19 February 2020: Right-Wing Terrorism Puts Hanau on the Map

Until February 2020, Hanau at the River Main was just a small town in close proximity to the global financial capital of Frankfurt, rather unnoticed in the shadow. This changed when the terror attack of 19 February 2020, suddenly put Hanau on the map. In the space of a few hours, a male, white, right-wing extremist shooter deliberately killed nine people, in central Hanau and the nearby quarter of Kesselstadt, and then returned home and shot his mother and himself later that night. Once again, and similarly to incidents in Munich in 2016 and in Halle in 2019, a right-wing extremist shooter killed people of colour who were German citizens, the majority of whom were born in Germany, but were suspected ‘migrants’ to their murderers. As in many other cases, questions arose surrounding the incident: why was the emergency exit of the Shisha bar, where the shooting happened, locked? Why did police appear so late at the site of the killing? As the research group Forensic Architecture later proved, police had difficulties entering the house of the killer, where he finally shot his mother and then himself, raising questions about the role of the shooter’s father in this scenario.

To this day, the perpetrator’s father denies his son’s crimes and refers to the victims as people who do not belong in Germany. He stalks and threatens the victims’ families, even under the risk of arrest (Haschnik, 2023). Racism also was to be found among the police, since some of the police officers involved in the case had previously expressed racist beliefs. Meanwhile, Hanau’s mayor stressed that racism had no place in his town. His political statement stood in contrast to the history of the town. Hanau played a central role in the Third Reich, as will be demonstrated later, and yet the community of Hanau seems to be unaware of this particular past. This may come as no surprise, since the place lacks any sites to memorialise the town’s Nazi past. There is no memorial to the victims of the Shoah like the ‘Topography of Terror’ museum in Berlin. There are, however, memorial sites highlighting Hanau’s role as the birthplace of the Brothers Grimm. How can this void in relation to the memorisation of Hanau’s Nazi past be explained? And even more so, with respect to the 2020 terrorist incident, the question is: how does a place remember racist terror?

Hanau, Lieu de Mémoire? Whose Memories Are at Stake?

French historian Pierre Nora developed his concept of lieux de mémoire (i. e. memory sites) in the mid-1980s with reference to French history and the ways in which memory manifests itself in physical and abstract places and sites. For example, the Parisian Arc de Triomphe serves as a physical memorial site, while the Marseillaise activates (or binds) collective memory immaterially, through song. According to Nora, the lieu de mémoire is defined in three senses: material, symbolical, and functional, regardless of the degree in which these categories are present. A lieu de mémoire crystallises collective memory. Nora later extended his original concept to immaterial concepts of memorial sites (such as the Marseillaise) and has developed it further with regard to French history as perceived and remembered in the present. His concept has been critically discussed, adapted, and recontextualised beyond the original French context, although its application to other countries does not come without certain problems. In the German context, Jan and Aleida Assmann’s works on cultural memory have set a new standard. Still, German ‘memory sites’ (‘Erinnerungsräume’) mostly refer to the German majority, while excluding the cultural memory of minorities. The history of the ‘guest worker’ immigration from the 1950s to the 1970s still has no particular memory site in Germany, apart from a small section in the ‘Haus der Geschichte’ museum in Bonn.

This does not mean, however, that the Turkish community in Germany has no memory culture. On the contrary, since the early 1990s, Turkish-German literature and film have played a key role in the generation and proliferation of memory discourses. Turkish-German author Zafer Şenocak reflects on the notion of memory-making in his 1990s poems about Berlin and Istanbul. He does this by constructing a lyrical ‘I’, a contemporary flâneur, and at the same time tries to detect remains of forgotten histories in places, sounds, and objects of each city. In Berlin, for example, it is a broken mirror reflecting the (denied) Nazi past, whereas in Istanbul, the ‘vertical’ sea conceals tales about the long forgotten (denied) Ottoman past. The lyrical ‘I’ acts like an archivist who discovers unspoken narratives behind the official narratives. The lyrical ‘I’ collects mosaic impressions and puts them together, thus forming an archive of memories that undermine the official memory discourse of the cities. Şenocak wrote his ‘Metropolenlyrik’ in the 1990s, after the German reunification, when Berlin was once again the German capital and was undergoing major changes. At the same time, Istanbul (and Turkey) faced new times with the first Islamic Mayor and Islamic Party Leader, which meant a strong break from the secular traditions of the Turkish Republic.

Literary scholars like Leslie A. Adelson (2005) or Michael Hofmann (2013) have explored how Turkish-German literature opens new and often taboo discourses in German literature. Authors like Zafer Şenocak (1998) and Nuran David Caliş (2011) wrote novels dealing with aspects of the Armenian Genocide and the role of Turkish and German politics. Both authors thus reintroduced an almost forgotten subject, confronting the discourse of German-Turkish immigration with new and controversial positions. Their literary figures struggle with their identities, as what is believed to be merely ‘Turkish’ identity by the German public is really a combination of intricate aspects of ethnicity, including Turkish, Armenian, and Kurdish; and aspects of religion, including different versions of Islam (Sunnite, Alevite), or Christianity.

