Imagine You Had to Run
You leave your city in the middle of the night because men with guns have turned it to rubble and half your family is dead and you’ve been hearing for months about the rapes and the child soldiers and the suicide bombers and the European kids streaming in to play at war in what used to be your neighborhood. You’ve abandoned everything. You’ve kept your children alive. After weeks of travel and images you will spend the rest of your life trying not to see, you arrive somewhere safe. A bed. Clean clothes. The first quiet in months.
You smile at your daughter. You breathe. You open the window.
And a clean-shaved man in his mid-forties and his unemployed drinking buddies are screaming "foreigners out" at you from the street below. They’ll be back tomorrow. They have nothing else to do.
In Germany in 2015 this is not a thought experiment. By July of that year, 130 documented criminal acts against refugees had already been recorded. People set fire to a refugee home in Berlin. Someone fired shots at a refugee shelter near Leipzig. Red Cross volunteers were pelted with stones in Halberstadt. Pegida organized marches. The AfD held rallies. And the brownest corner of German political life found in the refugee crisis something it had been waiting for: an enemy that was finally visible, finally proximate, finally available to hit.
The Amadeu Antonio Foundation and the refugee rights organization PRO ASYL maintained a joint chronicle of attacks drawn from press reports and regional documentation centers for victims of right-wing violence. Numbers for 2015 up to that point: 101 attacks on refugee accommodations, thirteen of them arson. Forty-eight people injured. Twenty-eight direct physical assaults. Eighty-five anti-refugee demonstrations across the country. A map of shame was being maintained online, updated in near real-time, each pin a place where someone decided that violence was the appropriate response to a family in a temporary room.
Arson is becoming the preferred instrument. In Reichertshofen in Bavaria, in Prien am Chiemsee, in Lübeck—buildings targeted at night, when people are sleeping inside. The strategic logic isn’t complicated. You burn the house and the fear becomes permanent. They can’t sleep anymore either. If there’s one thing Germany has historically delivered, it’s efficiency in cruelty.
Berlin-Weißensee, a Wednesday morning in early July: five men charged out of a nearby café as a refugee family—father, mother, two children—walked past on their way home. Racial slurs. They beat the forty-two-year-old father. They beat the forty-one-year-old mother. They punched the eleven-year-old daughter in the face. Three adults against one, with a child present—these are the fighting conditions chosen by people who require structural advantages to feel brave.
Dresden’s Cotta district, April: a twenty-four-year-old Afghan asylum seeker jogging on a footpath brushed past a man going the other direction. The man knocked him down and kicked him until a bystander intervened, then fled with the woman he’d been walking with. The jogger was hospitalized overnight. The trigger—a shoulder brush on a public pavement—tells you exactly where the aggression was already sitting and what it was sitting there waiting for.
Freital, June, which by that summer had become a kind of emblem: three men followed a man back toward his refugee hostel, insulted him, hit him with a bottle, hit him with their fists, and when he was down, kicked him. Hospitalized. Three against one. A bottle. Courage.
Refugees make easy targets not only because they’re physically and psychologically depleted, disoriented, sometimes eleven years old. They’re easy targets because the bored nationalists and their families have found a new reason to get out of bed: the expulsion of these "subhumans" from their immediate vicinity. For once they can do something for the Fatherland besides masturbating in secret to a faded photograph of Adolf Hitler.
Before, the enemy was abstract—the lying press, the corrupt government, the shadowy financial interests circling their shaved heads, ungraspable and impossible to confront. Now the enemy lives ten meters away behind a fence. You can see the dark skin, hear the unfamiliar language, track the comings and goings. The enemy is local. You can act. For the first time in your largely uneventful life, you are doing something.
The thing that should frighten everyone is how little coherent ideology these incidents actually require. Most of these men are simply bored, and violence against a visible out-group provides a structure that their actual lives were not providing. The displacement of a shapeless personal resentment onto the nearest available target isn’t a German phenomenon or a nationalist one. It’s a human one. Which is precisely why it should be named for what it is, every time, without qualification.
One can only hope—with complete sincerity—that the people doing this never find themselves on the receiving end of the same logic. Climate displacement does not negotiate citizenship. Economic collapse does not check your passport. History has a way of producing the exact scenarios its loudest opponents insist could never happen to people like them.
Because you leave your city in the middle of the night because men with guns have turned it to rubble. And half your family is dead. And after all of it—the weeks of travel, the images you can’t stop seeing, the total exhaustion—you arrive somewhere safe and you smile at your daughter and you open the window.
And you realize you’ve been here before. Just on the other side of it.