HANAU, Germany—On a fall day in 2022, Serpil Temiz Unvar was sitting in her kitchen when, by means of the window, she noticed an older man and a German shepherd standing exterior. Assuming the person was a neighbor, Unvar opened her window to greet him. She was bewildered when he started asking her more and more unusual and aggressive questions: Are you Kurdish? Why did you permit your homeland? How do you have the funds for to dwell right here and to go on so many holidays again in Turkey?
The expertise left Unvar, 51, deeply unsettled. After the person left, she referred to as a number of mates who confirmed what she already suspected: The person with the German shepherd wasn’t only a neighbor. He was additionally the daddy of her son’s killer.
Unvar’s son Ferhat, then 23, was certainly one of 9 folks shot and killed in a violent rampage focusing on immigrants on Feb. 19, 2020. The shooter, Tobias R., opened hearth at a bar in Hanau’s heart earlier than driving throughout city, the place he shot a person who had adopted him from the primary bar by automobile. Then, Tobias R.—recognized by his first title and final preliminary consistent with German privateness legal guidelines—walked into the Area Bar & Cafe, showering patrons in a twig of bullets, Ferhat amongst them. The shooter then drove to his mom’s home, killed her, and turned the gun on himself.
The shootings shook Hanau, a metropolis of simply over 100,000 folks 15 miles east of Frankfurt. The town is amongst Germany’s most numerous: Practically 30 p.c of Hanau’s inhabitants doesn’t maintain a German passport, in keeping with latest metropolis statistics, round twice the nationwide common. German media reported that Tobias R. had posted a manifesto on his web site shortly earlier than the assault, which authorities described as demonstrating a “deeply racist angle.”
The Hanau assault grew to become a logo of Germany’s wrestle to extinguish far-right violence and anti-immigrant ideology. Then-Chancellor Angela Merkel condemned the assault, warning, “Racism is a poison. Hate is a poison.” However quickly, information crews departed. Politicians who had supplied solemn condolences moved on to different issues, and the nation went into lockdown because the COVID-19 pandemic took maintain.
Unvar felt a rising sense of rage on the authorities’s lack of response to the Hanau assault, she instructed me after I sat down along with her in March. Later that 12 months, she grew to become an activist: She based an academic initiative geared toward combating racism in faculties; testified on the Hanau killings within the state parliament of Hesse, the place Hanau is positioned; and labored with the members of the family of different victims to stress the federal government to take motion to stop future racist assaults.
However honoring Ferhat’s reminiscence has made Unvar a goal herself. The person’s 2022 go to to her residence wasn’t an remoted occasion; Hans-Gerd R. got here again that night time and the subsequent day. After Unvar filed a restraining order in opposition to him, he began sending her letters. “In case you as a migrant hate the land of the German folks, then please go away it, and shortly, and please return to the place you got here from,” he wrote in a single missive. The harassment and stalking are nonetheless occurring, she instructed me.
Unvar’s struggle in opposition to racist concepts about who belongs in Germany has laid naked how deeply ingrained this ideology stays in components of the nation—significantly because the far-right Different for Germany (AfD) occasion continues to creep up within the polls. “We wish to belief this nation, however this nation additionally wants to guard us,” she stated. “However how? I don’t know.”
Mourners pray previous to the funeral of victims of the shootings in Hanau on Feb. 24, 2020. Thomas Lohnes/Getty Photographs
The Hanau murders got here on the heels of a string of different lethal racist assaults in Germany. Lower than six months earlier, in October 2019, one other right-wing extremist confirmed up at a synagogue within the jap metropolis of Halle on Yom Kippur intent on murdering Jewish worshippers; he finally killed two folks exterior the synagogue. Earlier that 12 months, a neighborhood politician within the Hessian city of Kassel, Walter Lübcke, was shot and killed by a right-wing extremist who was sad over the politician’s welcoming coverage towards refugees.
