Tarnished German image on World Cup eve

With just days remaining before the World Cup opens June 9, the Brandenburg tourism office is abuzz with phone calls from potential visitors. But instead of queries about hotels or day trips into the lake region around Berlin, says spokesperson Birgit Freitag, callers have a more pressing question: Will they be safe?

A string of recent attacks on dark-skinned Germans and immigrants in the country, coupled with new police statistics showing a rise in violent right-wing activity in the past year, have presented Germany with a serious image problem as the country readies itself for the arrival of an estimated 1 million soccer fans.

A former government spokesman's suggestion two weeks ago that certain areas of Germany would effectively be off-limits to some visitors touched off the controversy, which has dominated headlines ever since.

"There are small and medium-sized towns in [the German state of] Brandenburg, as well as elsewhere, which I would advise a visitor of another skin color to avoid going to.... It is possible he wouldn't get out alive," said Uwe-Karsten Heye, formerly German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's spokesman and now head of the antiracism foundation "Show Your Face!"

Just days later, Turkish-born politician Gyasettin Sayan was accosted by assailants in the Berlin neighborhood of Lichtenberg. And a half-dozen people in three eastern German cities were attacked last week, leading to 13 arrests over the weekend. Newspapers have published maps of "no go" areas in eastern Germany, such as Lichtenberg, that they say foreigners had best avoid. And the umbrella group for the Germany's African organizations plans a similar online service for World Cup visitors.

Politicians and tourism officials have spent the past week trying to assuage concerned guests.

"The great majority of Germans are looking forward to our visitors during the World Cup," said Matthias Platzeck, the premier of Brandenburg, where neo-Nazis are suspected in last month's beating of a German-Ethiopian outside Berlin.

But critics say that such attacks are further evidence that Germany has failed to tackle a problem that has reared its ugly head repeatedly since reunification. Over the past decade, the subject has tended to be either hyped by the media or ignored altogether, says Stefan Reinecke, a columnist at the left-leaning Taz newspaper.

Most of the media attention since reunification has focused on the right-wing problem in former East Germany, where neo-Nazis espoused anti-Semitic and German nationalist ideas, says anti-racism advocate Anetta Kahane. When the wall fell, the violence "exploded," says Ms. Kahane, who heads the Amadeu Antonio Foundation - named after the first postreunification victim of racist violence, who was beaten to death by skinheads in the Brandenburg town of Eberswalde in 1990.

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