- guardian.co.uk, Thursday August 3 2000 02.21 BST
The environment minister, Jürgen Trittin, made his proposal amid a rapidly growing crusade by the government against the far right.
The campaign was given huge additional impetus last Thursday when a bomb, thought to have been planted by ultra rightwingers, exploded at a Düsseldorf railway station injuring nine immigrants, including six Jews.
Mr Trittin's remarks nevertheless planted the seeds of a potentially troublesome crop for the government. The only parties that can be outlawed in Germany are those proved to be undermining the constitution. A ban would need to be reviewed by the constitutional court and the process of scrutiny could take years.
Doubts were also expressed about the effectiveness of such a ban, even if it were approved. The interior minister of Germany's most populous region, North Rhine-Westphalia, said that when the authorities there outlawed a far-right group, it only succeeded in driving it underground and making surveillance of its members more difficult.
"It actually led to the opposite of what we wanted," said Fritz Behrens.
The family minister, Christine Bergmann, hinted at divisions within the ruling centre-left coalition over the issue. She agreed that a ban could be discussed, but added that it would not "take the problem off the table".
Though figures have been produced to suggest that neo-Nazi violence is again on the rise, they are far from conclusive. Sources close to the chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, say the authorities have been prompted to tackle the far right essentially for economic and diplomatic reasons.
On Monday, the government handed out the first of 20,000 work permits allowing skilled foreigners to enter Germany to work in its computer industry. Ministers accept that substantial immigration from outside the European Union is required, not just to bridge a technological skills gap, but to keep a balance between Germany's active and non-active sectors of the population and keep its creaking pensions system from ruin. Pension reform is the key political issue on Mr Schröder's autumn agenda.
The other factor prompting official concern is the prospect of EU enlargement to the east, which could bring large numbers of Poles, Czechs and Hungarians into Germany.
They risk encountering a level of xenophobia which prompted Wolfgang Thierse, the speaker of the lower house of the German parliament, to say at the weekend: "I am ashamed of this country."
Statistics point to a level of anti-immigrant violence proportionately similar to that in Britain. The daily Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung yesterday quoted police and security officials as saying that more than 30 people had been killed by rightwing extremists in the past 10 years - in a country of some 80m.
The Home Office in London said that in the four years from 1996 to 1999, there were 10 reported racially motivated homicides, in a country with a population less than three-quarters the size of Germany's.
The problem is that Germany's far-right violence is overwhelmingly concentrated in the economically depressed east, which was under communist rule and, until the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, had an uninterrupted experience of dictatorship stretching back to the foundation of the Third Reich. There was far less re-examination of the Nazi past in the east than in the capitalist west.
A report issued earlier this year by the BVD, Germany's equivalent of MI5, showed that the five regions with the highest incidence of suspected or proven rightwing violence were all in east Germany.
Yet this is the area most in need of foreign expertise and likely to see the biggest influx of outsiders when the EU expands.
