The Glee I Couldn’t Explain

There’s a habit I have that gets me into trouble. I try to understand everyone—not excuse them, just locate the chain of cause and effect that produced a person capable of a particular thing. I’ve done it for people whose politics make me physically sick, for people who’ve done things I can barely read about. Nothing happens without a reason. Everyone believes, at some level, that what they’re doing is right.

Then I watched the footage from Heidenau.

In August 2015, far-right mobs attacked a refugee shelter in the small Saxon town, throwing bottles and fireworks at police, chanting slogans, apparently having an excellent time. That was what I couldn’t locate the mechanism for: the good time. These weren’t people in a fury—they were having fun. Laughing. The footage that circulated that week was hard to watch not because the violence was so extreme but because of the mood in it. The glee.

I kept looking for the frame that would make it make sense and I kept coming up empty. How do you stand at a fence laughing while families with children are on the other side, families who have already traveled thousands of kilometers out of actual war, who thought they’d finally made it somewhere safe, and feel—what? Entertainment? Satisfaction? I stared at that footage for a long time trying to find a way in. There wasn’t one.

The other thing I kept thinking about was the people inside. A child holding on to a parent, crying. After everything they’d survived to get there, after the journey that would have broken most people I know—this. The mob was grotesque but dismissible. The child’s face wasn’t. That image is the one that stayed.