It has never been easy for foreigners to come to Germany for work. For many decades, political leaders have insisted the country wasn’t pursuing active immigration policies. But this has changed in recent years due to the fact that Germany is lacking more than a million skilled laborers to keep its economy going.
As of March 1, a new law will facilitate the immigration of qualified workers to Germany. Below is a list of the most important changes for all those who are seeking a job from abroad.
Who is considered a skilled worker?
Contrary to previous legislation, being considered a skilled worker, or “specialist,” is no longer restricted to a person with a university or college degree. Instead, the term now also applies to someone who has acquired a vocational training certificate. The training program must be at least two years in length, and the resulting degree needs to be recognized as equal or similar to a German degree.
If you want to check whether your qualification suits the requirements, you can access an information portal set up by the German Labor Ministry. How this works is explained on the “Make it in Germany” website, where you can also find links to other issues related to working in the country.
The government’s aim is to finish the recognition process of an applicant within three months after all the necessary documents have been provided. A work visa will be issued four weeks later.
Who is allowed to work in Germany?
In principle, applicants from outside the European Union are generally allowed to work in Germany if they have a work contract with a firm based in Germany and the relevant professional qualification for the job. The new law has stripped away a key regulation: That people from outside the EU can only take a job if there is no German or EU citizen who is able to do it instead.
Job seekers with qualifications lower than the vocational training level are, however, excluded by the new law. They can nevertheless apply for immigration if they possess a work contract or a job offer from a German employer. The employer then has to train the applicant and make sure he or she acquires a professional-level certificate within two years.
What else is needed?
All those with a work contract or a specific job offer are granted residency status for four years, or the duration of their contract. After four years, they can apply for a permanent residence status.
If you’re looking for a job, you are also allowed entry into Germany — on the condition that you can prove you’re able to support yourself and that you speak sufficient German (B2 level).
The new law also applies to foreigners seeking professional qualifications or a university degree in Germany. In addition, they must have obtained a diploma from a German school abroad or any other degree that qualifies them for university or professional education, and they must not be older than 25. After working for two years in Germany, people in this category can apply for permanent residence status.
Foreign skilled workers who are older than 45 have to prove they earn a minimum of €3,685 per month in their German job, or possess adequate old-age retirement funds.
Special rules for special skills
In sectors with an acute shortage of skilled professionals, the bar for emigrating to Germany has been lowered as well. Medical doctors, IT specialists or registered certified nurses, for example, don’t need to have their qualifications recognized by German authorities as long as they can prove a minimum of five years of on-the-job experience.
However, employers are obliged to take on financial responsibility for up to one year, including repatriation costs, for an employee whose contract has expired and who refuses to leave Germany voluntarily.
Family members are allowed
Under the new law, qualified workers are also allowed to bring their spouses and minor children to Germany. But they must prove to be able to support their family members financially and must provide them with sufficient living space. They cannot receive state benefits such as social welfare payments.
Welfare organizations including the Catholic charity Caritas have criticized the regulation, saying it would tear families apart. Those foreigners working in social occupations or the care sector wouldn’t be able to meet the requirements for families, they said.
Are refugees and asylum-seekers also welcome?
In principle, the new regulations also apply to asylum-seekers and refugees, although politicians admit only very few of them would qualify for it, namely those granted exceptional leave to remain.
Such foreigners with no residential status but who cannot be deported for various reasons are allowed to start training under certain conditions. They must have been working at least 35 hours a week for 18 months, and need to be able to support themselves. In addition, they must have sufficient command of the German language (B2 level) and must not have committed a criminal offense.
Pegida supporters, including Bjorn Hocke of the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD), gathered for the group’s 200th demonstration in the city.
Hundreds of anti-Pegida demonstrators arrived in Neumarkt square, with posters carrying slogans such as “Red card for Nazis” and “Grandmas against the right.”
Organizers of the counterrally said earlier on Monday that they had expected around 1,000 people to attend, but 90 minutes into the event, they estimated that 2,500 people had arrived, according to German news agency DPA.
Local media reported that Pegida leaders complained and threatened to cancel planned speeches due to the level of noise from counterprotesters.
Nazi rhetoric
The Pegida movement, created in 2014, is led by Lutz Bachmann,who has previously been convicted for incitement.
As one of the AfD’s most contentious figures, Hocke has been accused of using Nazi rhetoric in his speeches.
Pegida stands for “Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West.”
Local chapters of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) in the state of Saxony called for a counterrally under the slogan “Democracy needs backbone.”
Both parties have the support of Saxony’s Association of Jewish Communities, the Catholic Church and the Protestant Church.