Being a Turkish-German literary scholar myself, who has worked extensively on the impact of racist terror on the cultural production of Turkish-German artists (Yeșilada, 2012b), I find it somewhat hard to keep an academic distance concerning the topic of the Hanau terror incident. Why is that?

Hanau is not any place to me. I was born and grew up in Hanau. How does terror affect childhood memories of a place? As a cultural studies scholar, I generally look at facts and analyse fiction, like I did, for example, in regard to the poems about right-wing arson attacks of the 1990s (Yesilada, 2012a). This time, though, the fact that the killing had happened in my own hometown, somehow got under my academic skin. It changed my way of looking at things and brought back memories. These memories stood against the manifold voices claiming that Hanau was ‘no place for racists’, in the aftermath of February 20, 2020. My memories told me otherwise.

In his novel Gefährliche Verwandtschaft/Perilous Kinship (1998), Zafer Şenocak writes of Berlin-Turk Sascha Muhteschem, whose family relations represent something unfamiliar, since he is the son of a German-Jewish mother and a Turkish father, carrying with him a multifaceted burden of guilt. The simultaneousness of the experience of the victim (concerning his Jewish family who survived the Nazi terror in the Turkish exile) and the experience of the perpetrator (through his Turkish grandfather who was actively involved in the Armenian genocide) in his own family tree forms a ‘perilous kinship’, forcing him to deal with being Turkish, German, Armenian and Jewish at the same time. These conflicting positions undermine Muhteschem’s effort to clarify his family relations, and push him to admit that his memory work can only be imaginative. Consequently, he relies on what he refers to as ‘twilight’—or blurred—memories to trace back his own writing about the secret story of his lost grandfather.

Being the daughter of a Turkish father who immigrated to Germany in 1962, and of a German mother who fled from Silesia to Western Germany in 1945, my own kinship seems, to me, somewhat complicated. Taking on the concept of listening to the unspoken, I find myself confronted with my own ‘twilight memories’ of the town I grew up in, and with an unsettling feeling that the terrorist act of February 2020 somehow, and in a very peculiar way, ‘made sense’ to me. Against the background of my own experiences in Hanau, I was only mildly surprised that Hanau, too, found its place within the national German topography of far-right terrorism. Again, I find myself asking why. Exploring varied reasons, my paper addresses blurred memories, corresponding with thoughts, and turns into a freely written essay.

In his essay ‘Dialog der Dritten Sprache’ (‘Dialogue about the Third Language’), Zafer Şenocak depicts two different Turkish identities. In the essay, a Turkish newspaper seller and a German-Turkish newspaper buyer discuss the impact of belonging through language (Şenocak, 1992: 89). Rather than excluding the German-Turk from the Turkish society, the Turkish girl at the newspaper stand embraces his double-natured Turkishness, and the two agree on what they call a third language additionally to German and Turkish: a third language crafted from the deaf and dumb, from the broken sounds, a bastard language that transforms misunderstandings into comedy and fear into understanding (Şenocak, 2000: 35).

Considering the intricate relationships of things German, Turkish, Silesian, and racist in my own biography, I can relate to Şenocak’s metaphor, especially to the transformation of ‘fear into understanding’, and I choose an academic ‘third language’ to reflect on the subject. Neither strictly academic, nor fictional, it allows me to weave personal aspects into this paper as regards the topography of terror in my childhood home, Hanau. In what follows, I will address the underlying memories behind my scientific dealing with the Hanau terror attacks.

Whereas the facts of terror are more or less clear in the light of day, memories of the racism I witnessed during my childhood in Hanau emerge in a blurred way, which cannot be scientifically proven. Following Walter Benjamin’s suggestion to brush history against the grain, I will critically look at my own biographical history. In doing so, I will demarcate these twilight zones in my chapter with italics, for clearer differentiation.

Places of my life form peculiar statistics with regard to terrorism: I grew up in Hanau*, studied and completed my PhD in Marburg (11 years), studied in London* (6 months), worked in Istanbul* (4,5 years), lived and worked in Munich* (11 years), and currently live in Paderborn. Each of the cities marked with an * has been struck by terrorist attacks in the last two decades, either in the form of Islamist or far-right terrorism. In 2023, living with extremist terror and threats seems to be the new norm, no matter which city you live in. Looking at my personal history, another peculiarity, as regards racism and anti-racist activities in my life so far, is revealed. I was raised mono-lingually and rather mono-culturally German but had Turkish nationality. Despite being raised as a German with a focus on my German heritage, and being ‘half’-German by blood, I was not a German citizen according to German law. Thus, I had to apply for an ‘Aufenthaltsgenehmigung’ (residency permit), and later for an ‘Aufenthaltsberechtigung’ (residence permit) in Germany (1978–1987). In 1985, I applied for German citizenship and in 1987 I became a German citizen. As a result, I was forced to give up my Turkish citizenship under German law, which denied (and still denies) double citizenship for Turkish citizens (whereas EU and US citizens are allowed to carry two nationalities). Asking for a residential permit as a young person left behind unsettling memories. The residence permit of the time defined different types of Aufenthaltsberechtigung and Aufenthaltsgenehmigung; the latter could be granted and withdrawn on grounds of minor administrative offences (‘Ordnungswidrigkeiten’).

At the age of 15, I had forgotten to re-apply on time, exceeding the expiration date by two days. The clerk, a middle-aged, white male, then informed me he could easily have me reported and withdraw my residence permit.

