Germany Struggles to Respond to Racist Mass Murder

Germany Struggles to Respond to Racist Mass Murder

Germany Struggles to Respond to Racist Mass Murder

Is it any wonder, when radical right ideas are no longer confined to the margins, but have become normalized?

Copy Link
Facebook
X (Twitter)
Bluesky
Pocket
Email

In a shooting rampage Wednesday night at two hookah bars in the city of Hanau, in western Germany, a gunman murdered nine people with immigrant backgrounds and wounded six others. The killer, Tobias R., 43, then went home and killed his mother and himself. The whole episode, numbingly depressing, has unrolled according to the routine you already know: There is the racist manifesto, the condolences offered by the politicians, and the vigils around the country. Unfortunately, no one can have more than a fading hope that this latest act of rightist terror will be Germany’s last.

Just a few days before, on February 14, police had conducted a series of raids across the country, arresting 12 members of a terror cell that was plotting numerous assassinations with the intent to provoke “civil-war-like” conditions. A similar plot was broken up last summer, around the same time that a neo-Nazi already known to police shot and killed a conservative politician who had called for the humane treatment of refugees. Later in the summer, an immigrant from Eritrea, chosen at random for the color of his skin, was wounded in a drive-by shooting. And last fall, on Yom Kippur, yet another right-wing gunman killed two passersby in the course of a failed attempt to attack a synagogue.

Germany’s domestic intelligence service reported, in December 2019, that the number of right-wing extremists in the country had risen by a third since the previous year, from 24,100 to 32,200. Faced with the growing threat of violence, the federal Parliament funded 300 new positions in the intelligence service and another 300 in Germany’s FBI equivalent, the Bundeskriminalamt. This response was supposed to put some muscle behind the promises, made after every one of the terror attacks, to take the problem of right-wing violence more seriously.

But while these resources might help, political racism in Germany is not merely a technical challenge. Radical right ideas are no longer confined to the margins of the country’s political system, which means that the violence isn’t being fueled by some mysterious process of radicalization that occurs out of sight, in a dark corner of the Internet. It’s happening in plain view, as right-wing thinking becomes normalized. Political discussion has been dominated for several years by questions of immigration and identity, and the mainstream parties have struggled to deal with the disruptive presence of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), now the largest opposition party in Parliament, and an important power in some states.

Writing after the attack in Hanau, Annette Ramelsberger, a journalist at the Munich daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, described the impact of Germany’s political right turn on the violence-prone actors who are increasingly coming out of the shadows: “They are seeing how right-wing thought is penetrating ever further into society, how it’s becoming acceptable in society. And suddenly they no longer feel crazy, eccentric, or alone, but important, like the military arm of a national movement. These people sense how the mood is shifting. How radical right thinking is heard even in legislatures.”

Understood in this context, the selection of hookah bars as targets must have seemed perfectly logical to the perverse mind of Tobias R. After all, the AfD has made a point of campaigning against these bars as dangerous, unsanitary, and under-regulated. On Twitter, the Left Party politician Lorenz Gösta Beutin shared several memes that the AfD, which naturally condemns the shooting in Hanau, has used in this effort. “Gang Rape in a Hookah Bar!” screams one.

The premier of the state of Hesse, where Hanau is located, is a member of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, and he vowed after the shooting that “this changes everything.” But putting these tough words into practice will not be easy in a Germany that feels headed for uncharted territory.

Be part of 160 years of confronting power 


Every day,
The Nation exposes the administration’s unchecked and reckless abuses of power through clear-eyed, uncompromising independent journalism—the kind of journalism that holds the powerful to account and helps build alternatives to the world we live in now. 

We have just the right people to confront this moment. Speaking on Democracy Now!, Nation DC Bureau chief Chris Lehmann translated the complex terms of the budget bill into the plain truth, describing it as “the single largest upward redistribution of wealth effectuated by any piece of legislation in our history.” In the pages of the June print issue and on The Nation Podcast, Jacob Silverman dove deep into how crypto has captured American campaign finance, revealing that it was the top donor in the 2024 elections as an industry and won nearly every race it supported.

This is all in addition to The Nation’s exceptional coverage of matters of war and peace, the courts, reproductive justice, climate, immigration, healthcare, and much more.

Our 160-year history of sounding the alarm on presidential overreach and the persecution of dissent has prepared us for this moment. 2025 marks a new chapter in this history, and we need you to be part of it.

We’re aiming to raise $20,000 during our June Fundraising Campaign to fund our change-making reporting and analysis. Stand for bold, independent journalism and donate to support The Nation today.

Onward, 

Katrina vanden Heuvel 
Publisher, The Nation

Ad Policy
x