State premier Michael Kretschmer, and a number of his ministers, have offered their support in a private capacity.
Bjorn Hocke has been accused of using Nazi rhetoric in his speeches.
AfD presence
AfD executive board member Alexander Wolf told the DPA news agency that Hocke’s rally attendance was risky ahead of elections in the northern German city of Hamburg on Sunday.
“As legitimate as the issue may be, a demonstration does always hold risks because you cannot control who takes part,” he said.
Thousands of anti-Pegida protesters took to Dresden’s Neumarkt square
The Pegida movement has also had the support of Hocke in the past. In 2016, he said in a speech that: “Without them, the AfD would not be where it is.”
Pegida held its first rally in Dresden in October 2014, calling for an end to the “Merkel dictatorship” and protesting against Islam and refugees
During the movement’s peak, tens of thousands of people participated in Pegida rallies.
Sometimes, it takes an earthquake to reveal what’s below the surface.
In the eastern German state of Thuringia this week a regional election displayed the disastrous state of Germany’s political center — and how far the country now stands from the anti-fascist consensus it proclaims to maintain.
On Wednesday, the state Parliament of Thuringia elected Thomas Kemmerich of the Free Democratic Party as the new governor. The only reason Mr. Kemmerich was able to win, though, was because he received the backing of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, known by its German initials AfD. The Free Democrats in Thuringia, along with members of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, agreed to the deal to ensure Mr. Kemmerich took office.
In doing so, the center-right parties broke a taboo that has been in place in German politics since the end of the Nazi era. Mr. Kemmerich became the first high-ranking German politician since World War II to be elected by relying on votes from a far-right party.
The centrists’ decision to side with the far right is especially worrying in Thuringia, where the AfD is not only the second strongest party in the regional parliament, but also more extreme than in any other state. The AfD’s boss there, Björn Höcke, is the leader of a hard-line movement inside the party known as “Der Flügel” — The Wing. In a 2018 book, he warned of the “coming death of the nation through population replacement.” Last year, a court ruled that he could legally be termed a fascist.
The events in Thuringia have shaken German politics. Ms. Merkel called the outcome “unforgivable.” Lars Klingbeil, the secretary general of the Social Democrats, spoke of a “low point in Germany’s postwar history.” Even the conservative tabloid Bild called the result a “disgrace.” After a wave of public fury — including protests across the country — Mr. Kemmerich announced on Thursday that he would resign in order to allow new elections. (It’s far from clear that a new election wouldn’t produce even stronger results for the AfD, however.)
But what led to these shameful machinations goes far deeper: the increasing normalization of the radical right in German politics. Even if Germany’s conservatives and liberals have not previously entered into formal agreements with the far right at the federal level, and are unlikely to let the AfD into a future government, they have nonetheless helped it gain power and far too often set the agenda. That dynamic won’t disappear soon.
This was not the first time that centrists have collaborated with the AfD. There have been at least 18 cases in which Ms. Merkel’s party has cooperated with the AfD on a local level, it was reported last fall. In the state parliaments of Berlin and Brandenburg, for example, the two parties have voted together on legislation. Leading Christian Democrats from several states have declared their willingness to work with the far-right party. In Saxony-Anhalt, the two parties teamed up in 2017 on an “inquiry on left extremism.” And in the same state, two Christian Democratic members of Parliament wrote a position paper last year in which they considered a coalition with the AfD. “We must reconcile the social with the national,” they stated, echoing neo-Nazi rhetoric.
The AfD has grown consistently since its founding in 2013 and is now present in the parliaments of every one of Germany’s 16 states. The parties of the center, meanwhile, have all shifted rightward. Both the Free Democrats, under their leader Christian Lindner, and the Christian Democrats have moved their policy platforms in an anti-immigrant direction. Neither Ms. Merkel nor the party’s new leader, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, have created clear boundaries between their party and the far right. But many voters, especially in the east of Germany, would rather buy the original product than its copies.
How did it come to this? One major factor is the obsession of many German centrists with the so-called horseshoe theory of politics, where the far left and the far right are equivalent.
Ms. Merkel’s Christian Democrats have been guided by this theory. In an official resolution, the party stated that it will never enter coalition with either the Left Party or the AfD. In Thuringia, it was this unmovable opposition to the left — demonized in its entirety by conservatives and liberals, citing the Left Party’s history as successor to the East German Communist Party — that laid the groundwork for the latest scandal. To prevent a relatively moderate and highly popular Left Party politician, Bodo Ramelow, from taking power in a minority government, the Christian Democrats and the Free Democrats instead colluded with the AfD.
