This text first appeared in March 2019 for the 25th anniversary of the attack on the synagogue in Lübeck.
There was this bright light, almost a flash that woke him. Strange, a change in the weather? Chaim Kornblum got up, it was after 2 o'clock in the night of March 25, 1994, and went to the window. Then he saw the fire in the building next door.
There was no burning house. But Lübeck's synagogue from 1880, in which Kornblum worked as a preacher. For the first time since the Nazi era, a synagogue was in flames again in Germany.
"In such a moment you do not realize that," recalls the 58-year-old. He had not had time to worry about why it was burning. Because not only the outbuilding was inhabited, also in the synagogue there were four residential units, heated by gas boiler. That could be dangerous.
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Attack on Lübeck's synagogue: "Dad, why do people do that?"At 2:17 am Kornblum alerted the fire department. Then he ran to the synagogue, warned the inhabitants, and fetched the key to the gate to open the rescue services. They arrived nine minutes later. The shock, the fear and anger - all this seized Kornblum and the 600 members of the Jewish community later, when the fire was extinguished, the assassin had sparked with Molotov cocktails.
A side entrance and an anteroom were charred, documents burned - one day before Passover. The property damage amounted to 160,000 marks, the psychological wounds went deeper. The Kristallnacht of 1938 was suddenly present again. "The murderers return," headlined the "taz."
Wave of racism
"For me, it was an attack on a symbol," says Kornblum. He does not believe that the four young perpetrators later claimed that they did not know that they were setting up a synagogue. "It does not happen by accident."
This was also the opinion of Lübeck's then mayor Michael Bouteiller. "They wanted to set a shit, they succeeded." The act put him back to his roots: Once Bouteiller had worked at the University of Bielefeld and as an administrative judge with racism. In the seventies he was co-founder of the Bielefeld peace house, a meeting place for Germans and foreigners.
Now, racism hit its city with full force.
Even today Bouteiller approach the events of March 1994 noticeably. The first word that comes to mind is "shock" when he thinks of the moment he entered the scene. "The worst has happened, when houses burn, people die next, and those who symbolically set fire to a synagogue show that they are ready to kill people."
Reporters from around the world reported the fire. After the neo-Nazi arson attacks in Mölln and Solingen, the riots in Hoyerswerda and Rostock-Lichtenhagen, the idyllic Lübeck suddenly made headlines, until then rather famous for the pretty old town.
"Political pogrom mood "
Mayor Bouteiller, who has been in office since 1988, knew how much it was bubbling under the surface of the postcard backdrop. Since the beginning of the nineties, united Germany has been discussing heated migration, a consequence of, inter alia, the Yugoslav wars. "That was a political pogrom mood, it was said, the cities must close down." After Luebeck came annually about 2000 refugees, so Bouteiller, in addition still late repatriates from the former Soviet Union.
The asylum compromise of 1993, which massively restricted immigration, Bouteiller considered a "great failure" also of his party, the SPD, with which he later overruled. At that time, all bourgeois parties had reservations about migrants. "So a Volkish thinking could spread, 'Germany the Germans' and 'The boat is full' were the slogans of the time." Despite the stricter asylum laws, hatred remained - even in Lübeck.
Bouteiller sensed this already when he had residential projects for foreigners and homeless people built. "The soul of the city has always been torn" - the birthplace of Willy Brandt and the liberal writers Heinrich and Thomas Mann, as well as the city of Hitler's chief ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, once honorary citizen of Lübeck. Swastika flags flew at the Holstentor, right next to the historical inscription "Inside Eintracht - outside peace".
The fortified city
The 1994 fatalities threatened to disintegrate this harmony, even though many in the city now moved closer together. Thousands gathered at vigils, participating in demonstrations against anti-Semitism and racial hatred. Particularly committed were students and young people. The Jewish community also welded the attack together, remembers Kornblum - the shock hit most of the elderly, who had seen synagogues burn once before.
