On 29 May 1993, Gürsün İnce (27), Hatice Genç (18), Gülüstan Öztürk (12), Hülya Genç (9), and Saime Genç (4) were murdered in an arson attack on their home in Solingen. Fourteen other people were injured, some of them seriously.
The perpetrators were four young men with links to the far-right milieu in Solingen.
The event was reported upon far beyond Germany and was linked internationally to fears about a resurgence of right-wing sentiment in reunified Germany. It has given rise to questions about how to politically deal with the far right, questions about feeling at home in Germany and, above all, questions about remembrance culture in a society marked by migration. However, the attack in Solingen was far more than just an event. In terms of the number of victims and public attention, it represents the apex in a long series of attacks on immigrants, refugees, and Jewish institutions in the early 1990s.
The attack in Solingen and the time in which it took place have taken a firm place in post-migration remembrance, influencing the way that similar events based on far-right motives in the present are interpreted.
It is important to realise that political-extremist violence always affects specific people, yet it is also always exemplary, sending a message to many more people – beyond the act itself. I would like to call the first group those directly affected and the second group those indirectly ‘intended’. This distinction is so important because remembrance work often focuses on those directly affected. To this day, the way those who were ‘intended’ experienced the events is not very present in German remembrance culture. However, if we want to understand the often-ambivalent relationship of people with a migration background to their identification with Germany as their homeland and their relationship to its institutions, then we need to consider the event, its context, the traumas it triggered, and how the event was dealt with. In doing so, it is important to include the perspective of those ‘intended’. The attack in Solingen is not an event that has been concluded with a trial and a memorial, but rather a building block in the historical experience of people with a personal or family history of migration. Even if they did not experience the specific event themselves or cannot name it. The perspective of this group on the events and their significance is different from that of those not affected and not intended – the majority society. The inclusion of such a perspective in a larger German culture of remembrance holds a considerable democratic and anti-racist potential, emanating from people with a history of migration or other ‘intended’ people.
The context: the 1993 Solingen attack does not stand alone, but is rather embedded in historical and current developments. Germany reunited at the beginning of the 1990s. At the same time as the resulting national euphoria, the number of people seeking refuge in Germany from the Balkans, Kurdish regions, the Middle East, Africa, and other regions increased, partly because the collapse of the prior world order was accompanied by insecurity in many regions. They were joined by ethnic Germans from Russia and Jewish ‘quota refugees’.
Disrespectful and dehumanising terms such as ‘asylum tourism’ and ‘glut of asylum seekers’ circulated in the media and public discourse, with talk of people exploiting the welfare state. The ‘Unwort des Jahres’ (Worst Word of the Year) for 1993 was ‘Überfremdung’, a word used to indicate fears of the country becoming too ‘foreign’. The bourgeois parties were concerned about the rise of organised right-wing extremism, right-wing extremist parties, and right-wing extremist violence. In the so-called ‘asylum law compromise’ of 26 May 1993, three days before the attack in Solingen, the CDU, SPD, and FDP changed the constitution’s fundamental right to asylum in order to ‘take the wind’ out of the right-wing extremists’ sails. The media and politicians adopted the right’s framing of the developments, to an extent giving into their demands, thus allowing the arguments of the far right to enter the mainstream.
This linguistic dehumanisation was accompanied by violence. Between 1990 and the Solingen murders in 1993, there were a series of attacks on people, accommodations, and buildings. The riots and sieges of refugee and contract worker accommodations in Hoyerswerda (17 and 23 September 1991) and Rostock-Lichtenhagen (22 to 26 August 1992), after which refugees and migrant workers were ‘evacuated’ from the city and in some cases subsequently deported, have become infamous. This was a complete success for the politics of violence. Law enforcement officers either watched, looked the other way, were not on scene at all, or were overwhelmed.
The list of right-wing acts of violence that took place in East Germany at that time is long. However, the problem was not limited to East Germany: on 23 November 1992, three Turkish women were killed in an arson attack on their home by right-wing extremists in Mölln in northern Germany. There was also an attack on a memorial to the deported Jews at the Putlitzbrücke on 29 August 1992, and the Jewish barracks in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp were destroyed by arson on 26 September 1992. In retrospect, the attacks were directed against everything viewed as not belonging to Germany. German civil society undertook many large actions such as chains of light, demonstrations, and concerts protesting the right. In retrospect, it is fair to ask the critical question of whether these actions lacked the perspective of the far right’s ‘intended’ victims.
