scores of assaults, beatings, etc. that do not make it even to the bottom of the pop charts. For them, you would have to scour the local press and Antifa websites. Above all, the Hoyerswerda pogrom has been displaced in German memory by the Nationalsozialistische Untergrund or NSU fiasco, in which a trio of just-better-than stoners barely out of their teens set out on a murderous rampage designed to bring down the German state and gave said State a good run for the money.[ii] 

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Hoyerswerda lies in German coal country – the Black Triangle, an environmental disaster zone cutting through East Saxony, Poland, and what we on the winning side of the Cold War game used to affectionately call Czecho. Good beer, good girls, both cheap back then. In 1955, ground was broken at Hoyerswerda for the largest industrial project ever to be constructed in the communist German Democratic Republic (Deutsche Demokratische Republik, DDR), the Schwarze Pumpe coal gasification plant, plus a briquette manufactory, both fed by the neighbouring open-pit lignite mine. Advertisements were posted throughout the DDR to attract migrants to the new workers’ paradise. A new town was built from scratch across the river from the existing old one, eventually housing some 60,000 inhabitants and dwarfing the original settlement of 7,000 or so. Row on row of Plattenbau – the cheap, bolted-together prefab concrete-block rectangular buildings inspired by Le Corbusier that were to DDR housing what the Trabant was to family transport – sprang up to house the miners and plant workers and their families. The new neighbourhoods were named – here is DDR imagination for you – Wohnkomplex I through Wohnkomplex X. 

DDR imagination was to architectural charm as the DDR workforce to labour productivity. And not only had many young men perished in the war, but the East haemorrhaged youth to the West throughout the 1950s until the Berlin exit loophole was closed by the Wall in 1961. One response to the labour shortage was the institution of bilateral worker visa programmes with comradely states. It started with Brothers Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, and Romania, but when the supply of European kinfolk dwindled, agreements were negotiated with further afield, more exotic and darker-complected relatives, such as Cousins Cuba, Algeria, Vietnam, and Mozambique. This was to be mutually beneficial circular migration, nothing like the capitalist exploitation of Turkish and Italian guest workers in West Germany (Bundesrepublik Deutschland, BRD). Imported workers were to receive training in valuable skills that they could take back to their homes along with the socialist consciousness they had absorbed and could impart to their benighted countrymen. All for the betterment of the grateful visitors and the elevation of their homelands.

In fact, the policy goal was to use up the contract workers and throw them out before they could become established or, God forbid, seduce local women and start breeding like the Schwarznegern American soldiers stationed in the BRD. Extensions to the basic five-year contract were rarely granted and workers were subject to immediate dismissal and expulsion for failure to observe socialist work standards (“Fight American imperialism! Show up for work on time!” urged one poster). There was no training in valuable skills. Lacking in German and with rudimentary education, the foreign hired help was engaged in menial, repetitive tasks. Lumpen of the Lumpen.

Population has memory, and the loss of young workers due to the war and emigration in the 1950s, together with rock-bottom fertility rates despite generous family and woman-friendly policies, began to pinch hard in the 1980s. The recruitment of foreign contract workers, in the case of Hoyerswerda, mostly from Mozambique and Vietnam, accelerated pari passu. They were exclusively male and lived in a Plattenbau in Albert-Schweitzer-Strasse. It was a dormitory existence, housed two and four to a room, segregated by race, all goings and comings controlled at the entrance. Bused to work with the shift bus, bused back after.

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The DDR collapsed and chants of Wir sind das Volk gave way to Wir sind ein Volk. Reunification was hastily cobbled together and took official effect on 3 October, 1990. Economic and monetary integration had taken place on 1 July. In the DDR, expectations of a rise to BRD living standards ran wild in defiance of the fundamental principle of equilibrium that the bottom does not rise to the top; the two meet somewhere in between. There is neoclassical economics (and classic thermodynamics), for you. Just where in between to be decided by those on top; there is political economy for you. As between the BRD and DDR, it was no contest. Initial euphoria waned as it became clear that Hoyerswerda was broke; out of business. BRD real estate agents descended to snap up prize old-town altbau buildings at bargain basement rates. There was an infestation of Mormon missionaries asking if you had a moment; Jehovah’s Witnesses asking you if you had read the Bible, Scientologists offering you a free personality test.[iii] Environmentalists cried havoc about coal. Management consultants arrived to rationalise Schwarze Pumpe. The gasification complex and the mine were privatised and sold off.