Hanau commanded specific consideration as a result of it was a focused assault on folks with “immigration backgrounds,” the official time period Germany’s Federal Statistical Workplace makes use of to explain those that have been born to at the least one mother or father who was not a German citizen. German authorities additionally confronted intense scrutiny for his or her dealing with of the incident.
The killer had been allowed to buy a gun regardless of previous indications that he had a psychological sickness, which authorities didn’t adequately examine earlier than issuing him a weapons allow. The Hanau police have been gradual to answer emergency calls in regards to the shootings as a result of they have been chronically understaffed. An investigation by regional authorities additionally revealed that 13 of the officers who responded to the assault have been a part of a police unit that was later disbanded because of a scandal over membership in right-wing discussion groups.
Within the Area Bar, the place Ferhat was killed, an emergency door had been locked to maintain patrons from fleeing throughout common police raids on the venue to search for unlawful medication. A damning investigation by the U.Okay.-based group Forensic Structure featured in an exhibition in Frankfurt two years in the past discovered that each one 5 of these killed within the bar might have survived had the door been unlocked.
Police and emergency personnel are seen behind a police cordon in Hanau on Feb. 20, 2020, close to one of many bars the place the shootings occurred. Thomas Lohnes/Getty Photographs
Late final 12 months, after years of testimony and hearings, a Hessian parliamentary committee investigating the authorities’ response to the assault issued its closing report. In 642 pages, it particulars the assorted safety failures that contributed to the lack of life that day. However with out concrete penalties for these liable for the safety failures in Hanau, victims’ members of the family say it’s laborious to consider something will meaningfully change in how Germany handles right-wing and racist terrorism.
Not one of the officers or authorities concerned in Hanau’s safety failures have been disciplined or faraway from their posts explicitly because of their dealing with of the scenario. Though the Hessian parliamentary committee’s report outlined areas the place German legislation enforcement had fallen quick, those that misplaced members of the family that day felt its suggestions—for extra stringent checks earlier than issuing weapons permits, to develop anti-racism packages in faculties, and to raised talk with households of victims—supplied little greater than lip service.
Armin Kurtovic, whose son Hamza was killed within the assaults, described the report as a “slap within the face” to the victims’ households. “I used to be satisfied one thing like this wasn’t attainable on this nation,” he instructed German broadcaster Hessenschau late final 12 months. “However the extra I become involved and the extra I learn, the extra I see: That is continuity.”
Cops’ dealing with of the investigation was infuriating to Serpil Temiz Unvar, however it was hardly shocking to her and others who’ve tracked the historical past of far-right assaults in Germany. The authorities’ seeming blind spot for this type of violence—and a scarcity of concrete motion to stop it—extends again far past Hanau.
Probably the most well-known case of latest far-right violence in Germany was that of the Nationwide Socialist Underground (NSU), a neo-Nazi terrorist cell that killed 10 folks, largely immigrants, throughout Germany over the course of 13 years, evading police discover. Of their investigations of every homicide, the police fell again on racist stereotypes of immigrants, assuming that these slain had been concerned within the drug commerce or victims of immigrant-on-immigrant crime; the German media dubbed them “kebab murders.”
“A nation that loved to suppose it had atoned for its racist previous [was] compelled to confess that violent prejudice was a factor of the current,” American journalist Jacob Kushner wrote in his not too long ago printed e book on the NSU murders, Look Away, including that “in an age of unparalleled mass migration, the targets of white terrorism are more and more immigrants.”
Unvar at her group in Hanau on Jan. 19, 2023. Behind her is a portrait of her son Ferhat, one of many victims of the 2020 shootings.Thomas Lohnes/Getty Photographs
After I arrived on the places of work of Unvar’s group, the Ferhat Unvar Academic Initiative, in March, the very first thing I noticed was a black-and-white mural of Ferhat. Sporting a cap and searching ahead, his face seems subsequent to the phrases “We’re solely lifeless after we are forgotten.” Ferhat had posted the phrase on social media earlier than his dying. It has now develop into his mom’s tenet as she builds a company to honor his reminiscence.
