Being Black in Germany has never been easy. Elections in eastern states could make it harder still

ERFURT, Germany (AP) — It was a balmy summer night in 2020, shortly after the lifting of Germany’s first COVID-19 lockdown, and Omar Diallo and two friends from his home country of Guinea wanted to celebrate Eid al-Adha, the Muslim festival of sacrifice.

“We were enjoying life, playing music, walking through the city at night — we just wanted to be together again and have a good time,” Diallo, 22, told The Associated Press in Erfurt, in the eastern state of Thuringia.

He was not prepared for how the day would end. Suddenly Diallo and his friends were confronted by three black-clad white men.

“They were shouting: ‘What do you want here, f-——- foreigners, get out’!” Diallo remembered.

“First there were three, then five, seven — they were surrounding us from all sides. We couldn’t run away, and then they started chasing us,” he said.

At some point Diallo managed to call the police, and when the officers finally arrived, the attackers ran away. One of his friends was beaten up so badly that he had to be hospitalized.

“I simply tried to survive,” Diallo said. “I hadn’t done anything wrong. It all happened only because of my skin color.”

Being Black in Germany has always meant exposure to racism, from everyday humiliations to deadly attacks. In eastern Germany, the risk can be even greater.

After World War II, West Germany became a democratic, diverse society but in East Germany, which was run by a communist dictatorship until the end of 1989, residents barely had any contact with people of different ethnicities and were not allowed to travel freely abroad.

Experts say that specifically in Thuringia, radical far-right forces have created an environment that’s hostile toward minorities, including Black people.

Now, with the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, Black Germans and African migrants like Diallo are growing increasingly concerned.

Thuringia, which has a population of 2.1 million,holds state elections on Sept. 1, and the fiercely anti-immigration AfD is leading the polls, on 30%.

In 2023, the NGO Ezra, which helps victims of far-right, racist and antisemitic violence, documented 85 racist attacks in Thuringia, down only slightly from 88 attacks in 2022, which Ezra described as “an all-time high of right-wing and racist violence” in the state.

“In recent years, an extreme right-wing movement has formed in Thuringia, which has contributed to a noticeable ideological radicalization of its followers. Politically, the Alternative for Germany party is the main beneficiary,” Ezra and a consortium of organizations tracking racism wrote in their annual report.

AfD’s Thuringia branch is particularly radical and was put under official surveillance by the domestic intelligence service four years ago as a “proven right-wing extremist” group.

“Authoritarian and populist forces, which are becoming very strong here now, harbor a great danger in Thuringia,” says Doreen Denstaedt, Thuringia’s minister for migration, justice and consumer protection.

Denstaedt, the daughter of a Black father from Tanzania and a white German mother, was born and grew up in Thuringia.

The 46-year-old member of the Green party said that growing up in Communist East Germany, she was “always the only Black child.” As a teenager, she was never allowed to go home on her own because of the risk of racist attacks, and she sometimes suffered racist slurs in her school.

“I actually experienced myself that people called me a foreigner, which really confused me at first, because I was born in Saalfeld” in Thuringia, Denstaedt said.

She fears that in the current political climate, racist narratives will become acceptable in the middle of society.

“My biggest concern is that people do not question (these prejudices), especially if they are not affected themselves,” she said.

It’s not exactly clear how many Black people live in Germany nowadays, as different ethnicities are not documented in official statistics, but estimates put the number of people of African descent at 1.27 million. More than 70% were born in Germany, according to Mediendienst Integration, which tracks migration issues in the country.

Germany’s history of racial discrimination begins long before the Nazis began excluding, deporting and ultimately murdering Black people in the 1930s and 1940s.

The German Empire held numerous colonies in Africa from 1884 until the end of World War I. These included territories in present-day Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, Namibia, Cameroon, Togo and Ghana.

The German government has only recently started dealing with the injustices committed during that period. In 2021, President Frank-Walter Steinmeier called on Germans to face the country’s cruel colonial past, and in 2023, he apologized for colonial-era killings in Tanzania over a century ago.

Daniel Egbe, a 58-year-old chemist from Cameroon who moved to Thuringia in 1994 to study, says he’s shocked how little Germans know about their colonial history. He says this ignorance may also factor into the unequal treatment of Black people.

“I’ve been teaching classes in school,” Egbe told the AP. “I tell them a bit about myself and especially the fact that Cameroon was a German colony. Many students don’t know anything about Africa or about the German past and it must be put on the map.”

Egbe, who took German citizenship in 2003, founded AMAH, an organization that helps university students and migrants from Africa when they experience discrimination in the city of Jena, in eastern Thuringia.

He’s worried about the rise of the AfD but has no intention of leaving.

“We won’t leave, we will do our part to change this society,” he said. “People are mostly afraid of what and who they don’t know. We have to change things through education.”

As for Diallo, the Guinean who was attacked in Erfurt four years ago, he also vowed to help improve the situation for Black people in Germany.

Even though the attack traumatized him, it also empowered him to fight for justice, he said. A year ago, he enrolled in university in Munich to study law, but he still visits Erfurt frequently, where he supports Youth without Borders, a network of young migrants.

“I don’t exactly know yet how I’m going to change Germany, but I know I will,” he said.