Empathy and angst in a German city transformed by migrants

The mood in the school gymnasium was turning. City officials had invited people from the nearby tower blocks, to explain that a group of mostly Syrian migrants had been housed in the neighborhood the night before. An elderly woman stepped up to the microphone: “Will you be building a mosque next?” she demanded. “Will they […]

The mood in the school gymnasium was turning. City officials had invited people from the nearby tower blocks, to explain that a group of mostly Syrian migrants had been housed in the neighborhood the night before.
An elderly woman stepped up to the microphone: “Will you be building a mosque next?” she demanded. “Will they wake us up with their prayer at 5 a.m.?”
A schoolteacher asked, “How do we protect our children?”
One young man did not even bother asking a question: “This has to stop,” he announced, to a smattering of applause.
“This” is an unprecedented stream of mostly Muslim migrants into a city that until recently was so white that a black man in the local Green Party was reportedly known as “Erfurt’s African.”
In this city of 208,000, once home to Martin Luther and sometimes referred to as the Rome of Thuringia for its many churches, pork sausage is a local specialty. The number of Muslims stood around 500 until recently, the mayor estimates. But by Christmas, 4,000 migrants, many from Muslim countries, could settle here.
“Erfurt is changing,” said the mayor, Andreas Bausewein. A home for migrants is opening next to his house. His youngest daughter now has an Afghan girl in her class. She uses a wheelchair. “Shrapnel,” Mr. Bausewein said.
Until last weekend, he had told his staff that the migrant crisis was the biggest challenge since reunification. Now he says it is the biggest challenge since World War II.
About 800,000 asylum seekers are expected to have arrived in Germany by the end of the year, plunging the country into a live experiment that many believe could do more to transform it than even the fall of Communism.
In the aftermath of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s welcoming stance toward the thousands arriving from war and strife in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, ordinary cities like this one are suddenly coping with the extraordinary. From 100 migrants a month in June to 300 a week now, the effects here and in other states, cities and towns are accelerating. And it is at this level that the experiment will either work or not.
To work, there must be beds and showers. Translators and teachers. Social workers and police officers. Homes and classrooms. Jobs and money. And there must be cooperation from average Germans. Many of them have greeted the migrants with generosity, but others remain anxious and have yet to be convinced that the benefits are worth the cost, disruption and, ultimately, reconfiguration of German identity.
In Erfurt and elsewhere, welcoming the migrants is not just a matter of managing logistics, It is also managing the public mood.
So far, this city on the edge of the former East, in the geographical heart of reunified Germany, is adapting. With a half-day’s notice on Monday, a former conference center was transformed into a temporary camp for 674 people.
Barely touched by the war, Erfurt has the feel of a fairy-tale town frozen in time, with a cobblestone center, pastel-colored medieval houses and church spires that are among the best preserved in Germany.
Spare beds in 19 homes set aside for migrants were filled, and new ones were identified. The building used the night before for the new Syrian arrivals – a disused brothel – turned out to be particularly suitable: small rooms with separate showers and bathrooms. “It’s perfect,” said Jens Hennig, one of the social workers running it. A coat of white paint transformed the pink walls.
Residents have welcomed the trains of migrants with clapping and cheering. Housing facilities have turned away donations and volunteers because storage rooms are full.
Even as some in the gymnasium and at other meetings like it this week expressed anxiety over crime, higher taxes and “more Muslims,” others routinely stood up to express sympathy with the migrants.
Erfurt has absorbed successive waves of mass migration, said Steffen Rassloff, a respected local historian. From Celts and Slavs and Dutch bridge builders to a thriving Jewish community in the Middle Ages that helped make the city a wealthy metropolis, migration has been mostly beneficial, he said.
But there was tension even when roughly 14 million Germans were expelled from the eastern territories that became part of the Soviet bloc after World War II, and 670,000 of them came through emergency camps in Erfurt. “And that was with the same language and the same culture,” Mr. Rassloff said.
Today, unease is palpable in a city that is no stranger to ideological extremes. The Left Party, successor of the eastern Communist party, runs the state administration in a coalition with Social Democrats and Greens. The far-right National Party of Germany has a representative in the City Council. There was an arson attack this week on three (still uninhabited) homes for migrants in the northern part of Thuringia, the state in which Erfurt is the capital.
Back in the neo-Gothic City Hall, a monument to 19th-century Prussian pride, Alexander Hilge admitted that he was worried. He had just come out of a briefing with state officials. Tens of thousands more migrants were reportedly on their way to Germany from Hungary. Of every new group, Germany’s federal quota system will send 2.5 percent to Thuringia. And one in 10 of those will end up in Erfurt.
Mr. Hilge, 38, coordinates the city’s response to the migrant crisis. His office has become the unofficial situation room. The wall calendar is stuck on last Friday, when thousands of migrants were still pent up in Hungary; since they were put on trains west on Saturday, no one has had time to move forward the little red icon that marks the date.
Friday, Mr. Hilge said, was already “another era.” Back then, he still received detailed warnings of arrivals: Lists with names and some indication of need, like the number of nursing mothers or sick children about to arrive. Now he just gets a total. And that number is usually wrong.
Since Monday, a crisis team of the city’s firefighters, social workers, school officials, health authorities and finance committee members has met every day at 9 a.m. On the agenda one morning this week: an imminent shortage of shelter if migrants keep coming.
Werner Ungewiss of the education authority outlined a tentative plan to take over 13 of the city’s 68 school gymnasiums. “Physical education will be canceled, and sport clubs using the facilities no longer have access,” he said.
Mr. Hilge shifted in his seat. “Parents will revolt.” He spoke of “Volkszorn,” or people’s wrath. So far, managing the public mood has been about asking locals to accept migrants as their new neighbors. “Now we’re reaching deep into their lives,” he said. “We are taking their children’s classes away, their football clubs.”
There is little choice.
Waiting outside his office was Jens Bösel, manager of EBB, a company that sells live-in containers. There is now a delivery backlog of up to 25 weeks.
Cots are also running low across Germany. Mr. Hilge is looking into ordering 5,000 beds and mattresses from Ikea Poland, just in case. He spent an hour on the phone trying to buy portable showers. “Sold out,” he said.
The lack of showers concerned Tamara Thierbach, the city’s representative for social work. She warned of “hygienic chaos” and suggested organizing migrant shower days: Busing migrants from a camp to a shower once a week. “There are rules,” she reminded her colleagues.
There are a lot of rules in Germany. Rules governing who is allowed to teach migrants German, how to tender building contracts, the number of emergency exits in a temporary camp, the hours a bus driver is allowed to drive.
“Sometimes we are too German for our own good,” Mr. Hilge sighed. His remit at City Hall is “order.” Ordnung. He smiled tiredly. “It’s a curse and a blessing.”
Across the Gera River, in the Thuringia State Legislature, Dieter Lauinger is minister for migration, a post that did not exist until last December. He pointed to another kind of shortage in his state: “People.”
For him, the migrant crisis is not just a humanitarian imperative, it is an opportunity. Germany has among the lowest birthrates in Europe. The population is shrinking and aging, particularly in the former east.
“I just met a refugee family with five children,” he said. “Five children. These people could be paying our retirement.” Small and medium-size businesses in the region are looking for 3,000 apprentices. Electricians and builders are in demand. Doctors and teachers, too.
Giving people a roof over their heads and three meals a day is a gigantic task, Mr. Lauinger said. “But it’s small compared to giving them a future.”
The Johannes School, a primary school in central Erfurt, knows this firsthand. There are two asylum homes in its district. These days the headmistress, Sabine Iffarth, regularly gets phone calls from panicked counterparts across the city seeking advice from her experience with migrant children.
“I tell them that they need a whole new infrastructure for this,” she said. Her school now has an “integration helper,” a social worker, a psychologist and an educator who speaks Arabic. A number of its teachers are getting extra qualifications to teach German as a second language. It also had to buy a second barbecue grill: Muslim children are served chicken and turkey sausage, not the local pork sausage.
Distributed by The New York Times