“Ich könnte dich jetzt anzeigen, dann wärest du vorbestraft und würdest sofort ausgewiesen werden. Aber das mache ich mal nicht, gell.”

(“I could file a police report, which would result in a criminal conviction, and then you could be expelled immediately. But I will not do so, right.” Transl. KY)

Being told that I could easily be reported, criminalised, and expelled from the country of my birth, from my German mother’s, my whole German family’s home-country, just because I reapplied for my residence permit two days later than I should have, sent a crucial shockwave through my body and soul. This was the first real racial attack I experienced, forming a traumatic experience in my life. I believe that it had an impact on my scholarly work, which focuses on immigration cultures.

At the time I was born, the law did not grant German women the right to pass down their nationality to their children, meaning I was of Turkish citizenship exclusively. Applying for German citizenship meant an incredible amount of paperwork. It involved an expensive fee (of around 1,200 DM at that time), and I was denied the possibility of a double citizenship. I remember having to literally hand over my Turkish passport to the clerk at the immigration office (‘Ausländeramt’, ‘Ausländer meaning’ ‘foreigner’), who then—before my eyes—destroyed it by pressing holes into it with a machine. He handed me the cancelled Turkish passport back, saying: ‘So, nun ist Ihr türkischer Pass entwertet und gilt nicht mehr.’ (‘Now your Turkish passport is invalidated and no longer valid.’) It was only years later that I learned that no country is allowed to invalidate another country’s passport. I could and should have filed a lawsuit against the German immigration office. Instead, I am still denied dual citizenship, because one of the nationalities is not European, or Swiss, or American, or socially very important.

Being confronted with this kind of racism in my early life has made me sensitive towards cultural productions and structures dealing with otherness, language loss, and identity, and adopting strong anti-racist positions, ever since. Hanau’s racism has changed me. I look back on more than 40 years of racism in my biography, and on 30 years of academic anti-racist work. Counting from the first deadly arson attack against Turkish homes (Mölln 1992, which coincided with the start of my academic work), it is over 30 years of pogroms and terror against the Turkish community in Germany. Mölln 1992, Solingen 1993… and now Hanau. Mal wieder, once again. Now, I don’t have to explain anymore where Hanau is. I no longer say: I am from “near Frankfurt”. Because everybody knows Hanau from this attack. Mal wieder.

‘Once again’ implies the repetitiveness of attacks from the far-right against racialised minorities in Germany. It is yet another attack against immigration itself, in a country that has denied the fact of immigration for over 50 years. German-Jewish writer Esther Dischereit (2022) expresses the notoriety of right-wing terror in Germany in an article that hints at the deliberate passivity of the state.

I am writing about Hanau two years ago on February 19, 2020, about Halle, about the attack at the Munich Olympia-Shopping Centre, about Rostock-Lichtenhagen, about Hoyerswerda, about the NSU-murders and bombings. Others wrote about Mölln and Solingen and the Oktoberfest bombing, about the double-murder of Shlomo Levin and Frieda Pöschke, and about the death of Oury Jalloh in a police station in Dessau. (Dischereit, 2022. Translation into English by K. Yeșilada.)

Dischereit, who was also one of the observers of the first parliamentary inquiry into the right-wing terrorism of the NSU (short for ‘Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund’, ‘National Socialist Underground’) in 2012 and 2013, marks the repetitiveness, or rather: the omnipresence of right-wing terrorism in Germany. By listing the topographies and incidents, she also implies criticism of the state’s reported failure to prevent right-wing terrorism and dismantle its intricate network structures.

My own memories concerning race and ethnicity during my first 18 years in Hanau are somewhat blurred, yet certain words and phrases have remained clear. When my mother applied for a flat in what she believed to be a well-maintained, rather civilised building (‘ein ordentliches Wohnhaus’) owned by her employer German Post (Deutsche Post) in the mid-1970s, she was rejected at first. She was confronted in public by one of our future neighbours, Herr Müller. What he said to her, and what she told me, stuck with us for the rest of the time: ‘Wir wollen keine Türken im Haus! (We don’t want Turks in our house)’. We moved in, eventually, but were harassed by this neighbour from that moment on.

My father, a former military reserve officer with two engineering degrees, who had worked as taxi driver for a long time, once told us about an incident he witnessed during his taxi nightshift in the 1980s: During an arrest in the middle of the street, German police officers kicked a Turkish man, who was lying on the ground, handcuffed. They deliberately kicked his kidney area. My father was shocked by this, but we just would not believe him. Already then, he would say: ‘Die größten Feinde der Deutschen sind die Türken! (Germans make Turks their worst enemies!)’ This phrase was and still is the mantra of a Turkish man, who came to live in Germany for most of his lifetime (in 2016, he moved back to Turkey after 55 years in Germany), and who is still desperately in love with this country.

