On racism in Germany, and what I call “aggressive apathy”.

There are many things that bother me about living in our age of rising fascism, most of all the increasing comfort with which I see fascists walking around my city of Berlin, but another one of the main ones is what I call “aggressive apathy”. Aggressive apathy, in this context, is when you point out an act of racial violence or harassment in Berlin and the response that you get is “well, of course, it has always been that way”. It angers me because it does nothing to help the victim.  

But let me go back for a second and give you some more detail. Last Saturday, I was on the tram home with a friend when a dark-skinned young man sitting behind us cried out in disbelief. A young woman, who had just boarded the tram, had whispered to him that he looked “like a terrorist”. She then smirked at him, swore at him, then sat down next to her friend. We politely and persistently asked her to explain her remark. She declined. She looked confused, then uncomfortable, and then she and her friend - who looked like he wanted to be anywhere else - got off at the next stop, clearly unsettled that she had experienced consequences. 

When I mentioned this incident online, several people replied with “aggressive apathy”. What else did you expect, said one person, this is Germany. We have always had Nazis here, said another. The reason I am enraged by comments like these is that they are not only lazy, they are part of the problem. For one thing, I am not some naive, starry-eyed clown who is only just having their illusions about this city finally shattered. I am black and I have a Muslim first name and I have been living in Germany for over ten years. I fully understand the risks and the rewards of living here. I have been attacked in the street by racists and so have several of my friends and even their children. I have experienced racism in the most casual of contexts, including at the doors of nightclubs and in the queues at airports. I have friends who left the country because the racism and the xenophobia from some quarters became too much. More importantly: when I say that the racial climate is getting worse, I not only mean it, but I can look at the statistics to back that up. The area where I live has seen the biggest spike in far-right violence in ten years. The percentage of black people in Germany who have experienced an incident of racial discrimination in Germany has risen from 50% in 2016 to 76% in 2023. 

But let me frame it another way. To shrug away this young man’s experience is to be dangerously jaded. It is to normalise something that can never be normal, should never be normal, should never be accepted. The second most shocking thing about the incident was how many passengers looked on meekly or blankly as the young man sat there upset. And I am not saying everyone should have risen to their feet. It’s just that there were plenty of English speakers on that tram and almost none of them had anything to say. Maybe they were thinking “what do you expect, this is Germany”. Or maybe they were thinking “we have always had Nazis here”. Maybe they were in silent agreement with the young woman. Who knows? Their silence enabled her because cruelty thrives in silence. 

Most importantly: every time someone is publicly humiliated because of their race, it matters too much for their suffering to be shrugged aside, as if it is merely the price of living here. And if the aggression of that apathy could be channelled into something more productive - say, funding one of the best anti-racism NGOs in the country - then we would get much further, much faster.