One day after the disaster in Thuringia, Friedrich Merz, a Christian Democratic politician whom some believe could be the next chancellor, appeared on a late-night talk show. After condemning his party’s decision to collaborate with the AfD in Thuringia, Mr. Merz also felt the need to warn of the “left scene” in Berlin torching cars; he went on to equate the Left Party with the AfD. Should Mr. Merz really become Ms. Merkel’s successor, we can expect a red scare to become ever more part of the centrist program.
For the far right, this week has been an outstanding success. AfD’s leaders have long predicted — and hoped for — a convergence with centrist and conservative parties. On Wednesday, when shaking hands to congratulate the newly elected Thuringia governor, Mr. Höcke smiled. The scene reminded many Germans of a famous picture from 1933 in which Adolf Hitler greets Paul von Hindenburg, Germany’s president at the time.
Germany in 2020 is not Germany in 1933. But German politics have shifted in recent years in a disturbing way. Centrists and the far right share talking points on immigration. They share what they perceive as a common enemy in the left. And now, for the first time in decades, they even share a governor.
Germany’s federal government has been criticised for taking a bureaucratic and contradictory approach towards restoring citizenship for Holocaust survivors and their descendants.
On Wednesday, Bundestag president Wolfgang Schäuble told a special parliamentary sitting, attended by Israeli president Reuven Rivlin, that Germany would never forget its historical responsibility to Holocaust victims and survivors – and their descendants.
Meanwhile, back at work a day later, the federal government used its parliamentary majority to block an opposition proposal to bed down in law liberalised procedures for people who either lost or were stripped of their German citizenship in the Nazi era.
Article 116 of the postwar Basic Law states that “former German citizens who between 30 January 1933 and 8 May 1945 were deprived of their German citizenship on political, racial, or religious grounds may have their citizenship restored. This generally also applies to their descendants.”
But some who have applied for German citizenship say a gap exists between theory and practice.
The issue has grown in significance since the 2016 Brexit vote in the UK. Where just 43 applications for citizenship restitution were filed in 2015, that had jumped to more than 1,500 annually in 2018. The growing number of applications mirrored a rise in complaints that restitution rules were problematic and applied narrowly.
Reasons for rejection
The UK’s Association of Jewish Refugees has a sizeable file of people denied citizenship, although family members fled Germany after persecution on political, racial and religious grounds. One common reason for rejection was a requirement that the person who fled – the relative of the applicant – is a man, reflecting rules on the transfer of citizenship by fathers only until postwar reform.
Other applicants tell of being refused citizenship because, though their Jewish grandparents saved their lives by fleeing Nazi Germany, they left too soon, in the eyes of today’s German authorities, to qualify as persecuted and thus eligible for restoration of citizenship.
Similar to discussions in Canada about statues of former historical figures and leaders. Believe there is a greater risk in removing the ugly parts and aspect of our history and historical figures than not, and having interpretative plaques or adjacent exhibits is a better approach:
A court in eastern Germany indicated Tuesday that it will likely reject a Jewish man’s bid to force the removal of an ugly remnant of centuries of anti-Semitism from a church where Martin Luther once preached.
The Naumburg court’s senate said, at a hearing, that “it will maybe reject the appeal,” court spokesman Henning Haberland told reporters.
“The senate could not follow the plaintiff’s opinion that the defamatory sculpture can be seen as an expression of disregard in its current presentation,” Haberland said.
The verdict will be announced on February 4.
The so-called “Judensau,” or “Jew pig,” sculpture on the Town Church in Wittenberg dates back to around 1300. It is perhaps the best-known of more than 20 such anti-Semitic relics from the Middle Ages that still adorn churches across Germany and elsewhere in Europe.
Located 4 meters (13 feet) above the ground on a corner of the church, it depicts Jews suckling on the teats of a sow, while a rabbi lifts the animal’s tail. In 1570, after the Protestant Reformation, an inscription referring to an anti-Jewish tract by Luther was added.
Judaism considers pigs impure and no one disputes that the sculpture is deliberately offensive. But there is strong disagreement about what to do with the relief.
Tuesday’s hearing was the second round in the legal dispute, which comes at a time of mounting concern about anti-Semitism in Germany. In May, a court ruled against plaintiff Michael Duellmann, who wants the relief to be taken off the church and put in the nearby Luther House museum.
Judges in Dessau rejected arguments that he has a right to have the sculpture removed because it formally constitutes slander and the parish is legally responsible.