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Since last year, the school has run an intensive language course for newcomers. For four hours every morning, children learn German, then are integrated into regular classes for the rest of the day. The most recent additions are two Syrian sisters, Sabah, 7, and Arzo, 8, who three weeks into the term can already name vegetables and fruit and answer basic questions in German.
Not all parents at the school are happy with the attention and resources dedicated to non-Germans, inside and outside the school, Ms. Iffarth said. Those who are granted asylum in Germany get an apartment, health insurance, a language course and 399 euros (about $450) a month. Many in the neighborhood are unemployed and have problems of their own. “We fail to integrate the losers in our society, and then we ask them to integrate the refugees,” she said.
The other day, a boy refused to take off his baseball cap inside the school. His father defended him: “He’ll take that off when they take off their head scarves,” he said.
But among the children, there is rarely tension, said Franziska Vogt, who taught the language class this week. “Their parents grew up with hardly any immigration, but for the kids it’s totally normal that their best friend is called Ahmed,” she said.
Mr. Hennig, the social worker at the brothel-turned-asylum home, had to unfriend some of his relatives on Facebook because they were calling the migrants parasites. It makes him angry. All the migrants he has met want to learn German and work as soon as possible, he said.
Shyar Ibrahym, 34, a car mechanic and Kurdish refugee from Aleppo, Syria, wore a German soccer shirt recently night, on his second night in Erfurt. In his first-floor room, which he shares with three others, a German flag adorns the wall. His friend Othman Othman was registered as “Assmann Assmann” by immigration officials. No matter.

Distributed by The New York Times