Writings on the Wall

‘Türken raus aus Deutschland!’ (‘Turks out of Germany!’) or simply ‘Türken raus!’ is a slogan deeply burnt into my memory. I myself saw these slogans on walls in Hanau and elsewhere. Besides the anti-Semitic slogans (e.g. on the synagogue of Cologne in 1959), this was an explicitly post-war racist graffito appearing Germany-wide in the 1980s (additionally, it was a song by the punk band Böse Onkeltz), and came back into use after the discovery of the NSU attacks (Albay, 2021). This slogan first appeared during the reign of the Social-Liberal coalition in the 1980s. In 1983, Christian Conservative politician Helmut Kohl won the parliamentary elections, among other reasons, because he promised that once in power he would ‘reduce the numbers of Turks living in Germany by 50%’ (Seisl, 2013). Indeed, in that same year, his government presented the new ‘Rückkehrförderungsgesetz’ (RückHG). The intention was to relieve the tight German economic situation (with an unemployment rate of nearly 10 per cent and 4.6 million foreigners in Germany, out of which 1.5 million were from Turkey). Ongoing procedures of ‘luring away’ Turkish employees willing to return to Turkey were now legally supported. The law created an atmosphere of hostility against Turkish migrants in Germany. This was met with huge support within Germany’s population, Germany’s industrial society was experiencing major changes, including the 1973 oil crisis, the growing unemployment rate, and rising immigration numbers. At that time, public discourse focused increasingly on the so-called ‘Ausländerproblematik’ (problem of foreigners).

The extent of the resulting public uncertainty could be seen from the constantly rising xenophobia in the German Federal Republic at the beginning of the 1980s, a xenophobia which increasingly involved xenophobic violence. (Hunn, 2005b: 452. Translation by K.Y.)

Hunn states that less obviously, yet effectively, a new culturalization and ethnicization of the ‘foreigner problematic’ was installed by political and media discourses during the 1980s, establishing a new focus on the so-called ‘Türken-Problem’ (‘problem of Turks’). Consequently, the introduction of a law enforcing the ‘return’ of Turkish ‘guestworkers’ back to Turkey seemed to be common sense. Even though the actual effects of the ‘Rückkehrförderungsgesetz’ were rather disappointing, as Hunn (2005a) points out, the effect of stigmatising the Turkish minority as a ‘problem’ had a profound impact.

‘Wann gehen Sie zurück?’ / ‘When do you return?’ has become a common question towards people with Turkish names, ever since then. In fact, even though I was born in Germany to a German mother and spoke German with my family, I had to answer the ‘Ach, Türkin? Und wann gehen Sie zurück?’ question many times. This was especially so during my working period as university lecturer for the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) in Istanbul: Germans at the Turkish embassy or at home in Germany were all convinced I should not belong to ‘their’ country. I always felt the intricate distortion between belonging and exclusion behind such conversations.

In 2013, German media appeared to be very ‘surprised’ by a newly emerged secret protocol from Britain detailing Helmut Kohl’s ‘repatriation’ plans (Seisl, 2013). Turkish-Germans, however, were not surprised, and never were, as for them German institutional racism is a lifelong experience.

When, in 2018, a new formation of far-right extremists under the name of ‘NSU 2.0’ started attacking Turkish-German people, political activists, and institutions, threatening them with murder or bombing, ‘Türken raus’ graffiti reappeared on walls, this time signed by the NSU 2.0. In 2021, though, a graffito by the NSU 2.0 stating ‘Turks out!’ in Witten, a small town near Bochum in North Rhine-Westphalia, was removed quickly. Moreover, neighbours put up a sign contradicting the extremist ban by saying: ‘No! They are our neighbours!’ (Albay, 2021). This solidarity met with the fact that the NSU 2.0 affair soon revealed another scandal, as the terrorists had collaborated with individual members of the police in Frankfurt. It shed more light on the far-right problem within the institution of German police. In the case of the Hanau attack, some of the police officers involved in the incident shared far right beliefs (Weizmann, Andrizou & Trafford, 2021).

Portraits on Murals—#SayTheirNames

The general imperative ‘Türken raus!’/ ‘Turks out’ anonymously addresses all Turks, while at the same time denying them their individual identities. This same intention works with any act of mass terrorism that targets victims as an anonymous mass rather than as individuals. The Hanau shooter aimed his gun at what he believed to be ‘migrants’, or ‘Ausländer’. Through mass killings, the perpetrators intend to take not only the lives of victims, but also to destroy their identity, whilst hoping to make a name for themselves through their act of terror. In a certain way, they almost succeeded, because each terror act is related to the place where it took place: we speak of ‘Hoyerswerda’ (1991), ‘Mölln and Solingen’ (1992 and 1993), of ‘Berlin Breitscheidplatz’ (2016), ‘Munich 2016’ (as opposed to Munich Olympia-Attentat 1972, or Munich Oktoberfest 1986), we locate ‘Halle’ (2020), and ‘Hanau’ (2021). Through the relation of the terror act and the name of the place, terror defines the place and creates a memory site in Nora’s sense of the lieu de mémoire—often to the dismay of the respective cities and their representatives and inhabitants. For the victims, or the minority groups who consider themselves in solidarity with victims, these names represent the memory of a collective trauma. While literary texts often present a voice that ‘speaks back’ to the perpetrators, standing up as subjects rather than victims (see, for example, the poetry ‘post Solingen’, Yeșilada, 2012b), the public space lacks sites or objects with such a function.

