by Nick Thorpe
Further down my carriage, a group of young women have decorated their space with balloons and party bunting, and play awful disco music from a cheap loudspeaker. They’re drinking a bright yellow liquid from little glasses that must be quite strong, judging from the rising level of jollity. In the next carriage there’s what seems to be a sports club, in which all the men wear orange T-shirts and drink beer and sing loudly, though it’s only ten in the morning. I start to miss my gentle, sober Muslims.
At each station, the intercity train gets more crowded. People with reservations fight their way down the aisles, but it is all rather good humoured. The ticket inspector is a young woman with a kind word for everyone, who has a calming effect on the travellers. Soon most people have a seat or at least a suitcase to sit on. The train is immaculately clean, even the toilets. This vast network of trains, all running like clockwork, exactly on time. A million more people have arrived? No problem, we just reopen disused buildings, set up container camps, give them an allowance, set them to learning German. No national consultations, no official campaign to warn people how dangerous they might be. Just one party, the AfD, campaigning against them, but all the mainstream parties sitting down to work out how to integrate the newcomers and set them to useful tasks, not how to keep them out. This is a tolerant, thoughtful country.
Omar is waiting for me at the Herrieder Tor in Ansbach, with his girlfriend Carolina, her nine-year-old daughter, her sister, her brother-in-law and their children. He stands out as a tall, self-confident Iraqi in a friendly cluster of Germans. We walk together, all of us, through the narrow, cobbled streets of the old city in Ansbach. It’s a feast day in this pretty Bavarian town, there are stands with games for children, fast food stalls selling vegetarian flammkuchen and wok-burgers, barrel organs and ice creams. There are also many refugees here, Kurdish, Syrian, Iraqi and Somali, mingling with East European immigrants from Romania and Albania. There are shops selling shisha water-pipes next to traditional beer-cellars and sausage stalls. The meat stands mention delicacies like lamb and beef alongside the more traditional pork, as a gesture to Muslim customers. It’s still very Bavarian, but with an international, Middle Eastern twist, adding to the general frivolity of a day off in mid-week. And each quarter, the bells toll from the many churches, reminding all and sundry that everyone owes their freedom from work to the Christian roots of this community.
Omar has had several girlfriends since he came here eighteen months ago, he tells me, but now he has found Carolina and is in love. She’s a Bavarian village girl, blonde and vivacious, who was teased when she first came to the town because of her village accent. The father of her daughter was a Somali asylum seeker who left her when he got his refugee status.
She had a low opinion of Arab men before she met Omar, she says. She thought they mistreat their wives, that they were dirty, uneducated. But all that has changed now, and she finds him very ‘attentive, romantic and reliable’.
He has learnt German quickly, has already passed his B1 exam and is studying hard for his B2. When he has passed that, he can take his driving licence. From the autumn, he will study computer engineering. He had just qualified as an English teacher when he had to flee Mosul, on the day in August 2015 when IS took over the city, but he’s been told there’s not so much demand in Germany for English teachers.
‘I’m so happy. I’m doing my language courses, I found the vocational course that I like, which I didn’t have the chance to do in Iraq. Germany has been good to me. People are nice, and I’m grateful to them. I’m making progress.’
We sit together in the park while Carolina takes her daughter and cousins to a playground. The birds are loud, joggers pass, and young Germans on bikes. Is everything in Germany perfect then? I ask. Not quite, he admits.
I’m sorry to say this, but the Germans sometimes seem like machines. They look straight ahead, not left or right, they work all the time and don’t have any time for themselves. Then at the weekend they just sleep or go to the swimming pool or something. A person needs some time for himself, to enjoy life too. Maybe this comes from the history. They had to rebuild their country after the Second World War. And they did rebuild it, as the strongest economy in Europe. But work here takes over everything.
Another thing is the relationships. I’ve noticed people don’t have great contacts with one another. Let’s say the daughter lives in Bavaria and her parents are in Hamburg. Maybe they speak on the phone every two months. Or send a text. And that’s it!
