The atmosphere in our carriage was rather muted when the police and refugees had left the train. I spent the rest of the journey discussing the proceedings with a young Austrian who said she felt rather shaken and reminded of another time in our shared history where people had been taken off trains. I didn’t enjoy the proceedings either, but frankly felt there were no parallels to our murky past. This is different, very much a result of modern global and European politics.
At one of the stations in Austria people from the Caritas were handing out free lunches and drinks to refugees and people here in Munich are still making a great effort to help. A website has been set up through which the volunteers can enlists for shifts at the main station and elsewhere. The website also publishes addresses where to donate clothes, etc. as well as current lists of what kind of items they would like people to donate. All things considered things are running fairly smoothly here.
Nonetheless people are beginning to get worried. Not so much about the refugees as much as the radicalization in the political arena. The far right is beginning to say things publicly which most people thought impossible until now (like the stuff Akif Pirincci came up with in Dresden on 19 October. Fortunately his publishers reacted immediately and stopped selling his novels.) Suddenly the batty, scattered few are not only sizeable in number but also almost permanently visible and unashamedly aggressive.
We ourselves have begun to divide people into good Germans (for the refugees) and bad ones (Pegida, etc.). A development I find really worrying, because it pits people against each other and tends to make real discourse between them impossible. A friend recently said that the situation is beginning to feel a little like Weimar. She was referring to the ferocious knife attack on Henriette Reker (newly elected mayor of Cologne) by a right wing extremist. It was not a comparison I liked, but one I couldn’t brush off so easily as the Austrian’s.