My hometown Chemnitz: Between hatred and hope

Personal Experiences and Historical Contexts of Right-wing Extremism in Saxony

“We walk through our village in the evening when we suddenly hear music playing. Because we want to know where it’s coming from, we get closer. We’re perceiving male voices. Maybe 15 people, sitting together in an allotment garden. The closer we get, the more we understand the lyrics of the song they are listening to: ‘In Buchenwald, in Buchenwald, we kill all the Jews.’ Everyone is singing along. Later, we witness them going home. They laugh and shout ‘Sieg Heil.

~ Johanna Behring*, 19 years, living in Hartmannsdorf close to Chemnitz

I grew up in a village near Chemnitz. Chemnitz, that’s a city of 250,000 inhabitants in eastern Germany, the state of Saxony.

There isn’t much to see there. What used to be an industrial metropolis is now a mid-sized city without any special sights, still bearing the charm of GDR-era. The only place of interest is a giant stone-head of Marx, which adorns a square in the city center. Behind it, in large letters and various languages, it is written: ‘Working men of all countries, unite!’ Karl-MarxStadt. That’s what Chemnitz used to be called. I feel at home there. Somehow. I know people there who love me, whom I love. I like the aesthetics of the 1960s prefab buildings that still shape the urban architecture. Somehow. And yet, the thought of Chemnitz always comes with a bittersweet feeling inside of me.

I’m sure of few things in my life. But when I finally finished school this year, I was sure of one thing: I need a break from Chemnitz. I need distance. I need to get away. Right-wing extremism has been a problem in this region not only recently. Already in the 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Saxony became a stronghold of neo-Nazism. From these so-called Baseball Bat Years, there are two stories that left me shocked. They both took place near my home. That’s why I want to share them: It is an evening in September of the year 1991, when a group of right-wing extremists attacks Vietnamese cigarette sellers in the Saxon town of Hoyerswerda. They flee to their dormitory, but the Nazis follow and pelt the accommodations with stones. In the following days, an increasingly violent mob of up to 500 people gathers in front of the contract workers’ apartments. For civil society, the attacks become an event. Many standby as spectators. After days of siege, the police decide to evacuate the people. Even during the evacuation, Nazis don’t stop attacking the contract workers. As they drive away in buses, the Nazis celebrate their triumph and declare Hoyerswerda the first ‘foreigner-free city in Germany.’

In October 1, 1999, another incident takes place as punk concerts are held in the youth center of the Saxon town of Hohenstein-Ernstthal. Several cars with Nazis patrol outside the venue. When the concert is over and the punks leave the building, the Nazis seize their opportunity. They get out of their cars and beat up the concertgoers.

We will not leave these people the space, we must stand up to them, show them that their hate meets resistance. Every time, everywhere. Again, and again.

The punks retaliate, but the right-wing extremists are reinforced by 150 to 200 members of the notorious Chemnitz thug group ‘HooNaRa’ (Hooligans-Nazis-Racists). Fearing for their safety, the concertgoers hide themselves in the youth center, barricading doors and windows. Patrick Thürmer and his friend are also there. Because they don’t want to stay inside any longer, they flee over the roof and head home. They think they are safe when a car stops next to them. The door opens, three men jump out and start beating Patrick’s friend mercilessly. He falls to the ground and pretends to be dead to avoid further blows. The three men now focus on Patrick. They beat him until he lies motionless on the ground. They throw his lifeless body into a nearby stream, where it is found by passersby the next day. He is declared dead in the hospital. The prosecutor’s office needs 17 lines to list all the injuries he succumbs to.

Both stories brutally illustrate the latent propensity for violence that people with migrant backgrounds and left-wing people were particularly exposed to in East Germany at the end of the 20th century. When these things happened, I wasn’t even born yet. I can only gather from others’ reports how omnipresent fascists must have been in those years.

The year I was born was 2004. While life was given to me in that year, it was taken from other people in the most brutal way. Already in the late 1990s, the core trio of the right-wing terrorist group NSU (National Socialist Underground) was formed with Beate Zschäpe, Uwe Böhnhardt, and Uwe Mundlos as its main members. While they initially lived in Thuringia, they went underground in 1998 after a police raid and operated from the cities of Chemnitz and Zwickau. They armed themselves, committed bank robberies, and planned gruesome murders of people with migrant backgrounds throughout Germany.

