Neo-Nazis and Anti-Fascists: Protest and Counter Protest in Regensburg

Last night (Tuesday) there was a noisy, if not large, protest and counter protest in Haidplatz, just behind my apartment on Hinter de Grieb. Regensburg has an active neo-Nazi movement, the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands [NPD] Kreisverbandes Regensburg, headed by one Wille Wiener. The Regensburg Nazis made the German headlines not long ago by seriously beating an Iraqi man they encountered on the Munich subway.

This June when the NPD set up a recruiting table in the Kassiansplatz there was a confrontation with anti-fascists who gathered to protest. There was a scuffle and a couple of anti-fascist protesters were arrested and Wiener and the Nazis withdrew issuing threatens. Little if any of this was reported in the Regensburg press which is more concerned with boosting the community than with reportage of embarrassing reality.
[http://de.indymedia.org/2005/06/121021.shtml Regensburg: Eskalation am NPD-Infostand]

Last night’s episode came after it was announced that Michel Friedman, a former CDU politician was coming to Regensburg to give a reading to publicize his new book, Kaddisch vor Morgengrauen. Friedman is a colorful and controversial character whose mother and father were “Schindler Jews” saved from Auschwitz Birkenau by Oskar Schindler. In the 1980s he was a member of the Frankfort Central Jewish Council and a rising star in the Hesse CDU until he was sidetracked by fund-raising improprieties and by particularly intemperate personal attacks on Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Later he was involved in a prostitution and cocaine scandal and convicted of drug possession but he managed to rehabilitate himself and now moderates a weekly political talk show on the N24 news station.
When Wiener’s Nazis learned of Friedman's book reading at a hotel on Haidplatz, they organized a protest citing Friedman’s moral corruption. Within hours the Regensburg political Left, mostly students, anarchists and the local multicolored, multi-pierced punks, had organized a counter protest. The Regensburg police moved quickly and in force—body armor and full riot gear—to cordon off Haidplatz to keep the two groups apart. The result was the loud exchange of last night.
What strikes me is the openness with which neo-Nazis are allowed to operate in the reunified Germany. In the old FGR, the display of Nazi symbols and the promotion of its ideology were illegal. While the former is still disallowed, the ideology is now protected by free speech laws. In the 2004 elections, the anti-democratic, racist, anti-Semitic, xenophobic NPD of Brandenburg and Saxony won seats in the German parliament.

Declaring “Our fathers were not criminals,” NDP head Udo Voigt believes in “the natural law of the inequality” of human beings and has called for “re-evaluating” the crimes of Hitler’s Third Reich. For better or worse, speech is free in Germany and, as in the USA, one takes the good with the bad.