AT 6:00 ON the evening of November 23, 2015, a crowd began to converge on the expansive open square known as Theaterplatz in central Dresden. At first, their numbers were small—just a few hundred, some carrying homemade signs or German flags—but by 7:00, the crowd had swelled to seven or eight thousand. For the next hour, they listened attentively to a succession of speakers who took to the small rostrum, applauding or waving their flags in appreciation, and then they broke to begin an orderly march through the empty streets of downtown.
Given their good manners and benign appearance—the crowd was well dressed and skewed toward early middle age—one aspect of the proceedings that the uninitiated might have found baffling was the scores of German police in riot gear who kept watch over the speechmaking in Theaterplatz, and who flanked the marchers in their progress through the streets. That gathering, however, was just the latest in a string of rallies that had taken place every Monday night in Dresden over the previous year, and which had made the city in eastern Germany one of the tensest flash points in Europe’s deepening immigration crisis.
What gave Dresden a starring role in that crisis was the creation there in October 2014 of an organization called Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West, more commonly known by its German acronym, PEGIDA. An umbrella group for various German right-wing and anti-immigration groups, PEGIDA’s past marches had occasionally been marked by violence, sparked both by neo-Nazis and skinheads within its ranks and by leftist counterdemonstrators. By the autumn of 2015, however, a combination of the heavy police presence and the efforts of PEGIDA leaders to purge their most extremist members had imposed a calming effect. The police kept a close watch for “hooligan” elements and anyone who appeared intoxicated, while the Theaterplatz speakers struck a civil tone. Still, the immigrant and minority communities of Dresden knew to stay well away from downtown on Monday nights. This included a rather recent arrival to the city from Syria, twenty-three-year-old Majd Ibrahim.
From Greece, Majd and his two companions from Homs, Amjad and Ammar, had traveled the migrant trail through Eastern Europe and reached southern Germany by mid-August. Majd had intended to continue on alone to Sweden, where he’d heard winning asylum was easiest, but those plans were dashed when the three friends were pulled off a northbound train by German police. After being shunted between different migrant holding facilities, they were brought to Dresden in mid-September. There, the local social-welfare agency had placed the Syrians in a small attic apartment on the outskirts of town, shared with six other asylum seekers, as they waited for their petitions for resident status to wend their way through the German legal system.
For refugees from Homs to find themselves in Dresden held a certain paradox. The city, infamous for having been largely destroyed by Allied bombing in World War II, lay in what until 1989 had been East Germany, and it was in the east where the anti-immigration movement had taken deepest root since German unification. That discontent had reached a new boiling point amid the migrant crisis in the summer of 2015, when close to a million would-be refugees had flooded into Europe—the majority from Syria and Iraq, and the majority making for Germany. In Dresden and other eastern German towns where the migrants were housed, that had translated into isolated beatings of migrants and arson attacks on their shelters. When I visited Majd on November 23, it had been just a week since terrorist strikes in Paris killed 130, and anger against the migrants—and especially any from Muslim countries—was at a new fever pitch.
“There have been quite a few incidents here just this past week,” Majd told me. “A lot of the guys won’t go to the city center at all right now.”
Certainly they wouldn’t be heading downtown that evening, a Monday, when the PEGIDA activists were gathering in Theaterplatz.
But against this atmosphere of tension, Majd and his Syrian companions had developed an easy camaraderie with the other migrants in the attic apartment. Meals had become a new preoccupation, and two of their roommates, from India, had installed themselves as the lords of the kitchen.
“Their food is much better than ours,” Majd explained. “They give us a list of what to buy, and we go to the market for them, but they do almost all of the cooking.”
As he waited for his asylum petition to work its way through the German bureaucracy, Majd passed the time taking German-language classes offered by the local university and trying to stay in touch with his family and friends back in Syria through Facebook and the occasional telephone call. What he didn’t spend a lot of time doing was monitoring the situation in his homeland, especially all the talk about cease-fires or foreign-brokered peace talks; he had been optimistic so many times before, only to see the fighting resume, that he now refused to get his hopes up at all. Plus, he simply saw no way out of the morass.
“The militant groups will never agree to a peace where Assad stays in power, but what happens if Assad is forced out? Then not only are the Alawites finished, but so are the Christians and the Ismailis [a moderate Shiite splinter sect] and anyone else who isn’t Sunni. So that is why I think Assad is the best out of all bad choices. With anyone else, I think Syria is destroyed forever.”
Majd had spoken frequently of his intention to return to Syria someday, and that afternoon I asked if he could foresee a time when such a return would be possible. He thought for a long time. “Minimum, ten years from now,” he said. “We have a saying in Syria: ‘Blood brings blood.’ Now everyone will want to take revenge for what has been done to them these past years, so it will just go on and on. Blood brings blood. I don’t think it will end until everyone who has taken up a gun in this war is dead. Even if the killing speeds up, that will still take at least ten years.”
By coincidence, I was with Majd the following day, when, returning to his communal apartment, he found a letter awaiting him. It was from the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, and it informed Majd that a background check on him had just been completed and that no problems were found; it was the last major hurdle in his petition for residency, making it all but certain that Majd would now be allowed to stay in Germany for the next three years. Setting the letter aside, the college student from Homs crossed to one of the attic’s dormer windows and sat staring out at the street for a long time.