Dark Germany, Bright Germany: Which Side Will Prevail Under Strain of Refugees?
Photo Gallery: Bright Germany, Dark Germany Photos
Hermann Bredehorst/ DER SPIEGEL
Germany is experiencing an unprecedented influx of immigrants who will fundamentally change the country. They represent a burden, but also a chance to create a New Germany, one that is more cosmopolitan and generous. By SPIEGEL Staff
Anger is in the air. Angela Merkel has come to Heidenau and the locals are lined up to see her. But it is anything but a friendly welcome: It is a crowd full of hate. Some call out: "Traitor to Your People!" Others yell "We Are the Pack," a reference to Deputy Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel's strong condemnation of right-wing, anti-refugee demonstrators.
It is the pride of idiots. After the chancellor disappears into the former building supplies store, where 400 refugees have found shelter, the residents of the small Saxony town begin talking about the outsiders who have become their temporary neighbors.
"Did you see the young men? Full of hormones and with nothing sensible to do. They can't help but get dumb ideas," says one tanned pensioner wearing a bike helmet. A woman nods and says she no longer allows her granddaughter to walk past the building supplies store alone.
A policeman with foreign features is standing in front of the villagers wearing a firearm and a baton, but his face is friendly. Eventually, he joins the discussion. "I was born in Germany in 1980, but my parents are from Afghanistan," he says. "They came to escape the war with the Russians." His German is flawless. The emblem of the Lower Saxony police force is displayed prominently on his breast. The Saxons around him listen closely. And are amazed.
"My father was a teacher in Afghanistan and my mother worked in the technical field," the policeman says. "But of course they could no longer practice their professions here." The young man speaks calmly, but insistently, looking at the people behind the police barricade directly in the eyes. He declines to give his name -- not out of fear, but because he doesn't want to speak of his political viewpoints while in uniform. The man with the Afghan parents has completely internalized Germany's civil servant principles.
The Heidenau residents say nothing; their enmity goes silent for a short moment. For the first time all day.
Germany, in this late summer of 2015, can be a confusing place. There are migrants in uniform who have to protect the chancellor, herself from East Germany, from an eastern German mob.
The attacks on refugee hostels in Germany have reached a shocking level this year. By July 6, there were fully 199 of them, and the attacks have shown no signs of stopping. At the same time, though, Germans seem more willing to help than ever before. They visit refugee hostels, bringing along clothes and toys. They cook together with the Syrians and Sudanese. They invite migrant boys to join the football teams where their own children play.
Which Germany will prevail? The Germany of racist chants from the roadside? The Germany of rioters and drunken rock-throwers? "Dark Germany," as President Joachim Gauck calls it? Or will it be the new, bright Germany, represented by the young policeman with his roots in Afghanistan? Will Western Europe ultimately prefer to allow the refugees to die in trucks rather than to open the door to the desperate? Or will Germany rejoice in helping and in allowing the refugees to take part in the unbelievable prosperity that the republic has enjoyed in recent decades?
Germany has always harbored its illusions about migrants. In the 1960s, it was said that the workers brought in from Italy and Turkey were only guests in the country, helping hands on the assembly lines of Bosch and Daimler. Then, when they stayed and their children sat next to German kids in schools and Turkish vegetable stands sprung up on every street corner, the overwhelming majority of German policymakers continued to refuse to identify Germany as a country of immigration.
Is a new lie now being told today? Germany's political leadership still hasn't made up its mind and seems simultaneously tentative and courageous. It is hard to know in which direction it will end up going. German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière long acted as though the problems were merely administrative in nature.
But there are rays of hope. After days of silence, the chancellor visited the refugee hostel in Heidenau that were the target of right-wing protests last weekend. Her deputy chancellor, Gabriel, had earlier this year voiced understanding for the xenophobic protests of the Pegida movement, known by its full name as Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the Occident. This time around, though, he didn't mince words. The protesters, he said, were "a pack, a mob" that "should be locked up."
But how long will this consensus, this alliance of reason, hold up? That's just one of the many questions that must now be addressed. As many as 800,000 refugees and migrants may arrive in Germany this year, according to Interior Ministry forecasts. And even if we don't really know how things will develop in coming years, one thing is certain: The numbers aren't likely to drop appreciably. The civil war in Syria grinds on, there is no end in sight to terror in Iraq, and the situation in Eritrea isn't likely to improve any time soon, to name just a few significant drivers of migration.
