Walls scorched by fire, roof charred by flames, the Hotel Husarenhof presents an incongruous sight in this neat east German town with its well-preserved medieval square and centuries old waterworks beside the Spree river.
In 2015 the Husarenhof was repurposed to house a cosmopolitan mix of refugees awaiting their official paperwork. But in February this year, before the first immigrants could move in, the building burst into flame as a gathered crowd chanted anti-immigrant slogans.
In 2015, more than a million people registered for asylum in Germany and were sent to refugee processing centres across its 16 States on the basis of yearly tax receipts and population contributed by each region. The States further assigned asylum seekers to privately run facilities, like the Husarenhof.
Bautzen lies in Saxony, an under-populated State that has been assigned only five per cent of the total asylum seekers but has spawned a violent anti-immigrant called Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West (PEGIDA) that has shot to prominence by organising weekly marches of angry citizens ostensibly worried about the erosion of their Germanic identity.
Much of the violence has been directed at buildings earmarked to house refugees.
“Mayors hold a public meeting to say, we will be creating a facility for refugees here. And then one night, Poof, it is on fire,” said Miki Hermer of the Antonio Amadeau Stiftung(AAS), a private foundation monitoring Right-wing activity in Germany, “There have been no casualties yet, but if this continues — it is only a matter of time.”
The AAS has recorded over 196 acts of arson directed at refugee homes and shelters across Germany since the beginning of 2015. Yet, many who work closely with refugees believe that inefficient local bureaucracies have contributed to the rise of the Right-wing by presenting a relatively straightforward task as a near-impossible feat.
“The main problem with this supposed ‘immigration crisis’ is that we are treating it as a crisis,” said Peter Rausch, the laconic, chain-smoking manager of the Spree Hotel, the first privately-run refugee shelter in Bautzen, “One million people in a rich country of 80 million is not a crisis, it is a problem.”
The Spree Hotel was set up in 1993 as a business hotel on the outskirts of Bautzen, but struggled to attract customers. Mr. Rausch, who is German, acquired the property in 2000 after years of working in the hospitality business in the United Kingdom. (He sold it to an investor in 2007, but continues to manage it).
He tried to transform the property into a leisure hotel, and toyed with the idea of turning it into a care facility for the elderly, but nothing seemed to work. In the meantime, the population of Bautzen steadily shrank, from about 47,000 residents in 1995 to about 39,500 in the last census in 2014, making it harder and harder to improve business. In the summer of 2013, he learnt the local administration was struggling to house refugees and decided to help.
“We had people standing outside screaming ‘Heil Hitler’. We received death threats over e-mail,” Mr. Rausch said, “But there was no clear statement from the administration to either support us or shut us down.” The prevarication of the local government, in Mr. Rausch’s eyes, created an atmosphere of uncertainty that played into the hands of the rightwing.
Today, the Spree hosts 256 people from 19 different countries in small rooms with grey and white walls and blue carpeting. The hotel kitchen has been opened up for residents to cook their own meals and groceries are available at the local supermarket and a small shop, run by a former Spree resident, which stocks traditional Arabic foods.
The restaurant and bar have been turned into a common area that feels like a waiting lounge for the dispossessed fleeing the long, troubled arc of contemporary, post-World War history.
Mazar Al Masri, a 37 year old, for instance, has been at the Spree Hotel for over a year, in the hope that he may, for the first time in his life, have a place to belong to.
“I don’t have a country, I was born in the Mar Elias camp where my father came as a boy,” Mr. Al-Masri said, referring to the Palestinian refugee camp that was set up in Beirut in 1952 to house the victims of the Nakba, the 1948 exodus in which over 7,00,000 Palestinians were expelled from their ancestral lands to make way for the newly created state of Israel.
On another couch Nawaz Al Shammi, a 22 year old from Iraq, and Atayee Mohammed Sadiq, 27 year old from Afghanistan, both fleeing the chaos unleashed by the American invasion of their respective countries sit beside each other, staring at the television. In the kitchen, Pakistanis, Afghans, Bangladeshis, and Iranians, cook meals on an array of gas burners.
Abu Hala, a thickset Syrian in his mid forties, struggles to keep track of his two boisterous daughters as they bounce on his knees and play with his cell-phone. Seven months ago, Hala and his daughters went shopping to a market not far from his home in Damascus.
“When I came back several hours later, the battle-line between the government and rebels had shifted and my home lay across the front,” he said, his voice shaking, “I waited with my daughters in Damascus for seven months, but we couldn’t go home.”
He finally to Germany in November last year, but every month is consumed by hope for asylum, and worry for the family left behind: his wife, and his youngest daughter — stuck behind a warfront that slid down a couple of streets one morning, and cleaved his life into two.
In February this year, the German Cabinet passed a package of regulations to make it harder for many to gain asylum, and suspend family reunifications for 2 years; meaning that even if Abu Hala gets asylum status, it will be 2 years before the rest of his family can join him.
“At times, it seems like the system is designed to fail,” said Steffen Grundmann, a social worker at the Spree Hotel since August 2014, “Rather than directly say, sorry we will not take you, the authorities do it in another way.”
Whilst helping asylum seekers with their paperwork, Mr. Grundmann said he had noticed a clear pattern when it came to the tenure of residence granted to those seeking asylum.
“Single men with no families usually get 3 year residency, while those with families still stuck in Syria usually get one year residency — which means they can’t get their families over,” he said, adding that he knew of cases where Syrians who had residency were thinking of returning home because they couldn’t leave their families by themselves in Syria. “It’s like hanging a carrot before a donkey, except that after 2 years of paperwork, you suddenly take away the donkey.”
The prohibition on reunification is pushing vulnerable people to try ever more extreme measures to unite with their families in Germany.
Firas Al Habbal, the Arabic language translator at the Spree Hotel, was living in a refugee camp in Beirut in 2014 when he became one of the first Syrians to get asylum in Germany. He speaks fluent German and English and is starting university in October to become a medical engineer.
“Last year, my father came over as well,” he said, “The plan was that he would apply for residence and then get my mother over.” But with the new rules prohibiting family re-unification, his mother was left stranded in Istanbul. So one day last year, his 56-year-old mother jumped onto a flimsy rubber dinghy with a group of fellow refugees and crossed the Aegean Sea.
“She didn’t tell anyone she was going to do it,” said Habbal, laughing nervously, “Now she’s in a refugee camp in Munich, and I am trying to get her to Bautzen.”
In 1634, a great fire decimated most of Bautzen, except for a large wooden cottage with a tall, shingled roof shaped like a witch’s hat. Over the centuries, the “Hexenhaus”, or witch house as it came to known, survived fires, battles, and two world wars local legend says — by dint of a wandering gypsy’s prayers. The perfectly preserved Hexenhaus is a short walk from the Hotel Husarenhof’s charred ruins — two diverging tales of fire marked by an immigrant’s blessing and a nativist’s curse.
( This is the last in a three-part series on refugees filed by New Delhi-based journalist Aman Sethi, who travelled to Turkey and Germany last month. The full version of each of these will be at www.thehindu.com. Aman, who had previously worked with The Hindu, is at aman.am@gmail.com .)
