Germany’s Cultural Suicide

Flight EZY8629 from London Gatwick touched down at Berlin Brandenburg at 05:40am, and with it came an unexpected pang of nostalgia for Berlin’s old Tegel Airport.

I had flown there in 2020, shortly before it was closed and repurposed as a refugee arrival and accommodation centre.

I had been training as an English teacher with the Berlin School of English at the time, and used to love taking the S- and U-Bahns from Friedrichstraße to Charlottenburg, and Wilmersdorfer Straße to Fehrbelliner Platz to visit my aunt and uncle who lived nearby.

This time, I planned to take a bus from the airport to Rudow and then the U7 onwards; however, much had changed since I had last been in Berlin, and not all for the better.

Rudow, in southern Berlin’s Neukölln borough, is a quiet, peripheral residential area on the city’s outskirts: a suburban mix of houses, apartment blocks, and green spaces. 

Yet, as my morning train rattled through the grey dawn, an Arab man hobbled angrily down the aisle on child’s crutches, demanding money from sleepy commuters.

I was stunned. This is something I expect in London late at night. Not in Germany.

My fellow commuters ignored the man, quietly scrolling through their phones in what felt, at least to me, like a surreal scene; nobody bothered to challenge the charlatan.

Angela Merkel opened Germany’s borders to vast numbers of Syrian asylum seekers in late August and early September of 2015, but in 2020 I had noticed no real issues. 

New police data now shows that foreign nationals feature disproportionately in violent crimes, with sharp regional disparities, according to The European Conservative.

So, what changed? Was I simply unlucky that morning as I caught my train, or had something frayed in the city’s social fabric?

I suspect the answer is that the headline influx of one million migrants has since been eclipsed by hundreds-of-thousands more men from Africa and the Middle East.

The data confirms Germany received 113,236 asylum applications in 2025, 229,751 in 2024, and 329,000 in 2023—a cumulative total of 672,000, albeit on a declining trend.

Public sentiment appears to have shifted, too, with polling in recent years consistently showing immigration ranks among Germans’ top political concerns. 

“Wir schaffen das”—“We can do it”—Merkel’s famous words now feel, to many, more ambiguous in hindsight. 

As my train rattled along, the sun now rising over a city I love, I felt this too. 

German pork, beer, and mixed feelings

Later that same day, my uncle teasingly warned me it might not be wise to carry my British Army daysack as a rucksack in the city, given the changes since my last visit.

Over Bavarian pork and beer at ‘Zum Hax’nwirt’, a restaurant at the end of Gieselerstrasse and hardly a halal establishment, we joked that it might inflame passing jihadis.

Still, I felt conflicted. During my time at the Berlin School of English, I had met a very kind, young Iraqi man who had fled to the city and learned German fluently.

He was a refugee who was also studying English in our classes and had won a university scholarship. We smiled over photos I’d taken of Iraqi food in London.

He was a kind man, and, as a Christian, I struggle to reconcile Europe’s clear and horrifying migration issues with the kind and decent individuals caught up in them.

I felt especially moved when he shared how he once scrambled for cover during a car bomb explosion in Baghdad; he smiled sadly during the telling, but one could tell it hurt.

His story reminded me that we are all God’s children and immigration ultimately has a human face. Yet open borders cannot be justified by individual stories alone.

Lives like his sit alongside burning questions about mass migration and, if Douglas Murray’s Strange Death of Europe is to be believed, our impending civilisational suicide.

This is well illustrated at Tegel, where Berlin Refugee Council reports reveal unsafe, mixed-gender housing that fails to protect vulnerable Ukrainian women and children.

Housed alongside African and Middle Eastern men, aka, “asylum seekers”, there has been documented sexual harassment, violence, and at least one unverified rape claim.

Small wonder Germans are at breaking point: common sense seems all but abandoned.

Standing beside the crumbling, graffiti-covered remains of the Berlin Wall, I felt the country’s modern political anger take on a chilling relevance, too.

Here, East Germans had once rallied against communist tyranny with the cry “Wir sind das Volk”; that is, “We are the people!” in a chant later echoed at PEGIDA rallies.

These thoughts and more swirled through my mind as I boarded my train at Berlin Hauptbahnhof, bound for my next stop: Hamburg. 

