What You Find When You Ring the Doorbell

There’s a question worth sitting with: why do the people loudest about hating refugees online so often look exactly the way you’d expect? Are the more coherent ones simply more careful, or more cowardly, depending on how you frame it? Or is it just that cliché and reality occasionally converge?

The team at SPIEGEL TV pulled some of the vilest comments they could find on Facebook—the ones calling for refugees to be shot, beaten, hanged, gassed, or left to drown in the Mediterranean—and drove out to Freital, a small town near Dresden that had become a flashpoint for far-right violence against refugees, to knock on the actual doors of the actual people who had posted these things under their real names.

What you see isn’t quite monsters. You see people who are furious, frightened, and privately ashamed of their own lives. They don’t want refugees to fail purely out of hatred—or not only for that. They cannot hold the thought that a person who arrived with nothing, who speaks no German, who comes from somewhere they cannot place on a map, might in a few years be doing better than they are. That possibility is unbearable. Their hatred is the shape their self-loathing takes when it needs an address.

That’s not an excuse. It can’t be. But it might be the actual problem, and it’s a different problem from the one you engage with by calling people Nazis on the internet. These are people ground down by fear and resentment who’ve been told, by those happy to exploit both, that refugees are the cause. You won’t dislodge that with a counterargument. You might—slowly, unglamorously, without the satisfaction of winning anything—with something else. What that something looks like, watching this footage, I genuinely couldn’t tell you.