In Germany, there are hardly any memorials bearing the names of victims murdered by (right-wing) terror acts. When Vietnamese-German scholar Kien Nghi Ha listed the names of all the victims of right-wing terrorism in his book ‘Asiatische Deutsche’ (‘Asian Germans’) in 2012, he was one of the first and few publicists to honour the victims by saying their names. It is different when it comes to the names of the arson attack victims from 1992 and 1993, and the victims of the NSU killings: names like Bahide Arslan, Mevlüde Genç, or Halil Yozgat ring a bell. Still, they remain exceptions within the vast number of nearly 200 unremembered victims of right-wing terror.

However, since the terror attack of 2020, something has changed: now, specific Turkish (and other) names and faces are to be seen on a wall in Frankfurt. Thanks to the initiative ‘#SayTheirNames’, a huge mural located under the Friedensbrücke (Peace Bridge) in Frankfurt displays photographic sketches and names of all the nine victims of the terror attack from 19 February, 2020.

Relatives and friends of the Hanau victims immediately, i.e. a day after the shooting, posted names and pictures of the nine victims on social media under the hashtag #SayTheirNames. The intention was to overshadow the terrorist’s name with the names of the people he had killed.

With the help of the Amadeu-Antonio-Foundation, information about all nine people was soon at public disposal. In line with the foundation’s policy of documenting right-wing hate crimes and preserving and honouring the memory of the victims, the Hanau victims were brought back into memory:

Regardless of the important discussion about the attack in Hanau on 19 February 2020, the remembrance of the victims must not fade into the background. It is their names that are to be remembered. (Brandorff, 2020, translation by K.Y.)

Co-funded by the Governmental programme ‘Demokratie leben’/ ‘Living Democray’, this initiative explicitly seeks to actively keep the memory of the victims alive by saying their names. Therefore, the initiative supports projects nationwide in Germany, through an annual competition of anti-racism projects among other means. A poster with pictures and names of all the victims could be downloaded from the foundation’s website.

The mural was presented to the public just four months after the attack. Several (Turkish-German) artists forming the ‘Kollektiv ohne Namen’ (‘Collective Without Names/a Name’) contacted the families of the victims, as well as the city of Frankfurt, in order to depict a 27-metre-long mural in a well-frequented spot in Frankfurt.

This mural, in this dimension, is in a public space. You can’t just click it away or turn off the TV. People also have to deal with it even if they don’t want to. We want to change society and build a better tomorrow for all the people. It just can’t go on like this. (Kollektiv ohne Namen, 2023. Translation by K.Y.)

The artist’s intention was to confront people with the victims’ personal stories by presenting their portraits. They also wanted to disrupt the ‘wall of silence’ surrounding each and every terror attack from the far right. In particular, the collective silence surrounding the NSU terror killings, until the disclosure of circumstantial evidence revealed the true extent of the group’s crimes in 2011, created significant trauma among the German-Turkish community. The artists from Kollektiv ohne Namen turn the situation around, by determining the way in which terror victims are presented in public. In this way, they also exercise a level of control over the discourse around the commemoration of their lives and identities.

Seda explains what is driving the group: ‘Unfortunately it has been common in Germany to forget right-wing attacks quickly, to return to business as usual. Then, the next attack happens. This is how it has been for decades. You have to feel uncomfortable to feel the need to change something. If you forget, you don’t change anything.’ (Kollektiv ohne Namen, 2023. Translation by K.Y)

What the artist refers to is the repetitiveness of both terror acts and their tolerance by a society only too willing to forget them. This echoes Esther Dischereit’s frustration of having to list yet another topography of German far-right terrorism. Interestingly, a group of intellectuals, among them Zafer Şenocak, had published an article headlining ‘Es reicht!’ (‘Enough!’) in the newspaper Tageszeitung, a day after the second arson attack on Turkish homes in May 1993. They even demanded Chancellor Kohl’s resignation (Şenocak, 1993). Nearly three decades later, nothing seems to have changed. While the newspaper headline from May 1993 was forgotten the very next day, the Frankfurt mural from 2020 lasts longer. The artists from Kollektiv ohne Namen had the same intention as the generation before them, but they chose different ways to establish a public site of commemoration of the victims. What both generations have in common is the feeling that the German state passively acts as a bystander, not preventing extremist terrorists from openly pursuing their murderous agenda. Chancellor Kohl, in 1991, played down racist terror by calling the perpetrators ‘Jugendliche Wirrköpfe’ (‘young scatterbrains’), thus diminishing their racist agenda. Neither did he attend the victims’ funeral after the Solingen arson attacks in 1993 (he refused to participate in what he called ‘Beileidstourismus’/‘condolence tourism’ (Prantl, 2013). He did not even send the then-minister of family affairs Angela Merkel to the funeral. He embodied what Dischereit later called the ‘passive state’, which could also be translated as the ‘complicit state’ (‘der untätige Staat’). Turkish-German director and author Nuran David Calis goes even further, accusing the political establishment of encouraging terrorism: The murderer knows he is not alone if leading politicians from the amidst society can spread National socialist ideas publicly in parliaments and media.

In the discourse around right-wing terrorism, authorities often stress the fact that the terrorist was a ‘lone perpetrator’, (‘Einzeltäter’). This serves to play down the impact of National-socialist ideologies spread among far-right groups. During anti-racism demonstrations in Hanau 2020, banners were shown stating ‘Deutschland du Einzeltäter’ (‘Germany, you lone perpetrator’), ironically reversing the lone perpetrator theory in order to hold society as a whole accountable.