It is also certain that the newcomers will change our country. Germans have only recently become used to the idea that they live in a country of immigration and now, the next illusion is being destroyed: that there is such a thing as controlled immigration. It isn't just the best minds that are coming to us; it is people fleeing Assad's barrel bombs and Islamic State brutality. They are running for their lives, whether they are illustrious or illiterate.
The good news is that most Germans don't have a problem with this. Sixty percent are of the opinion that the country can absorb the huge numbers of refugees currently arriving. And a new form of civility is developing, one that isn't just being driven by pricks of conscience and the weight of the past. Rather, it is fueled by the joy of doing good. But how long will it last?
During the World Cup in 2006, Germany presented itself as a joyful country. Finally the world liked the Germans. But it was an easily earned affection. A bit of good weather and a few people waving flags for football instead of for fascism was enough.
Now, though, the situation is a different one. The refugees are going to be a burden on the country; that much is clear. They will move into apartments that are already in short supply in some cities. They will present a challenge to teachers, because children who speak no German will enter the school system. This will not be the kind of summer fairy tale that 2006 was.
This new Germany will demand a fair amount from its citizens. But it also represents an opportunity. The refugees are mostly young, whereas Germany is rapidly aging. At the moment, the vast wave of desperate newcomers is dividing the European Union, but it also presents a chance for the community to find a new identity. It could also provide further proof that German democracy works even in moments of great difficulty and challenge.
But what must be done for the positive to prevail? And how might the country -- the destination of dreams for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of refugees -- be changed?
Happiness
Günther Schulze has two mobile phones. One rings every couple of minutes while the other receives an unbroken stream of emails. A woman has a mattress to donate, 200 centimenters by 90 centimeters, but it has to be picked up. Another is collecting school bags: "How many do you need?" A third writes in with the information that the publishing house he works for has just made its online Arabic-German dictionary available free of charge. Schulze says he could spend the whole day writing answers. And he would like to send thank you notes to everybody. But he is starting to worry that, if he did, he would no longer have enough time to take care of his real work.
One year ago, the Willkommensbündnis für Flüchtlinge (or Welcoming Alliance for Refugees) was established in the upper middle-class Berlin quarter of Steglitz-Zehlendorf. Some 300,000 people live in the district along with, as of recently, a few hundred refugees divided up among five shelters. More than 1,000 people support the initiative with 300 people volunteering their time to help the newcomers with bureaucratic formalities or to collect donated clothing for them.
It is just one example of a new grassroots movement of a kind never before seen in Germany. "At the beginning of the 1990s, there was a wave of people willing to help the refugees who were coming to the country to escape the war in Yugoslavia," says Olaf Kleist, a research fellow at the Refugee Studies Center at Oxford University. "But it wasn't nearly this big or this broad."
It is a movement from the center of German society. But it is one not focused inward, but outward, toward those who are now arriving in the country. "It is a clear indication that the German society is prepared to change. It is becoming more curious and open to novelty," Kleist says.
Gaby Engelmann, for example, became involved because she found the protests against a refugee hostel in the Berlin quarter of Hellersdorf to be so insufferable. She got in touch with the Willkommensbündnis and initially helped by distributing clothing before another helper asked her to accompany a refugee on a visit to the authorities. Her calendar entry for that February day read "10:00 a.m. Syrian." Today, she sees that Syrian almost every day. "My son has taken to calling him 'half-brother,'" the 69-year-old says. She has accompanied him to various agencies and to the health insurance company. She demanded a credit rating for him from the German agency responsible and even called the German Embassy in Beirut so that his family might join him more quickly.
"I suddenly feel happy," Engelmann says. "I am becoming acquainted with other cultures, I have improved my English and I have many new friends."
The readiness to help is particularly large among pensioners like Schulze and Engelmann. They have plenty of time and many of those in their age group are looking for something to give their lives meaning after all those years in the labor market. They see Germany as an island of prosperity and feel morally obliged to help.
Such good intentions will permanently change Germany. Helpers, and society at large, are changed by their interactions with the refugees. Contact with people from other cultures becomes more normal and tolerance rises as a result. A new view is created of the foreigners coming to the country: a view free of prejudice, but also free of illusions.
But volunteer work cannot completely supplant the state. Günther Schulze, founder of the Willkommensbündnis, sometimes feels abandoned. If citizen initiatives are going to take on tasks that should really be fulfilled by the state, then they should at least get financial support for doing so, Schulze demands. Sometimes, it would also help if the bureaucrats were a little less zealous in their work. One thing refugees can be sure of as soon as they have found their first apartment in Germany: As absurd as it may sound, one of their first pieces of mail will be a letter demanding their contribution to Germany's public broadcasting system.
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