Seeing Life Through the Eyes of a Reformed Neo-Nazi : FUHRER-EX: Memoirs of a Former Neo-Nazi by Ingo Hasselbach with Tom Reiss; Random House : $24, 384 pages

“I’m searching,” sang Neil Young in one of the emblematic songs of ‘60s counterculture, “searching for a heart of gold.”

I wonder how Neil Young would feel if he knew that Ingo Hasselbach was a fan of Young’s life-affirming music even when he was strutting the streets of Germany as the founder of the first neo-Nazi political party in the former Third Reich.

“Those looking for a new Fuhrer saw me as a pure ‘blond beast’ risen from the ashes of the Iron Curtain,” Hasselbach writes of himself in “Fuhrer-Ex,” “and, along with the drug of never-ending rebellion, I began to crave the fix of power I got from handing out hate literature, planning attacks, and standing at the head of hundreds of other equally angry young people.”

“Fuhrer-Ex” offers us a rare opportunity to look in the face of the slouching beast of neo-Nazism, to plumb the depths of what Hasselbach himself calls “a sewer of Third Reich waste water [that] flows beneath the clean streets of modern Germany.”

Hasselbach, for example, describes how the aging Nazis locked up in East German prisons celebrate Hitler’s birthday by fashioning armbands out of toilet paper marked with swastikas. And he tells us that the new generation of Nazis arm themselves with castoff weapons of World War II, which they literally dug out of the ground at battle sites around Berlin.

America plays an odd role in nurturing the neo-Nazis in Germany, according to Hasselbach. He reports that Doc Martens boots are the favored footwear of both the left and the right; only the color of the shoelaces suggests that the wearer is a neo-Nazi (white laces) or an anti-fascist (red laces). And he discloses that “virtually all of our propaganda and training manuals came from right-wing extremist groups in Nebraska and California.”

But the biggest surprise in “Fuhrer-Ex,” I think, is the fact that Hasselbach comes across as a bright, articulate and insightful young man rather than a surly brute. His co-writer, American journalist Tom Reiss, surely deserves credit for giving him such an appealing voice, but the young man himself is hardly the hater that we might expect to find under the Nazi regalia.

Hasselbach describes an unhappy childhood in Communist East Germany, and we begin to see his troubled relationships with a distant father and a brutal stepfather as more significant than his political beliefs in turning him toward street violence. The skinheads and their stylized Nazi trappings seemed to supply a kind of comfort that he lacked at home.

“I felt strong,” he writes of his early contact with the neo-Nazis, “and I liked belonging to a group that wouldn’t take [expletive] from anyone and couldn’t be shocked.”

These revelations may help to explain why a perceptive young man like Ingo Hasselbach turned himself into a neo-Nazi in the first place--and we are surely not surprised to learn that he has left the movement and repudiated his former brothers-at-arms.

But such insights only go so far. As I read Hasselbach’s curiously endearing memoir, I realized that what turned Germany to war and genocide in the ‘30s and ‘40s was something quite different, something far more profound and pervasive, than what provoked Ingo Hasselbach and his “Kamaraden” to shave their heads, put on jackboots, and take to the streets with spray cans and firebombs.

Indeed, Hasselbach himself struck me as not much different than the restless youth of earlier generations and other countries: sex, alcohol and music were as important as politics in defining his rebelliousness. And he seemed to wear his Nazi regalia the way John Lennon used to wear castoff army uniforms--his stance sometimes seems ironic and even satirical.

“Neil Young was the only thing that brought me back,” he affirms, “and whenever the scene became too much for me, Neil could always ease me down.”

Hasselbach’s face, at least as we see it in “Fuhrer-Ex,” is not the face of a torturer or a mass murderer. And so the question of what turned a civilized nation to Nazism--the mystery of what motivated the men whose fingers were on the triggers at Babi Yar or the levers of the gas chambers at Auschwitz--remains unanswered in “Fuhrer-Ex.”