On a beautiful morning last May, Diana Feldmann sat in her apartment in a suburb of Mainz, a prosperous city in western Germany, waiting for her fourteen-year-old daughter, Susanna, to return from a sleepover. When her phone finally lit up with a WhatsApp message, her heart leaped. “I’m in Frankfurt, taking a walk with my boyfriend Armando,” it said. “I’ll be back sometime later.”
Feldmann immediately grew suspicious. The message did not match her daughter’s usual writing style. Susanna had never mentioned somebody by the name of Armando. Nor, it soon became clear, had any of her friends heard of him. All of Feldmann’s attempts to reach her daughter were unsuccessful. That night, Susanna did not return.
More than twenty-four hours after her daughter had disappeared, Feldmann finally received a longer message. “Mom, I’m not coming home,” it said, in ungrammatical German. “I’m with my boyfriend in Paris. I’ll be back in two or three weeks, or never. Don’t look for me.”
Feldmann reported her daughter missing. But, since Susanna had skipped school a few times, the police suggested that she had probably just run away from home, and would soon return. In the following days, Feldmann kept pressing the police to do more. She asked Susanna’s friends when they had last seen her, and tried to get a television station to report on the case. Eventually, she wrote a desperate plea on Facebook, addressed to Germany’s Chancellor: “Dear Mrs. Merkel, this letter is a cry for help!!! I feel abandoned by the German state and our friend and helper (the police) . . . . Not to know where your child is, and whether she is OK, is the worst feeling a mother can have.”
Three days after this post, her daughter’s body was found in Wiesbaden, less than ten miles from her home, hidden in bushes along some train tracks. She had been raped and strangled. A police investigation quickly identified a suspect: Ali Bashar, a twenty-one-year-old resident of a nearby shelter for refugees. The more details emerged about him, the more it looked as though the authorities had committed a remarkable string of blunders. Bashar’s application for asylum had been rejected more than a year earlier. In the months leading up to Susanna’s death, he had allegedly pushed and spat at a policewoman, robbed a man at gunpoint, and repeatedly raped an eleven-year-old girl. Even after he was identified as a suspect in the country’s highest-profile murder case, Bashar, along with his parents and five of his siblings, managed to procure papers, board a flight to Istanbul, and return to the family’s home, in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq.
Hundreds of people are murdered in Germany every year. But the troubling circumstances surrounding Der Fall Susanna, the case of Susanna, helped create a cause célèbre, generating intense media coverage—and activating the major fault lines now running through the country. Far-right parties hailed her as a martyr. Horst Seehofer, the country’s interior minister, who has repeatedly clashed with Angela Merkel over the government’s policy on immigrants and refugees, invoked the case when he threatened to resign last summer, sparking one of the most dramatic political crises in the country’s postwar history. And conditions were already fraught. Germany’s once placid political system had, over the past five years, been thrown into chaos by the rise of a new populist party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD). Support for Merkel had rapidly weakened, and, in October, in part to avert rebellion within her own party, the Christian Democratic Union, she resigned as its chair and promised to step down as Chancellor by the next general election.
Since that announcement, a vast debate about Merkel’s legacy has come to inflect discussion of virtually every event of the past decade. Was her decision, in the summer of 2015, to open the border to a million refugees the noble embodiment of a liberal and self-confident Germany, or did it sow the seeds of communal strife and precipitate the rise of the far right? Is her cautious, reasoned style of politics what Germany needs in order to weather the growing tumult, or has it papered over problems that its citizens must urgently confront? Susanna Feldmann has, in her death, been swept up in a grand argument about the lingering effects of the refugee crisis and the future of the country.
Rising tensions over immigration have fuelled clashes all over Germany, none more prominent than the ones that erupted late last summer in Chemnitz, a proudly proletarian city in the country’s east. On the morning of August 26th, a drunken altercation over cigarettes reportedly pitted a small group of refugees against a handful of locals at the sidelines of the city’s fair. One of the refugees pulled out a knife and stabbed a carpenter named Daniel Hillig five times. Later that day, as news of Hillig’s death spread, far-right groups assembled for a spontaneous show of strength. In a video that galvanized the nation, neo-Nazi agitators appear to chase passersby whom they deem to look foreign. The woman who took the video tells her companion, “Honey bunny, you’d better stay here,” as a group of his friends pursue two men across a busy roadway.
When I arrived in the city, six days later, it was as though some demon had, at least for a few days, turned the most pessimistic predictions for the country’s future into grim reality. Eight thousand far-right protesters were marching through the city center, filling its thoroughfares with a steady stream of anger. A few hundred yards away, at a park ringed by socialist-style housing projects, a much smaller group of counter-protesters was assembled for a concert celebrating diversity. Between the two, scores of policemen, on foot, in vans, and on horseback, formed a buffer that seemed perilously fragile.
Walking through the streets of Chemnitz, I saw few signs of ordinary life. Tram and bus service had been suspended. Shops were closed. Large areas were deserted. In contrast to the earlier protests, the political theatre I witnessed felt carefully choreographed. The police were on a mission to show they were in control. The right sought to match its own dominance of public space with a demonstration of discipline. The counter-protesters were desperate to prove that the town wasn’t defined by the ugly scenes that had been watched around the world.
Chemnitz had suffered from a serious image problem even before the most recent bout of negative headlines. After the Second World War, the Communist regime renamed the city “Karl-Marx-Stadt” and turned it into an industrial powerhouse. But after reunification most of Chemnitz’s factories proved to be outmoded. Unemployment skyrocketed. As dislocation bred dysfunction, gangs of neo-Nazis roamed the city.
It was during this last period that Benjamin Jahn Zschocke first got drawn into activism. In the nineteen-nineties, when he was a teen-ager in Chemnitz, he briefly joined an anti-fascist group. “That’s the kind of person I am,” he told me in the dining room of the Chemnitzer Hof, a fading grand hotel located along the Avenue of the Nations. Now thirty-two, he’s still boyish, with short, pale-blond hair and an ostentatiously polite bearing. “When someone gets beaten up, I come to his defense.”
In time, though, Zschocke came to see the influx of foreigners as a dire threat to his home town, and he drifted right, rising to be a key leader of the local ultranationalist scene. He thinks that cities in the west of Germany, like Munich or Cologne, where a majority of the population will soon have what Germans call “migrant roots,” are doomed. “If their inhabitants took to the streets, clans of Arabs would tyrannize their children the next day,” he told me. “For those who like their own culture, the west is already lost.” Thankfully, he said, whites still constitute a clear majority in cities in the east of the country. “For those who don’t want a multiethnic society, the east is becoming a kind of refuge.”
I wondered whether he favored a new border between east and west. But Zschocke thought all that was needed to make sure that Chemnitz wouldn’t come to look like Cologne was to create a sufficiently hostile atmosphere for foreigners, who would then choose to stay away from his side of the country’s historic divide. This was one of the main tasks for Pro Chemnitz, an amorphous political movement that he had helped found; having won a sizable presence on the city council in recent elections, the association is now one of the key groups mobilizing local residents to protest refugees.
Germany does not record the ethnicity or immigration status of offenders in a systematic way, and most of the available evidence suggests that refugees are not, in general, more likely to commit crimes than others of their age cohort. Intent on depicting the new arrivals as criminal marauders, movements like Pro Chemnitz have eagerly seized on high-profile stories about radicalized refugees, like a Syrian who, in 2016, was discovered to have plotted to bomb an airport in Berlin. But stories that involve sexual violence, like that of Susanna Feldmann, resonate especially strongly.
