ERFURT, Germany (news agencies) — 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 media 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.
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