German Winter

On 20 December 2024, shortly after 7 pm, a fifty-year-old man, a citizen of Saudi Arabia, drove a rented SUV onto the Christmas market in Magdeburg. He drove at normal speed to begin with, then accelerated and hurtled, zigzagging, between the mulled-wine stalls. Six people died, three hundred were injured.
In the newspaper Volksstimme the offender was described as follows: ‘50-year-old Taleb A has been living in Germany since 2006. He works as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist in the Salus Clinic in Bernburg... He seems to have had Islamophobic tendencies and identifies on social media as anti-religious and a fan of the Alternative for Germany (AfD).’
On the next day, 21 December 2024, the first of many protests was held on Magdeburg’s Hasselbachplatz. Demonstrators chanted far-right slogans.
On 23 December, AfD leader Alice Weidel visited Magdeburg; according to police estimates, 3,500 people gathered at the rally. In her talk she called the offender who had expressed sympathy for her party an ‘Islamist’ and complained that he hadn’t been sent back to Saudi Arabia years ago. (AfD fan Taleb A was in custody at that point and will presumably have followed the news. You wonder what he made of it all.) Weidel said, ‘Anyone who despises and even kills the citizens of the country that grant them asylum, anyone who despises everything we stand for, everything we love, does not belong to us.’ Cries of ‘Deport them, deport them!’ went up from the crowd.
Following this rally, the Regional Network of Migrant Organisation of Saxony-Anhalt (LAMSA) recorded an average of one ‘violent assault’ per day on people ‘perceived as migrants’. Both police and victim support assumed a significantly higher number of unreported cases. The press reported that language-class attendance was down because participants were afraid to go out. Chaperone services were organised so that women could go shopping.

According to the Süddeutscher Zeitung the first incident of such racist assault was reported on the evening of the attack itself. ‘A 13-year-old boy whose family was from Syria was subjected to racist insults by a neighbour, prevented from leaving the lift and choked.’  

I read the article several times: ‘A 13-year-old boy...choked...racist insults...prevented from leaving the lift and choked.’ Then I looked for more information on the violence raging in Magdeburg but found nothing. Over the course of the next days and weeks I came across the occasional report. I read everything again and again.
It was the beginning of the year. The sun was just visible over the trees in front of my balcony; I had a knitted blanket over my shoulders but shivered anyway, and I read and read some more and couldn’t find enough. But how much would have been enough? 
I had come to the end of the old year and entered the new year with a sense of gloom, the feeling that something was brewing or had already erupted. Acts of aggression on the streets were on the rise; reports of growing and increasingly horrific violence filled the news. But this was different; it felt different. It reminded me of I wasn’t sure what. I wanted to say something, but didn’t know what to say. I clicked my way through the internet.
All the articles reported in detail on the facts of the crimes. A woman had been spat at and pelted with insults. A nurse who had treated survivors of the Christmas market attack had been assaulted outside hospital after work. A DJ had been beaten up so badly on his way home on New Year’s morning that he had vomited from the pain. Open wounds, bruises, concussion. According to one article, he was wondering if there was still a place for him in Magdeburg.
What does it take to know there’s a place for you, to know you’re in the right place? A photo accompanying the article showed DJ Brahim B sitting up in a hospital bed, an oximeter on his finger, his hands grazed, an attempt at a smile on his face. He’d come to Germany to find fame as a DJ and now he was famous for being attacked. He was a news item in the papers, a number in the police statistics. Soon the papers moved on to other stories; the attention wore off. But the people were still there.
I got in touch with one of the journalists reporting from Magdeburg and asked if she thought it might help those concerned to talk some more about what had happened to them. To talk to someone who wouldn’t report on their case but listen and try to understand and maybe one day turn their experiences into a novel or a short story. The journalist forwarded me M’s number.

Dear M,
I was given your phone number by X who said I could get in touch with you. I am planning to write about the current atmosphere of violence in Germany, not as a journalist but as a literary writer. I write novels and essays and plays. I emigrated to Germany with my parents as a child and have experienced racist violence myself. Could you envisage talking to me about being assaulted?
Please let me know if you’d consider a phone call.
Thank you and best wishes,
Sasha
 

Dear Sasha,
Thank you for your message. I’d be happy to help you and anyone else in whatever way I can... As I have a strong personal interest in art and literature, I’d be curious to hear more about your approach and the aim of your text.
All the best,
M

M’s first question when we met on a video call was ‘What is art good for? What’s the point of it?’
Her face was soft-looking. From offscreen came a scraping, metallic sound like a claw being run over bars. Later in the conversation M would tell me it was a parrot that was sitting not in but on its cage, playing the bars like a harpist.
When I told my wife about the call later that evening, I noticed how slowly I was speaking. Every time I stopped to draw breath I’d lose the thread, falling Alice-in-Wonderland-like down rabbit holes, climbing out again, losing my balance, slipping back in, popping back out.
I’m usually a fast talker. Indignant listeners write in to complain after hearing me on the radio: ‘How do you expect us to keep up?’ That evening I was talking like a record playing at the wrong speed, or as though I had a loose connection. I kept getting stuck in the same place, breaking off, starting again.
 

