‘Please stop calling East Germans racists. Sit down and listen to them’
I am leaving The Local today after three and a half years working for the website as reporter then editor.
When I started in the job at the beginning of 2015, Germany was leaving a very good impression of a sleepy country pub while quietly turning over cash like a Vegas casino…
Looking at the figures, little has changed since. The economic good news never stops…
At the same time though, Germany has become a very different place. There is rancour and anger in the streets now. When Merkel heads out of Berlin into the eastern provinces she is hounded by cries of “traitor to the people” or “Merkel out!” By last year’s elections she had turned from the CDU’s biggest asset into a weight around their neck. The country’s “Mutti” had become the evil aunt.
The humiliation for the CDU was most keenly felt in the east. Since reunification, they have dominated the states of Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia. But at the national election their authority was smashed by the Alternative for Germany (AfD). And if polling is to be believed the AfD are going to become the second biggest force in eastern politics next year when three state elections are held.
Conveniently for opinion makers in the west, anger in the east is easy to portray as nationalist, xenophobic and all things they seek to distance Germany from.
Germany’s media elite - mostly based in Hamburg - love to shake their heads about the east. Whereas they can only look with resentment at the conservative but awkwardly successful Bavarians, they reserve something much worse for the Ossis - their pity. Those poor Ossis who had to live for so long under dictatorship, they still just don’t get democracy, Spiegel lamented on Thursday. They are such victims, but why do they have to take this out on the only people weaker than them - the refugees?
The Hamburg media elite concern themselves with causes like shutting down nuclear power plants, convinced they are saving the world from a technology that never killed a single German. Meanwhile, barely a week goes by without a rape or knife attack happening as a result of the liberal media’s favourite of all Merkel policies - taking in refugees.
Let me just summarize this article from the Badische Zeitung to make my point. The small local newspaper reported on a brutal rape on Sunday of a 63-year-old woman in the tiny spa town of Bad Krozingen.
In an incident which gained no attention outside of the southwest of the country, an unidentified man who spoke broken German and had dark skin pulled the elderly woman under a bridge in the city centre before raping her in a dried-out river bed. Police suspect the man is north African.
Amazingly the town of 19,000 inhabitants is in the middle of a sexual assault crisis. Since February two private security guards patrol the town’s Cure Park on 24-hour watch after a series of sexual assaults there last winter. That come after two women had been brutally raped in the park in the summer of 2016. Two men from Gambia are doing jail time for the crimes…
Let’s be clear here, if Bad Krozingen has a rape problem, then something is very wrong. People have a right to feel mainstream politicians aren’t taking their concerns seriously. It should come as no surprise that people flee from all the established parties - left and right - to the only party that talks about these things - the AfD.
