The first time I went to Hanau, I was creeped out by how ordinary it was. This mid-sized city of 100,000 people right in the geographical centre of Germany, looked and felt like many other places in western Germany I had been to: built around a bombed and reconstructed old town, expanded by a soulless mall with a multiplex cinema, surrounded by a vast industrial area and neighbourhoods separated along class lines. What the city prides itself on is that the Brothers Grimm grew up here in the late 18th century before they started publishing folk tales such as Cinderella and The Frog Prince. Since 2020, however, Hanau stands for something else: it’s the place where a far-right gunman killed nine people he assumed to be immigrants, and afterwards killed his mother and himself.
The attack on 19 February of that year not only left a deep wound within immigrant communities throughout the country, it again raised questions about how seriously the German state takes rightwing extremist terrorism, even after the infamous murders by neo-Nazi terrorist cell the National Socialist Underground (NSU), which spanned most of the decade from 2000.