The relief “is a terrible falsification of Judaism … a defamation of and insult to the Jewish people,” Duellmann says, arguing that it has “a terrible effect up to this day.”
When the church was renovated in the early 1980s, the parish decided to leave the sandstone sculpture in place, and it was also restored. In 1988, a memorial was built on the ground underneath it, referring to the persecution of Jews and the killing of 6 million in the Nazi Holocaust.
Pastor Johannes Block from the Town Church says the church also considers the sculpture unacceptably insulting. However, he argues it “no longer speaks for itself as a solitary piece, but is embedded in a culture of remembrance” thanks to the memorial.
“We don’t want to hide or abolish history, but take the path of reconciliation with and through history,” he says.
In Berlin, the federal commissioner for Jewish life in Germany told reporters he favored putting the relief down into a museum.
“This would be a good contribution by the church to overcome anti-Semitism,” Felix Klein told reporters ahead of the court hearing.
The security at the New Synagogue, located in Berlin’s city center, is regrettably familiar in Germany.
The approach is well protected: A chain-link barrier keeps vehicles at a distance, two guards flank the main entrance, and a metal detector arcs over visitors’ heads. It takes about five minutes to get through.
“In the U.S. you can go into a synagogue without any kind of controls,” says Sigmount Königsberg, the commissioner against anti-Semitism for the Jewish community in Berlin. His office is housed within the synagogue. “In Germany, we hardly remember a time like this. Even when I was 10, growing up in the 1970s, there was always a police officer standing in front of the synagogue.”
Such security remains critically necessary, as anti-Semitic incidents in Germany are on the upswing. A shooting outside a synagogue in Halle captured global attention in October, but the gunman couldn’t foil security measures to enter. Metal detectors also stand at the entrance to Jewish kindergartens, primary and secondary schools, and homes for senior citizens.
Christian Mang/Reuters
Security like these police officers outside the New Synagogue in Berlin has long been used at Jewish institutions in Germany to protect from anti-Semitic incidents.
But Mr. Königsberg and other activists warn that though such measures are still needed, to root out anti-Semitism it must be fought someplace where it cannot be physically blocked: in schoolyards and classrooms. To stop an anti-Semitic hate that seems at once more aggressive and also more subtle, they say, it needs to be addressed at an early age. And that means ground zero must be schools.
“Nine of 10 children are in public schools,” Mr. Königsberg says. “You can start there.” Yet efforts to date are underfunded and a bit random; more systemic action is needed, he says.
Anti-Semitism in the schoolyard
Society-wide, the numbers around anti-Semitism are stark. Six of 10 Jews in Germany have experienced anti-Semitic “hidden insinuations,” while 9 of 10 Jews in Germany feel “strongly burdened” by anti-Semitism directed at their family, according to a 2017 qualitative study out of Bielefeld University titled “Jewish Perspectives on Antisemitism in Germany.”
Schools in Berlin have seen an uptick in incidents, reporting 41 incidents in 2018, up one-third from the previous year, according to RIAS, a monitoring agency that tracks anti-Semitic incidents.
Recently, at one Berlin public school, Mr. Königsberg says, a teacher was instructing a unit on religion. One boy offered up that he was Jewish, only to hear a classmate mutter in response, “I’ve got to kill you.” The teacher heard the remark, but did nothing to intervene, says Mr. Königsberg.
Other school situations can be understated or offhand, and even perpetrated by teachers, he adds. Take the time a Berlin public school took a field trip to the city’s Holocaust memorial. A 14-year-old Jewish girl, emotional over what she was seeing, began to sob. Her German teacher told her, “Why are you crying? It was so long ago.”
“There is no typical story, no typical solution,” says Mr. Königsberg. “Sometimes I need a lawyer, and other times I need a psychologist.”
Other times, one might need the police. A Jewish woman whose child attends an elite Berlin public school says she volunteered to run the Israel booth at the school’s international fair. She says she immediately felt uncomfortable. First, a child of about 5 years passed by and told her, “Israel is bad.” Later, as students assessed the falafel offered at the booth, several offered that the food had “nothing to do with Israel.”
Toward the end of the fair, a teenager leaned over the table to get in her face, snarling, “I wish the falafel were grenades, and that they would explode in your face.” Another parent intervened and moved the teen away from the table.
The woman visited with police over the verbal assault, but ultimately decided not to file a report. “I didn’t feel a 15-year-old should have a criminal record,” she says.
When she reported the incident to the school principal, she came away disappointed. “The issue was never raised with the community,” says the woman, who wished to remain anonymous since her child is still enrolled in the school. “Eventually the principal left. Nothing was done.”
