Munich, September 2015, and something briefly going right

There’s a particular kind of image that stays with you not because it’s spectacular but because it’s so unexpected that it takes a moment to register what you’re actually looking at. People at a train station, applauding. Not for a concert or a sports result. For other people getting off a train.

When refugees arrived at Munich Hauptbahnhof in early September 2015, they were met with applause, medical assistance, candy and stuffed animals for the children, strangers reaching out to shake hands. The BBC filmed some of it—the moment when the people arriving begin to understand that this is actually happening, that these strangers are genuinely glad to see them. You can watch a face move through disbelief into something cautious that might become relief. It takes a while.

Elsewhere in Europe that summer, people were burning shelters. Britain was being publicly criticized for its immigration policy, for treating refugees as a logistical problem to be managed rather than human beings in crisis. Hungary had deployed razor wire. The mood across much of the continent was one of threat and closure.

And then Munich. I don’t know what to do with the gap between these things except acknowledge it. The Germany that welcomed people at that station and the Germany that set fire to buildings were the same country at the same moment. Both things true simultaneously. What I keep coming back to is the image of those arrivals—the hesitant smiles, the first handshakes on unfamiliar ground. Not as proof of anything. Just as evidence that it was possible. That it happened once, on a platform, in September, and the people who arrived there never forgot it.