It must have been in the late 1980s, when my father grumbled once again about German racism against Turks. ‘One day’, he said, ‘one day, they will shoot Turks in the middle of the street, right into their heads, you will see.’ (‘Eines Tages werden sie den Türken auf offener Straße in den Kopf schießen, du wirst sehen!’) God, how I resented him, then. How could he say things like that? In 2011, when the NSU terror attacks came into light, his words came to my mind.

During a discussion about racism at school, in the mid-1980s, a (dear) school friend told me this: ‘If you lot will be targeted one day, don’t count on my support’, (‘Wenn es irgendwann mal gegen euch geht, werde ich nicht zu dir halten.’). With ‘you’/’euch’ he referred to my Turkish identity.

These blurred memories from my youth in Hanau have always been with me and rang a bell each time Turkish immigrants were killed by far-right terrorism in Germany.

According to one of the artists of Kollektiv ohne Namen (2023), the work on the Frankfurt mural had been their biggest emotional challenge yet, and the artists cried a lot while painting since most of the murdered Hanau victims were of the same (young) generation. Their initiative to present and conserve a visual memory in a public space is supported by the victims’ families.

In addition to this physical site of memory, a public website, provided by Hanau’s community, presents the digital memory under the slogan ‘Hanau steht zusammen’ (‘Hanau stands together’), and another, privately initiated website also preserves the digital memory of the victims. The latter represents the families and friends of the murdered and injured victims of the attack. Unlike the official Hanau initiative, the group behind ‘Initiative 19. Februar’ Hanau (2020) takes a victim-focused, critical perspective on the ongoing Hesse Parliamentary Commission Inquiries and claims political visibility.

We create a space of trust. We want political solidarity and visibility. We represent diverse, civil society. Hanau is our town, our home. This is how it is and how it will remain. This is where the relatives, families, and friends of the victims and injured live. They have to be heard. We will stand by and support each other during the next weeks, months, and years. And we will see to it that consequences will be seen—and that nothing will be forgotten. (Initiative 19. Februar 2020. Translated by K. Y.)

All in all, these initiatives can be seen as a means of empowerment through which the families of the victims receive public attention, thus shifting attention away from the attacker, who is formally remembered as ‘Tobias R’. Both official representatives of the city and private initiatives stand together to defend the victims’ families, e.g. against the perpetrator’s far-right extremist father, who continues to offend and threaten the victims’ families. This official support also seeks to minimise the physical and symbolic space that the perpetrator’s father can claim to express his own and his son’s racist beliefs. For example, each of his demands that the families of the victims leave Hanau and return to their home countries is contradicted immediately by statements of inclusion and belonging, making a point that Hanau stands together and is the families’ hometown.

In this sense, Hanau has become a lieu de mémoire, not only for the murderous, terrorist attack by a single white man, but rather a lieu de mémoire of the empowerment of multi-ethnic civil society standing together—at least, so it would seem.

A glance at Hanau’s history shows that immigration and diversity are at the core of its civil identity. What impact does it have on today’s civil, immigrational society?

And what does it mean for me as a Turkish-German academic in the aftermath of the Hanau Attack? What do I remember? Which memory sites, both material and immaterial, are linked to ‘my’ Hanau?

Hanau, the Grim(m) City

Hanau at the river Main, founded by the Earls of Hanau, today is best known as the birthplace of the Grimm Brothers, and, to the soccer world, as the birthplace of Rudi Völler. With nearly 100,000 inhabitants, and its vicinity to Frankfurt, it became an important industrial location in the twentieth century. Hanau was an important political and cultural location from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. In other cities, there are a lot of streets named ‘Hanauer Straße’ (Hanau Street).

In fact, the terrorist shootings from ‘Munich 2016’ happened in several locations on Hanauer Straße. To me, yet another strange coincidence.

The Earls of Hanau joined the Hesse-wide positioning in favour of Protestantism and invited French Huguenots to immigrate to Hanau, thus establishing important economic structures. The immigration of these religious refugees brought new infrastructure and wealth to the prospering city (Iding, 2020). Hanau’s vernacular is still full of Frenchisms and French names (e.g. Schamp/Duchamps) from that period. The impressive late mediaeval Goldsmiths’ House in the old Marketplace stands for the prolific Goldsmith Art brought by the Huguenots and Waldensians, making Hanau the Goldsmith City.

My father, the Turkish immigrant, prides himself on having studied at the famous Hanau Academy of the Arts, and having exhibited his silversmith crafts and artwork in the Hanau Goldsmiths’ House, a symbol of the wealth brought to the city by French immigrants 400 years ago.

Hanau was heavily bombed and destroyed during the Second World War (19/03/1945), which is well documented on the city’s official website. US-American Allied troops marched into Hanau on 28 March 1945 and established extensive barracks (Fliegerhorst, marking an area of 340 hectares) in and outside the city soon after. When they retreated at the end of 2008, there were still 1,200 soldiers with their families, in addition to 300 American and 300 German civilians working for the troops (plus at least one Turkish civilian, my uncle Ahmet Yeșilada).

