Study into east German xenophobia sparks angry backlash

A study into the causes of heightened right- wing extremism and xenophobia in formerly communist eastern Germany has sparked an angry backlash and charges of sloppy academic methods.

The paper published a week ago “borders on a scandal,” said Volker Kauder, the parliamentary chief of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center- right Christian Democratic Union ( CDU) party.

Kauder argued that basing the study, “Causes of right- wing extremism and xenophobia in East Germany”, on just 40 interviews was “more than dubious,” speaking to mass- circula- tion Bild daily on Wednesday.

He said the research paper “which severely condemns parts of the East German population,” fell short of accepted academic standards and should never have been published.

Other critics also ripped into the work for using pseudonyms for some interview subjects and for introducing a bias by focusing on cities or towns that have made headlines for ugly racist attacks.

CDU lawmaker Arnold Vaatz from the eastern city of Dresden told the Frankfurter Rundschau daily that the reputational “damage for eastern Germany is enormous.”

The report was commissioned by Iris Gleicke, the federal commissioner for the region, who is a member of the center- left Social Democratic Party, the CDU’s main challengers in September elections.

Gleicke defended the study, saying she saw “no reason to question its content or methodology.”

She said the research needed to be conducted “openly, without taboos, because xenophobia and right- wing extremism are a serious threat to social peace and economic development in East Germany.”

The authors, from the Goettingen Institute for Democracy Research, defended the practice of using pseudonyms for some interview subjects, saying that critics of the far- right needed to be protected from social ostracism and the risk of retribution.

The report looked into the question of why eastern Germany, with only about 17 percent of the national population, accounted for about half of the more than 1,400 far- right violent hate crimes reported in Germany in 2015.