Wednesday's edition of the populist Bild newspaper carried a blaring quote from "Germany's leading mind," a conservative historian named Arnulf Baring: "Something's gone wrong with the foreigners," he said. Baring is a respected scholar who's moved right in recent years; he likes to sound authoritarian and patriotic. In his Bild interview on Wednesday he dropped a line that you can now hear in pubs across Germany, ever since news broke last week of student violence  in a heavily Turkish high school in Berlin.

"Multiculturalism," Baring declared, "is dead."

Blame for its death, of course, lies at the feet of the "multi-culti" types who thrived under center-left ex-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder -- all those dim Germans who over the last few decades have bumped faithfully but naïvely from Kurdish Folk Festivals to the Lebanese-run Italian corner restaurant without seeming to notice how both the Kurds and the Lebanese whet their flashing knives, talk smack about their women and plot an unfriendly takeover of the Federal Republic of Germany. Thank God for Baring, who's warned us back from the brink.

But it's time to kill a few myths: Neither the Schröder government nor the dim multiculturalists bear most of the blame for Germany's current integration crisis. The real villain's name is Helmut Kohl. During his long stint as chancellor, from 1982 to 1998, and despite the fact that his daughter-in-law is Turkish, Kohl managed to ignore the immigration problem. Blood laws for German citizenship were kept in place; immigration went unregulated. It grew anarchically through asylum loopholes and laws allowing guest workers' families to come to Germany, while foreign children living here were never asked to go to school. "Tolerated outsiders" didn't need to learn to read or write.

When skinheads burned immigrant dormitories in Solingen, Mölln and Rostock in the early '90s, Kohl never bothered to show his face. The man who understood so much about the power of symbols (like German reunification) never stood for a photograph with the victims or visited a crime scene. Why? Because the victims weren't German? No one really knows.

Kohl's credentials on German reunification are indisputable, but he never seemed to care about integrating "new" Germans. It was Schröder's government that first grappled with the problem -- if a little half-heartedly. Schröder's federal president, Johannes Rau, made a few tentative steps in the right direction when he said he wanted to preside over all the people who live in Germany, not just "Germans." For 6.7 million foreigners here, it was the right thing to say; but it was the kind of gesture which the Schröder government never quite ventured beyond.

Modernizing German citizenship laws so far has been a patchwork effort. Children are still born here who can't be citizens. In his interview, Baring said that patriotism in American immigrant families "crystallizes" within three generations at the latest. But every baby born in the United States  -- even the child of an illegal Mexican laborer born in a Texas barn -- has the right to a US passport. The answer to this from immigration hardliners in Germany is wishy-washy; all they can muster is a recommendation to "return juvenile delinquents to their countries of origin."

The fact of the matter is, however, that the "country of origin" for these kids is Germany. Multiculturalism here is a fact. There's no way back to any kind of ethnic purity. And that's something conservatives in Germany are going to have to learn.

Berlin's grand coalition government of the left and right, now in power under Angela Merkel is on the verge of gambling away the second German unification -- namely the civilized merging of legal immigrants into a single German republic.

How, for example, is one supposed to interpret the silence of the Social Democrats on this issue? There are ways out of the "multiculturalism" crisis; all it takes is a will to lead. How about a law allowing the automatic citizenship for every child born in Germany? That would be a novel idea. We've had enough warm and fuzzy words. What Germany now needs is a real, self-critical balance of passions. Neither multicultural pieties nor hysterical fear-mongering will help anyone. And whoever says things have gone wrong with "the foreigners" is still thinking in outmoded terms of "us and them. "

We -- meaning all German citizens -- can't handle another failure of German immigration policies. Foreign-born workers are twice as likely to be unemployed as native Germans; more and more kids with "immigrant backgrounds," as the politically correct phrase goes, are becoming "problem kids." We need nothing less than a national effort to change this trend. Even the (anti-immigrant) governor of Bavaria, Edmund Stoiber, must recognize an urgent selfish need in the face of falling birthrates to educate today's talented Turkish kids into tomorrow's German elite. It would be nice if he could do some practical work in this direction, instead of just sounding alarm bells. Munich, for example -- Stoiber's seat of power -- could use an immigration office.

But successful immigration isn't just a matter of government ministries. The hard work of integrating minds into a coherent German republic needs to be done by the immigrant communities themselves. There's a lot to do on that end, as a recent debate over speaking German in Berlin schools suggests. For their part, immigrant interest groups need to realize that if you don't speak German, you can't do anything in Germany. It really is that simple. And it has almost nothing to do with discrimination. Anyone who wants their kids to have a future in Germany needs to buy them a dictionary and a grammar book today, not tomorrow.