Anti-foreigner feeling rose. We are being laid off; why are we giving jobs to foreigners, some black as the ace of spades, others slant-eyed, who cannot speak a word of comprehensible German? Our rents are going up; do they even pay rent? Ugly rumours had always circulated that, before economic reunification, the contract workers were paid in precious BRD Deutschemark, not the worthless DDR Ostmark like everyone else.

The jig was up for the foreigners. The contracts of the Mozambicans were due to expire at the end of September 1991; those of most of the Vietnamese in December. All were on reduced hours. The Mozambicans passed their leisure in the summer of 1991 lounging around the public space in front of the Albert-Schweitzer-Strasse dormitory wearing outfits and listening to music whose loudness offended the neighbours in equal degree. The Vietnamese, a mercantile people, and one that had never been as despised as the Africans, were more pro-active: they cornered the illegal trade in cigarettes, mostly smuggled from Czecho, in the weekly new town market at Lausitzer Platz.

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As a teenager in the late DDR or just after, to be Systemkonform like your parents was to be a Schleimer; acrawler. If you had any get-up-and-go, you hung with either the punk or the skinhead scene, and which one did not much matter so much as the gesture of contempt for the System. Sometimes the two even hung amicably together, distinguishable only by their hairdos and the shoelaces on their boots – white for the skins, red for the punks. The punks listened to The Clash and AC/DC. The skinheads listened to Skrewdriver and Neue Werte. 

“Neo-Nazi” is a term of disputable legal, political, and sociological meaning; but it will do until a better one shows up. If you wanted to act out and cause a teenaged commotion in those heady times, then celebrating the Third Reich, flinging Nazi salutes, and so on was a good place to start. And if you were one of that sliver of humanity that enjoys inflicting violence on others at close quarters, hand-to-hand, even at risk of being injured yourself, then better a skin than a punk. Not to forget: there were no neo-Nazis in the DDR. Party line. Fascism was the outgrowth of capitalism and, in the BRD, practically bourgeois – Michael Kühnen (ex-Air Force officer), Jürgen Rieger (attorney), Gerhardt Frey (real estate tycoon), Christian Worch (notary’s assistant) & Co. In the DDR, fascism had been eliminated root and branch; there were only anti-social hooligans; “rowdies.” Nothing political about it.

There is, in Germany, a wide margin of appreciation for public drunkenness. The open consumption of beer is, unless you are staggering, vomiting, or near-comatose, a sacred right, and the legal age is sixteen. Late in the afternoon of Tuesday, 17 September 1991, a group of skins was hanging out at the Lausitzer Platz market making a civic nuisance of themselves; swilling beer with the odd schlug of vodka, bellowing snatches of songs by favourite banned neo-Nazi bands, overturning parked bicycles, mocking the good citizens out for their shopping, and assaulting, with perhaps some mild battery thrown in, the odd punk passerby who came within their orbit. Just lads being lads after a few too many. When the ciggies ran out, they mobbed one of the Vietnamese trading tables and helped themselves.

In the retail cigarette black market, margin is thin. Smuggled inventory, always at risk of being confiscated by the police, is financed at loan-shark rates and precious as a consequence. So, it is not surprising that a scuffle ensued. At 17:20, two police wagons arrived and, amid much shoving and abuse, the police detained seven persons. But more skins had shown up, and the rumor spread that a Vietnamese had stabbed one of their friends’ dogs. That was casus belli for the skins.

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Discretion is the better part of valour, Falstaff observed in Henry IV, Part 1. Respecting that principle, the Vietnamese withdrew to shelter in their Albert-Schweitzer-Strasse dormitory. The skinheads followed, picking up camp followers along the way. The crowd shouting threats and racist slogans in front of the Plattenbau grew to about forty and started to throw bottles at the windows behind which the residents cowered. The police showed up at 18:15 and were met with a torrent of abuse. Neighbours gathered to cheer the rioters on. Police from surrounding towns were called at 19:00 and by about 21:00, the sun had fallen, the scene had been controlled and the crowd disbursed.