That incident brings up the question: Where is the anti-Semitism coming from? Reporting around incidents doesn’t often include the background of the perpetrator, so good data is unavailable, says Mr. Königsberg. Yet, while it’s clear that some problems stem from increasing immigration from the Middle East, a greater hostility originates inside Germany’s increasingly vocal far-right, exemplified by the Halle shooting. The far-right is hostile to both Muslims and Jews, says Mr. Königsberg, and it’s important to tackle both. “People need to learn to accept minorities.”
Teaching teachers how to respond
Doing nothing is easiest in the face of an issue that’s “massively complex,” says Levi Salomon, lead spokesman for a lobbying group called Jewish Forum for Democracy and Against Anti-Semitism. “Anti-Semitism is the oldest form of group-targeted hatred, and 2,000-year-old stereotypes are archived in European memory. Teachers are hesitant and unclear how to deal with that history.”
On top of that, teachers are overwhelmed and overworked in the face of a massive educator shortage, says Heinz-Peter Meidinger, president of Deutscher Lehrerverband, Germany’s largest teachers association. In other words, even if there were a nationalized curriculum for addressing the issue of prejudice, there’s little time to implement it.
There are also institutional problems: Reporting an anti-Semitic incident is not universally required. “Teachers should be required to report,” Mr. Meidinger says. “I also wish that every German state appointed an independent contact person in the school ministry to take reports.”
Administrators’ instincts also might be to keep the issues quiet. “For example, if a student does the Hitler greeting, school management is often afraid of reporting because they think, ‘If this reaches the outside world, we’re ruined,’” says Mr. Meidinger.
Other times, educators who are sensitive to the issue feel isolated or alone, found a 2017 survey of anti-Semitism in schools out of Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences.
The German government has implemented a number of measures against anti-Semitism broadly in society. For example, denial that Jews were murdered during the Holocaust is a crime, as is the display of a swastika. Golden Stolpersteine, concrete cubes with inscribed brass plates, are displayed at thresholds to commemorate victims of the Holocaust.
Regarding schools specifically, anti-Semitism has been introduced as a category of discrimination in the emergency response plans for schools in Berlin and two other states. This requires administrators to report any incidents to a government office starting the 2019-20 academic year. Politicians in other German states are considering following suit.
Yet the people working on this issue feel that much more awareness around anti-Semitism and structural change inside the education system is needed. “We’re hoping for a continuous conversation, rather than one-off approaches around single incidents,” says Marina Chernivsky, head of the Competence Center for Prevention and Empowerment. Her organization is focused on bringing change via outreach and providing educational workshops to teachers, families, and the public. “We can help educate and teach, but there needs to be a shift and systemic change.”
She’s working toward a time when a Jewish child won’t be asked to draw a family tree in class, without the teacher first thinking about the context and possible repercussions of such a request.
In that recent case, says Ms. Chernivsky’s colleague Romina Wiegemann, a child given such an assignment suddenly came home asking questions of a mother who wasn’t prepared to field questions about relatives lost to the Holocaust. When the mother raised the question with administrators, she found little support.
“We must think about the effect this has on children, and make sure schools engage with topics,” says Ms. Wiegemann.
Mr. Königsberg at the New Synagogue thinks that there’s reason to hope. “When I call the schools now, I get an appointment,” he says. “Last year, they ignored me.” But he sees the fight against anti-Semitism as a fight for democracy. “A true democracy doesn’t work with discrimination.”
The right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) on Saturday opened a two-day conference where, as it seeks to build on recent election successes, it rejected a swerve to the extreme right.
After delegates voted on Saturday evening, the relatively moderate candidate Jörg Meuthen secured another term as co-chair, while compromise candidate Tino Chrupalla was elected to replace outgoing co-chair Alexander Gauland.
Internal power struggles had been expected to dominate the halls of the conference center, where 600 party delegates, in addition to choosing co-chairs, were voting on 13 members of the executive committee.
An extreme-right faction known as the Wing (Flügel) had been hoping to boost its representation on the executive council and make a bid to swing the leadership in its direction.
The two-day gathering in the city of Braunschweig comes on the heels of state elections in eastern Germany in recent months that saw the AfD surge to second place in Saxony, Brandenburg and Thuringia with more than 20% of the vote.
Meuthen used the moment to revel in the declining support for Germany’s traditional center-left Social Democrats and center-right Christian Democrats.
“We are experiencing the implosion of formerly dominant forces with the simultaneous strengthening of new forces … I believe that government-building without us will become more and more difficult, until it does not work at all anymore,” he said.
