The Hanau shooting suspect was marinated in an online world of racist fantasy and conspiracy theories
AT A RECENT ceremony in Berlin to commemorate the victims of the Nazis, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany’s president, issued a bleak warning: “Hatred and abuse are spreading,” he said, in front of an audience that included his Israeli counterpart. Having imagined that “the spectres of the past would vanish with time”, Germans now see them “raising their ugly heads again in a new guise”.
Several German politicians noted that the massacre slots into a grim pattern of recent far-right violence. Last June Walter Lübcke, a regional politician from Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union who had backed her refugee policy, was shot dead at home in Kassel. On Yom Kippur, in October, a young man armed himself with home-made grenades and assault rifles and attempted to carry out a massacre at a synagogue in Halle.
A separate concern centres on the far-right Alternative for Germany party. Since the refugee crisis in 2015-16 the AfD has shifted ever-rightwards, fostering racial tensions that some say contribute to an atmosphere in which violence thrives. Its politicians delight in portraying shisha bars as shady dens of money-laundering and other nefarious activities.
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