It’s a daunting job. “All of them have had encounters with the police,” concedes Michael Wieczorek, 37, the social worker in charge of Roots. One club member tried to throw a man from Mozambique from a streetcar. Almost all are unemployed and undereducated, united in hatred for the guest workers and asylum seekers they blame for all their woes. But Wieczorek believes these kids are salvageable; he says few of them understand, much less hew, to extreme-right-wing ideology. That makes it somewhat easier to inch toward Roots’s goals: to stop the violence, find jobs or training and wean the kids from neo-Nazism.
After six months, Roots has had some success in curbing the worst savagery. “They used to drink from morning till night and beat up anyone they didn’t like,” says Wieczorek. " That would never happen here now." The threat of taking away the club is one deterrent. But Wieczorek has also tried to turn confrontation into communication. Recently, he brought a group of young Swedes to the club. At first a fight nearly broke out. But things calmed down, and the two radically opposed groups held a three-and-a-half-hour talk that ended with an invitation to visit Sweden. Local jobs, while scarce, can be had. Some kids earn three marks an hour gardening around the clubhouse; others may find work sprucing up Marzahn.
Instilling a spirit of tolerance is proving a lot harder. “It has to be done in very, very small steps,” gays Wieczorek. Among the first: soccer tournaments against teams of Turks, Vietnamese and Russians. More ambitious is an upcoming trip to Morocco, where the kids will be forced to depend on an alien culture and to defend themselves as foreigners. Some lessons are starting to sink in: last week the group voted not to celebrate Hitler’s birthday and, instead, will host a festival for the children of Marzahn. Says Rene Noack, 16, “People will see that we are skinheads doing something constructive.” That would be a first.