The ICE north cut through fields and forests that looked much as they always have, but it was the stations, towns, and cities along the way that felt different.

FCK AFD: political graffiti

Hamburg is a fairly attractive North German port city, and I was meeting an old friend from nearby Schleswig-Holstein. We got coffees and croissants and took in the sights. 

Like in Berlin, however, one couldn’t help but notice what felt like a big demographic shift, and my friend, a teacher, later opined that German cities were in decline. 

Checking into my hotel late at night, I certainly felt profoundly unsafe walking past shuttered shops near Reeperbahn Street, with scowling foreign men out and about.

Unlike Berlin, however, Hamburg is a rich industrial powerhouse and no sanctuary for artists, clubbers, or left-wing idealists. It is a city packed with private banks that caters to a large, wealthy portion of northern Germany.

During our sightseeing, I nonetheless noticed a crude piece of political graffiti along the waterfront: “FCK AFD”, accompanied by a pink communist hammer and sickle drawing.

The execution was rough: the symbol appeared to have been smeared onto a metal electrical cabinet with a pink marker pen rather than carefully painted. The blackish lettering looked hurried and uneven, as though scrawled in haste. 

The restaurants behind provided an absurd contrast to the ugly politics of the street art.

The AfD (Alternative for Germany) is an ultra-conservative German political party known for its nationalist, anti-immigration, and Eurosceptic views. The party is led by Alice Weidel.

It has also advocated remigration policies, a term sometimes interpreted as implying the forced or incentivised return of African and Muslim immigrants and their descendants.

Communist graffiti may tell one story, but the AfD’s rise to second place in the Bundestag suggests another: my friend put it bluntly as evidence of growing public anger about the Islamification and Africanisation of Europe.

The next day I caught another train to my final destination, travelling from Hamburg Hauptbahnhof to the small town of Bad Arolsen in central Germany, where I have family.

When I left Hamburg, my thoughts were tied to my friend, his family, the unsettling lack of street safety, and communist graffiti. Twenty-four hours later, I discovered how narrowly I had escaped a mass stabbing.

The very spot where I’d been standing on platform 13 became a bloodbath, with 18 people injured before the attacker was stopped.

What had become of Germany? 

Bad Arolsen: from SS garrison to refugee reception centre

I’ve always loved the town of Bad Arolsen, from its Baroque palace and wooded hills to its quiet surrounding villages. As a child, visits to my German grandmother meant forest walks, ice cream in town, cake, and long afternoons at the local swimming pool.

Strolling past 18th-century architecture and the grand palace where the Prince of Waldeck and Pyrmont still resides, you would never suspect the town’s darker history.

Under the Nazis, the town hosted a regional SS garrison and administrative hub, complete with purpose-built barracks, training grounds, and forced-labour sites.

Today, it hosts quite a different kind of government administrative hub, namely the Hessian Initial Reception Centre for Refugees (HEAE), operated on behalf of the state.

My German cousin, who works for the NGO Johanniter-Unfall-Hilfe integrating asylum seekers there, sees this centre from the inside.

Her everyday work sits right at the heart of an intense national debate, where left-wing elites often insist that the country must welcome migrants as a ‘penance’ for WW2.

Yet, can a white-majority nation, shaped by Christian heritage and post-1945 liberal democracy, sustain mass migration from Islamic and sub-Saharan African societies? 

My cousin believes Germany can manage the challenge. I remain less certain.

I love the town, yet the presence of this centre unsettles me: I worry that rural Germany may increasingly face issues more commonly associated with bigger cities like Berlin and Hamburg.

Already, Die Zeit, a respected German newspaper, reports that an armed resident at the centre triggered a major police operation after staff discovered several knives; one can only shudder at what might have unfolded.

Leaving Bad Arolsen to return to England, then, I found myself thinking about the unusual layers of history, personal and political, imbued across Germany for me. 

As the news of Abdul Ballout’s attack still hangs over the country, I am left with the grim conviction that Germany is not merely changing; it is committing a slow form of cultural suicide.

The same streets that once felt the stamp of Nazi jackboots now host an ever-growing swell of very different invaders—or refugees—depending on who you ask.