Police sirens cut through the genteel calm inside the Chemnitzer Hof. I asked Zschocke when he would be heading over to the rally he had helped organize. Flashing a sly smile, he shook his head. “I’m far too sensitive for that,” he said. “The huge crowds, all that intense emotion—I’m going home to listen to classical music.”
When Zschocke and I parted ways, I headed toward the city’s traditional focal point: a forty-three-foot, forty-four-ton sculpture of Karl Marx’s head, erected by the Communist regime. In an attempt to counter the city’s image as the gray heartland of racists and Brown Shirts, an activist group had covered the statue’s pedestal with a giant placard that read “Chemnitz is neither gray nor brown. #wearethemajority.”
But, that afternoon, the other side was far more numerous. People marched past Marx’s oversized face waving German flags and chanting, “Merkel has to go.” Many looked like average citizens. Some bore the insignia of various neo-Nazi groups. A few I recognized as leaders of the AfD. At the front of the march, a man was carrying a large poster of a teen-ager with a round face, dark eyes, and a melancholy smile. The picture was framed by a black border in the style of a funeral notice, and captioned with the words “Susanna Feldmann Wiesbaden 2018.”
Two days after Susanna’s body was found, Thomas Seitz, one of the AfD politicians who won election to the national parliament, the Bundestag, the previous year, got up to address his fellow-members. He was supposed to discuss rules of procedure. Instead, he called for a minute of silence to commemorate Susanna. “All came from dust, and all return to dust,” he said, clasping his hands in front of his broad frame and looking down, as a murmur coursed through the plenary hall.
Claudia Roth, the acting speaker of the Bundestag at the time of the session, took Seitz to task for this rare breach of protocol. Seated just above him, in a yellow blouse and a blue jacket, she curtly asked him to stick to the agenda. When Seitz did not respond, and his Party colleagues remained standing in silence, she told him to vacate the podium.
Almost immediately, the attacks began. The Facebook pages of the AfD accused Roth, a sixty-three-year-old Green Party stalwart, of being indifferent to Susanna’s death; a former member of her own party who now sympathizes with the far right denounced her as “an ice-cold ideologue who doesn’t even have second thoughts when her ideology turns deadly.” In the next days, she received hundreds of angry e-mails and thousands of comments on Facebook, many of them threatening her with assault, rape, or murder. Roth had, in fact, long been a target of right-wing animus; Lutz Bachmann, one of Germany’s most virulent propagandists, recently said that “all these ecoterrorists should be summarily shot, starting with Claudia Fatima Roth!”
I was scheduled to talk to Roth over an afternoon coffee in Augsburg, her constituency in the conservative heart of Bavaria, but, a few days beforehand, she extended another invitation to me: might I like to accompany her to a klezmer concert at the local synagogue to mark the Jewish New Year? The performance lived up to the clichés I remembered from my youth, when guilt-prompted dollops of Yiddishkeit became a regular feature of German cultural events. As the lead singer belted out klezmer tunes with all the subtlety of a Wagnerian soprano, Roth exclaimed, “What a blessing it is that there’s Jewish life among us again! A real chance for our democracy.” Despite the pieties, I found myself warming to Roth in the time we spent together. Listening to klezmer at the synagogue, eating a pizza at what she described as her favorite Turkish fast-food joint, or glad-handing functionaries at a regional Party conference, she embodied the unabashed antithesis of Zschocke’s longing for cultural purity.
Just as Zschocke was shaped by the turmoil caused by the fall of Communism, Roth was shaped by her generation’s rebellion against the legacy of Nazism. Her father had hoped to study music in France. Instead, he was drafted into the Wehrmacht, and first visited the country of his dreams as a conqueror. Her mother, desperate to avoid being drafted as a battlefield nurse, embarked on a career as a teacher. After the war, both were intent on reckoning with the past. When Claudia was little, her parents took her to see the Dachau concentration camp.
Like many other members of her generation and political orientation, Roth joined the Green Party in the hope of turning what they perceived as the drab, repressive Germany of the nineteen-fifties and sixties into a Technicolor paradise of social liberalism. In the many hours we spent together, Roth spoke to me at length about the importance of “intersectional activism,” and offered well-crafted monologues about the discrimination against Jews, Muslims, the Sinti and the Roma, and the L.G.B.T. community. After she introduced me to Bavaria’s first black state legislator, she told him, “Go make the parliament more colorful!”
In her view, the arrival of a million refugees was an opportunity rather than a threat. Half the people in Augsburg have migrant roots, she observed. “How can I say we no longer want a multicultural society? The task is to shape this reality in a democratic way.”
Roth’s unwavering commitment to multiculturalism is one of the reasons she was so angered that day in the Bundestag. In her eyes, Seitz’s rogue minute of silence was just a way for the AfD to “press Susanna into the service of their shitty ideology.” But Roth, buoyed by the Green Party’s recent rise in the polls, doubts whether the AfD will succeed in its larger aims. The events in Chemnitz, which were obsessively covered by the German media, were a crucial turning point, she maintains: “A lot of people who saw what was going on there said to themselves, ‘We can’t put up with that.’ ”
Roth is one of the most senior politicians in the country; Zschocke is a local impresario directing a ragtag gang of extremists. Roth, for all her stridency, is a defender of decency and tolerance. Zschocke, for all his nimble politesse, propagates intolerance and exclusion. It would be absurd to draw a parallel between such different figures. Yet political debate in Germany increasingly feels polarized between the camps these two represent. On one side, there are flamethrowers who denounce what they consider to be a self-abnegating élite as an existential threat to the German nation. On the other side, there is an establishment that dismisses concerns about crime or institutional failures out of hand. Neither position comes close to capturing the complexities on the ground.
When I sat down to eat at a McDonald’s in the historic center of Wiesbaden, around 11 p.m. on a Friday, customers and staff appeared to be enacting a daily ritual of mutual hostility. A wiry customer whose accent suggested that he had recently arrived from Francophone Africa impatiently snapped his fingers at a pale and pudgy cashier. “It’s not ready yet,” the cashier responded, snapping his fingers right back. Much of the noise in the dining area consisted of banter between teen-age girls, who were mostly white, and men in their twenties or thirties, who appeared to be African or Middle Eastern. On the square outside, parents were pushing strollers, groups of friends were drinking beer, and couples were making out.
This is the kind of fast-food restaurant at which Susanna spent time one night last May. Bullied at her school in Mainz, she had fallen in with an eclectic group of kids from nearby Wiesbaden. According to Diana Feldmann, she was particularly taken with a fourteen-year-old refugee who was, like her own father, of Kurdish extraction: Ali Bashar’s younger brother.
As she had many times before, Susanna headed to the refugee shelter that Ali and his brother shared with the rest of their family. Much of what happened next is still murky: although Bashar has confessed to killing Susanna, his indictment has not been made public. “Help me,” she texted her friend Sonja in the middle of the night. “I want to go and they won’t let me. They’re keeping me here.” Soon after, Bashar strangled Susanna. When her body was recovered, some two weeks later, her face was so disfigured that the police advised Feldmann not to view her daughter’s remains.
The refugee shelter consists of a midsized apartment building in a suburban business district, where it’s sandwiched between a three-star hotel named for Tuscany and a generic restaurant that touts itself, in English, as “the Culinary Soul of Wiesbaden.” When I asked a passerby—a middle-aged woman walking her dog—about the shelter’s presence, she told me that, aside from the fact that the refugees occasionally failed to separate trash in the prescribed manner, she had no concerns about it; in fact, she had grown close to one of the families that lived there.