‘Some people say it was just a bit of spit.’
M was sitting with her back to the window. I could see her wide eyes, her open mouth. Because I was looking into the light it felt dark in the room, although it was still early afternoon. ‘Do you know how long I’ve kept quiet about the insults we put up with in this town? A very long time.’
And then she told me. About the woman in the tram who had pointed at her and started yelling that it was madness – where did all these foreigners come from? ‘Madness, madness, madness.’ The ten-year-old child that M had picked up from school that day because their parents couldn’t make it had tried to cover M’s ears. They’d held M’s head in their hands, looked into her eyes and said, ‘Don’t listen. Ignore her. Ignore her.’
M told me about the bus driver who hadn’t asked to see anyone’s ticket except hers. When she’d asked him not to talk to her in such a loud voice he’d said, ‘I hate your accent,’ and told her to get out of Magdeburg.
Interestingly, he’d suggested she ‘go to Leipzig’. There were, apparently, a lot of them in Leipzig. Whatever that meant.
 

‘I fled Iran,’ M told me, ‘because I wanted freedom. Now I have to be accompanied if I want to go out. In Iran, you know, terrible things can happen to a woman on the street, but I was never afraid. I came to Germany alone with my son and I wasn’t afraid. Now I’m on sick leave and have to wear this neck brace.’
She held up a beige foam collar that she’d taken off for the video call, a support like those worn by whiplash victims. I found myself imagining beige child’s hands holding her head and a beige child’s face saying, ‘Don’t listen.’ Eight days after the Christmas market attack a man had spat at her and verbally abused her in the station underpass. In the words of the police: ‘The right sleeve of her coat was spat on by a male person in the pedestrian tunnel at Magdeburg Central Station.’ (Source: Der Spiegel)

What do those words mean? What does a medical certificate mean? What does it mean to bear witness?
What’s the point of art?

By way of reply, I told M about May Ayim, the poet and activist whose dissertation on African-German reality had been rejected by her supervisor at the University of Regensburg in 1986 on the grounds that there was no such thing as racism in Germany. Ayim’s poetry collections, blues in schwarz Weiss (‘blues in black and white’, 1995) and nachtgesang (‘night song’, posth. 1997) opened up German poetry to people whose lives had barely figured in it before. 
There is now a biopic about May Ayim, a reggae song dedicated to her, a literary prize named after her. In the Berlin district of Kreuzberg, you can sit on a pier on May-Ayim-Ufer and look upstream towards Oberbaum Bridge. None of these honours was granted her during her lifetime. Ayim took her life in 1996 at the age of thirty-six. Her poems are still not read in schools. They are not known to the general public but only to a small circle of initiates; they’re not part of the canon. For some people, however, they are a means of staying sane.

I didn’t read her poems until I was in my twenties and I’ve often wondered who I’d have become if I’d discovered blues in schwarz weiss earlier, as a teenager. Would I now find it easier to trust myself and my perception? Would I have more trust in the world if I’d known back then that I wasn’t imagining the things that were happening around me daily? The things that were happening to me?
Who would I be – and what impact would it have had on my writing – if I’d read about lives like mine as a teenager, or stories that reflected the reality I knew? Would it have helped me cope with the shock I felt when I sat in class with blue and green bruises on my face and arms? The children who’d given me the bruises were in my class; they were sitting a few rows behind me. It was clear that nothing would happen to them; even when my mother and other women from the asylum home where we lived went to the head to protest, nothing happened. When children from the home were attacked, there were no consequences. The attitude seemed to be: kids will be kids. That was what German kids did. They chased foreigners, pelted them with stones, hurled abuse at them and hit them in the face. That was normal, it was just kids playing. The children got off scot-free. And everyone involved – victims, offenders and the silent majority – accepted that. It was 1996.
Although the bruises on my body were documented, although that small group of outraged women gathered outside the school head’s office to complain and although the kids-will-be-kids children who had hurled insults and dealt blows did not deny their crimes, I grew up with the story that none of that had happened.
I was only a child; the word gaslighting didn’t yet exist, and I had no way of coping with the feeling that I was losing my mind because things were happening and everyone was pretending they weren’t, or with the feeling of not being safe that flooded my body every day on the way to school. It’s like a towering wave crashing over you, sweeping you away, filling your lungs with water. You gasp and spit and flail around; you make a lot of unnecessary noise. I taught my body to pull itself together; dramatic gestures were no use to either of us. I split off from my body. Bad things happened to it; they didn’t happen to me. I, whoever ‘I’ was – my conscience, sanity, sense of humour: something with a voice, anyway – I would free us both, my body and me, from this predicament. I’d study hard, do my exams, move away. But my body would have to do its bit.
 