Hanau, to Me, is a Place—or Rather a Lieu de Mémoire—of US-American Presence.

Before learning about how and why American Allied Troops were stationed in Hesse, I integrated them into my life: In the 1970s, my Turkish-German family already ate at Kentucky Fried Chicken, long before it became part of German eatery culture. We had peanut butter in the house, long before it was available at German supermarkets, and the legendary Wrigley’s Chewing Gum was something normal, because my Turkish uncle brought it to our house. The two Turkish brothers often fought, because one—my father—followed the traditional Islamic rules of alcohol abstinence, and the other—my uncle—took up drinking and consuming cannabis from his American colleagues. These were the ‘cultural divisions’ I grew up with.

We attended ‘Deutsch-Amerikanische Volksfeste’, German-American folk festivals, where we happily enjoyed corn on the cob, although keeping a good distance from the GI’s.

There are discomforting memories of the US Army in my childhood: due to the American presence, there were, apart from the barracks and military territories as such, certain ‘no go areas’ for children and youngsters in our town. One was a nearby forest, Buhlau, which was ‘haunted’ and thus to be avoided (two women had been murdered here by an American GI). The other no go areas for teenagers were the northern Lamboy Viertel (Lamboy District), as well as the central ‘Heumarkt’ quarter, with bars and brothels, mostly frequented by the US Military.

The Shisha Bar of the Hanau shootings is situated in the Heumarkt Viertel.

During his time as a taxi-driver, my father witnessed a lot of trouble with the Americans. He was often cheated and sometimes physically attacked by ‘the Amis’. I especially recall one night, when he came home with his shirt torn, and blood on his face, and he angrily complained about the bad morals of the ‘occupiers’—‘Why do you put up with them, but complain about us Turks? Turks work here, they don’t occupy!’, he angrily shouted. Witnessing this as a teenager, it made me feel very uncomfortable, partly because I perceived the Allied forces as a threat to my personal freedom.

There were gangs of Turkish youngsters in Hanau, too, harrassing both German girls and boys. They once tried to beat up my brother, because according to them, he was ‘not Turkish enough’. My German girlfriends from school and I perceived these children as a threat, too.

Grim Sites in the Grimm City

Among others, Hanau had three major industrial plants: DUNLOP, LEIBOLD-HEREAUS, and DEGUSSA. In the 1960s, these companies recruited large numbers of so-called ‘guestworkers’. Did these migrants know about the history of the German industry during the Third Reich?

I grew up in Hanau, just three blocks down from the huge industrial site of the DEGUSSA. My father told me about the infamous past of the DEGUSSA. Otherwise, I had never heard about it, neither at school nor anywhere else.

The DEGUSSA, Deutsche Gold- und Silber-Scheide-Anstalt, founded in 1873, originally specialised in industrial chemicals. It gained importance during the Third Reich and profited a great deal from expansions through Aryanization and forced labour. The DEGUSSA not only melted Jewish gold (such as, for example, gold teeth from the victims of the gas chambers), but also produced and sold Zyklon B through its subsidiary DEGESCH (Leyendecker, 2010). In other words, the deadly chemical, used for the mass killings in Auschwitz and elsewhere, came from Hanau—Shoah, made in Hanau.

Degussa also produced special masks for the SS Divisions and contributed to Hitler’s atomic plans with a special research programme. ‘Nearly no other [German] company has such an NS past’, states Süddeutsche Zeitung editor Hans Leyendecker. DEGUSSA themselves only started acknowledging this part of their history in the 1990s, commissioning a research study about their cooperation and complicity with the Nazi regime (Hayes, 2004). DEGUSSA CEOs were among the founders of the foundation Foundation ‘Remembrance Responsibility Future’ (Stiftung Erinnerung Verantwortung Zukunft). They have pledged to compensate former forced labourers under the NS regime, and ‘to keep the memory of National Socialist persecution alive, to accept responsibility in the here and now, and to actively shape it for the future and for subsequent generations’ (Stiftung Erinnerung Verantwortung Zukunft, 2023).

In my school-time in the 1980s, there was no information whatsoever about this part of grim history in the ‘Grimm city’, even though NS-history was part of our school curriculum. To me, it still seems ironic that my Turkish father knew about this and we did not. Back in the 1970s/80s, he must have been close to sources dismantling the well-kept taboo of Hanau’s dirty history. Due to his memory, this industrial neighbourhood was part of an uncanny topography.

In his essay Thoughts on 8 May 1995, Zafer Şenocak reflects on the implications of German capitulation and the end of World War II for both Turks and Germans. Writing about his own father, who, as a young man, had witnessed the war only through his radio in Turkey, he considers the fact that his father was ‘neither victim nor perpetrator’ a ‘vantage point’ (Şenocak, 2000: 59). Critically commenting on German memory rituals in the 1990s, he demands laying a stronger focus on the perpetrators, drawing a line to contemporary racism in united Germany.

United Germany is that country in which four thousand to five thousand attacks and transgressions against ‘foreigners’ (Fremde) take place annually. The foreigners in Germany, most of whom have been here for a long time, barely bother to reflect on the history of the Germans. (Şenocak, 2000: 60. Translation by Leslie A. Adelson.)