Wiesbaden is a diverse and affluent city that has long played host to immigrants and asylum seekers. After my grandfather was thrown out of Poland by the Communist regime, in the late nineteen-sixties, he settled in Wiesbaden, working in a print shop. When thousands of refugees arrived in the city during the summer of 2015, there was tremendous support. So many residents sought to help that the authorities had to turn away dozens of would-be volunteers. Scores of locals came out to nearby train stations with banners reading “Refugees Welcome.”
Of the roughly 1.6 million refugees who have arrived in Germany during the past four years, not even half have been granted asylum. Fewer than a hundred thousand have been deported. Many of the rest remain in a state of limbo. Because their requests for asylum have been rejected, they have limited access to the labor market, and have been told that at some unspecified point they will have to leave. But, because their countries of origin refuse to take them back or are deemed unsafe, most will stay in Germany for the foreseeable future. The difficult task of integrating refugees into a society that has officially told many of them not to build a life within it now falls to local officials like Christoph Manjura, a vice-mayor of Wiesbaden who is responsible for the department of social affairs, and Wolfgang Werner, the department’s lead civil servant.
Manjura is a polished politician in his mid-thirties who speaks in long, technocratic sentences. “If the wise always give in,” a plaque on his office wall announces, “the dumb will rule.” Werner is a couple of decades older and given to interrupting his boss’s monologues with gruff, impolitic outbursts. One of the problems with the refugees, Werner told me early in our conversation, is that “they aren’t used to having to work all day long.”
Together, this odd couple has taken an active and mostly humanitarian approach to the refugee crisis. Instead of bargaining to accept the smallest possible number of people, as many other cities have done, they decided to “sail in front of the wind.” Building a cross-party consensus, they placed refugees in small housing units spread around the town instead of concentrating them in one building. On the whole, they contend, the “Wiesbaden model” has been a success.
It is evident that Werner and Manjura are working hard to manage a difficult situation. And yet I found myself a little shaken by the things they take for granted. The eleven-year-old girl allegedly raped by Ali Bashar, for example, had repeatedly hung out with a group of much older refugees, many of them grown men. Far from being an aberration, Werner casually acknowledged, the phenomenon of older refugees pursuing an attention-starved young local is part of a wider trend. Still, he didn’t see this as a pressing reason for his department to get involved; instead, he put most of the blame on the girls’ parents: “Do you even know where that girl of yours is running around?” he asked.
Yet in Wiesbaden, too, the backlash against refugees is gathering force. Especially since the AfD won thirteen per cent of the vote in municipal elections in 2016, the atmosphere in the city has become “more harsh and more bruising,” Manjura said. “No politician would now celebrate our country’s welcoming culture”—its Willkommenskultur.
Diana Feldmann, for one, has come to blame what she sees as an overzealous Willkommenskultur for her daughter’s death. A Jewish immigrant from Moldova who fled the Soviet Union at the time of its collapse, in the early nineteen-nineties, Feldmann in some ways personifies the country’s multiethnic future. Her fiancé, with whom she has a five-year-old daughter, is an Italian Catholic. Susanna’s father was a Kurd who had grown up in Turkey. Feldmann did not object when her daughter started to hang out at the refugee shelter in Wiesbaden: “They tell the kindergarten kids, ‘Make friends with foreign children.’ That’s what I taught my children.”
In the weeks after her daughter’s murder, Feldmann posted messages of grief on her Facebook wall. One of those early messages read, “You are missed . . . always and everywhere, for the rest of my life,” the plaintive words flanked by a heart-shaped candle. Over time, she grew more political, and more outraged. In recent months, she has shared calls for Merkel to leave office, memes portraying Vladimir Putin as a protector of decent Germans, and a string of posts by a newly founded association called Jews in the Alternative for Germany.
It’s tempting to assume that a Jewish woman who arrived in Germany as a refugee would be wary about efforts by anti-immigrant activists to exploit her daughter’s death. But Feldmann regards anyone who professes to care about Susanna’s fate as an ally. When far-right protesters marched through the streets of Chemnitz with pictures of Susanna and other victims of crimes committed by immigrants, Feldmann approvingly shared photographs of their demonstration. When Roth criticized Seitz for his minute of silence, Feldmann came to his defense: “I think it was a beautiful and humane gesture.” And, when another teen-age girl was raped in a refugee shelter, Feldmann made it clear that she considered Merkel responsible for the tragedy. “These bastards,” she posted. “Who is this woman bringing into the country . . . is the woman dumb, blind, deaf or is she doing all of this intentionally . . . ???”
For much of 2018, Germany seemed to be on the cusp of radical transformation. The Alternative for Germany repeatedly placed second in national polls. Conservative members of Merkel’s coalition were publicly treating her like an enemy to be vanquished rather than an ally to be swayed. At times, it looked as though the Chancellor was about to be toppled, leaving her internal critics to drag the Party, and the country, far to the right. Then came a series of regional elections that were seen as a crucial test of the country’s political mood. The Christian Democrats did poorly in some of their traditional strongholds. The Greens drew record support, thanks to the clear position that Roth and other leaders have staked out in the country’s intensifying culture wars. At the same time, the AfD continued its long run of successes, making it the first far-right party in the history of the Federal Republic to be represented in all national and state parliaments.
Merkel, a master tactician, conceded just enough ground to calm her critics. By agreeing to step down from her party’s leadership, she put the decision about its future direction into the hands of its rank and file. Many commentators expected one of her conservative rivals to take the helm of the Party, making it difficult for Merkel to continue as Chancellor until the next election. (Her term ends in 2021.) But, at a Party convention in early December, her favored successor, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, was narrowly elected to take her place.
The elevation of Kramp-Karrenbauer, a former governor of Saarland, the country’s smallest state, and a longtime political ally, makes it likely that Merkel can stay in power for another year or two, and that the Christian Democrats will follow her moderate line even after that. Yet it also raises the prospect of further instability. Kramp-Karrenbauer, widely derided as “Mini-Merkel,” is seen as representing a continuation of the political line on immigration which has fuelled such intense opposition to the Chancellor.
In reality, Kramp-Karrenbauer is showing signs of emancipating herself from the positions of her mentor. Though she hasn’t directly criticized Merkel’s 2015 decision to keep the border open to asylum seekers, she has warned that its legacy could weaken the Party for decades. But what kind of course correction would soothe the country’s passions? The results of Merkel’s decision can’t be undone. And, in the past few years, Merkel has quietly concluded a series of deals with Greece, Turkey, and other countries on the European periphery which are designed to keep refugees out of Germany. The number of new arrivals has, in any case, plummeted.
This situation leaves many political observers feeling simultaneously hopeful and apprehensive. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, famous for his role as the informal leader of the May, 1968, student uprising in Paris, spent much of the nineteen-nineties running an office for multicultural affairs in Frankfurt, a half-hour drive from Wiesbaden. When I met him at a café in the Westend, once a hub for student radicals but now one of the city’s glitziest neighborhoods, he told me that the easy mixing of cultures he had always hoped for has, in many milieus, become a part of everyday life. The intermarriage rate between different ethnic groups, for example, is rapidly growing. A few days after we talked, his son married an old high-school classmate of Eritrean ancestry.
At the same time, the political potency of cases like that of Susanna Feldmann shows “the fragility of the whole society,” Cohn-Bendit said, his blue eyes intent behind large round glasses. Some immigrant groups, in his view, really are failing to integrate. But populists, instead of tackling real tensions, are merely seeking to weaponize them. “The problem is both the AfD and the radicalization of certain immigrant groups,” he said. “The two go together.” An easy solution won’t be forthcoming. For the past generation, Germans have touted the stability of their political system, and prided themselves on their honest confrontation with the country’s history. But, Cohn-Bendit warned, “The age of German exceptionalism is over.” He went on, “There is a truth that politicians simply cannot say out loud: a part of the problem posed by refugees is unsolvable. Which society can stomach that much honesty?”