Sometimes teachers write to me after reading about my childhood experiences in an essay or an article. ‘I had no idea,’ they say. Or: ‘I’m sorry that’s how you perceive it.’
One such letter came from the class teacher who had refused to give me the recommendation I needed to go to grammar school, although my grades were good enough. Her argument had been that we were better off ‘staying with our own kind’; she advised me to go to the comprehensive where there were other children from the home and other migrants.
I have yet to hear from the maths teacher who told me I ought to be better at maths because I was Jewish. Back then I flung my exercise book across the classroom at him – and he threw it right back. I don’t know what happened after that; the scene freezes there. No one ever mentioned the incident. It was as though it had never happened.
Until I chucked in school, scuppering my chances of doing leaving exams, no one spoke about anything. After that there was no longer any point in speaking. I left. And I, too, held my silence.
 

Rostock-Lichtenhagen, 1992. Mölln, 1992. Solingen, 1993. It was only much later that I found out about the fatal attacks on migrants and discovered that I’d grown up in what were known as ‘the baseball bat years’. My family had come to Germany in 1995; I was ten at the time. When I first attempted to piece together the fragments of my experiences in the early 2000s, I couldn’t make sense of them; there seemed to be no continuity. If I spoke of what I’d been through to other people, they often contradicted me: maybe there was racism and xenophobia in East Germany, but not here, not in West Germany. Not in Lower Saxony, where my sixteen-year-old self rolled a joint first thing every morning and waited for the panic to subside before setting off for school. Here in Lower Saxony, where I ended up dropping out of school because I couldn’t stand it any longer.

A few years later I did eventually go to a grammar school in Lower Saxony to finish my schooling. And a classmate I was sleeping with at the time told me in my bed – I don’t know how we got onto the topic; maybe it was my star of David necklace – this classmate told me that Jews no longer existed because they’d all been wiped out. It was time they accepted that. The Huguenots no longer existed either.

Interesting that I write ‘a classmate I was sleeping with’, when C and I were together for three years.
 

‘What is art good for? What’s the point of it?’ M asked me, and I remembered that the first person I had known to bear witness to the ubiquitous violence of the nineties was May Ayim in her poem ‘autumn in germany’ (here in the translation by Ayim and Ekpenyong Ani):

...
in the newly united Germany
that so much likes to
likes too much
to call itself re-united
it happened
that here and there
it was first houses
then people
that burnt down
first in the east then in the west
then
the whole country

first at first and then again

it is not true
that it is not true
that’s how it was

that’s how it is
autumn in Germany
I dread the winter
 

So there was May Ayim long before anyone listened to me – before I realised that I’d pulled myself to pieces to protect myself (breaking some parts in the process and preserving others), before I learnt to walk faster and talk faster and jut out my chin, to look fearless while keeping one eye over my shoulder, before I got into the habit of clenching my fists at the least hint of danger and wondering whether my rucksack was heavy enough to hit my aggressor over the head. (I write ‘der Angreifer’, masculine, because those who attacked me physically were always men, but I recall one encounter with a girl from my school whose name I remember to this day. I remember that she wore her brown hair in a pageboy. I remember what she said, I see her coming towards me, I remember running away. That was twenty-five years ago.) But there was May Ayim and her poems long before I experienced all that and learnt to deal with it. Which means, I said to M, that there were witnesses. There are always witnesses.

M and I talked all afternoon. She told me about fleeing Iran and about her son who was twenty and doing a traineeship in business. She showed me pictures she’d painted. She showed me the parrot that was sitting on top of the cage. (‘We never shut him in.’) At the end of our chat she told me she used to make – used to, she spoke in the past tense – videos and animations to inform people about the situation of migrants in Germany. Her work oscillates between art and education.

In the videos, we see her painting. She uses words like ‘hope’, ‘justice’ and ‘fighting spirit’. She paints the faces of women with loose, uncovered hair, looking up into a clear, open sky. The videos have been extensively edited; one of them has been coloured blue and turquoise, as though the person on the screen trying to make themselves understood were behind the glass of an aquarium or under water. M has wet hair in this video. She talks about arriving in a ‘foreign ocean’, leaving her heart in her ‘old ocean’ because she couldn’t take it with her. 

In our video chat, she told me that a lot of the videos had been made to give courage to other women, women like her who came to Germany on their own to start a new life. Now she didn’t know what to say anymore. She couldn’t leave the house unaccompanied. She was in indefinite sick leave, unfit for work. She held a clear plastic folder up to the camera, full of medical reports and letters of referral.

