Mithu Sanyal

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Mourners attend a memorial service for victims of the racist terror attack in Hanau, Germany, 28 February 2020. Photograph: Armando Babani/EPA

I have to admit that when I heard the news my first thought was: “I hope the perpetrator wasn’t a migrant.” The press would surely go at us hammer and tongs again, warning about the danger posed by immigration in general and Muslims in particular. There would be endless articles and talk shows discussing the threat. My second thought was: “Thank God it is a white guy.”

On 19 February, Tobias Rathjen went into two shisha bars in the town of Hanau, near Frankfurt, shooting people he described as “foreign”. In his “manifesto”, if you can call such a rambling text a manifesto, he stated he wanted to cleanse Germany from … us.…  Seguir leyendo »

Demonstration for the right of sexual self-determination in Berlin, 26 January 2019. Photograph: Hayoung Jeon/EPA

It’s like the holocaust only worse, according to babycaust.de, the German website dedicated to abortion, or as they call it: “The mass murder of unborn children”.

Every country has its nutters. The problem with these particular nutters is that their website is your best bet if you need to find a doctor who performs abortions in Germany. It provides a full list of practitioners with the “licence to kill” by town and postcode, decorated with images of hacked-up babies in petri dishes, some of them made into gifs to show the blood still dripping. Whatever for? They obviously don’t want you to go to these doctors.…  Seguir leyendo »

A recent German advertising campaign features a woman in a hijab. Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

When I was growing up there was no racism in Germany. In the 1980s every child learned at school that race was a construct that fascists had used to justify segregating and killing people. So if race didn’t exist, it naturally followed that racism didn’t exist either. If you wanted to talk about it people looked at you as if you were the Nazi.

All this is changing. It is dizzying to watch my motherland grapple with the concept of race. And, to be honest, to grapple with it myself because when you stop speaking about something you stop thinking about it eventually too.…  Seguir leyendo »