When Ali Bashar made his way back to his home town of Zaxo, in the Kurdish region of Iraq, eleven days after strangling Susanna Feldmann, it appeared unlikely that he would ever stand trial for his misdeeds. Iraq does not have an extradition agreement with Germany, and relations between the government in Baghdad and the Kurds in the country’s north are extremely strained. Given that the German authorities had failed to pick up on Bashar’s crimes when he was living in the country, and to stop him from leaving it once he became a murder suspect, he had reason to doubt that they would find a way to arrest him two thousand miles away.
But Dieter Romann, the head of Germany’s federal police force, had a personal stake in the case. When hundreds of thousands of refugees, including Bashar and his family, started to arrive in Germany, in 2015, Romann developed a plan for how to stanch the flow by closing the border between Germany and Austria. Fearing that serious violence would result, Merkel vetoed it, and the relationship between her and Romann never recovered.
Sensing an urgent need to enforce law and order, and perhaps an opportunity to embarrass the Chancellor, Romann flew to northern Iraq and persuaded Kurdish security forces to put Bashar on the next flight to Germany. Flanked by members of the GSG 9, the country’s most élite police unit, and followed by a reporter for Bild, the country’s biggest tabloid newspaper, he returned the suspect to Frankfurt. In a splashy exclusive, Bild celebrated “the Rominator” as a swashbuckling hero who had set bureaucratic niceties aside to help bring a monster to justice.
More upmarket newspapers, and some politicians, were critical of Romann’s exploits; acting on a legal complaint lodged by a prominent defense lawyer, among others, Frankfurt’s public prosecutor is investigating whether he illegally deprived Bashar of his liberty. But, for all the controversy, many Germans are grateful to Romann for helping bring Bashar to justice. “If he hadn’t acted so quickly,” Diana Feldmann told me via Facebook Messenger, “the murderer of my beloved daughter would still be running around out there raping and killing women!”
When I first spoke to Feldmann, last summer, she told me that her most urgent desire was for Bashar to receive his “just punishment.” At the time, she was hopeful that a trial would take place by the beginning of September. As the months passed, and the trial kept getting postponed, she always returned to that same theme. “My verdict is a life sentence,” she wrote when the trial had been pushed back to the late fall. “But I have to remain strong to make sure that the murderer is convicted; that’s what I owe to my angel.”
Because Bashar is likely to plead guilty to manslaughter rather than to murder and sexual assault—he has admitted to killing but not to raping Susanna—it is far from certain that the ultimate verdict will satisfy Diana. Germany, like many other Western European countries, has traditionally imposed lenient punishments for violent crimes. In 2012, for example, the average prison sentence for manslaughter was six and a half years; the average sentence for rape was less than three and a half. Many perpetrators spend only about half of that time in prison before being released on parole.
Alongside the large placard showing Susanna’s face at the protest in Chemnitz was another, bearing the picture of fifteen-year-old Mia Valentin, from Kandel, a town of ten thousand inhabitants in southwestern Germany, close to the French border. In the next months, as I travelled around the country, I kept hearing about Mia.
Mia had, I learned, begun a romantic relationship with an Afghan refugee, Abdul Mobin Dawodzai, who had been placed in her class at school. After they broke up, Dawodzai (who had claimed to be a minor but was at least twenty years old, according to authorities) allegedly began to stalk and threaten her. On December 27, 2017, he repeatedly stabbed her with a bread knife in front of a drugstore in the city’s center. She died a few hours later.
Dawodzai was tried for murder at the district court in nearby Landau, and, at the beginning of September, he was sentenced to eight years and six months in prison. Far-right agitators used the shocking details of Mia’s death for full propagandistic effect, just as they did with Der Fall Susanna. They depicted it as another example of the government’s complacency and of the need for popular revolt.
In the past two decades, many German towns have started to memorialize victims of the Holocaust with brass-plated cobblestones bearing their name and the place and circumstances of their death, usually placed in front of the home from which they were deported. These Stolpersteine (“stumbling stones”) are meant to shock Germans into contemplating their country’s darkest time as they go about their daily life. In the wake of Mia’s death, a movement called Kandel Is Everywhere, which aims to stoke anti-refugee sentiment in areas outside the far right’s traditional heartland, appropriated the idea. Replacing the names of Jews murdered by the Nazis with those of Germans murdered by refugees, it produced a viral poster that memorialized Mia Valentin, Susanna Feldmann, and other alleged victims of immigrant crime under the heading “Merkel’s Stolpersteine.”
At a Kandel Is Everywhere rally to protest Dawodzai’s light sentence, held in Landau’s main square, I found the clash between two Germanys to be even more manifest than it had been in Chemnitz. A bulky barricade ran through the middle of the square, neatly dividing it into two halves. But, where the atmosphere in Chemnitz had been tense, even aggressive, the mood in Landau was largely jubilant. Residents and officials had mounted messages of solidarity with immigrants and refugees on houses around the square. “Landau against racism,” a big banner hanging from the town hall read. “Landau is colorful,” a house on the opposite side of the square proclaimed. “We are the majority,” the crowd, composed of students, church groups, and families with small children, chanted. In Chemnitz, that vow had felt like wishful thinking. In Landau, it stated an undeniable reality.
Flanked by police, a few dozen far-right protesters began to walk toward the deserted courthouse. The speeches they made in front of it hit the usual notes. “What do all these men in the best age for fighting and procreating even want here?” Christiane Christen, one of the group’s organizers, demanded. “They are leading a war. And the bill for all of this is footed by the taxpayers, who are told that they are paying off some kind of original sin.” But, with her words barely audible over the speeches of nearby counter-protesters, Christen’s fearmongering failed to have much effect. By nightfall, the small crowd was already dispersing.
Walking to the train station through dimly lit streets, I stumbled over a protruding stone. With a start, I realized that it was one of the Stolpersteine: “Here lived melanie rauh, born Levy in the year 1882, deported to Gurs in 1940, murdered 1942 in Auschwitz.” She would have been more than fifty years old by the time Hitler came to power. Had she, like so many other German Jews, taken for granted the tenacity of civilization long after it had begun to give way?
When I was growing up, Germans liked to call members of the far right Ewiggestrige: those who are forever of yesterday. The term has come to seem unduly hopeful; history can move backward as well as forward, and yesterday’s men can, from one day to the next, come to look like the prophets of tomorrow. Travelling across Germany in the past months, I met plenty of young and disconcertingly smart activists who are trying to take their country far to the right. It would be a mistake to write off their influence. But, if naïveté is a danger, so is fatalism.
Curious to see whether the far right’s message might resonate more strongly in a small town that had just suffered a traumatic crime, I got off the train in Kandel. As it turned out, residents had organized a self-styled festival of intercultural understanding in the town’s idyllic main square, beneath a round church tower. A cover band was entertaining a few hundred locals with the most famous pop songs of the past few decades and the most tired jokes of the past century. If you looked closely, you could make out some scattered signs of politics: a “No AfD” poster here, a young woman carrying a “Refugees Welcome” placard there.
As a chilly late-night breeze swept through, and couples seated at the beer tables began to hold each other a little more tightly, I felt a glimmer of optimism. It wasn’t because of the well-intentioned politics; it was the scene’s sheer ordinariness.