It’s February 24, 2004, when Mehmet Turgut becomes a victim of the NSU in Rostock. The 25-year-old is helping in his father’s kebab shop when two men, presumably Mundlos and Böhnhardt, enter the store and shoot him three times at close range. The bullets penetrate his neck, his back, and his head. He dies instantly. Turgut was neither the first nor the last victim of the NSU. In total, the trio murdered 11 completely innocent people across Germany until their exposure in 2011.

When the NSU complex was uncovered, I was 7 years old. At that time, I didn’t notice anything about it. But it must have been around the same time that I had my first experiences with Nazis. Back then, one of my closest family members became a target for neo-Nazis himself. I still remember bold-headed men menacingly loitering in front of our entrance, waiting for him to come out. I still remember how we locked the door because of that. I still remember how the Nazis hung a poster at the playground in my village, threatening him with death: ‘Meerheim, you rat tick, you will be drowned.’ From that moment on, I knew that Nazis are a real danger, that they are not to be trifled with, that they do not even stop at my safe space, my family’s house. It took a few more years until I actually developed an understanding of politics and began to really engage with this problem. 2018 was the year I attended an anti-fascist demonstration for the first time. There was a compelling reason for that: At that time, Chemnitz became a showplace of tragic scenes that caused a stir not only in Germany but also internationally. Following the killing of a man called Daniel H. at the Chemnitz city festival by an asylum seeker, the city saw weeks of demonstrations and riots. The right-wing and neo-Nazi scene instrumentalized the death of the 35-year-old for ideological purposes. Demo participants shouted slogans like ‘Foreigners out’ and ‘Germany for Germans.’ Nazi salutes were made. Some Nazis began to roam the city in groups, looking for people who “looked foreign” to attack them.

It’s one of those Friday evenings in September when Farhad Keshavarzi is sitting innocently with friends at the Castle Pond in Chemnitz. Suddenly, 20 to 30 black-clad men armed with quartz gloves and electric shockers surround him. Among them are members of the right-wing terrorist cell ‘Revolution Chemnitz,’ who were later convicted by the Federal Constitutional Court. The police arrive before they can attack him. The masked men run away and throw bottles at Keshavarzi as they flee. One hits him on the back of his head. He states, “I’m afraid to go out, for example, I’m afraid at dusk.

With the beginning of my own politicization, the confrontations with Nazis have of course not become fewer but more. I can list places I no longer go to because I know I risk being insulted or attacked there. And of course, I’m not the only one. I know incredibly many people who, because of their political beliefs, their background, their sexuality, or other factors, always have to be mindful of where they go and which places they should avoid for their own safety.

One of my best friends told me last summer: "I was bathing in the local quarry with a friend. Even in the water, we saw these men on the other shore and noticed them talking about us. When we came out of the water, the group of men approached. They eyed us suspiciously and whispered. I let my hair down to dry. They saw my dreadlocks. Then I heard them say, ‘Wow, she has dreads, she must be a leftist.’ One shouted, ‘You damn tick, I’ll rip the dreads off your skull.’ We quickly went home. Luckily, nothing else happened. But I wouldn’t go bathing in the quarry anymore.”

But sometimes even that’s not enough for the Nazis. Then they come to the places where we should feel safe. They besiege our homes. That’s what happened to another person in my circle of acquaintances: “ When we moved to the village, people created an Instagram account named ‘adolfhitler88’. They uploaded photos of me and wrote underneath that “this tick should disappear”. The same people came to my house two years later because they saw a rainbow flag hanging in the window. They knocked on my window and shouted through a megaphone that the rainbow flag should be replaced with the Flag of the German Empire.”

~ Anouk*, 18 years, now living in Chemnitz

Sometimes it can be exhausting. Sometimes it feels like there’s nothing you can do against them, as if they are much more, much stronger anyway. But sometimes there is also hope. When I talk to my friends, people around me, we always agree on one thing: We will not leave these people the space, we must stand up to them, show them that their hate meets resistance. Every time, everywhere. Again, and again.

I want to close with the words of Jakob Springfeld, who describes this dilemma of hatred and hope for his hometown Zwickau in his book ‘Jung. Ostdeutsch. Gegen Nazis.’ He speaks from my heart, just by substituting ‘Zwickau’ with ‘Chemnitz,’ his message aligns with mine: "I’ll come back, in a few years. Absolutely. I say it out loud, maybe also because I want it to become a commitment for me. Because I know that I will continue to struggle with this conflict within me, with my love and my hatred for this city. Living in Zwickau means living among Nazis. But living in Zwickau also means living among friends, among activists who never give up. Zwickau is my hell; Zwickau is my home.”

*Name changed to protect anonymity