My mother heard my father’s voice rise and came to see if everything was all right.
“Tommy is our friend, and if you don’t like it, then you can stop coming over here,” I heard my father say. Latif took his things and left.
Some weeks later, my father came home and said that he had seen Latif in the city center with other bearded men. They had set up a table and chairs under a tent, and they were handing out books, trying to convert people to their interpretation of Islam and telling them about the war in Afghanistan. They were speaking to migrants but also to Germans, many of whom remained bitter about the division of Germany and hated the “godless” Soviets.
“There were men from Algeria, Morocco, Pakistan. They all were calling for support of the ‘jihad’ in Afghanistan,” my father said. He told my mother never to let Latif into our house again. “I don’t want you or our daughters to have anything to do with people like him,” he said.
There was something else happening in Europe at about this time. In Britain, France, and Germany, some men who had returned from the fighting in Afghanistan began to tell other Muslim immigrants that it was their duty to protect oppressed Muslims around the world. Back then, these men weren’t seen as threats. Western Europe was proud of its freedom of thought and expression, and these former fighters were allies of a sort, helping defeat the Soviets. Political leaders didn’t suspect that the people fighting the Soviets would one day turn against them and their allies in the Middle East. They didn’t realize that a quiet battle was beginning between secular, individualistic ideals and radical religious ideologies coupled with the will to rise up and fight injustice.
In our family, my parents wanted us to integrate as much as possible into German society while not forgetting our own culture. Two afternoons a week, we attended Arabic school with a Moroccan teacher, a school organized and financed by the Moroccan consulate, but most days we played with the kids in our class after school. Unlike some Muslim girls in Europe today, who don’t take part in swim lessons or other athletic activities, we played sports. I played field hockey for six or seven years, which my parents encouraged. One of my sisters even joined a church youth group for a while.
Still, some of the families in our neighborhood would not allow their children to play with us. This was partly because my parents were blue-collar workers, and there were also those who made fun of my oldest sister, who was disabled; others said that we came from a backward culture.
More than once, neighborhood parents spoke to my sister Hannan’s primary-school teacher and asked that she be removed from the class because she didn’t “fit in.” Often the children of immigrants were asked to repeat classes, in some cases because they had problems writing German but also because of racism. Sometimes, after the first four years of primary school, they would be sent to F?rderstufe or Hauptschule, vocational schools for children who weren’t planning to go to university. Even though my sisters and I were all fluent in German, Hannan’s teacher and some of the parents decided that she should go to the F?rderstufe. Luckily she performed so well that after a year her teachers sent her back to the regular secondary school, which we call gymnasium. I was lucky with my teacher Mrs. Schumann. She supported my hopes to go straight to gymnasium when I was eleven.
Our neighbors the Ehrts are one of the reasons I speak German as well as I do. Antje would keep an eye on what I was doing in school, and she was always very particular, especially about my writing. She wanted me to learn the best form of German. When I was a small child, she would read with me and often gave my sisters and me books of fairy tales and cassette tapes of Mickey Mouse stories that her children had outgrown. We were thrilled. My parents couldn’t afford to buy us many books or tapes.
Around the time I started gymnasium in 1989, I began to see changes among the Yugoslavs who worked with my mother in the church community, including Aunt Zora and Aunt Dschuka. Their children had been in the after-school day care, like me. We had all been close friends, especially because our mothers were unskilled workers, which set us apart from German children, many of whose parents had been to university. Their children had names like Leika, Zoran, Ivica, and Ivan. They would always say proudly that they came from Yugoslavia. Suddenly, they refused to play with each other. Instead of sharing Yugoslavian heritage, they began to say, “I am Croatian,” “I am Serbian.” Others called themselves “Bosnians” or “Muslims.” Their mothers stopped joking with each other and drinking coffee and eating borek together in the break room.
While we could clearly see a divide between Yugoslavs at my mother’s workplace, my parents asked us not to generalize. Aunt Zora and Aunt Dschuka were Serbs. They and their families came to visit and eat with us. Like us, they were horrified by what they heard and saw in the news but would always say that the country’s schism hadn’t come from within. “We used to be one people,” Aunt Zora told us. “We never asked if someone was Serb, Slovene, Croatian, or Muslim.” She believed that the war was a Western plot to weaken socialist Yugoslavia.
We heard about massacres on the news or heard in school about someone’s uncle having been killed fighting in the former Yugoslavia. But this was all far away from my family and me. We had often felt like outsiders in Germany, but we didn’t feel directly threatened until September 1991. Almost two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, xenophobic riots broke out in Hoyerswerda, a town in the northeast of Saxony. Right-wing groups attacked workers from Vietnam and Mozambique and threw stones and gasoline bombs at an apartment block that housed asylum seekers.
My parents and I watched on TV as Germans applauded when a building burst into flames. Some even raised their hands in a Hitlergruss, the infamous straight-armed Nazi salute, and screamed, “Germany for the Germans! Foreigners out!”
My parents said not to worry, that this was in the former East Germany and that people in the West would never do something like this. “The people here know that without people like us, their economy would not be where it is today,” my father said.