“We hope that Kandel will soon be peaceful again,” the singer with the terrible jokes said as he prepared to leave the stage. “We hope that all these different camps will unite. We hope that people will encounter each other with openness.”
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Feldmann immediately grew suspicious. The message did not match her daughter’s usual writing style. Susanna had never mentioned somebody by the name of Armando. Nor, it soon became clear, had any of her friends heard of him. All of Feldmann’s attempts to reach her daughter were unsuccessful. That night, Susanna did not return.
More than twenty-four hours after her daughter had disappeared, Feldmann finally received a longer message. “Mom, I’m not coming home,” it said, in ungrammatical German. “I’m with my boyfriend in Paris. I’ll be back in two or three weeks, or never. Don’t look for me.”
Feldmann reported her daughter missing. But, since Susanna had skipped school a few times, the police suggested that she had probably just run away from home, and would soon return. In the following days, Feldmann kept pressing the police to do more. She asked Susanna’s friends when they had last seen her, and tried to get a television station to report on the case. Eventually, she wrote a desperate plea on Facebook, addressed to Germany’s Chancellor: “Dear Mrs. Merkel, this letter is a cry for help!!! I feel abandoned by the German state and our friend and helper (the police) . . . . Not to know where your child is, and whether she is OK, is the worst feeling a mother can have.”
Three days after this post, her daughter’s body was found in Wiesbaden, less than ten miles from her home, hidden in bushes along some train tracks. She had been raped and strangled. A police investigation quickly identified a suspect: Ali Bashar, a twenty-one-year-old resident of a nearby shelter for refugees. The more details emerged about him, the more it looked as though the authorities had committed a remarkable string of blunders. Bashar’s application for asylum had been rejected more than a year earlier. In the months leading up to Susanna’s death, he had allegedly pushed and spat at a policewoman, robbed a man at gunpoint, and repeatedly raped an eleven-year-old girl. Even after he was identified as a suspect in the country’s highest-profile murder case, Bashar, along with his parents and five of his siblings, managed to procure papers, board a flight to Istanbul, and return to the family’s home, in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq.
Hundreds of people are murdered in Germany every year. But the troubling circumstances surrounding Der Fall Susanna, the case of Susanna, helped create a cause célèbre, generating intense media coverage—and activating the major fault lines now running through the country. Far-right parties hailed her as a martyr. Horst Seehofer, the country’s interior minister, who has repeatedly clashed with Angela Merkel over the government’s policy on immigrants and refugees, invoked the case when he threatened to resign last summer, sparking one of the most dramatic political crises in the country’s postwar history. And conditions were already fraught. Germany’s once placid political system had, over the past five years, been thrown into chaos by the rise of a new populist party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD). Support for Merkel had rapidly weakened, and, in October, in part to avert rebellion within her own party, the Christian Democratic Union, she resigned as its chair and promised to step down as Chancellor by the next general election.
Since that announcement, a vast debate about Merkel’s legacy has come to inflect discussion of virtually every event of the past decade. Was her decision, in the summer of 2015, to open the border to a million refugees the noble embodiment of a liberal and self-confident Germany, or did it sow the seeds of communal strife and precipitate the rise of the far right? Is her cautious, reasoned style of politics what Germany needs in order to weather the growing tumult, or has it papered over problems that its citizens must urgently confront? Susanna Feldmann has, in her death, been swept up in a grand argument about the lingering effects of the refugee crisis and the future of the country.
Rising tensions over immigration have fuelled clashes all over Germany, none more prominent than the ones that erupted late last summer in Chemnitz, a proudly proletarian city in the country’s east. On the morning of August 26th, a drunken altercation over cigarettes reportedly pitted a small group of refugees against a handful of locals at the sidelines of the city’s fair. One of the refugees pulled out a knife and stabbed a carpenter named Daniel Hillig five times. Later that day, as news of Hillig’s death spread, far-right groups assembled for a spontaneous show of strength. In a video that galvanized the nation, neo-Nazi agitators appear to chase passersby whom they deem to look foreign. The woman who took the video tells her companion, “Honey bunny, you’d better stay here,” as a group of his friends pursue two men across a busy roadway.
When I arrived in the city, six days later, it was as though some demon had, at least for a few days, turned the most pessimistic predictions for the country’s future into grim reality. Eight thousand far-right protesters were marching through the city center, filling its thoroughfares with a steady stream of anger. A few hundred yards away, at a park ringed by socialist-style housing projects, a much smaller group of counter-protesters was assembled for a concert celebrating diversity. Between the two, scores of policemen, on foot, in vans, and on horseback, formed a buffer that seemed perilously fragile.
Walking through the streets of Chemnitz, I saw few signs of ordinary life. Tram and bus service had been suspended. Shops were closed. Large areas were deserted. In contrast to the earlier protests, the political theatre I witnessed felt carefully choreographed. The police were on a mission to show they were in control. The right sought to match its own dominance of public space with a demonstration of discipline. The counter-protesters were desperate to prove that the town wasn’t defined by the ugly scenes that had been watched around the world.
Chemnitz had suffered from a serious image problem even before the most recent bout of negative headlines. After the Second World War, the Communist regime renamed the city “Karl-Marx-Stadt” and turned it into an industrial powerhouse. But after reunification most of Chemnitz’s factories proved to be outmoded. Unemployment skyrocketed. As dislocation bred dysfunction, gangs of neo-Nazis roamed the city.
It was during this last period that Benjamin Jahn Zschocke first got drawn into activism. In the nineteen-nineties, when he was a teen-ager in Chemnitz, he briefly joined an anti-fascist group. “That’s the kind of person I am,” he told me in the dining room of the Chemnitzer Hof, a fading grand hotel located along the Avenue of the Nations. Now thirty-two, he’s still boyish, with short, pale-blond hair and an ostentatiously polite bearing. “When someone gets beaten up, I come to his defense.”
In time, though, Zschocke came to see the influx of foreigners as a dire threat to his home town, and he drifted right, rising to be a key leader of the local ultranationalist scene. He thinks that cities in the west of Germany, like Munich or Cologne, where a majority of the population will soon have what Germans call “migrant roots,” are doomed. “If their inhabitants took to the streets, clans of Arabs would tyrannize their children the next day,” he told me. “For those who like their own culture, the west is already lost.” Thankfully, he said, whites still constitute a clear majority in cities in the east of the country. “For those who don’t want a multiethnic society, the east is becoming a kind of refuge.”
I wondered whether he favored a new border between east and west. But Zschocke thought all that was needed to make sure that Chemnitz wouldn’t come to look like Cologne was to create a sufficiently hostile atmosphere for foreigners, who would then choose to stay away from his side of the country’s historic divide. This was one of the main tasks for Pro Chemnitz, an amorphous political movement that he had helped found; having won a sizable presence on the city council in recent elections, the association is now one of the key groups mobilizing local residents to protest refugees.
Germany does not record the ethnicity or immigration status of offenders in a systematic way, and most of the available evidence suggests that refugees are not, in general, more likely to commit crimes than others of their age cohort. Intent on depicting the new arrivals as criminal marauders, movements like Pro Chemnitz have eagerly seized on high-profile stories about radicalized refugees, like a Syrian who, in 2016, was discovered to have plotted to bomb an airport in Berlin. But stories that involve sexual violence, like that of Susanna Feldmann, resonate especially strongly.
Police sirens cut through the genteel calm inside the Chemnitzer Hof. I asked Zschocke when he would be heading over to the rally he had helped organize. Flashing a sly smile, he shook his head. “I’m far too sensitive for that,” he said. “The huge crowds, all that intense emotion—I’m going home to listen to classical music.”