My father reflected on Germany’s history and often referred to National socialist ideology as the source of contemporary racism. In this way, he was also very critical of my German grandparents’ ‘Mitläufertum’ (meaning they were passive followers) during the Third Reich. His children—my brother and me—would not relate this directly to their German grandparents, though, because of the familial taboo around addressing the topic. We knew about my grandfather’s ‘Ent-Nazifizierung’ and degradation during the denazification process, but we never knew what he had done as a soldier in Russia. There were tales of grandma ‘defending her Jewish help’, but no tales about what happened to that Jewish woman in the end.

‘You should marry a German’, a drunk relative from my German family once told me, ‘Then it will diminish in the mendelizing process.’ (Du solltest einen Deutschen heiraten. Dann mendelt sich das wieder aus.“) She said that some weeks after the murderous Solingen attack had happened.

For me, personally, Hanau’s Nazi past was simply not present, whereas the Nazi past in my family was a taboo. It was only after the Hanau attack in 2020 that things changed for me, since yet ‘another’ terrorist attack happened to take place in my hometown, triggering personal feelings and memories. Blurred memories reemerged, and separate bits and pieces of both personal and collective Turkish-Migrant memories fell into place. Combined with my academic work on the immigrational culture and memory formed a new conscience, which I find mirrored and echoed in writings about Hanau. I suffered and raged with each racist attack and terrorist act that has happened since ‘Hoyerswerda’, ‘Mölln’ and ‘Solingen’ (which sums up to a timeline of over three decades). But it culminated into a ‘coming out’ when it came to Hanau. 19 February 2020, brought about a fusion of individual and collective memory for me, personally, which I intend to productively transform and integrate into my academic work.

Hanau, Topography of Terror and Empowerment

‘Never Again!’—(‚Nie Wieder’) is a motto and a firm belief of contemporary German society to never again repeat the crimes of the Nazi period. Yet, the number of racist attacks on Jewish and migrant people in Germany is constantly rising. Meanwhile, far-right political parties, especially the ‘Alternative für Deutschland’ (AfD), constantly and significantly grow in terms of members and votes. German Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s dictum of the lone-wolf perpetrator (Einzeltäter) committing a crime that does not count and, as a result, can soon be forgotten, seems to have been proven wrong by such statistics in the younger history of United Germany. His memorable banalisation of the far-right perpetrators through coining the term ‘scatterbrained youth’ (‘jugendliche Wirrköpfe’), seems even more shallow and mistaken than in its time in the 1990s.

Germany of the 2020s is a country of immigration and a society formed by millions of cross-cultural biographies. Even if they form a minority, it is through the confrontation with terrorist attacks and incidents that this minority, or rather, these minorities form their own special cultural memory. Being attacked on racist grounds by far-right extremists addresses aspects of ethnicity and contexts of belonging and exclusion as ‘a group’. It addresses concepts of exclusion as ‘a minority’, as suspected ‘migrants’ who can ‘return to their home-countries’. In claiming belonging and participation, these groups refer to their specific migrant memory, which is formed of individual memories of immigration, coping, arriving, and settling. This individual process is reflected in the cultural production of numerous literary and theatrical works, movies, installations, and performances. Through cultural production and reception, migrant memory slowly enters the German collective memory, inscribing migrant memory into German memory (Adelson, 2005).

Through dealing with each terrorist attack, this process is further enhanced. Unlike in the 1990s, when racist attacks were conceived more as an affair migrant communities had to deal with on their own, attacks from far-right extremism seem to have shifted to the centre of German civil society. Given the public and official political response to attacks in Halle or Hanau, things seem to have changed since 1991. This process started with the ‘discovery’ of the NSU terror in 2011, shedding light on the dubious role of state institutions in the matter. But the ‘NSU’ covered several places in Germany, whereas ‘Hanau 2021’ once more stigmatised a certain place as a place of memory. Hanau as ‘yet another’ place of racist terror marked a specific change in dealing with the fact that the name of the town became a lieu de mémoire. It sparked a significant reaction of self-empowerment among the migrant community. Civil society—represented by the families and friends of the victims who formed an Initiative, and represented by artists of the ‘Kollektiv ohne Namen’—formed an alliance with the political state (represented by the German government and the Hanau Administration), which sends a clear and publicly visible message: ‘Hanau stands together’. And this seems to go beyond the generally shallow promise of such messages. Hanau’s administration seeks to file complaints and defend the families against the perpetrator’s father, and when German filmmaker Helmut Boll announced an unauthorised project on the Hanau attack, Hanau’s Mayor intervened (together with the victims’ families) publicly with an open letter (Kaminsky et al., 2021).

The artists of the ‘Kollektiv without a Name’, with their mural, have made sure that the names and portraits of the murdered victims of the Hanau Attack are honoured and remain present in the public space. They have made it their claim to secure the (murdered and surviving) migrants’ position firmly at the heart of ‘their’ migrant society, in ‘their’ home country, Germany. Through this act of standing against the ideological aims of the racist perpetrator, they contribute to the formation of a shared history and a shared memory, defining Hanau as a memory site, a lieu de mémoire that focuses on the future, rather than on the past.Footnote 1

(For Hasan Yeşilada and Ilse Yeşilada, born Reinhardt)