All parties represented in Germany’s federal and state parliaments have refused to work with the AfD.
As Meuthen expressed ambitions to enter government, some 20,000 protesters gathered outside the conference. Some shouted “all of Germany hates the AfD” and “no place for Nazis.”
Extreme right of the AfD
The Wing’s influence in the AfD has been strengthened after two of its key figures — Björn Höcke and Andreas Kalbitz — scored significant electoral victories in regional elections in eastern Germany this year. By some estimates, up to 40% of party members are sympathetic to the Wing, giving them a prominent role in choosing the executive council and co-leaders.
Chrupalla, who won the support of 54.5% of delegates, was viewed as a compromise candidate acceptable to moderates and radicals. He was ultimately able to battle off a challenge from a more hard-line lawmaker, Gottfried Curio.
At a press conference, Chrupalla disputed the idea that the AfD used incendiary rhetoric to win votes, saying “we have used reason” to gain centrist voters, which “requires no drastic language.”
Founded in 2013 as a euroskeptic party, the AfD has drifted to the right as it seized on the 2015 refugee crisis to promote an anti-Islam, anti-foreigner and pro-family program. Despite scoring above 20% in eastern Germany, it has stalled nationwide at about 13-15%.
Moderates within the party want to appeal to a broader political base and disgruntled voters by shedding its far-right image in a bid to capture support from other parties, particularly the ruling conservative Christian Democrats and their center-left Social Democrat coalition partners.
The battle over the future direction of the AfD is not only a strategic question, but an existential one.
It comes as Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has put some local AfD offices under further scrutiny. There is great concern within the party that its national associations could be put under observation if it swings too far to the extreme right.
The far-right Alternative for Germany party on Sunday celebrated a strong showing in the former Communist East, more than doubling its support in a state election held two weeks after an attack on a synagogue that some tied to the party’s use of hateful language.
The party won 23.5 percent of the vote in Thuringia, according to preliminary returns, up from 10.6 percent in 2014. That left it in second place, behind the Left Party but ahead of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives.
The party, known by its German initials AfD, has no hope of governing, since all the other parties have ruled out cooperating with it. But its strong showing is likely to reverberate in other ways. The election outcome could further strengthen the power of Björn Höcke, the party’s leader in Thuringia and its most notorious figure.
Slowly, many would say too slowly, Germany is waking up to the threat of far right terrorism. How could it not after a gunman attacked a synagogue in the eastern city of Halle on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar? Unable to enter, he killed a woman on the street and a man in a kebab shop.
The shooter’s “manifesto” was a typical anti-Semitic screed, but his mother’s words, in their way, were more chilling. She told the German magazine Der Spiegel that her son “didn’t have anything against Jews in that sense. He had something against the people who stand behind financial power.”
Unfortunately, such parsing of definitions is not unique to the moms of murderers. Violent hate crimes that stop short of fatalities occur on an almost daily basis in this country, but are rarely reported or prosecuted.
In the past week alone, three right-wing extremists walked through the streets of Doebeln wearing orange jackets that said “Safe Zone,” chanting far right slogans and claiming to hunt “foreigners.” Right-wing extremist strategy is to make out that a “foreign threat,” that is, immigrants, has made streets unsafe, and that the German state has lost control of order, so it’s up to quasi-nazis to defend the streets and their country. Thus the “safe zone” reference.
In Mannheim, a 62-year-old man was arrested after shouting racist abuse at people on the train. (He was first told to leave because he didn’t have a ticket.) In Halle, someone uploaded a video of a man on the bus slurring abuse and talking about “gassing” people.
A few hours after the terror attack in Halle, police in the western city of Bonn reported that shots were fired through the window of an immigrant asylum home. The suspects drove off.
For the far right, such attacks small and large serve to instill fear in the targeted group, to drive a wedge between that group and the rest of society and thus fuel the extremists’ prophesied “war of cultures,” as Matthias Quent writes in his book Deutschland Rechts Aussen, or “The German Far Right.” And by failing to provide victims of hate crimes with justice, or declining to acknowledge that they are what they are, Germany’s democratic institutions perpetuate these aims.
In the aftermath of Halle, some measures have been announced. At a press conference, German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said security measures at synagogues across the country would be improved.
But the government’s anti-Semitism commissioner, Felix Klein, thinks that’s not enough. Speaking on ZDF television the day after the attack, he demanded that judges be allowed to recognize and give tougher sentences to anti-Semitic hate crimes. Right now the relevant law speaks of “contemptuous” motives.