When Zschocke and I parted ways, I headed toward the city’s traditional focal point: a forty-three-foot, forty-four-ton sculpture of Karl Marx’s head, erected by the Communist regime. In an attempt to counter the city’s image as the gray heartland of racists and Brown Shirts, an activist group had covered the statue’s pedestal with a giant placard that read “Chemnitz is neither gray nor brown. #wearethemajority.”
But, that afternoon, the other side was far more numerous. People marched past Marx’s oversized face waving German flags and chanting, “Merkel has to go.” Many looked like average citizens. Some bore the insignia of various neo-Nazi groups. A few I recognized as leaders of the AfD. At the front of the march, a man was carrying a large poster of a teen-ager with a round face, dark eyes, and a melancholy smile. The picture was framed by a black border in the style of a funeral notice, and captioned with the words “Susanna Feldmann Wiesbaden 2018.”
Two days after Susanna’s body was found, Thomas Seitz, one of the AfD politicians who won election to the national parliament, the Bundestag, the previous year, got up to address his fellow-members. He was supposed to discuss rules of procedure. Instead, he called for a minute of silence to commemorate Susanna. “All came from dust, and all return to dust,” he said, clasping his hands in front of his broad frame and looking down, as a murmur coursed through the plenary hall.
Claudia Roth, the acting speaker of the Bundestag at the time of the session, took Seitz to task for this rare breach of protocol. Seated just above him, in a yellow blouse and a blue jacket, she curtly asked him to stick to the agenda. When Seitz did not respond, and his Party colleagues remained standing in silence, she told him to vacate the podium.
Almost immediately, the attacks began. The Facebook pages of the AfD accused Roth, a sixty-three-year-old Green Party stalwart, of being indifferent to Susanna’s death; a former member of her own party who now sympathizes with the far right denounced her as “an ice-cold ideologue who doesn’t even have second thoughts when her ideology turns deadly.” In the next days, she received hundreds of angry e-mails and thousands of comments on Facebook, many of them threatening her with assault, rape, or murder. Roth had, in fact, long been a target of right-wing animus; Lutz Bachmann, one of Germany’s most virulent propagandists, recently said that “all these ecoterrorists should be summarily shot, starting with Claudia Fatima Roth!”
I was scheduled to talk to Roth over an afternoon coffee in Augsburg, her constituency in the conservative heart of Bavaria, but, a few days beforehand, she extended another invitation to me: might I like to accompany her to a klezmer concert at the local synagogue to mark the Jewish New Year? The performance lived up to the clichés I remembered from my youth, when guilt-prompted dollops of Yiddishkeit became a regular feature of German cultural events. As the lead singer belted out klezmer tunes with all the subtlety of a Wagnerian soprano, Roth exclaimed, “What a blessing it is that there’s Jewish life among us again! A real chance for our democracy.” Despite the pieties, I found myself warming to Roth in the time we spent together. Listening to klezmer at the synagogue, eating a pizza at what she described as her favorite Turkish fast-food joint, or glad-handing functionaries at a regional Party conference, she embodied the unabashed antithesis of Zschocke’s longing for cultural purity.
Just as Zschocke was shaped by the turmoil caused by the fall of Communism, Roth was shaped by her generation’s rebellion against the legacy of Nazism. Her father had hoped to study music in France. Instead, he was drafted into the Wehrmacht, and first visited the country of his dreams as a conqueror. Her mother, desperate to avoid being drafted as a battlefield nurse, embarked on a career as a teacher. After the war, both were intent on reckoning with the past. When Claudia was little, her parents took her to see the Dachau concentration camp.
Like many other members of her generation and political orientation, Roth joined the Green Party in the hope of turning what they perceived as the drab, repressive Germany of the nineteen-fifties and sixties into a Technicolor paradise of social liberalism. In the many hours we spent together, Roth spoke to me at length about the importance of “intersectional activism,” and offered well-crafted monologues about the discrimination against Jews, Muslims, the Sinti and the Roma, and the L.G.B.T. community. After she introduced me to Bavaria’s first black state legislator, she told him, “Go make the parliament more colorful!”
In her view, the arrival of a million refugees was an opportunity rather than a threat. Half the people in Augsburg have migrant roots, she observed. “How can I say we no longer want a multicultural society? The task is to shape this reality in a democratic way.”
Roth’s unwavering commitment to multiculturalism is one of the reasons she was so angered that day in the Bundestag. In her eyes, Seitz’s rogue minute of silence was just a way for the AfD to “press Susanna into the service of their shitty ideology.” But Roth, buoyed by the Green Party’s recent rise in the polls, doubts whether the AfD will succeed in its larger aims. The events in Chemnitz, which were obsessively covered by the German media, were a crucial turning point, she maintains: “A lot of people who saw what was going on there said to themselves, ‘We can’t put up with that.’ ”
Roth is one of the most senior politicians in the country; Zschocke is a local impresario directing a ragtag gang of extremists. Roth, for all her stridency, is a defender of decency and tolerance. Zschocke, for all his nimble politesse, propagates intolerance and exclusion. It would be absurd to draw a parallel between such different figures. Yet political debate in Germany increasingly feels polarized between the camps these two represent. On one side, there are flamethrowers who denounce what they consider to be a self-abnegating élite as an existential threat to the German nation. On the other side, there is an establishment that dismisses concerns about crime or institutional failures out of hand. Neither position comes close to capturing the complexities on the ground.
When I sat down to eat at a McDonald’s in the historic center of Wiesbaden, around 11 p.m. on a Friday, customers and staff appeared to be enacting a daily ritual of mutual hostility. A wiry customer whose accent suggested that he had recently arrived from Francophone Africa impatiently snapped his fingers at a pale and pudgy cashier. “It’s not ready yet,” the cashier responded, snapping his fingers right back. Much of the noise in the dining area consisted of banter between teen-age girls, who were mostly white, and men in their twenties or thirties, who appeared to be African or Middle Eastern. On the square outside, parents were pushing strollers, groups of friends were drinking beer, and couples were making out.
This is the kind of fast-food restaurant at which Susanna spent time one night last May. Bullied at her school in Mainz, she had fallen in with an eclectic group of kids from nearby Wiesbaden. According to Diana Feldmann, she was particularly taken with a fourteen-year-old refugee who was, like her own father, of Kurdish extraction: Ali Bashar’s younger brother.
As she had many times before, Susanna headed to the refugee shelter that Ali and his brother shared with the rest of their family. Much of what happened next is still murky: although Bashar has confessed to killing Susanna, his indictment has not been made public. “Help me,” she texted her friend Sonja in the middle of the night. “I want to go and they won’t let me. They’re keeping me here.” Soon after, Bashar strangled Susanna. When her body was recovered, some two weeks later, her face was so disfigured that the police advised Feldmann not to view her daughter’s remains.
The refugee shelter consists of a midsized apartment building in a suburban business district, where it’s sandwiched between a three-star hotel named for Tuscany and a generic restaurant that touts itself, in English, as “the Culinary Soul of Wiesbaden.” When I asked a passerby—a middle-aged woman walking her dog—about the shelter’s presence, she told me that, aside from the fact that the refugees occasionally failed to separate trash in the prescribed manner, she had no concerns about it; in fact, she had grown close to one of the families that lived there.
Wiesbaden is a diverse and affluent city that has long played host to immigrants and asylum seekers. After my grandfather was thrown out of Poland by the Communist regime, in the late nineteen-sixties, he settled in Wiesbaden, working in a print shop. When thousands of refugees arrived in the city during the summer of 2015, there was tremendous support. So many residents sought to help that the authorities had to turn away dozens of would-be volunteers. Scores of locals came out to nearby train stations with banners reading “Refugees Welcome.”
