The fall of the Wall

Are the AfD about to come in from the cold?

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Dear Reader,

I don’t know how you reacted to the news that an Afghan refugee attacked a group of kindergarten children with a knife in the small Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg on Wednesday afternoon, killing one and seriously injuring another.

As the father of two nursery-aged children, my first instinct was to think: “I don’t think I can live in this country anymore.”

Sure, if you think about it rationally you can play down the significance of these crimes. Getting into a car is still objectively more dangerous than walking through the park in the afternoon; Germany is still a safe country in comparison with most of the world etc. etc.

But statistics only describe half of reality. The repetition of these indiscriminate murder sprees - to list just the past six months: Solingen, Magdeburg, and now this - is deeply unsettling. There is a reason why it is called terrorism.

I remember the first of these insane crimes. In July 2016, an Afghan refugee ran through a regional train outside Würzburg (a 40-minute drive from Aschaffenburg) swinging an axe at terrified passengers while screaming 'Allahu Akbar.’