Dark skin has therefore been visible on Western streets for a decade or more

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Dark skin has therefore been visible on Western streets for a decade or more. A black person is unlikely to be stared at these days in Düsseldorf. In Leipzig, in the East, such a spectacle might bring traffic to a halt.Hermetically sealed in their communist paradise, the people in the East were not exposed to alien ways. Not counting the Soviet soldiers, who rarely ventured beyond their barracks, the closest the natives came to strange-looking people was on the beaches of Hungary and Bulgaria.

Even 10 years after the tumbling of the Berlin Wall, the average East German's knowledge of the outside world, and consequently their tolerance toward strangers, remains lamentable.The mayor who suggests a black man should have known better than to stroll down the streets after dark has a point You do not even need to be black to "provoke" a reaction. If you look different, you are a stranger and therefore a threat. At the campsites of Mecklenburg on the Baltic coast, for instance, "West" German tourists have attracted the attentions of the baseball-wielding mob. In Frankfurt an der Oder, on the Polish border, all 22 foreign scientists working at an EU-funded research institute have suffered racist abuse in the streets. The victims are predominantly white, hailing from as culturally menacing nations as Britain and Spain.The level of ignorance is brilliantly summed up by a cartoon that appeared recently in Berliner Zeitung, a paper that knows the East better than most.

The cartoon shows Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and an aide puzzling over a map by the road somewhere on his current tour through the region Behind the bushes lurk two skinheads with swastika tattoos "Look," says one skinhead to the other "Kanaken." ("Coons.")These people need help. They need to be immunised against xenophobia, in the same way that other nations in western Europe have been in the past decades. The treatment? Give them lots of foreigners to look at, to co-exist with.Naturally, it would take huge courage for any politician to stand in front of the German public and advocate more immigration. The current coalition of cosmopolitan Greens and ambivalent Social Democrats ran into problems when they tinkered with the nationality law.