The seemingly idyllic southern German town of Freiburg is suddenly the center of the refugee debate after an Afghan teenager became the suspect in the rape and murder of a female student.
It’s late evening in the southwestern city of Freiburg. Isabel Urbach and her two girlfriends are just coming from the center of town. At the end of the Blue Bridge that stretches over the main train station’s tracks a dark-skinned man suddenly approaches them.
He is staggering about, a bottle in his hand. “Hey,” he calls. The young women pause for a moment, size him up, maybe he just wants to ask directions. He then calls out to them, “Hey sexy ladies, party!” The three quickly try to escape around the corner, he follows them for a while. “Listen to me!” he shouts. Then he turns around and staggers off again in the direction of the train station.
Shortly afterwards, the three women are standing and talking together, visibly upset. “Nothing like that has ever happened to us in all these years,” they say. They are happy that the three of them had been out together. “As a woman, I wouldn’t go into certain parts of town alone anymore,” says Ms. Urbach. The 26-year-old is a teacher, and had studied German and French in Freiburg. For some years now, she has no longer been feeling safe everywhere. “But it naturally got even worse after the two murders,” she stresses.
In October, a 19-year-old medical student, Maria L., was attacked coming home from a party. She was raped and thrown in the Dreisam River, where she drowned. A month later, a 27-year-old woman was raped and murdered in a section of woods in the vicinity of Endingen am Kaiserstuhl, a small town close to the French border in southwest Germany. The crimes didn’t gain attention at first. But then just over a week ago, the police presented a suspect in the Maria L. case: Hussein K., a young Afghan, who had come to Germany as a refugee. Since then the crime has been splashed across the media, not just in Germany, but throughout the world.
The murder has set off a renewed debate about crime among asylum seekers, one that has dominated Germany for days. When the evening news program, Tagesschau, initially didn’t report about the arrest, the show’s news editors were deluged with a storm of accusations. They later regretted the fact that they ignored this case, having at the time decided it was only of “regional significance.” Two days later, even Chancellor Angela Merkel, leader of the conservative Christian Democrats, commented on the case and warned against making sweeping judgments about a whole ethnic group.
Others have already formed their own opinions on the matter; Andreas Schumacher, for example. He calls the dead student “a victim of the Merkel open-door culture.” Mr. Schumacher is 23 years old, studies German and social studies and plans to become a teacher. He has just recently been made the district spokesperson for the right-wing, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, in Freiburg. “What still has to happen before the professional applauders and do-gooders finally wake up?” he wrote on the AfD’s website. He is fully aware that what he wrote will attract a lot of hate comments, he says in a student café. But: “You have to tell the inconvenient truths, otherwise you won’t be heard.”
For him, one of those truths is that the refugees have changed the city. This is the feeling politicians in his party are trying to spread throughout Germany. In a popular TV talk show, Alice Weidel, a member the AfD’s national executive committee, accused Chancellor Merkel of being personally responsible for the death of Maria L. Even though criminologists never tire of pointing out that asylum seekers don’t become criminal more often than Germans, and that sexually-motivated murders are becoming increasingly rare in Germany despite the constantly growing percentage of foreigners – the murder of the medical student has galvanized anti-immigrants and shocked the whole nation. Particularly because it happened in Freiburg.
The town with a population of 230,000 at the foot of the Black Forest is considered to be Germany’s alternative green paradise. The sun shines especially long on the many solar roofs of the passive-energy homes in the car-free neighborhood of Vauban in Germany’s warmest major city. For decades, a political-minded citizenry with a history of being against nuclear power and with a pitch-in and help mentality, particularly when it comes to helping immigrants, has been supplemented by the 25,000 students from a university with a strong tradition in the humanities. After all, Hussein K. wasn’t living in a filthy container home on the outskirts of some city but rather with a well-situated guest family. Furthermore his alleged victim, Maria L., was engaged in supporting an elementary school in Ghana. If the integration of refugees fails even here, one has to wonder how it is supposed to succeed anywhere.
Now a shadow has been cast over the seemingly idyllic town. In the eyes of the anti-refugees, it signals the failure of the open-door culture.
“Since the murders, you can really sense that women are afraid,” says Abdel-Karim Ourghi. The native-born Algerian, who teaches Islamic theology at the city’s teachers’ college, often rides the tram that Hussein K. took on the night of the crime. “The women take a closer look at who is climbing aboard, especially in my case as a Muslim man,” says the professor thoughtfully. “I can definitely understand that, too.”