He worries that if he settles down here, and starts a German family of his own, he would be expected to behave like that too, and he wouldn’t like that. The family is very important in Iraqi culture, he explains.
My brother is in the UK, my family is in Iraq, and we are in contact every two or three days. If someone is sick we go to him, if someone needs money we send it to him. For example, my brother in the UK gave me the money to come to Europe. He did so much for me, and he called his friends to see if they can help me too.
Another thing which drives him crazy is the paperwork. None of his qualifications from Iraq, not even his driving licence, are recognised here, so he has to do everything again. ‘Even to go to the supermarket here, you need a paper!’ He exaggerates. ‘And the internet is so bad. When I talk to my family in Iraq, and the signal is so weak, they can hardly believe that I’m really in Germany!’
There are also strange anomalies in the system for asylum seekers, administered by the BAMF. He has noticed that more educated refugees get sent to the villages, while less educated ones are put in the cities. He has also witnessed with his own eyes how some asylum seekers cheat the system.
I knew one man who was actually from Egypt, who managed to pass himself off as a Syrian. He was given refugee status for three years. But he was lying! I told them only the truth, and I was only given permission to stay for one year. I’m grateful for that of course, but still . . .
The refugees who come here need to work hard on themselves. They have to learn this language, they need to do many things, to integrate. But it’s also true that whatever you do, you will never quite reach the level you wanted. There are some areas that the Germans reserve just for themselves. You will never be fully accepted as one of them.
Omar stays with Carolina in Ansbach sometimes, but his official place of residence is in a refugee camp in Schopfloch, a village 40 kilometres away. He shares accommodation with Kurdish Iraqis, with Afghans, Somalis and Eritreans. It’s a very diverse group, he says, but with a common responsibility.
We are guests here and we need to give the best we have. In our country it’s the same. If you are foreign and come into another country, you need to be polite, to be on your best behaviour.
Some people here don’t like refugees, but they don’t like Italians, or Spanish people, or foreigners in general either. People are waiting for what we are going to do, so we just have to do our best.
That evening Omar, Carolina and I meet Magda, an official in the local council in Schopfloch whom Omar regards as his protectrice, his ‘German mother’. We sit at an outdoor café. He eats ice cream, I drink beer, the girls drink fresh lemonade. The town is buzzing with yet another Bavarian religious festival – nowadays it seems, a chance for the locals to eat sausages and consume vast amounts of beer. Magda tells us her story.
I grew up in a refugee family too – my father came from the Sudetenland, in what is now North Bohemia, in the Czech Republic. I was born in Germany after the war, but he told us as children many stories about his old home, and what it was like to flee. That’s why I help refugees today.4
Nevertheless, when we first heard in 2015 that 130 asylum seekers would be placed in our village it was very difficult. People were very fearful. No one could really imagine it. And up to a point that is still the case today. Many people have not taken the trouble to get to know these people better. If they had, they would not entertain such fears any longer. Although everything has calmed down, it has been very peacef
ul here, nothing at all has happened to disturb that.
Not in Schopfloch, that is, but the first suicide bombing in Germany took place just a few hundred metres from where we are sitting, in July 2016. Mohammad Daleel was a twenty-seven-year-old Syrian who arrived in Germany in August 2014.5 His first request for asylum was turned down, and he was supposed to be deported to Bulgaria, the first country where he registered. Bulgaria automatically granted him asylum, and under the Dublin procedures, the German court argued that that was therefore where he ought to be. According to German media reports, he tried to kill himself twice, and was given psychiatric treatment. He appealed against the deportation decision, but in early July 2016 was told that his appeal had been rejected, and he must return to Bulgaria.
