Day Of Broken Dreams

GOOD INTENTIONS ARE SOMETIMES BLINDSIDED, BUT rarely so spectacularly. Expressing revulsion toward a wave of antiforeigner violence that has spread across their nation this year, 300,000 German demonstrators -- nearly four times the number expected -- converged in Berlin's Lustgarten to rally for goodwill. But in full view of world media, the demonstration turned into an ugly spectacle of egg-splatting, paint-bombing counterprotest -- staged not by the neo-Nazi right, whose xenophobia prompted the march in the first place, but by some 400 left-wing anarchists. Chancellor Helmut Kohl was forced to abandon the procession shortly after beginning it. More enduring was the image of Germany's distinguished President, Richard von Weizsacker, his coat splotched by eggs, wanly shouting a message of peace from behind a thicket of police riot shields.

Purposely held the Sunday before the 54th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the first major pogrom in Nazi Germany, the demonstration thus inadvertently showcased the intolerance it was meant to decry. Kohl dismissed last week's disrupters as "rabble" and promised not to let Germany's course be influenced by "terror of the streets," of whatever stripe. But the subversion sent precisely the message that authorities were trying to counter: that political extremists are getting out of control in Europe's largest country. (See related story on page 48.)