FRANKFURT -- Daniel Cohn-Bendit appears in his office rumpled, tousled, unshaven and sniffling with a cold, not quite what you expect from a German public official, but OK for a post-revolutionary radical from the '60s.
The generation of the '60s is in office everywhere, of course, notably in the White House. But it's still a bit surprising to find "Danny-the-Red" of 1968 ensconced as a deputy mayor in the financial and banking center of Germany.
Mr. Cohn-Bendit is "Stadtrat" for multicultural affairs in Frankfurt, which means he's a kind of ombudsman for what is proportionately the biggest foreign population in any German city. And he does a pretty good job, according to most accounts.
Frankfurt has escaped the anti-foreigner violence and hatred that flashed across Germany after the firebomb attacks at Rostock in late August. Mr. Cohn-Bendit got much of the credit.
"Here you don't have the aggressive, violent things you had in Rostock," Mr. Cohn-Bendit says, in an English accented more by his cold than his German. He speaks German, French, Italian and English fluently.
"A lot of time people say you get this aggressivity when you get a certain percentage of foreigners in a country, " he says. "This is not true. In Rostock, you had 0.8 percent foreigners and in Frankfurt you have 27 percent.
"I give you another figure," he says. "In all the five new Bundeslaender [the states of the old communist East Germany] you had in total 180,000 foreigners. In Frankfurt alone you have 180,000.
"The problem is how to get people used to live with immigration," he says. "In German there is a proverb: What the peasant doesn't know he doesn't eat. So, of course, what the people don't know they don't like. Or they're afraid of it. Some are curious, then interested. But if you get to know more [foreigners] you say they are as good or bad as you are."
"I wouldn't say everybody here loves immigrants," Mr. Cohn-Bendit says. "I don't think this is a problem. In time you can learn to love someone."
Frankfurt needs foreigners
So, Frankfurt has come to accept its foreigners; somewhat like a partner in an arranged marriage, Frankfurt knows it needs its foreigners. As a banking and finance center, this is a service city that needs many unskilled workers.
"Frankfurt knew from the beginning it needed these people to make the city function," Mr. Cohn-Bendit says. "Seventy percent the garbage collectors are migrants. The economy would crash without immigrants."
