TIME October 9, 2017
Idlib, had just found out she was pregnant
with her second child when she and her
family decided to flee. Facebook posts
from friends who had already arrived in
Germany boasted that their children were
enrolled in school and fluent in German. A
former music teacher, she was desperate
to put her son in school, and she was
encouraged by stories of how Germans
accepted veiled women. “Because there
are many Muslims there, people don’t
mind the hijab,” she says. “They don’t
look at it as something strange.”
By early 2016, Taimaa and her husband
Mohannad had scraped together enough
money to pay a smuggler to get the family
to Greece. From there, she figured, they
could travel by train and on foot to
Germany, like hundreds of thousands of
Syrians before them.
IN THE PAST TWO YEARS,more than
1 million refugees and asylum seekers
have arrived in the Federal Republic of
Germany. About half, mostly from Syria,
have been granted the right to stay and
be resettled across the nation. They are
trying to mix in a culture that is famously
homogenized, orderly and keenly aware
of its unwelcoming past. TheWillkom-
menskultur (welcome culture) that led
refugees to pawn wedding rings to pay
for perilous Mediterranean crossings and
families to become indebted to smugglers
promising passage across closed borders
hasn’t always been matched by a genu-
ine welcome upon arrival. Although the
number of asylum seekers reaching Ger-
many has declined by two-thirds since
2015, federal and state agencies tasked
with processing their arrival are still
swamped. As a result, most refugees
now spend months languishing in tem-
porary camps where they are denied the
very elements—school enrollment, for-
mal language courses, job training—that
made Germany’s integration program
so successful at the start. “We have be-
come too much of an object on which mi-
grants from all over the world pin their
longings,” admits Joachim Stamp, min-
ister for refugees and integration in the‘GO TO MAMA
MERKEL—SHE’S
ACCEPTING
EVERYONE.’state of North Rhine–Westphalia. “That
is something that we can view positively,
but it must also be clear that people don’t
automatically embark on a life of bliss the
moment they touch German soil.”
Meanwhile, the arrival of all these
newcomers has had a powerful effect on
German politics. And the court system
is so overwhelmed by appeals to asylum
rejections that it is struggling to process
legitimate deportation orders. One who
slipped through the net was Anis Amri,
a 24-year-old rejected asylum seeker
from Tunisia, who plowed a stolen truck
through a Berlin Christmas market in
December, killing 12.
Far-right parties in Germany seized
on the incident as a rallying cry against
Merkel’s refugee policies, and in national
elections on Sept. 24, the anti-immigrant,The anti-immigrant party
Alternative for Germany, which
won almost 13% of the vote in the
Sept. 24 elections, has distanced
itself from far-right protests like this
one held in Berlin on Sept. 9