At the political level, a memorial service was held after the murders in Solingen (as well as after the attack in Mölln), which was attended by numerous public figures, such as Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker, Labour Minister Norbert Blüm, and Minister President of North Rhine-Westphalia, Johannes Rau. Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl was conspicuously absent. His press secretary justified his absence with other appointments, pointing out that the Federal Government was not going to ‘engage in condolence tourism’. This had a lasting impact on how the ‘Chancellor of Unity’ was and is remembered, and left its mark, too, on the self-positioning of many migrants. What remained was a vacuum in relation to the importance of the self, one’s own security, and belonging in and to Germany, a vacuum often later filled by Turkish nationalist groups.
For people with a Turkish migration history in West Germany in particular, the Solingen attack came at precisely the point in their own biographies when Germany had conclusively become their new home, with any idea of ‘returning’ to Turkey put to rest.
The Genç family was a prime example of this. Society’s inability to integrate the history of migration as an integral part of reunified Germany and to defend it as an achievement, even to the right, has had wide-ranging impacts, including on the way people understand their relationship to the country. The fact that the term ‘xenophobia’ is still being used in this and similar contexts years later adopts the perpetrators’ view of the victims, implying that the people in question are indeed outsiders. It also suggests that their presence is part of the problem, thus reversing the roles of victim and perpetrator.
The murderous attack in Solingen is now commemorated in several places in Germany. Debates about locating a memorial in the city centre of Solingen, which proved politically impossible, the renaming of a remote street in Bonn, and a memorial in Frankfurt, which was erected privately and then damaged so often that it had to be dismantled, all speak to a similar dynamic. The events are being remembered, but it is a struggle for remembrance always accompanied by resistance. Parallels to the erection of a memorial at a central location in Hanau for the victims of the terrorist rampage that took place there, discussions about memorials for NSU victims, and recurring acts of vandalism against remembrance sites all indicate that the problems faced in the aftermath of Solingen are not one offs. For the ‘intended’ victims of these attacks, this is all a part of an ongoing series of experiences of right-wing extremism, loss, and questions about post-immigration identities and affiliations in Germany. History continues to have an impact in the present, and past events cannot be assigned to the past by a trial, conviction, and memorial plaque.
Mainstream society, on the other hand, does integrate direct victims into its rituals of remembrance. Mevlüde Genç, who lost two daughters, two granddaughters, and a niece in the Solingen attack, received the Federal Cross of Merit and the Order of Merit of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia in 1996 because she spoke out in favour of reconciliation and tolerance after the attack. Since 2018, the same state government has honoured special services to tolerance, reconciliation between cultures, and the peaceful coexistence of religions with the ‘Mevlüde Genç Medal’.
These are positive signs, but they are also rituals of coping via which the majority society assures itself that the people and events have been integrated into its own memory. What is left out is the memory of the ‘intended’ victims themselves.
When people with a migration biography speak about the experience of the post-reunification years, they speak of a trauma with lasting impacts. Parents who set up fire extinguishers in different rooms and attach a rope ladder to the windows, who keep a packed suitcase in the car because Germany felt and feels like an unsafe place – these experiences continue to have an impact. The events of the early 1990s have not been completed and dealt with; their impacts echo through the long series of apparent failures with the NSU, the Hanau attack in 2020, recurring attacks on mosques, the discovery of right-wing networks in security institutions, the presence of the AfD with its rhetoric seeping into the mainstream, as well as the ‘intended’ peoples’ experiences of racism. The idea that a more or less satisfactory examination of the events will bring them to a close does not apply to the group of the ‘intended’. A pluralistic society needs a pluralistic culture of remembrance that gives more space to the perspectives of both the direct and ‘intended’ victims of such acts. Only when their memories are also integrated into the collective memory, when their memories experience belonging, when their perspective is adopted by the majority, will it be possible for them to view their position in this society in a way not completely overshadowed by the events of the past. These perspectives and learning experiences can also raise awareness among the broader population of how patterns from the past repeat in the present, making it possible for society to counter them together.