“The attack began with a man wearing a shirt emblazoned with the image of Horst Wessel, a Nazi shot in 1930 and portrayed as a martyr by Josef Goebbels. ”
“I have not had one case where anti-Semitism was clearly named as the motive for a crime,” says Christina Büttner from “ezra,” an organization in Thuringia, where victims of violent hate crimes can get counselling and legal advice.
Thuringia is an eastern German state and home to the far-right AfD, Alternative für Deutschland, hardliner Bjoern Hoecke, who has called the Holocaust memorial in Berlin a “monument of shame” and said that schools should highlight German suffering in World War Two
In 2014, a group of right-wing extremists beat up six people at an art exhibition in Erfurt, a city in Thuringia. The attack began with a man wearing a shirt emblazoned with the image of Horst Wessel, a Nazi shot in 1930 and portrayed as a martyr by Josef Goebbels. That man started making anti-Semitic slurs to visitors before he was joined by seven other men who shouted “Sieg Heil.” At their court hearing, the consensus appeared to be that the offenders were “drunk and looking for a fight,” says Büttner. The anti-Semitic slurs were “brushed aside.” The fact that one of them had the face of an SS officer tattooed on his calf was only added to the case file after he appeared at proceedings in short pants.
“There are education gaps about anti-Semitism among officials, state prosecutors and judges,” says Büttner. “One cannot assume that highly educated people in Germany know what anti-Semitism is.”
According to official figures, such as they are, anti-Semitic and racist hate crimes—including online hate speech and the use of Nazi symbols—increased almost 20 percent in Germany last year. In most cases, the offender was judged to have a far right background. Büttner says her organization has dealt with one case where the offender had a Muslim background, but when it comes to violent anti-Semitic attacks, right-wing extremists “are in the majority.”
When confronted with the case of a person who may have been a victim of a violent hate crime, the police in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, where Halle is located, have been told to refer victims to independent advisory services like ezra. The legal advice of these NGOs can be useful, for example, if police refuse to provide a translator to a victim who doesn’t speak German.
“In Halle, this works very well,” says a counselor for the organization Mobile Operberatung. “But in other parts of the state, it may be that the police don’t recognize the cases or that they don’t know what they are supposed to do.”
Independent advisory services for hate crimes—mostly present in eastern Germany—record a much higher number of violent attacks than the authorities. Last year, they estimated that an average number of five people a day were attacked.
“Last year, they estimated that an average number of five people a day were attacked.”
Even more hate crimes go completely unrecorded. “Our statistics are the tip of the iceberg,” Büttner says.
In Germany, the individual police officer asked to register an assault decides whether it is a hate crime or not. Judith Porath, who counsels victims of violent hate crimes in the eastern state of Brandenburg, says that the people who come to her center often decide not to go to the police. Some worry about revenge. Others distrust the authorities. “People feel that they are not being believed, that they are being treated as the offenders,” she says.
Sometimes, a person who is targeted repeatedly by hate crimes will think there is no point in going to the police if they are still waiting for the legal proceedings against a different assailant from three years ago. One reason that proceedings are so slow is that there is a significant shortage of judges and state prosecutors in Germany.
In cases of far right violence, according to Porath, a common strategy that her organization has encountered is for gangs to first ambush a person who is alone, then accuse that person of assault. The culprits can back each other up in court. If the victim has no witnesses, the case either is dropped or the victim ends up being charged.
The fact that there are more hate crimes could be interpreted by the organized extremist movement as a sign the population is “leaning toward their ideology” and shares their definition of “enemies,” Daniel Koehler, director of the Institute on Radicalization and De-Radicalization Studies, tells The Daily Beast.
There are some signs that the German law enforcement’s sensitivity may be improving. In the ZDF interview, Felix Klein said that one reason the number of officially recorded anti-Semitic hate crimes last year increased was because more people are now going to the police.
In Halle, the number of violent attacks recorded by the Mobile Operberatung actually decreased in the past year. But in the neighboring state of Saxony, NGOs recorded a 38 percent increase in violent attacks—not least because of a series of assaults fuelled by the racist riots in Chemnitz last August.
In the wake of those riots, four restaurants were attacked, including the Jewish restaurant Shalom and the Persian restaurant Safran. These properties were destroyed, swastikas were painted on the glass and one owner was in the hospital for eight days. The state police took over the cases, citing the likelihood of a xenophobic motive. No suspects were found.