Of the roughly 1.6 million refugees who have arrived in Germany during the past four years, not even half have been granted asylum. Fewer than a hundred thousand have been deported. Many of the rest remain in a state of limbo. Because their requests for asylum have been rejected, they have limited access to the labor market, and have been told that at some unspecified point they will have to leave. But, because their countries of origin refuse to take them back or are deemed unsafe, most will stay in Germany for the foreseeable future. The difficult task of integrating refugees into a society that has officially told many of them not to build a life within it now falls to local officials like Christoph Manjura, a vice-mayor of Wiesbaden who is responsible for the department of social affairs, and Wolfgang Werner, the department’s lead civil servant.
Manjura is a polished politician in his mid-thirties who speaks in long, technocratic sentences. “If the wise always give in,” a plaque on his office wall announces, “the dumb will rule.” Werner is a couple of decades older and given to interrupting his boss’s monologues with gruff, impolitic outbursts. One of the problems with the refugees, Werner told me early in our conversation, is that “they aren’t used to having to work all day long.”
Together, this odd couple has taken an active and mostly humanitarian approach to the refugee crisis. Instead of bargaining to accept the smallest possible number of people, as many other cities have done, they decided to “sail in front of the wind.” Building a cross-party consensus, they placed refugees in small housing units spread around the town instead of concentrating them in one building. On the whole, they contend, the “Wiesbaden model” has been a success.
It is evident that Werner and Manjura are working hard to manage a difficult situation. And yet I found myself a little shaken by the things they take for granted. The eleven-year-old girl allegedly raped by Ali Bashar, for example, had repeatedly hung out with a group of much older refugees, many of them grown men. Far from being an aberration, Werner casually acknowledged, the phenomenon of older refugees pursuing an attention-starved young local is part of a wider trend. Still, he didn’t see this as a pressing reason for his department to get involved; instead, he put most of the blame on the girls’ parents: “Do you even know where that girl of yours is running around?” he asked.
Yet in Wiesbaden, too, the backlash against refugees is gathering force. Especially since the AfD won thirteen per cent of the vote in municipal elections in 2016, the atmosphere in the city has become “more harsh and more bruising,” Manjura said. “No politician would now celebrate our country’s welcoming culture”—its Willkommenskultur.
Diana Feldmann, for one, has come to blame what she sees as an overzealous Willkommenskultur for her daughter’s death. A Jewish immigrant from Moldova who fled the Soviet Union at the time of its collapse, in the early nineteen-nineties, Feldmann in some ways personifies the country’s multiethnic future. Her fiancé, with whom she has a five-year-old daughter, is an Italian Catholic. Susanna’s father was a Kurd who had grown up in Turkey. Feldmann did not object when her daughter started to hang out at the refugee shelter in Wiesbaden: “They tell the kindergarten kids, ‘Make friends with foreign children.’ That’s what I taught my children.”
In the weeks after her daughter’s murder, Feldmann posted messages of grief on her Facebook wall. One of those early messages read, “You are missed . . . always and everywhere, for the rest of my life,” the plaintive words flanked by a heart-shaped candle. Over time, she grew more political, and more outraged. In recent months, she has shared calls for Merkel to leave office, memes portraying Vladimir Putin as a protector of decent Germans, and a string of posts by a newly founded association called Jews in the Alternative for Germany.
It’s tempting to assume that a Jewish woman who arrived in Germany as a refugee would be wary about efforts by anti-immigrant activists to exploit her daughter’s death. But Feldmann regards anyone who professes to care about Susanna’s fate as an ally. When far-right protesters marched through the streets of Chemnitz with pictures of Susanna and other victims of crimes committed by immigrants, Feldmann approvingly shared photographs of their demonstration. When Roth criticized Seitz for his minute of silence, Feldmann came to his defense: “I think it was a beautiful and humane gesture.” And, when another teen-age girl was raped in a refugee shelter, Feldmann made it clear that she considered Merkel responsible for the tragedy. “These bastards,” she posted. “Who is this woman bringing into the country . . . is the woman dumb, blind, deaf or is she doing all of this intentionally . . . ???”
For much of 2018, Germany seemed to be on the cusp of radical transformation. The Alternative for Germany repeatedly placed second in national polls. Conservative members of Merkel’s coalition were publicly treating her like an enemy to be vanquished rather than an ally to be swayed. At times, it looked as though the Chancellor was about to be toppled, leaving her internal critics to drag the Party, and the country, far to the right. Then came a series of regional elections that were seen as a crucial test of the country’s political mood. The Christian Democrats did poorly in some of their traditional strongholds. The Greens drew record support, thanks to the clear position that Roth and other leaders have staked out in the country’s intensifying culture wars. At the same time, the AfD continued its long run of successes, making it the first far-right party in the history of the Federal Republic to be represented in all national and state parliaments.
Merkel, a master tactician, conceded just enough ground to calm her critics. By agreeing to step down from her party’s leadership, she put the decision about its future direction into the hands of its rank and file. Many commentators expected one of her conservative rivals to take the helm of the Party, making it difficult for Merkel to continue as Chancellor until the next election. (Her term ends in 2021.) But, at a Party convention in early December, her favored successor, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, was narrowly elected to take her place.
The elevation of Kramp-Karrenbauer, a former governor of Saarland, the country’s smallest state, and a longtime political ally, makes it likely that Merkel can stay in power for another year or two, and that the Christian Democrats will follow her moderate line even after that. Yet it also raises the prospect of further instability. Kramp-Karrenbauer, widely derided as “Mini-Merkel,” is seen as representing a continuation of the political line on immigration which has fuelled such intense opposition to the Chancellor.
In reality, Kramp-Karrenbauer is showing signs of emancipating herself from the positions of her mentor. Though she hasn’t directly criticized Merkel’s 2015 decision to keep the border open to asylum seekers, she has warned that its legacy could weaken the Party for decades. But what kind of course correction would soothe the country’s passions? The results of Merkel’s decision can’t be undone. And, in the past few years, Merkel has quietly concluded a series of deals with Greece, Turkey, and other countries on the European periphery which are designed to keep refugees out of Germany. The number of new arrivals has, in any case, plummeted.
This situation leaves many political observers feeling simultaneously hopeful and apprehensive. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, famous for his role as the informal leader of the May, 1968, student uprising in Paris, spent much of the nineteen-nineties running an office for multicultural affairs in Frankfurt, a half-hour drive from Wiesbaden. When I met him at a café in the Westend, once a hub for student radicals but now one of the city’s glitziest neighborhoods, he told me that the easy mixing of cultures he had always hoped for has, in many milieus, become a part of everyday life. The intermarriage rate between different ethnic groups, for example, is rapidly growing. A few days after we talked, his son married an old high-school classmate of Eritrean ancestry.
At the same time, the political potency of cases like that of Susanna Feldmann shows “the fragility of the whole society,” Cohn-Bendit said, his blue eyes intent behind large round glasses. Some immigrant groups, in his view, really are failing to integrate. But populists, instead of tackling real tensions, are merely seeking to weaponize them. “The problem is both the AfD and the radicalization of certain immigrant groups,” he said. “The two go together.” An easy solution won’t be forthcoming. For the past generation, Germans have touted the stability of their political system, and prided themselves on their honest confrontation with the country’s history. But, Cohn-Bendit warned, “The age of German exceptionalism is over.” He went on, “There is a truth that politicians simply cannot say out loud: a part of the problem posed by refugees is unsolvable. Which society can stomach that much honesty?”