But the news had spread, and to judge from what ensued, this was the best after-work entertainment in Hoyerswerda for months. By 17:00 on Wednesday, 18 September, there was a mob of four or five dozen skins and diverse other malcontents in front of the building and the number of upstanding neighbours gathered in support exceeded one hundred. Stones were thrown and the crowd cheered every time a window was broken; roaring that universal cry of triumph – Goo….al! Beleaguered dormitory residents sallied to defend the building and the seventy police now on the scene, reinforced by a Special Commando Unit from Dresden, struggled to separate the two sides. By 19:30, the crowd outside the building was estimated to be 200 to 250 persons. The usual wet blankets – a bureaucrat from the local office of the State government (Landesamt) of Saxony, another from the office representing foreign workers, and various persons of the cloth representing Christian values – showed up to preach tolerance. But, whereas their message was a cloying mix of the didactic, the chiding, and the cajoling, the message of the mob was straight, no chaser: If you do not get these people out of here, we will do it ourselves.

In public communicative space, it does not get simpler than that. Thus did the theft of a few packs of cigarettes become a pogrom.

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On Thursday the nineteenth, sympathisers arrived on trains and buses from across the region; the country, even, for this impromptu neo-Nazi Woodstock. The crowd of supportive locals had grown further; by 19:45, it was estimated at over five hundred. The first Molotov cocktails were thrown; none penetrating the building, but exploding on the terrace in front to loud huzzahs. Petrol was siphoned from parked automobiles and poured into empty beer bottles to make more Mollies. The police tried to contain access to the scene with roadblocks, but that did not alleviate the situation within the perimeter, where the security forces were now massed shoulder to shoulder with helmets and neck-to-knee riot shields to defend the building. Besieged residents threw missiles of fortune – bottles, glasses, chairs and the like – from the roof. It was midnight before the situation was finally brought under control.

The mighty German State swung into action on Friday the twentieth with the arrival on the scene of a senior official from the Landesamt Saxony. The police presence had now grown to three hundred. At a lunchtime crisis meeting, crisis management’s thinking crystallized around three conclusions: (i) the weekend was coming and, leisure being what leisure is, this was going to get worse before it got better; (ii) the citizens were against, not with, the forces of order; so (iii) the mob was going to grow bored with attacking the foreigners and turn their attention to the police.

Conclusion: The Ausländer had to go. As a goodwill gesture to the mob, that afternoon the police freed from custody all rioters that had been detained. Buses were brought to Albert-Schweitzer-Gasse and all but about seventy residents whose contracts were still valid for another month were evacuated. The crowed jeered and applauded as they were bussed away to Frankfurt or Berlin, where they were clapped on the back, given an ‘Attaboy! and put on the plane back home.

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But if the authorities thought they had ended the party by removing the punch bowl, they were naive – things were just getting lively. For months, a source of discontent even greater than the foreign contract workers had been the presence – a novelty following reunification – in Hoyerswerda of about a thousand asylum seekers from across the world. Then, as now, Germany was a magnet for the flotsam and jetsam of the international asylum system; a country where you were decently housed and provided with a basic stipendium while your claim was considered. A few side hustles – petty theft and extortion, loose joints, a girl – would generate supernumerary resources to round out the ends of the month. Your case was adjudicated at measured pace, with plenty of room for judicial review and going to ground if it was rejected (as most were, and are, destined to be). Some 240 asylum seekers were housed on Thomas-Müntzer-Strasse in Wohnungskomplex X.

The next day, the troublemakers from Albert-Schweitzer-Strasse converged on the asylum-seekers dormitory, bringing with them their supporters and attracting a local crowd that grew to an estimated one thousand. This was the Saturday peak that the police had feared. The scene became a family affair; women in housedresses or bathrobes suckled infants; dogs barked and peed at will; men guzzled beer and peed, backs turned, at decent remove. The weather was glorious.

The authorities were, for once, out in front of the mob; they had already decided on Friday that the asylum-seekers would have to go the way of the contract workers: Es besteht einheitliche Auffassung dazu, dass eine endgültige Problemlösung nur durch Ausreise der Ausländer geschaffen werden kann. Endgültige problemlösung, the only solution that will work in the end, is a euphemism for the forbidden term Endlösung of evil memory; the Nazi’s Final Solution.

