Events of the past few days in Germany are a chilling reflection of political atrophy and our collective amnesia. A little more than a week ago, a brutal mass stabbing at a local festival in the western city of Solingen left three people dead in what prosecutors believe to have been an act of Islamist terror. The alleged perpetrator of the attack is a Syrian asylum seeker. Reaction to the outrage has felt like a mirror image of a previous event in Solingen 31 years ago – an image turned on its head, with the same reductive rhetoric dominating public discourse.
Because when I think of Solingen, a bleak chapter of German history comes to mind. It is a symbol as much as a city. In 1993, after five women and girls of Turkish origin were murdered in a far-right arson attack, the then chancellor, Helmut Kohl, chose not to attend the memorial, dismissing other politicians’ decision to go as “condolence tourism”. The term was striking in its bluntness, suggesting that sympathising on the loss of these victims was performative rather than a genuine expression of grief by the country’s leaders.