“To some extent, the affected did not feel like they were being taken seriously,” says Anna Pöhl, a counselor for victims of hate crimes in Chemnitz. This was in part because of the manner in which police investigated the attacks, for example by checking for ties to organized crime or asking whether the offenders had perhaps been shouting something in Arabic or Russian–this after being told that they’d given a Hitler salute and shouted “Sieg Heil.”
This September, the far right Alternative für Deutschland party became the second strongest party in Saxony and Brandenburg. Now, Judith Porath says “The AfD tries to discredit us, they are constantly making inquiries about us.” Other political parties have defended the NGO, she said, so far.
One of the more lengthy and comprehensive analyses:
Germany’s constitution contains a provision that permits citizenship to be granted to descendants of persons stripped of their German citizenship by the former Nazi regime for political, racial or religious reasons.
In practice, this provision, Article 116(2), is mostly – although not exclusively – directed at descendants of Jewish refugees from Germany. Approximately 7000 German Jews fled to Australia before World War II, due to the policies of the Nazi regime, and there are many descendants in Australia who now wish to become German citizens.
However, the German parliament has not properly implemented Article 116(2) in its citizenship law. German legislation precludes the granting of citizenship to various groups of descendants of Jewish refugees.
Many applicants have been denied citizenship on the basis that the affected family member was female, because citizenship passed only through the father at the time the German constitution was enacted.
Other applications are denied because German authorities contend that the applicant’s female ancestor willingly gave up German citizenship by marrying a non-German man after escaping Germany.
In other cases, the authorities have denied applications to the descendants of those who the authorities argue left Germany “voluntarily” during the Nazi reign and willingly relinquished their German citizenship — a position that flies in the face of historical realities. And some applicants have been denied citizenship on the basis that their parents were unmarried, or that the applicant was adopted.
We can see no rational reason why these groups of descendants are excluded for eligibility for German citizenship. As Article 116(2) of the constitution seeks to provide a form of restitution for past injustices, it’s imperative that this provision is interpreted in a generous fashion, without drawing arbitrary distinctions between descendants.
An inconsistent law
A very strong argument can be made that the law is inconsistent with the right to equality under the German constitution, not to mention Germany’s obligations of non-discrimination and the right to private and family life under the European Convention on Human Rights, to which Germany is a party.
On 30 August, the German government issued a decree that attempts to rectify some of the discriminatory aspects of the law. The decree addresses some aspects of the gender discrimination in the current law, and extends citizenship rights to those born before 1949, who were until now precluded from eligibility by a 2012 decree.
However, the decree does not completely remedy the discrimination in the law.
For example, children born out of wedlock to a German mother would be excluded, whereas children born out of wedlock to a German father would be eligible. Moreover, citizenship won’t be granted unconditionally to those who become eligible. Rather, applicants will need to demonstrate German language competence and knowledge of Germany’s legal and social order.
The determination of whether these criteria are satisfied in an individual case is to a large degree discretionary, based on a subjective assessment made by German consular officials. In light of Germany’s track record in relation to granting citizenship under Article 116(2) of the constitution, there’s a need for greater transparency and more objective decision-making criteria to ensure the decree is given effect to in the manner it was intended.
Another issue is that by requiring certain groups to pass the above tests but not others, the law perpetuates gender discrimination. For example, descendants of female ancestors need to demonstrate German language skills, but descendants of male ancestors do not.
Moreover, the generation born after 31 December, 1999, would be the last generation to be eligible under this decree to obtain German citizenship. Although an argument can be made that the rationale for restitution lessens with the passage of time, we can see no justification for limiting eligibility to this timeframe.
There are also serious questions as to whether this type of rule-making by decree is appropriate, not to mention constitutionally valid.
The difference between a decree and legislation isn’t merely symbolic. A future government could revoke the decree with the stroke of a pen, whereas changing legislation requires that the proposed law be debated by parliament.
A law, properly debated and enacted through Germany’s parliamentary procedures, faces much higher hurdles for reversal.
Another provision of Germany’s constitution requires that certain “essential” decisions must be made by parliament, rather than by the executive branch of government in the form of a decree.
In our view, there’s a strong argument that this issue is one that can only be dealt with by parliament.
Germany has a largely commendable track record in confronting its Nazi past. It should do right by the descendants of those who had to flee to save their lives.
Germany has a largely commendable track record in confronting its Nazi past. It should do right by the descendants of those who had to flee to save their lives – end decades of protracted, unjustifiable and arbitrary discrimination by enacting a law that provides for a simple path to citizenship for all descendants.
Requiring descendants to fight for their rights in the courts would add insult to injury, and would be particularly difficult for descendants in countries on the other side of the globe such as Australia.
Multicultural Meanderings 