BY CARL-ERIK ISACCSSON
LEIPZIG, Germany - This city, the capital of the eastern German state of Saxony, was at the center of the political polarization in Germany on May Day. The ultrarightist German National Democratic Party (NPD) had applied to have a demonstration of 15,000 people at the war memorial Volkerschlachtdenkmal. This stone monument, which commemorates the defeat of Napoleon in 1813, was a traditional meeting place both for the Nazis in the 1930s and for the Stalinist government in the former East Germany.

The NPD demonstration was called in the tradition of the Nazis, who in 1933 declared May 1, the international workers holiday, as a day of "national" celebration.

The city council of Leipzig prohibited the rightist demonstration, but a higher court overruled the ban.

A rock concert called "Leipzig shows courage " against Nazism was organized in April 30 by local unions, political parties, churches, and artists at the plaza around the war memorial. More than 10,000 people attended and hung a banner reading, "Fascism never again" on top of the memorial to protest the NPD demonstration.

The banner was still there the next day when several thousand police escorted and protected about 4,000 NPD members and supporters in the plaza.

A counterdemonstration drew youth and others from all over Germany. By nine o'clock in the morning May 1, several hundred youth, most of them from Leipzig, had already gathered at the riot fences the police had set up overnight around the plaza.

Markus Finger a student in his late teens, commented, "The concert yesterday was great," when he saw this reporter taking a photo of the banner on top of the war memorial.

"Nazis out!" the early protesters shouted, leading chants from a yellow Volkswagen bus with a loud speaker.

Soon the police drove several water cannon wagons up to the fence and provocatively demanded that the counter demonstrators leave the area.

Then close to 1,000 people came marching down the street to join the antifascist protesters at the riot fence. They had arrived on buses from Berlin, a little delayed because the police had searched the buses for weapons but found nothing. In the front of the demonstration was a banner declaring, "Unemployment is not a question of foreigners but a question of the market economy."

Now the police put on the water and sprayed the demonstrators, who peacefully turned around and began marching through the streets of Stotteritz, as this area of Leipzig is called, shouting slogans against Nazism and gathering new forces. Both youth from Leipzig and people arriving from other parts of Germany joined the protest. When the march grew to several thousand, a new attempt was made to reach the fences around Volkerschlachtdenkmal, but the water cannon again forced the counterdemonstration to retreat. A few of the antifascist protesters raised barricades and threw stones dug up from the street at the cops' water cannon wagons. The counterdemonstration assembled its forces again and about 5,000 people eventually assembled, reaching the riot fences around the war memorial from another direction. The demonstrators massed there peacefully for more than an hour, shouting slogans against the NPD. The police tried to provoke a confrontation, this time unsuccessfully. From the loudspeaker in the bus, organizers called time and again, "Don't let yourself be provoked! Don't throw stones! That is just what the police want."

The daily paper Berliner Zeitung reported May 2 that the NPD demonstration numbered 3,000-4,000, much less than the organizers had projected. NPD leader Udo Voigt spoke at the rally, condemning "the parties of the system in Bonn" and "international capital." Banners carried by participants included "Jobs here for Germans," "Here the national resistance is marching," and "Don't complain - fight."

Some of the youth at the antifascist rally were consciously looking to the labor movement for help. Georg Rode and Udo van Lengen, two students from Berlin, were carrying flags from IG Metall. They said they had asked officials of the metalworkers union to support the demonstration. They got the flags, but no endorsement.

Frieder Weissbach, a medical student at the University of Leipzig, came up on his bicycle to look at the counterdemonstration. He had been at the May Day event organized by the DGB union federation in the city center. "There are more people here and it's much younger than at the DGB demonstration," he observed. "I feel sympathetic to this demonstration, but I was afraid it could become violent so I didn't participate. I think many people here in Leipzig feel like that."

Across Germany, about 500,000 people participated in union-organized May Day events. In Berlin, 10,000 marched in a demonstration called by the DGB.

Carl-Erik Isacsson is a member of the metalworkers union in Sodertalje, Sweden. Dag Tirsén, a member of the metalworkers union in Stockholm, contributed to this article.  
 
 
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