Icon: enlarge
Memory of the victims of the racist attack in Hanau
Photo: Milos Djuric / DER SPIEGEL
On February 19, 2020, a racist killed nine young people in Hanau.
He shot her while she was standing behind a counter, sitting in her shisha bar, smoking a cigarette on the roadside, eating noodles in a kiosk in Hanau-Kesselstadt.
I grew up in a high-rise near Hamburg's Reeperbahn. In the 1990s, my neighborhood was comparable to Hanau-Kesselstadt: high blocks, families from all over the world, lots of children.
Our meeting point back then was “Sun Food”, a bar like the last crime scene that night in Hanau.
I am 39 years old, the dead in Hanau were all younger than me, some could have been my sons.
In the days after the attack, I heard their mothers on TV saying: But my son had just finished his education.
I heard fathers say: We have always paid taxes in this country, why don't you still want us?
Suddenly they were visible, people you normally hardly heard.
People who helped build German autobahns, were shift leaders in industrial companies, bus drivers or carpenters.
Their children were heating installers, system mechanics, warehouse clerks, caretakers and exterminators.
Useful staff for the German economy.
In this country there are two drawers for migrant children: one for model migrants and one for problem migrants.
The parents of the murdered seemed to know these drawers, it was important to them to tell the real Germans again where to put their dead children.
On February 19, 2020, the children and grandchildren of people who came to this country in the past 60 years so that one day they or their children would be "better off" were murdered.
I know this is probably an old migration phrase for readers without a history of immigration.
For us it is a promise that we make when we start school.
Our degrees and jobs are the medals from our parents and grandparents, they are proof that it was the right thing to come here.
Nine of their children were now dead. There were demonstrations, expressions of solidarity.
But there were no mass protests, no marches through German cities, no nationwide riots like in America after the death of George Floyd.
Why not?
We stayed at home: people with no history of immigration because they did not feel affected by this attack.
People like me because they didn't want to be meant.
more on the subject
Hanau: The threat is omnipresent A guest contribution by Naika Foroutan
The "well-intentioned" everyday racism has always been there in my life.
Teachers who told my father that I only talked so much because, because of his Turkish origins, he suppressed me at home as a girl.
Chief physicians, my mother's, who clean her rooms in the Eppendorf University Hospital, praised the glass of wine that she raised at the Christmas party.
Passengers who got into my father's taxi and thought it was great that, as a »Turk«, he had managed to be a youth coach at St. Pauli.
I got used to it.
A few months after I signed my editorial contract with SPIEGEL, the NSU's racist murders became public.
The vegetable shop of the Hamburg NSU victim Süleyman Taşköprü was a few streets away from my uncle's Turkish tea room.
My father knew the family personally.
In the years that followed, I observed that something was broken in his relationship with this country.
My father came as a teenager; he had traveled after his father, who had moved to Hamburg as a port worker in 1964.
He had always trusted the German state.
But then members of the NSU victims were treated like accused, files were shredded, and it emerged that V-men had been at crime scenes at the time of the murder.
This state did not protect people like my father.
The "well-intentioned" everyday racism has always been there in my life.
For years I had planned to visit the families of the NSU victims and to go to the trial in Munich.
I never did.
For years I had suppressed the fact that I am affected when the right in this country kills, demonstrates and writes hate letters.
That there are perpetrators in this country who are ready to kill people like me just because we are there.
Then came Hanau.
It was about children who were born in this country after me.
The people I saw talking on TV were my people again.
With my colleague Timofey Neshitov, I spent months with the bereaved and survivors.
We followed her in her everyday life trying to understand what had happened.
more on the subject
Survivors of the attack report on their alienation from Germany: The Hanau Protocols by Özlem Gezer and Timofey Neshitov
We sat across from people who had experienced official racism after this racist act.
They first had to investigate themselves so that omissions by the authorities before and during the night of the crime become public.
Who do not understand why more people in this country did not take to the streets for their children.
And they were right.
Again, the many in this country had failed to mourn with them.
On my train journeys back to Hamburg, I kept thinking about this question that the Hanau parents ask each other every day: Why is my child dead?
My son is 4 years old and when he grows up he will look like the dead children from Hanau.
Their names
are:
Ferhat Unvar, Hamza Kurtović, Said Nesar Hashemi, Vili-Viorel Păun, Mercedes Kierpacz, Kaloyan Velkov, Fatih Saraçoğlu, Sedat Gürbüz
and
Gökhan Gültektin.
Icon: The mirror