Sowing destruction instead of pouring tin, rabble instead of toast: New Year’s Eve once again rudely reminded the inhabitants of several German cities of the unresolved migration problem raging in their “problem areas”. As with the assaults in Cologne in 2015, the riots in Berlin, Frankfurt or Düsseldorf a few days ago were mainly young migrants who acted against state authorities without any respect for firefighters, aid workers and police officers.
This is evident from video recordings of fireworks attacks – and from interviews with the marauding hooligans. For example, in Berlin’s Neukölln district, a young man said to the cameras after the violent clashes with the police and fire brigade: “I am Syrian. This is a bit of a feeling of home for me.” Then he laughs out loud, high-fives his colleagues and adds a loud “wallah”. “With God!”
Rebellious migrants and pressurized “Tagesschau” correspondents
The New Year’s Eve hordes in Berlin and elsewhere do not respect the rule of law. In the pseudo-gangster worldview of the Chaos brothers, that would be seen as a weakness. Incidentally, the masculine was deliberately chosen here. Berlin police statistics show: Of the 103 vandals arrested on New Year’s Eve, 98 are male.
Paradoxically, it is precisely this rule of law that protects the vandals, most of whom have emigrated, from the conditions that once drove them from their homeland. Without a state monopoly on the use of force there is no protection against arbitrariness, without protection against arbitrariness there are no investments, without investments there are no jobs and without jobs there are no prospects. What then remains is only fearful hope – or even the flight to where state power still offers humane preconditions for social coexistence.
Large parts of German society (and the German media) still find it difficult to call the problem by its name. In the main edition of the German “Tagesschau”, for example wanted the Berlin correspondent not talking about the perpetrators of the riot night and instead whispering about “group dynamics” related to the “great pressure on society after two years of pandemic”.
Tougher action against the “total dumbasses”
Can you do. But you don’t solve real problems with children’s linguistic gloves. This was made clear by the Neukölln integration officer Güner Balci (47) in a ‘Spiegel’ interview when she described the perpetrators as ‘hopelessly left behind’ and ‘totally stupid cheeks’ who presented themselves to the police as ‘tough gangsters-to-be’. Balci emphasizes: “The majority of people in Neukölln want to act harder, a stronger state.”
The problem is, of course, extremely complex. There is too easy access to dangerous fireworks. There’s the appeal of selfie videos of street fights, which in the age of social media are quickly seen as symbols of power. And then there’s the very fundamental problem of testosterone-driven group dynamics in underemployed young men, which Norwegian political scientist Henrik Urdal once held responsible for all of the world’s violent conflicts.
Each of these causes can be addressed. You can increase the penalties for those who attack people in uniform. You can ban fireworks. You can create more outlets for political dissatisfaction – for example through more say, as here in Switzerland, where there is also the problem of violence against civil servants, but never to the same extent as in Germany.
“Wallah” calls do not solve any problem
But what certainly does not solve the problem are language exercises in naming the perpetrators. So again, according to everything we know so far about the riots in Germany, a significant proportion of the perpetrators are young male migrants.
What these people – like everyone else – should be quick to realize in our bellicose, troubled time in Europe is this: if the democratic state suddenly has to defend itself against those it protects itself from greater adversity, then it is in danger of form the basis of our coexistence. Then there are too few resources to tackle the really big problems. And you don’t solve that with fireworks and shouts of “wallah”.