Just when he became radicalised is still not clear. He began to assemble the ingredients for a homemade bomb in the refugee hostel in Ansbach. July 26th was a Sunday, and a music festival was scheduled in the town centre. Following a knife attack a few days earlier in Munich, the police presence in Ansbach too had been strengthened. Daleel carried a rucksack, and either because of this, or because he had no ticket, he was refused entry to the concert, which was attended by 2,500 people in a closed space. He sat down outside Eugene’s wine bar at 22.22, leant forward, and his backpack exploded – possibly by accident. His last internet contact that evening was with a person in Saudi Arabia. He died on the spot. Fifteen bystanders were injured, four of them seriously. On his mobile phone, a video was found of him pledging allegiance to IS, which also claimed him, in a communiqué several days later, as one of their ‘soldiers’. The evidence made public so far suggests that he was in fact a ‘lone wolf’ whose mind snapped during the loneliness of exile and because of the failure of his asylum claim, rather than a so-called ‘sleeper’, sent from the Middle East to attack soft targets when the time was right.6
With Magda, Carolina and Omar, we visit the scene of the attack. ‘These were people who had already been living for a long time in Germany,’ said Magda, referring not just to Daleel but to the perpetrators of other recent attacks.
They were not newly arrived refugees. The media exaggerated so much. I still don’t know exactly what really happened in Cologne. I just don’t believe that those involved were normal young men. None of those I have got to know here were there.
People who live in ghettoes, whatever their ethnic origin, are more likely to turn to crime. Some may join IS, others will organise themselves in gangs or whatever. And then such atrocities are the result. So these are individual acts. The media and the politicians exaggerate their importance. I’m often alone with them, in the evenings to eat, I have never had reason for fear.
This is also what happened in Germany with Hitler. He said to them, ‘Come with us, and everything will be better and different.’ They can catch people like that. But when people integrate well it’s totally different. Omar could never be caught like that. Because he is well-integrated, because he can see where his life is going, where his path leads. That’s the answer – we should work harder to make sure people don’t end up in ghettoes. So they learn German even better, so they find work, and such problems don’t arise.
Bruchsal
Marah, twenty-two, from Aleppo in Syria, comes to meet me with her sister Rama, twenty. She can’t remember exactly where she first met me, but it must have been either in front of the east station in Budapest or on the hard shoulder of the motorway, during the long march towards Vienna on 4 September. ‘I gave so many interviews that day!’
Their father died before the war started in Syria. They travelled to Europe with their mother, Mouna, forty-four, and their brothers Hamze, fifteen, and Faisal, sixteen. Marah has long blonde hair, her sister a slightly darker shade. Both could pass as Germans – almost. They are observing Ramadan, though neither covers their hair with a scarf.
‘Perhaps I will wear a headscarf later, perhaps not,’ explains Marah. At this time in her life, as a refugee in Germany, she chooses not to. But the decision is not so much to do with what the locals think of her, rather about her relationship to her faith, she says. Right now, it is important to her to keep the fast, but not to cover her hair.
The three of us sit at a café in the pedestrian zone in Bruchsal. The waitress brings a menu. I order coffee and water. The girls say nothing for them, thank you. A flicker of recognition appears in the waitress’s eyes. With so many Turkish Muslims, and so many refugees in Bruchsal, she is well aware that it is Ramadan. Her Neckar valley sense of hospitality nonetheless ensures that she brings a large bottle of water, and extra glasses for the girls – ‘just in case’. As temptations go it is a rather innocent one, but the girls resist it easily.
During the first eight months, we were waiting to be able to start language classes. Then we were waiting to find out own flat. My brothers could go to a normal German school, so in a way it was easier for them. They could make friends really fast. Before that they went to a preparatory school but that wasn’t so useful, mostly drawing and playing.
We don’t have a lot of German contacts, but we have got to know some people. We meet in the street or in cafés or in the language school, but not really true friends, I think we should go to university or work to really get to know people and have a strong relation to them.