But Mr. Ourghi won’t subscribe to Freiburg having been a paradise before these two murders. “The feeling of being safe has been gone for some time.” The city has had a crime problem for years, he adds. He mentions Kirchplatz, a square in the district of Stühlinger, a dimly-lit hotbed of drug trafficking behind the train station. “The people living there are afraid,” says Mr. Ourghi.
Dieter Salomon is also aware of that. “Freiburg is not just this green idyllic place where we all run around in woolen socks and ride bicycles,” says Freiburg’s mayor, a Green party member who has been in office since 2002. The rest of Germany simply has a wrong image of the city, he says. “I can’t change the fact that, statistically, for 15 years we have been the most crime-ridden city in Baden-Württemberg.”
In 2015, there were 12,296 crimes for every 100,000 inhabitants in Freiburg, compared to 11,106 in the nearby larger city of Karlsruhe, and 10,850 in the state capital, Stuttgart. Since 2014, the number of crimes committed by asylum seekers has doubled although the number of refugees has increased four-fold. On average, therefore, Freiburg’s refugees are committing fewer crimes, but there are more of them.
Mr. Salomon has been trying to explain that for days. The 56-year-old appears tired; the last five days were a marathon of reporters and television teams at hourly intervals. By no means does he want to remain silent about what is happening in his city at the moment. Despite the rising crime rate, there are certainly not more homicides, he says. “But try explaining this random incidence to people.” His way forward is clear: “Rules apply to everyone and they must be obeyed.”
The only way to restore the feeling of security, he says, is through a strong police presence. “I’m not the chief of police, that’s a matter for the police.” But what the city can do, it is doing. Kirchplatz in Stühlinger now has better street lighting. The mayor plans to reinstate a ban on alcohol in the city center that was overturned years ago. The problems in the inner city, where a lot of muggings take place at weekends, he notes, seldom have anything to do with refugees. Mostly it is young people from the countryside coming to party in the city, he says, who are responsible for the outbreaks of violence.
Six hours later, Carsten Schlatterer enters a “war zone.” That’s what the 62-year-old in black uniform calls his workplace in the old historic part of Freiburg. “All hell breaks loose here Fridays and Saturdays,” says the wiry man with the small white moustache from CDS security services.
That’s when large crowds of people out to party head off from the main train station in the direction of the Bermuda Triangle, as it is called here, a district where discos and bars are lined up, one after the other. Only last weekend, there was another fight. “Four whites beat up two blacks, one of them was bleeding from the ear,” relates Mr. Schlatterer. “If we hadn’t broken it up, he’d probably be dead now.” For the seventh year in a row, Mr. Schlatterer has been working security at the Christmas markets together with four other guards. Mr. Schlatterer usually stands on Kartoffelmarktplatz, a square between the town hall and the city’s cathedral. He is regularly subjected to abuse there. Drunks throw empty bottles at him. “The willingness to use violence, the aggressiveness and the brutality has increased enormously in recent years,” Mr. Schlatterer thinks. Hooligans try to break open the stands, steal Christmas trees, kick apart parked bicycles. “Up to 98 percent of them are severely inebriated Germans and Eastern Europeans.”
The police, he says, are often helpless. In the spring he was doing shifts on Bissierstrasse, where the city operates a refugee home. There are a lot of residential houses and apartment buildings nearby, where many families live. A group of about 20 people were dealing drugs in front of the home. “It was in the middle of the day, on a Sunday,” remembers Mr. Schlatterer. He called the police. The response was that they knew but couldn’t do anything about it. “It’s simply being tolerated,” the security guard says in anger, his voice rising. “The authorities are powerless in this city.”
For years the mayor has been calling for more police to show more presence in critical spots like Kirchplatz in Stühlinger. It wasn’t until after the murder of Maria L. that they started listening to him – at least to some extent. The state’s interior ministry has temporarily sent 25 additional police officers. “If they had given me 25 new positions, I would have been even happier,” Mr. Salomon says.
Just the same, even if Freiburg had had 500 additional police before the arrest of Hussein K., the mayor argues, none of them would have been out on the job at 3 a.m. along the Dreisam River to prevent the murder of Maria L. Probably the only lesson to be learned from this tragedy is that absolute public safety is just as much an illusion as a big city without social problems. No one has to explain that to the people of Freiburg.
Co-Autor: Alexander Demling