When Ali Bashar made his way back to his home town of Zaxo, in the Kurdish region of Iraq, eleven days after strangling Susanna Feldmann, it appeared unlikely that he would ever stand trial for his misdeeds. Iraq does not have an extradition agreement with Germany, and relations between the government in Baghdad and the Kurds in the country’s north are extremely strained. Given that the German authorities had failed to pick up on Bashar’s crimes when he was living in the country, and to stop him from leaving it once he became a murder suspect, he had reason to doubt that they would find a way to arrest him two thousand miles away.
But Dieter Romann, the head of Germany’s federal police force, had a personal stake in the case. When hundreds of thousands of refugees, including Bashar and his family, started to arrive in Germany, in 2015, Romann developed a plan for how to stanch the flow by closing the border between Germany and Austria. Fearing that serious violence would result, Merkel vetoed it, and the relationship between her and Romann never recovered.
Sensing an urgent need to enforce law and order, and perhaps an opportunity to embarrass the Chancellor, Romann flew to northern Iraq and persuaded Kurdish security forces to put Bashar on the next flight to Germany. Flanked by members of the GSG 9, the country’s most élite police unit, and followed by a reporter for Bild, the country’s biggest tabloid newspaper, he returned the suspect to Frankfurt. In a splashy exclusive, Bild celebrated “the Rominator” as a swashbuckling hero who had set bureaucratic niceties aside to help bring a monster to justice.
More upmarket newspapers, and some politicians, were critical of Romann’s exploits; acting on a legal complaint lodged by a prominent defense lawyer, among others, Frankfurt’s public prosecutor is investigating whether he illegally deprived Bashar of his liberty. But, for all the controversy, many Germans are grateful to Romann for helping bring Bashar to justice. “If he hadn’t acted so quickly,” Diana Feldmann told me via Facebook Messenger, “the murderer of my beloved daughter would still be running around out there raping and killing women!”
When I first spoke to Feldmann, last summer, she told me that her most urgent desire was for Bashar to receive his “just punishment.” At the time, she was hopeful that a trial would take place by the beginning of September. As the months passed, and the trial kept getting postponed, she always returned to that same theme. “My verdict is a life sentence,” she wrote when the trial had been pushed back to the late fall. “But I have to remain strong to make sure that the murderer is convicted; that’s what I owe to my angel.”
Because Bashar is likely to plead guilty to manslaughter rather than to murder and sexual assault—he has admitted to killing but not to raping Susanna—it is far from certain that the ultimate verdict will satisfy Diana. Germany, like many other Western European countries, has traditionally imposed lenient punishments for violent crimes. In 2012, for example, the average prison sentence for manslaughter was six and a half years; the average sentence for rape was less than three and a half. Many perpetrators spend only about half of that time in prison before being released on parole.
Alongside the large placard showing Susanna’s face at the protest in Chemnitz was another, bearing the picture of fifteen-year-old Mia Valentin, from Kandel, a town of ten thousand inhabitants in southwestern Germany, close to the French border. In the next months, as I travelled around the country, I kept hearing about Mia.
Mia had, I learned, begun a romantic relationship with an Afghan refugee, Abdul Mobin Dawodzai, who had been placed in her class at school. After they broke up, Dawodzai (who had claimed to be a minor but was at least twenty years old, according to authorities) allegedly began to stalk and threaten her. On December 27, 2017, he repeatedly stabbed her with a bread knife in front of a drugstore in the city’s center. She died a few hours later.
Dawodzai was tried for murder at the district court in nearby Landau, and, at the beginning of September, he was sentenced to eight years and six months in prison. Far-right agitators used the shocking details of Mia’s death for full propagandistic effect, just as they did with Der Fall Susanna. They depicted it as another example of the government’s complacency and of the need for popular revolt.
In the past two decades, many German towns have started to memorialize victims of the Holocaust with brass-plated cobblestones bearing their name and the place and circumstances of their death, usually placed in front of the home from which they were deported. These Stolpersteine (“stumbling stones”) are meant to shock Germans into contemplating their country’s darkest time as they go about their daily life. In the wake of Mia’s death, a movement called Kandel Is Everywhere, which aims to stoke anti-refugee sentiment in areas outside the far right’s traditional heartland, appropriated the idea. Replacing the names of Jews murdered by the Nazis with those of Germans murdered by refugees, it produced a viral poster that memorialized Mia Valentin, Susanna Feldmann, and other alleged victims of immigrant crime under the heading “Merkel’s Stolpersteine.”
At a Kandel Is Everywhere rally to protest Dawodzai’s light sentence, held in Landau’s main square, I found the clash between two Germanys to be even more manifest than it had been in Chemnitz. A bulky barricade ran through the middle of the square, neatly dividing it into two halves. But, where the atmosphere in Chemnitz had been tense, even aggressive, the mood in Landau was largely jubilant. Residents and officials had mounted messages of solidarity with immigrants and refugees on houses around the square. “Landau against racism,” a big banner hanging from the town hall read. “Landau is colorful,” a house on the opposite side of the square proclaimed. “We are the majority,” the crowd, composed of students, church groups, and families with small children, chanted. In Chemnitz, that vow had felt like wishful thinking. In Landau, it stated an undeniable reality.
Flanked by police, a few dozen far-right protesters began to walk toward the deserted courthouse. The speeches they made in front of it hit the usual notes. “What do all these men in the best age for fighting and procreating even want here?” Christiane Christen, one of the group’s organizers, demanded. “They are leading a war. And the bill for all of this is footed by the taxpayers, who are told that they are paying off some kind of original sin.” But, with her words barely audible over the speeches of nearby counter-protesters, Christen’s fearmongering failed to have much effect. By nightfall, the small crowd was already dispersing.
Walking to the train station through dimly lit streets, I stumbled over a protruding stone. With a start, I realized that it was one of the Stolpersteine: “Here lived melanie rauh, born Levy in the year 1882, deported to Gurs in 1940, murdered 1942 in Auschwitz.” She would have been more than fifty years old by the time Hitler came to power. Had she, like so many other German Jews, taken for granted the tenacity of civilization long after it had begun to give way?
When I was growing up, Germans liked to call members of the far right Ewiggestrige: those who are forever of yesterday. The term has come to seem unduly hopeful; history can move backward as well as forward, and yesterday’s men can, from one day to the next, come to look like the prophets of tomorrow. Travelling across Germany in the past months, I met plenty of young and disconcertingly smart activists who are trying to take their country far to the right. It would be a mistake to write off their influence. But, if naïveté is a danger, so is fatalism.
Curious to see whether the far right’s message might resonate more strongly in a small town that had just suffered a traumatic crime, I got off the train in Kandel. As it turned out, residents had organized a self-styled festival of intercultural understanding in the town’s idyllic main square, beneath a round church tower. A cover band was entertaining a few hundred locals with the most famous pop songs of the past few decades and the most tired jokes of the past century. If you looked closely, you could make out some scattered signs of politics: a “No AfD” poster here, a young woman carrying a “Refugees Welcome” placard there.
As a chilly late-night breeze swept through, and couples seated at the beer tables began to hold each other a little more tightly, I felt a glimmer of optimism. It wasn’t because of the well-intentioned politics; it was the scene’s sheer ordinariness.
“We hope that Kandel will soon be peaceful again,” the singer with the terrible jokes said as he prepared to leave the stage. “We hope that all these different camps will unite. We hope that people will encounter each other with openness.”
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SOURCE : THE NEW YORKER
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