BONN -- For months, the German government has turned a blind eye to brutal physical attacks on foreigners by teenage neo-Nazis, hoping that the problem would just go away. It hasn't. Now, finally, Chancellor Helmut Kohl is starting to deal with what has become a damaging crisis. But don't hold your breath. Bonn is caught in a bind that looks likely to hold up effective action for a while longer.


The government's change of tack has come about because of growing international pressure, and the power of television pictures. The nightly sight of skinheads in what used to be East Germany giving Hitler salutes as they throw firebombs at refugees has reawakened bitter wartime memories. Anti-German rhetoric is on the rise: "The Germans are getting too big for their jackboots", said one British Tory MP, Sir Teddy Taylor, in a comment that made many Germans wince. More seriously, an American company has just become the first foreign investor to cancel a project in East Germany to protest at the violence.


Most West Germans, shocked and embarrassed by what is happening in the East, think that Kohl has been negligent in waiting so long. Responding to such criticism, the government last week made a priority of clamping down on the extremists. The problem it now faces is how to do so without infringing the civil liberties that were deliberately enshrined in Germany's constitution to avoid a repetition of Nazi-era abuses.


The issue has been muddied by Kohl's insistence on altering the constitution to make it harder for asylum-seekers to gain entry. Germany has become the first port of call for thousands of people fleeing hardship in Eastern Europe, particularly the burnt-out wreck of what used to be Yugoslavia. Authorities are overwhelmed by the influx; they have 400, 000 applications for asylum waiting to be processed.


No doubt German bureaucratic efficiency will eventually find acceptable solutions for the refugees and the criminal justice system. What will be much harder to deal with are the fasten tendencies that have crawled out of the East German woodwork.


Twelve years of Hitler followed by 44 years of Communism have evidently left deep scars. Just as shocking as the skinheads setting fire to homes for refugees are the East German families living nearby who applaud them.


In Bonn, worried officials believe it may take a generation to instill some of the finer notions of democracy, such as tolerance and charity, into the minds of their newly acquired countrymen. If that is true for Eastern Germany, which has all the benefits of a rich Western half, what hope is there for stable democracy in the rest of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union?