How one Berliner battles hate: with conscience and a scraper

As Irmela Mensah-Schramm descended from the train in Buch, a combustive locality in the north of Berlin that is a fault line in the refugee crisis, her agitation was visible. The last time the 70-year-old with snow-white hair was there, a local neo-Nazi shoved her roughly. Now, she says, she will not even venture into town, for fear that someone will recognise her and alert the thug.

Not to worry, though; there was plenty for this retired teacher to do at the station. In a passageway, half a dozen innocuous-looking green and white stickers featured, upon closer inspection, the sword-and-hammer symbol of a virulent neo-Nazi group. During lulls in foot traffic, Mensah-Schramm, who is well- known in Germany for her dogged campaign to remove neo-Nazi messages from public places, quickly went to work with a scraper.

While shakily clambering under a hand rail, Mensah-Schramm tore down a neo-Nazi poster declaring that "we" would never celebrate the end of World War II. She also made short work of a hand-drawn, fist-size swastika with a bottle of nail polish remover she keeps at the ready. Safely back on the train, she tallied the number of symbols erased - about 30 in all - in her spiral notebook. "That brings me up to 72,354 over the years," she said with a sense of rueful satisfaction. "It's pretty heavy."

For the last three decades, and starting long before the current uproar over the stream of refugees that is invigorating the German far right, Mensah-Schramm has spent her free time - lately, several days a week - roaming the streets of Berlin, where she lives, as well as other cities and towns throughout the country. Toting a canvas bag with the handwritten message "Against Nazis," she checks train stations, condom machines, cigarette dispensers, playgrounds, lampposts and alleyways in search of banned Nazi symbols, anti-immigrant catchphrases and political stickers. The offending items often lurk among "refugees welcome" notes, soccer club adhesives and the odd stick-on circus ad - often with encoded slogans like "We want to live" or "Punish child abusers to the utmost extent" and with web addresses for shadowy groups from the radical right.

When she finds something objectionable, which she says she nearly always does, she might take a photograph, peel a sticker off for her files or simply note the discovery, along with the date and place. Then she gets rid of it, either by scraping away the offending sticker or, in the case of graffiti, erasing or simply painting over it. "I have a strong appreciation for human dignity," said Mensah-Schramm. "When I see someone's dignity being hurt, I feel it myself."

Over the years, she has accumulated what might be the most extensive collection of radical-right stickers and graffiti in Germany. "She's got more than any state archive," said Isabel Enzenbach, who curated an exhibit at the German Historical Museum, featuring Mensah-Schramm's 80-odd binders of material, that traces the lengthy German tradition of plastering walls with messages of hate, as well as longer, funnier and more thoughtful counterarguments.

© 2016 The New York Times News Service