Stefan Hesse / picture-alliance / DPA
Demo against the synagogue plot
The Hanseatic city showed a fortified face, which also recognized foreign correspondents. But then there were those citizens who were overwhelmed by the media hype and the excitement, according to the motto: was it only material damage?
"These people said, what are these many demos, let's get back to order, the kids are otherwise only rebellious," recalls Bouteiller. "They only worried about the image of the city." That annoys him to this day. "It was not about the reputation of Lübeck, a city proves itself only by its actions, if it takes responsibility." He tried it with action alliances, remembrance and youth work.
Frustration, anger, alcohol
Meanwhile, the search for the perpetrators ran. After a month, four young men were arrested and charged with attempted murder and arson. Because of the importance of the case took over Federal Prosecutor Klaus Pflieger, who had already been identified in the Schleyer abduction and other RAF terrorist acts. Three of the defendants came from the far-right scene, clichéd losers from a troubled area: childhood in broken families, then children's home, foster parents, special education, unemployment. Much frustration, anger, alcohol.
"Substantial intellectual subterfuge" and "severe adolescent developmental overstrain" stated a court expert. A job had only the fourth defendant, who did not act out of extreme right-wing motives, but a friend of the trio was: As a department store detective in Hamburg, he had helped on the evening before the attack to convict a thief. Now he himself was in court.
Despite serially revoked confessions, the deed was roughly reconstructed: during the daytime on March 24, the men drank beer, slept, and continued drinking. Then they built Molotov cocktails, met their friend from Hamburg and lit the incendiary in an unlocked side entrance of the synagogue.
The court imposed imprisonment between two and four years. Silence did not return. "The attack was a dam failure," says Bouteiller. A motivator for like-minded people. There followed a series of attacks that guaranteed maximum attention. Bouteiller speaks of "four years of fire" in which committed opponents were personally hostile to xenophobia.
On 8 May 1995 - the 50th anniversary of the end of the war - it burned again on the grounds of the synagogue. An adjoining shed had been lit. The case was never resolved. This was followed by a letter bomb in Lübeck's city hall, sent by a later condemned Austrian right-wing extremist. The bomb was addressed to the Deputy Mayor Dietrich Szameit, who had criticized the verdict against the Synagogue arsonists as too lenient, but injured another employee in the town hall at the hand. And then in 2001 there was a bomb dummy on the grounds of the synagogue.
In the Jewish community, the initial defiance turned to fear over time, says Chaim Kornblum, now a rabbi in Gelsenkirchen. "At that time I thought about leaving my homeland Germany." For his little daughter the bomb dummy was a shock. She asked him, "Dad, why do people do that, why do not they like us?"
The tears of the mayor
Only months after the verdict against the synagogue assassins it burned again in Lübeck, with devastating consequences. Ten people died on 18 January 1996 in an asylum center. The attack is still unresolved, suspicious neo-Nazis were never charged. "An open wound" Bouteiller calls the case.
Wolfgang Langenstrassen / picture-alliance / DPA
Arson attack in 1996
At that time, the mayor broke down in a meeting with victims in tears. And polarized with it. "I got a lot of encouragement, but some thought I should do my duty instead of howling." In addition, some Bouteiller resented that he demanded an end to the "inhumane asylum law" and called for "civil disobedience" to prevent deportations.
But how else to fight hatred? Lübeck's Protestant pastor Günter Harig preached tolerance and gave church asylum to an Algerian family. Thus, like Bouteiller, he became the enemy of the Right. They smeared swastikas on church walls, in addition warnings: "Harig, how do you get." In May 1997, the Catholic St. Vicelin Church burnt down almost completely. "This is not Lübeck," Bouteiller said at the time. And he continued, with dedicated social and youth policies.
Today it is again Lübeck. The former mayor Bouteiller is convinced: The city has processed the attack on the synagogue. She must not forget him.
