A new museum of German immigration goes online this week, just as public debate on this emotive issue turns toxic. With testimony of 40 eyewitnesses and history of 1,000 objects, the online museum (domid.org) – through its website and a virtual reality interface – explores modern Germany’s ambivalence to new arrivals, encapsulated in 1965 by author Max Frisch: “We sought economic migrants, we got people.”
Half a century after the so-called Gastarbeiter wave, Germany is struggling again, this time with aftershocks of the 2015-2016 refugee crisis that saw over one million people arrive in Germany. Amid ongoing public safety concerns and integration challenges, chancellor Angela Merkel is under political siege as, day by day, waves of scandal over flawed asylum procedures encroach closer on her Berlin chancellery.
News that 1,200 people were granted asylum in the northern port city of Bremen, despite not meeting the criteria, is building into a nationwide scandal that could undermine Germany’s political response to the crisis – and the woman at its helm who insisted in 2015: “We can manage this.”
The question now is: at what cost was the refugee crisis managed, and who knew what – and when – about serious problems in the asylum system?
Asylum officials in the northern city of Bremen have hit back at claims of incompetence and corruption, including claims that they manipulated documents and took bribes to grant asylum papers.
Instead, they said, regional offices came under huge pressure from the federal asylum agency (BAMF) to reduce an asylum backlog, and that quality of asylum decisions suffered drastically as a result.
Applications
Leaning on BAMF to reduce the piles of asylum applications was the federal government in Berlin. But Dr Merkel’s former chief of staff Peter Altmaier, parachuted in as a refugee co-ordinator in 2015, insisted this week that the chancellery had no idea of the scale of the problem now revealed.
Mr Altmaier, now economics minister, claims he learned of the Bremen scandal from the media and insisted the federal interior ministry – not Dr Merkel’s chancellery – was in charge of the refugee question.
The asylum scandal was notably absent from a two-page interview with the chancellor in Sunday's <em>Frankfurter Allgemeine</em> newspaper
But documents leaked on Sunday show how BAMF executives warned in confidential reports to the chancellery that, as early as 2014, it was evident that there were inadequate controls to oversee the rising asylum wave.
"Given this situation, it cannot be explained why it was assumed that BAMF could even begin to manage the considerable rise in people seeking refuge," warned former BAMF chief Frank-Jürgen Weise in a 2017 report, leaked to the Bild am Sonntag newspaper.
Attacks are raining down on Dr Merkel over the asylum scandal, with even her Social Democrat (SPD) coalition partner warning on Sunday: “Angela Merkel can no longer leave the public in the dark.”
Yet the asylum scandal was notably absent from a two-page interview with the chancellor in Sunday's edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper.
Instead Dr Merkel pressed for this month’s EU summit to secure its outer border and finally agree on how to share the refugee burden. The price for not doing so, she said, could now be seen in Italy’s political uncertainty.
Harmonised
Dr Merkel insisted the EU needed a harmonised asylum system with unified standards, and a real EU border police with full powers to act independently of national police.
“In the final stage we need a common European refugee body that carries out asylum procedures at the borders on the basis of a common European asylum law,” she said. Failing to do so bodes ill for the passport-free Schengen area, she said, already suspended in Germany’s border region to Austria since 2015.
This week Berlin and Vienna announced plans to step up checks of freight trains after around 900 people were discovered hiding on board a train in a bid to get into Germany last year.
While Germany steps up plans for so-called “anchor centres” – centralised one-stop camps to house and process asylum seekers’ applications – Austria’s conservative far-right coalition is to cut by a third welfare for non-nationals unless they reach an intermediate B1 language level.
Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz plans to use Vienna’s six-month EU presidency from July to push an even tougher line on immigration, refugees and EU borders that reflects voter concerns.
Without mentioning Dr Merkel by name, he used a recent German newspaper interview to attack the “morally superior people in the EU who feel the need to forcibly educate others”.
Back in Germany, an emboldened far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) are determined to pin the asylum scandal on Dr Merkel – and build further their voter base. At a weekend gathering AfD leader Alexander Gauland called for a full parliamentary inquiry into Dr Merkel’s asylum policies and later dismissed Germany’s Nazi crimes as “just bird shit in 1,000 years of successful German history”.