Unvar grew up in a Kurdish metropolis in southern Turkey, close to the border with Syria. Her father moved to Paris, and he or she ultimately joined him. She moved to Hanau when she married a Kurdish man there, with whom she had 4 youngsters, together with Ferhat, earlier than later separating.
Within the months after her son’s killing, Unvar stated she agonized over what she might have executed to make his life higher whereas he was nonetheless alive. She thought in regards to the discrimination he confronted at school as a scholar with an immigration background and located herself wracked with guilt that she hadn’t fought tougher for him: pushing faculty officers tougher to permit him on a extra bold monitor of examine, for instance, or urging them to cease the discrimination he confronted from lecturers and different college students.
Ferhat was gone, however many different youngsters with comparable backgrounds confronted those self same robust odds at college—and there was nonetheless a approach to assist them, Unvar remembered pondering. Practically 9 months after the assault, on Ferhat’s birthday in November 2020, Unvar formally based her group, which seeks to fight racism and discrimination within the German schooling system, giving talks and holding trainings and workshops to empower younger folks struggling in opposition to systemic racism and to coach lecturers in regards to the challenges that college students from immigrant communities face.
Her first donation was from a gaggle of Ferhat’s mates, who handed her an envelope with 125 euros that they had raised collectively. She was touched and buoyed by the gesture. “I stated, OK, I couldn’t assist Ferhat, however I can assist them by means of Ferhat,” she stated.
The group has since scaled up considerably. Donations and grants helped Unvar rent employees and unfold the phrase about their anti-discrimination workshops. Some are for school-age youngsters and youth, giving them a secure house to speak about their experiences of discrimination or racism; others are for lecturers and educators, coaching them to root out racism of their school rooms; but extra are for adults in different professions, together with airport employees at Frankfurt Airport. Together with Initiative 19 February Hanau, a company run by the members of the family of a number of of the Hanau victims, Unvar’s initiative received the Aachen Peace Prize in 2021.
The Ferhat Unvar Academic Initiative holds an anti-racism workshop in Hanau on Feb. 16, 2023. Thomas Lohnes/Getty Photographs
“I by no means had it in my head to do one thing like this,” stated Unvar, reflecting on how her life modified after the assault. Sitting on a black sofa in a single nook of the group’s large occasion house, with posters depicting the group’s emblem and occasions on the partitions and brochures for her coaching packages on tables throughout the room, Unvar was animated as she described how she and others have constructed the initiative into what it’s right this moment. On the identical time, she stated, so “many individuals instrumentalize [the attack], not simply politicians but additionally others. That damage me deeply.”
Unvar instructed me that she hopes to create a cross-border assist community for households of victims of terrorism. In Greece, she met Magda Fyssa, the mom of Pavlos Fyssas, a younger anti-fascist musician murdered by members of the neo-Nazi group Golden Daybreak. She has additionally traveled to Norway, Spain, and France to fulfill with different households of terrorist victims and with organizations that fight terrorism. Unvar spoke with native activists and specialists about methods to collaborate of their struggle in opposition to violent extremism and be taught from each other’s experiences.
“No matter which nation I used to be in, I by no means felt alone,” she stated. “I noticed what number of different individuals are additionally combating on this course in opposition to terror, for humanity, for human rights—that gave me power.”
However Unvar admitted that it may be troublesome to press ahead along with her activism whereas feeling that regardless of how laborious she works, or how laborious others work, her efforts are unlikely to alter a rustic unwilling to handle its shortcomings in relation to welcoming and safeguarding immigrant communities.
In January, the German investigative information outfit Correctiv launched a report a couple of secret assembly between right-wing extremist leaders close to Berlin, together with members of the far-right AfD. These current mentioned a “remigration” plan to deport thousands and thousands of individuals with immigrant backgrounds, together with these with German passports.