How do you reach the point where you have to wear a neck brace to support the pressure? Does something break inside you? Can it be repaired?

I promised M I’d go and see her when it was warmer. That was in February. Even with a blanket round my shoulders I was shivering; outside my balcony door it was snowing; the treetops were turning white. When you went out you had to keep your eyes on the ground and tense your body so as not to break your bones on the icy pavements. All over the place people were falling down and pulling themselves up again like roly-poly toys. Cursing. Slithering on their way.

It was well into March when I caught the train to Magdeburg. Before meeting M, I had an appointment with AB in his office at the Regional Network of Migrant Organisation of Saxony-Anhalt (LAMSA), south of the station, not far from the spot where M was attacked. At the top of the network’s website there was a call for donations to provide pocket alarms for people in Magdeburg with a history of migration: ‘Give back a sense of security to people in Magdeburg’.

While preparing for my appointment, I had read in the newspaper that AB’s daughter, who had been six months old when the family came to Germany and spoke only German, had been assigned to a class consisting exclusively of children with a so-called ‘migrant background’. According to the governing body, it was better if these children stayed with ‘their own kind’; apparently it was a question of insufficient language skills. Except that all the children spoke German. When AB protested, the ‘migrant class’ was disbanded. The child in me who was refused a recommendation for grammar school would have liked to thank him, but it didn’t come to that. When I entered AB’s office, he was on the phone, talking slowly in a low voice. Light fell between the broad slats of the blind into the overheated room, splitting his face in two. ‘That was the parents of the twelve-year-old girl. Maybe you’ve already heard.’ I shook my head.

On the evening of 23 February 2025, the day of the German general election, a woman – the police report described her as ‘25 to 30 years old and Central-European looking’ – had chased after a twelve-year-old girl of Syrian origin and punched her on the head several times. The girl had been in hospital for three days; because of injuries to her face and jaw, she had been told to speak as little as possible. The woman was on the run.

AB was providing the girl’s family with support. They had all been equipped with pocket alarms by LAMSA – ‘giving back a sense of security to people in Magdeburg with a history of migration’ – which they wore on small carabines at their waistbands, or in their trouser or skirt pockets, within easy reach of their hands. Father, mother and two other children – they all had these alarms.

‘And you?’ I asked AB, looking into his face that was split by the light.

‘Me too.’ He showed me his; it was turquoise. Then he tugged at the ring and the alarm shrieked, shriller than a police siren.

M’s alarm was black; she kept it in her coat pocket, but it was too warm for a wool coat, so she carried the coat over her arm. She suggested going for a walk in the town centre – I’d never been before, had I?
It was clear what M wanted: she was rehearsing her return. She tensed her body; there was no ice on the ground, but we slithered anyway. We passed the square where the Christmas market was put up every winter; we stared at the tramlines that the car had crossed before hurtling into the crowd. We walked as far as Hasselbachplatz. It felt as though the streets were electrically charged. I strode along a little too close to M, walking tall, looking every passer-by straight in the eye. I noticed that we were both jutting out our chins, lifting our foreheads to the sun, spreading our shoulders like wings. We gave way to no one.

M’s response to the looks she was getting was to remark laconically that she was thinking of bleaching her hair. I wanted to tell her there was an idea for a novel growing inside me, and it had something to do with this feeling we both had. I wanted to tell her that I still believed in writing, that language was a shield. That we had to talk and write. I wasn’t sure I was getting my meaning across; I was afraid it might sound silly given the circumstances – given the fact that people were walking around town with alarms in their pockets. I was groping for words and, afraid of sounding like a record player with a loose connection, I asked M about her son instead. Then we talked about Hundertwasser.
M took me to a hotel he’d designed, her favourite building in Magdeburg. We posed for a selfie in front of the rose-coloured façade. Here and there in the labyrinthine courtyards, couples were sitting, drinking coffee, staring into space.
My skin prickled as we told each other it would soon be spring at last. After all, spring’s a synonym for hope, isn’t it? Everything bursts open and blossoms and puts out shoots.
Something yields and life is suddenly easier.

Under the title of the same name, Sasha Marianna Salzmann gave a lecture on May 21, 2025 as part of the event "The Art of Remaining Many. Forum for Art, Freedom and Democracy: Germany and Europe" at the Capital of Culture Chemnitz 2025, which was based on excerpts from this longer version of the text published here.

The subsequent panel discussion with performance artist Philipp Ruch and FAZ feature writer Simon Strauß, moderated by Natascha Freundel, was recorded by rbb/radio 3 and is available as a podcast in the “Der Zweite Gedanke” series. The contributions by Ruch and Strauß are also available to read in our online magazine.