Marah has found part-time work though, first in a bakery, now in a home-goods store, thirty-eight hours a week. She likes it there and the other staff are friendly. She started playing the violin, but had to give it up because she doesn’t have time at the moment, with the language classes and her work, and helping her mother at home. Soon her German will be good enough to go to university, she hopes, to study telecommunication engineering. Rama plans to move to Cologne, to finish her language courses. Then she would like to study bio-engineering, she thinks.
Marah likes the cosmopolitan feel in Bruchsal, and the whole country: ‘That’s what’s I find so beautiful in Germany. It’s always nice to see a mixture of people and that makes a country like an international country, like USA. There’s people here from the whole world and I think it’s very good . . . we can learn from each other, and like this, life is not boring.’7
News of terrorist incidents in Germany and other countries made the girls sad, they say.
Because people got hurt, and also because we are afraid that the people will turn against us, against all immigrants. Though I don’t think they have here. I always trying to explain that the people are different in every country, and there are bad Syrians too. That doesn’t mean we’re all bad. I think the situation will get better. Because the longer we spend here, the more Germans will get to know us, and understand us.
There’s no ‘Syrian community’, or community of immigrants from other countries here, that she knows of. ‘Syrians here don’t like to meet each other so often, we all want to get to know Germans, learn the language from them, and learn their way of life. The better contacts you have, the more likely you can find work, or an apartment.’
The main regret they have here, is that it has been very hard for their mother to get used to Germany. She’s learnt the alphabet and she has the basic words, but it’s proving hard for her to make progress with German. She’s rather lonely and says she would go home to Syrian immediately, were it not for her children. But she knows it’s better for the children, and far less dangerous, so she stays. They all stay. And life goes on. Back in Aleppo, their old flat is in any case in an area now controlled by snipers. There is still no electricity or water supply. There will be no going back for any of them for a long time, the girls think. They follow developments closely, mostly through friends’ posts on Facebook or Twitter.
After they have gone home to help their mother prepare the Ramadan feast, I visit a bookshop and chat with the owner. She welcomes the refugees but says their arrival has laid bare the division between the former East and West Germany – a division she had hoped had been at least partly overcome. She is upset about the hostility shown to the refugees by many
in eastern Germany. It’s like in the rest of Eastern Europe, she says. People are afraid of what they don’t know, yet they don’t want to get to know it. Their politicians manipulate their fear, and certain politicians know how to push the buttons which bring those fears to the fore. Nevertheless, she is cautiously optimistic. After everything Germany has been through in the last century, she is hopeful that the people can see through the machinations of those who push such buttons.
I find the street where Marah and her family live, near the railway tracks. It’s an old house, several storeys high, with a good wooden staircase up to their second floor flat. All the flats have Middle Eastern-sounding names outside. They were found for them by the Job Centre. It’s still hard to persuade local people to rent out their flats to refugees, Marah told me earlier. They never say that is the reason, but she feels it. They say usually say someone applied just before them.
The kitchen is all a bustle. Her mother, Mouna, offers me her wrist as her hands are wet. Both sisters and brothers are hard at work cooking, there are small pastries frying in one pan, parsley chopped on a board with tomatoes and bulgur for the tabbouleh salad, and wonderful scents wafting through the room. There’s also a soft undertow of laughter, given a sharper edge by the hunger, the anticipation of everyone in the room – only ninety minutes to go to the breaking of the fast. My own contribution is a bowl of green and black olives, from a stall in the market, and some peaches. Where do you come from, originally? I asked the young man selling them, his dark curly hair and beard suggesting the Middle East. ‘I’m German, I was born in Germany,’ he told me, somewhat resentful of the question. If his parents came here from Turkey, he implies, that is their problem.
I’m shown through to the living room to meet Ludwig. He’s a cheerful, gentle fellow in his mid-sixties who has become a personal friend of the Al-Saaed family. He was an English teacher for thirty-five years here in Bruchsal, and when all the refugees arrived in his town, he volunteered immediately to help.