Members of the Different for Germany occasion maintain an indication in Köthen in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, on Sept. 16, 2018. Craig Stennett/Getty Photographs
Unvar stated the nationwide outrage over the Correctiv report—and the thousands and thousands of people that turned out to protest throughout the nation within the weeks that adopted—gave her hope that the German inhabitants at massive lastly understood the size of its downside with right-wing extremism. “It’s good that [the story] got here out as a result of then folks like us can see how large and essential an issue it’s,” she stated. “The racists—they’re not letting up. We’ve seen the hazard is there. … We have to actually maintain collectively in opposition to the appropriate wing and in opposition to terror.”
Nonetheless, the AfD continues to realize floor. Driving a wave of assist for far-right events throughout Europe, the occasion gained 5 proportion factors in June’s European Parliament elections, coming in second—forward of all three of Germany’s governing events—with 16 p.c of the vote. The AfD then received its first state-level victory within the jap German state of Thuringia on Sept. 1, taking 32.8 p.c of the vote; in neighboring Saxony, it got here in a detailed second to the center-right Christian Democrats, with 30.6 p.c of the vote. A 3rd jap state, Brandenburg, votes on Sept. 22; the AfD is main the polls there.
The far-right occasion can also be a rising menace in Unvar’s residence state: Within the years because the assault, Hesse’s political panorama has shifted to the appropriate. The AfD received 18.4 p.c to develop into the second-largest occasion in final fall’s state elections, a rise of 5.3 proportion factors from the earlier election in 2018.
Individuals maintain indicators and pictures of victims of the 2020 shootings in Hanau on the anniversary of the assault on Feb. 19, 2023.Thomas Lohnes/Getty Photographs
In February, across the anniversary of the Hanau assault, Hans-Gerd R. despatched Unvar one other letter. One other one adopted this spring.
Hans-Gerd R. has been cited dozens of occasions for harassing Unvar and different victims’ members of the family and for repeatedly violating a restraining order in opposition to Unvar. He was taken into custody when he defied the restraining order and confirmed up exterior her home once more in 2023. He was additionally briefly despatched to jail that 12 months for failing to pay his fines for the assorted citations he had acquired associated to that harassment.
However regardless of the restraining order, the police instructed Unvar that they’ll’t do something in regards to the letters that preserve arriving at her home: There are not any legal guidelines in Germany in opposition to sending missives to somebody through the postal system, whatever the intolerance they include.
Hanau Mayor Claus Kaminsky described Hans-Gerd. R’s harassment of Unvar and different victims’ members of the family as “delicate, nearly diabolical” terrorism in a 2023 interview with the German broadcaster ARD, saying he wished the person would go away Hanau. However he reiterated that there’s little the authorities can do past the penalties they’ve already put into place. “In fact, it might be greatest if the daddy left town, if he modified his place of residence,” Kaminsky stated. “Which may even be higher for him. However there is no such thing as a authorized method to pressure this.”
Towards the tip of our time collectively, I requested Unvar whether or not she was afraid that Hans-Gerd R. would escalate from letters and leering exterior her kitchen window to one thing worse. Unvar’s youngest son, Mirza, who’s 11, had simply come into the workplace and sat down subsequent to her on the black leather-based couch. She wrapped her arms round him as he seemed up shyly.
“I’m not afraid, no. I actually have zero worry—what ought to I be afraid of? What can occur? I’ve already misplaced my dearest son,” she stated.
Finally, as she instructed me repeatedly all through the course of our dialog, her struggle isn’t about her. The tutorial initiative, the connections overseas, the advocacy, the lengthy hours of volunteer work—it’s about youngsters like Ferhat who wrestle to get forward at school due to the colour of their pores and skin; it’s about Mirza, sitting on the sofa subsequent to her, having the ability to develop up feeling secure.
“The killer’s father remains to be a hazard to my household,” she stated. “I don’t worry for myself, however I’ve youngsters.”
