Black community in Germany worry about racism ahead of polls

It was a balmy summer night in 2020, Germany's first lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic had just been lifted, when Omar Diallo and two of his friends wanted to celebrate Eid al-Adha, the Muslim festival of sacrifice.

Diallo, a 22-year-old migrant from Guinea in West Africa, told the Associated Press during a recent interview in Erfurt, the capital of the eastern German state of Thuringia, that he and his friends were "enjoying life, playing music, walking through the city at night" when the evening took a tragic turn.

As they strolled through a park, past a huge, dilapidated storage building, they were all of a sudden confronted by three black-cladded, white men.

“They were shouting: ‘What do you want here, f--king foreigners, get out!," Diallo remembered, his eyes still filled with horror as he recalls that night.

“Suddenly it was no longer just three, but five, seven. All over the place. So there was no escape route.”

Diallo doesn't remember how long they were being hunted, but at some point he managed to call police, and when the officers finally arrived, the attackers ran away.

One of his friends, both were also from Guinea, was beaten up so badly that he had to be hospitalised.

Being Black in Germany has always meant being exposed to racism in its many forms, from everyday humiliations to deadly attacks.

However, being Black in eastern Germany means the likelihood of becoming a victim of racism may be even higher, experts say.

While West Germany became a democratic, diverse society in the decades after World War II, in East Germany, which was run by a Communist dictatorship until the end of 1989, residents barely had any contact with people of other ethnicities and were not allowed to travel freely abroad.

Experts say that specifically in Thuringia, radical far-right forces have created an environment that's hostile toward minorities, including Blacks.

In 2023, the NGO Ezra, which helps victims of far-right, racist and antisemitic violence, documented 85 racist attacks in Thuringia.

That's only slightly below the 88 racist attacks in 2022, when Ezra registered “an all-time high of right-wing and racist violence” in the state.

“In recent years, an extreme right-wing movement has formed in Thuringia, which has contributed to a noticeable ideological radicalisation of its followers. Politically, the Alternative for Germany party is the main beneficiary of this,” Ezra and several other organisations tracking racism in the state wrote in an annual report about the situation in the predominantly rural state with an overall population of around 2.1 million.

That development is also reflected in polls about the upcoming local elections on Sept. 1, in which up to 30% of voters in Thuringia say they want to cast their ballot for the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, putting the party ahead of other mainstream parties.

Elections are also coming up in the eastern state of Saxony and Brandenburg where the AfD is also leading in the polls.

AfD’s Thuringia branch is particularly radical and was put under official surveillance by the domestic intelligence service four years ago as a “proven right-wing extremist” group.

The party's fiercely anti-immigrant rhetoric has raised not only concerns from people working to combat discrimination, but also minorities such as Black Germans and African migrants, who are among the most visible minorities and often the first to be discriminated against.

“I think that both right-wing, conservative right-wing forces and authoritarian populist forces, which are becoming very strong here in Thuringia, harbour a great danger,” said Doreen Denstaedt, the state's minister for migration, justice and consumer protection in Erfurt.

Denstaedt, the daughter of a Black father from Tanzania and a white, German mother, was born and grew up in Thuringia.

The 46-year-old member of the Green party said that when growing up in what was then Communist East Germany, she was “always the only Black child.”

As a teenager, she was never allowed to go home on her own because of possible racist attacks against her, and she sometimes suffered racist slurs in her school.

Denstaedt also said that people would call her a "foreigner" despite her being born in Saalfeld.

She feared that in the current political climate, racist narratives that are repeatedly propagated will become acceptable in the middle of society.

Blacks, while a small minority in Germany, have lived in the country for hundreds of years.

It's not exactly clear how many Black people live in the country as ethnicities are officially not statistically documented, but according to estimates about 1.27 million people of originally African heritage live in this country of about 83 million.

More than 70% of them were born in Germany, according to Mediendienst Integration, an organisation tracking migrant issues in Germany.

The German Empire held numerous colonies in Africa from 1884 until the end of World War I.

These included territories in today's Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, Namibia, Cameroon, Togo and Ghana.

Germany's government has only recently started to deal with the injustices committed during that period.

It was only in 2023, that Germany's president apologised for colonial-era killings in Tanzania over a century ago.

Daniel Egbe, a chemist from Cameroon, who moved to Thuringia in 1994 to study, said he was shocked by how little Germans knew about the country's colonial past when it comes to Blacks.

Egbe, who took on German citizenship in 2003, founded AMAH, an organisation that is based in the city of Jena in the east of the state, and helps university students and migrants from Africa when they experience discrimination.

As for Diallo, the Guinean migrant, who was attacked in Erfurt four years ago, he has also vowed to help improve the situation for Black people in Germany.

Even though Diallo said the attack really traumatised him, it also empowered him to fight for more justice for Black people in Germany.

A year ago, he enrolled in university in Munich to study law, but he still visits Erfurt often to protest for migrants' rights and against racism.

While Egbe is also worried that the far-right AfD may rise to further power in the upcoming elections, he said he won't leave Thuringia despite the growing racism.

"Even if the worst happens, we will stay here. We will not leave and we have to do our part to change this society,” Egbe said.