ERFURT, Germany (AP) — It was a balmy summer evening in 2020, shortly after Germany’s first COVID-19 lockdown was lifted, and Omar Diallo and two friends from his home country of Guinea wanted to celebrate Eid al-Adha, the Muslim festival of sacrifice.
“We were enjoying life, playing music, walking around the city in the evenings — we just wanted to be together again and have a good time,” Diallo, 22, told The Associated Press in Erfurt, in the eastern state of Thuringia.
He was not prepared for how the day would end. Suddenly, Diallo and his friends were confronted by three white men dressed in black.
“They were screaming, ‘What are you doing here, you bastards, get out of here!’” Diallo recalls.
“First there were three, then five, seven — they surrounded us from all sides. We couldn’t run away, and then they started chasing us,” he said.
At one point, Diallo managed to call the police, and when the officers finally arrived, the attackers ran away. One of his friends was beaten so badly that he had to go to the hospital.
“I was just trying to survive,” Diallo said. “I didn’t do anything wrong. It all happened just because of the color of my skin.”
Being black in Germany has always meant exposure to racism, from everyday humiliations to deadly attacks. In eastern Germany, the risk can be even greater.
After World War II, West Germany developed into a democratic, diverse society. In East Germany, which was ruled by a communist dictatorship until the end of 1989, residents had little contact with people of other ethnic groups and were not allowed to travel freely abroad.
According to experts, far-right forces in Thuringia in particular have created a hostile atmosphere towards minorities, including black people.
With the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, black Germans and African migrants like Diallo are increasingly concerned.
In Thuringia, with 2.1 million inhabitants, state elections are being held on September 1. The fiercely anti-immigration party AfD is leading in the polls with 30%.
In 2023, the NGO Ezra, which helps victims of far-right, racist and anti-Semitic violence, documented 85 racist attacks in Thuringia, only a slight decrease from the 88 attacks in 2022, which Ezra described as “a record high of far-right and racist violence” in the state.
“In recent years, a far-right movement has emerged in Thuringia, which has contributed to a noticeable ideological radicalization of its followers. Politically, the party Alternative für Deutschland is the biggest beneficiary,” Ezra and a consortium of organizations that map racism wrote in their annual report.
The AfD’s Thuringia branch is particularly radical and was placed under official supervision four years ago, the domestic intelligence service designated it as a “proven far-right” group.
“Authoritarian and populist forces, which are now becoming very strong here, pose a great danger in Thuringia,” says Doreen Denstaedt, Thuringia’s Minister of Migration, Justice and Consumer Protection.
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 Green Party member said she grew up in communist East Germany and was “always the only black child”. As a teenager, she was never allowed to go home alone because of the risk of racist attacks, and sometimes faced racist abuse at school.
“I have personally experienced people calling me a foreigner, which initially confused me a lot, because I was born in Saalfeld” in Thuringia, says Denstaedt.
She fears that in the current political climate, racist stories will be accepted in society.
“My biggest concern is that people don’t question (these biases), especially if they’re not affected by them themselves,” she said.
It is not entirely clear how many black people live in Germany today, as different ethnicities are not recorded in official statistics, but estimates put the number of people of African descent at 1.27 million. More than 70 percent were born in Germany, according to Mediendienst Integration, which tracks migration issues in the country.
The history of racial discrimination in Germany begins long before the Nazis began excluding, deporting, and ultimately murdering black people in the 1930s and 1940s.
From 1884 until the end of World War I, the German Empire held numerous colonies in Africa. These included areas in present-day Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, Namibia, Cameroon, Togo and Ghana.
The German government has only recently begun to address the injustices committed during that period. In 2021, President Frank-Walter Steinmeier called on Germans to confront the country’s brutal colonial pastand in 2023 he will apologized for the colonial-era massacres in Tanzania over a century ago.
Daniel Egbe, a 58-year-old chemist from Cameroon who moved to Thuringia in 1994 to study, says he is shocked by how little Germans know about their colonial history. He says this ignorance may also play a role in the unequal treatment of black people.
“I taught at the school,” Egbe told AP. “I tell them a little bit about myself and especially about the fact that Cameroon was a German colony. A lot of students don’t know anything about Africa or the German past and that needs to be put on the map.”
Egbe, who took German citizenship in 2003, founded AMAH, an organization that helps university students and migrants from Africa who face discrimination in the city of Jena, in eastern Thuringia.
He is concerned about the rise of the AfD, but has no plans to leave.
“We are not going away, we will do our part to change this society,” he said. “People are mostly afraid of what and who they do not know. We have to change things through education.”
Diallo, the Guinean who was attacked in Erfurt four years ago, also promised to improve the situation for black people in Germany.
Although the attack traumatized him, it also gave him the strength to fight for justice, he said. A year ago, he enrolled at the university in Munich to study law, but he still visits Erfurt regularly, where he supports Youth Without Borders, a network of young migrants.
“I don’t know exactly how I’m going to change Germany yet, but I know I will do it,” he said.
