Nationalism in Germany

Since 1989, nationalism in Germany has grown at a terrifying pace and has been accompanied by a level of political violence from the extreme Right not seen since the days of the Weimar Republic when Hitler's fascists sought to terrorise all opposition.
This violence, which has resulted in more than 80 fascist killings since 1990 and more than 23,000 Right-wing extremist crimes investigated by the German police in 1993 alone, is the product of the rise of nationalism in a country that has signally failed to come to terms with its recent history and which continues to have judical and law enforcement systems that are "blind in the right eye".
Since reunification, Germany has been the recipient of numerous protests and complaints about racism, antisemitism, fascism and state-inspired nationalist activities from, amongst others, the US State Department, the Russian Foreign Ministry, the Polish Foreign Ministry, the Danish, Czech, Nigerian, Portuguese and Israeli governments, the United Nations refugee organisation UNHCR, the World Jewish Congress, the European Jewish Congress, Amnesty International and the US human rights organisation Helsinki Watch.
All have demanded an end to the racist and antisemitic violence of the German extreme Right and many have put the responsibility for the lawless activities of Germany's 65,000-plus organised right-wing extremists squarely on the shoulders of the German government itself, either for its pitiful inaction in the face of this criminality or, in some cases, actually accusing the government of complicity.
Inside Germany, there exists a very broad consensus of concerned human rights organisations, anti-fascist organisations, some intellectuals, leaders of some opposition political parties, leaders of minority religious and ethnic communities, anti-militarist and trade union groups which takes the matter further. For this broad consensus, the issue of terror and violence, of burning refugee centres, vandalised former Nazi concentration camps and desecrated Jewish property, is summed up in a single German phrase: Die Brandstifter sitzen in Bonn. Translated into English, this phrase loses something but is nonetheless accurate: "the arsonists are sitting in Bonn", a reference to the German government of Chancellor Helmut Kohl.
What might reasonably be termed the resistance - few use the term "opposition" any more in Germany - shares the views of Grass and those who identify the German government and state as central to the problem of nationalism and its evil manifestations.
Two separate nationalist projects exist in Germany: the nazi project and that of the mainstream conservative Right
More and more, they see that, in reality, two separate nationalist projects exist in Germany: the nazi project and that of the mainstream conservative Right, embodied in the ruling Christian Democratic Union and its even more Right-wing counterpart, the Christian Social Union, in Bavaria. Sometimes these projects converge, sometimes they diverge, but almost continuously they run parallel.