However, evacuation raised legal issues because, unlike contract workers, asylum seekers could not, under the foundational non-refoulement principle of the 1951 Geneva Refugee Convention to which Germany is a signatory, just be flown back to their homeland. An asylum-seeker’s claim must be properly assessed and, with the German asylum mill’s commitment to grind fair and fine, its wheels turn slowly.

A frantic search was made for available accommodation in towns neighbouring Hoyerswerda. Panicked asylum-seekers begged to be relocated in the prosperous West, not the penurious East. But the BRD would not let the ex-DDR off the hook: when you joined the club, was its view, you agreed to take the bitter with the sweet. The Federal-level allocation system demanded that the new Länder must bear their fair share of the burden, and that burden was more several than joint. The problems that started in Saxony ought to stay in Saxony, ran the Berlin view. Even that paragon of solidarity, Gerhard Schröder, went on record that any reallocation of the asylum seekers would be a strictly one-off emergency measure.

The residents of the Thomas-Müntzer-Strasse dormitory were not privy to the high level discussions between Berlin and Landesamt Saxony. But they knew which way the wind blew. Even before the peak of the troubles, those who had access to automobiles or public transportation took off on their own, with preference to Berlin or Hannover, where civil society activists and churches awaited them with there-there’s and pats on the shoulder. The less resourceful boarded, under police guard, a convoy of buses Sunday morning and were removed under a hail of bottles and stones. One missile shattered a bus window and a young Vietnamese fell back screaming in pain, streaming blood from a sliver of glass in his eye. Gooo…al! It was hours before a rendezvous with an ambulance could be arranged to take the injured man to hospital for emergency treatment.

In this convoy of the damned, the voyagers passed under highway bridges festooned with anti-foreigner banners, through towns where residents lined the street to heckle them; were dumped at abandoned railway stations or factories, any place with a functioning WC; were registered at existing asylum-seeker facilities that had no room to accommodate them. Many, in fear, refused to disembark the buses. When an old disused Army barracks in a small town was rumoured to be used to accommodate some of the displaced foreigners, the locals burned it down. Days passed before the dispersed asylum-seekers could be properly disposed of.

Back In Hoyerswerda, there was jubilation. Its people, who apart from some footballers had never really amounted to much, had coined the German Unwort (literally un-word; loosely translated, detestable neologism) of the year: Ausländerfrei!

Endnotes

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[i] It is discussable whether the Hoyerswerda episode was a pogrom – a term commonly used to describe the massacre of Jews – or a mere riot. My view is that the violent expulsion by a large mob of a national, religious, ethnic, or sexual minority qualifies as a pogrom. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck … it must be a duck. The Slavic etymology of the term also supports this expansive view.

The German marking of the Hoyerswerda pogrom’s thirtieth anniversary was muted. An exception is a feature piece by staff journalist Ulrike Nimz in the centre-left Süddeutsche Zeitung: https://projekte.sueddeutsche.de/artikel/politik/hoyerswerda-wie-1991-auslaender-gejagt-wurden-e985000/

[ii] Between January 1998, when they went underground after being tipped off about a botched police raid, and November 2011, when two members committed suicide after a failed robbery and the third surrendered to the police, the NSU murdered ten persons of immigration background and one German policewoman, gravely wounded a German policeman with a bullet to the head, carried out a nail-bomb attack that maimed dozens on a Turkish shopping street in Köln, as well as one in a Nürnberg café that shredded a young Turkish woman’s face; and committed 15 daylight robberies – reckoned to amount to some EUR 615 thousand – to cover the rent, groceries, beer, and summer holidays on the North Sea. The incompetence of the federal and state-level security forces, both cops and spooks, has become legendary. Rumours of complicity abound, and the chummy relationship between intelligence services, their protected informers, and the NSU terrorists was so tangled that no investigative, let alone prosecutorial, mind will ever sort it out. Racism played a role, as well; with the police long blaming the murders on internecine Turkish gang wars. Following a five-year trial of the survivor and a few hangers-on that satisfied no one, multiple parliamentary inquiries, and an official apology to the German nation by Chancellor Angela Merkel, the NSU poisons German politics to this day.

The German-language literature on the NSU is vast, consisting as it does of books, newspaper and magazine articles, television interviews and documentaries, advocacy and non-governmental organization (NGO) reports and websites, Federal and state parliamentary inquiries running to thousands of pages, and so on. This is not to mention theatre pieces, art exhibitions, installations, etc.

A number of sources deserve note, but hovering above all of these is the four-volume set Der NSU-Prozesse: Das Protokoll (The NSU Trial: The Record) published by Verlag Antje Kunstmann with the support of the Sriftung Rudolf Augstein. It is a peculiarity, at least from the Anglo-Saxon point of view, of German law that trial transcripts and recordings are not allowed. A team of four, led (to judge by priority in the authors’ list) by Süddeutsche Zeitung journalist Annette Ramelsberger, followed the case daily throughout its progression over four years, casting their notes into text. Imagine a volume in publisher William Hodges’ illustrious Notable British Trials series on methamphetamine. The research apparatus is not so much an apparatus in the traditional sense of an index and list of references as it is a multidimensional concordance of biblical proportions. An Annex of legal terms is particularly useful to the non-German lawyer. For the serious student of the NSU, Das Protokoll should, of course, not be the omega, but it is assuredly the alpha of the case.

Heimat Schutz (Homeland Protection, Pantheon, 2014) by Stefan Aust and Dirk Laabs is a 900+ page account that can be considered authoritative in terms of documenting incidents along the way. Aust is a former editor of Der Spiegel and Die Welt, and Laabs is a well-known investigative reporter. They have also produced a significant television documentary on the NSU. The research apparatus is excellent, including references, of which NSU-Prozess, as an internal legal record, is innocent. There is, as well, a gazetteer of the complicated legal and law enforcement landscape of the case. A weakness of the volume is that, not content with telling a story, the authors are on a mission; to prove beyond doubt that the NSU was supported, à la Red Army Faction, by a vast web of sympathisers who have never been brought to justice (plausible) and that the German security and intelligence forces were not only incompetent (indubitable), but deliberately botched the investigation (plausible, but speculative).

More digestible, but less authoritative, is Tanjev Schultz’s NSU. Der Terror von rechts und das Versagen des Staates. (NSU: Terror from the right and the betrayal of the state, Droemer, München 2018). Schulz, like Aust and Laab, is a journalist (ex-editor, Süddeutsche Zeitung). 

On the academic side, Matthias Quent’s Rassismus, Radikalisierung, Rechtsterrorismus. Wie der NSU entstand und was er über die Gesellschaft verrät (Racism, Radicalization, Right-wing Terrorism. How the NSU arose and what it reveals about society, Beltz Juventa, Weinheim 2016) is an analysis of the development of the NSU from the perspective of political sociology, with an emphasis on the internal dynamics of the right-wing scene and the NSU itself.

An extensive synopsis of the 5-year trial, with critical apparatus, has been published NSU-Watch, a left-leaning advocacy and watchdog NGO (https://www.nsu-watch.info). 

[iii] What was it like to be young and setting out in life when the Wall came down? Journalist Sabine Rennenfanz (Eisenkinder. Die stille Wut der Wendegeneration (Children of Iron. The silent anger of the reunification generation, Luchterhand, 2013) is good on this. She describes the desperate need for something to believe, which, for her, led to attachment to an extreme Christian sect. Quent is also good on this search for meaning, if more pedantic and consequently less readable. Rennenfanz has recently raised a ruckus with a book suggesting that, whatever its limitations, life in the East was not that bad. Best of all, though, is Sven (Rossi) Rossman, a hardened skinhead responsible for multiple acts of violence, for which he served long prison terms. Interviewed by Stefan Aust and Dirk Laab, he describes how the collapse of the Stasi regime meant total freedom to do anything whatsoever, so long as it destroyed the left and anything that remained of its authority. His descriptions of fights, beatings, demonstrations, etc., are not descriptions of secular events; they are descriptions of ritual … that which must be performed to affirm belief.

*A version of this manuscript, with information on sources, appeared in the Journal of Right-Wing Studies (https://jrws.berkeley.edu/), published by the Center for Right-Wing Studies of the University of California at Berkeley Institute for the Study of Societal Issues (https://issi.berkeley.edu/crws).

Landis MacKellar is Guest Scholar Emeritus, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (www.iiasa.ac.at), Laxenburg, Austria.