The leafy market square, ringed by Middle Eastern restaurants in a quiet city where nearly half the residents have immigrant backgrounds, seems like the last place that would spur Germany’s latest explosive wave of nationalist backlash.
But it was in Mannheim where prosecutors say an Afghan man stabbed six people in May at an anti-Islamist rally, killing an officer who had intervened. No motive has yet been determined. But the death and the fact that the man accused had his asylum claim denied years ago set off calls for the expulsion of some refugees. Such sentiments were once viewed as messaging mostly reserved for the far right.
That this could occur in Mannheim, a diverse community of over 300,000 people known for its sensible plotting along a grid as a “city of squares,” has rattled Germany. It has been particularly painful for the longtime Muslim population of the city, where, according to some estimates, nearly one in five people are of Turkish descent.
Overtly, the political discussion concerns refugees, but in the lived experience of German Muslims, many said they felt like they were steps away from becoming a target. That worry has heightened since January, when an exposé revealed a secret meeting by members of the extreme right during which the deportation of even legal residents of immigrant descent was discussed.
Some expressed fears that what happened in Mannheim may have broken a dam.
Days after the death of the officer, Rouven Laur, 29, Mannheim became the reference point for a flood of anti-immigrant proposals — some once relegated to whispers only among the farthest right but that had now moved to the center of the German political debate.
Officer Laur was charismatic and passionate about police work, according to the mayor of the small town he was from. He had taken it upon himself to learn Arabic to be able to interact better with Arabic-speaking residents, according to one of his sisters. After his death, police departments and others around the country held memorials for him.
Some of the city’s placid squares were overtaken by protests from both the far-right party Alternative for Germany, or AfD, which had just earned second place in European Union elections, and furious counterprotesters. The AfD was emboldened, many attendees said, by the fact that its hard-line stance was, after Officer Laur’s death, being taken up by their adversaries, from the chancellor on down.
“We said this many years ago, and they said, ‘You’re a Nazi and a racist,’” said Damian Lohr, an AfD state representative, standing at a rally in Mannheim’s Parade Square. “And now they’ve taken over this opinion — so who are they now?”
From her office window overlooking the market square where the attack took place, Semra Baysal-Fabricius, a lawyer, said she watched the aftermath of that day in May in horror.
The man accused of the attack, whom the police named as Sulaiman A., 25, in accordance with Germany’s strict privacy rules, was shot by the police. The federal prosecutor declined to provide his current condition, citing privacy, but he has been transferred to jail after several weeks in the hospital. Ms. Baysal-Fabricius stood at her window as he and Officer Laur were taken away by ambulance.
The experience shook her, she said — but so have its ripple effects. She has found herself fearing for the first time for her 14-year-old son, who is German. Today she worries that he will become a target because he has black hair and dark features like her.
“There was always this debate about migration,” she said. “Now we have a feeling that the whole debate is shifting or changing because of things like this.”
She added, “I am afraid.”
Sulaiman A. came to Germany in 2014 seeking asylum, a claim that was rejected, according to the authorities. He married a German citizen with whom he had two children, giving him the right to remain in the country but not citizenship.
Even had he not, he most likely would not have been deported because the German government had long refused to return refugees to certain countries considered too dangerous — like Afghanistan — even when their asylum applications were unsuccessful.
That hesitation was eroded by the events in Mannheim.
In an attempt to claw back voters from the right and center-right, a widening chorus across the political spectrum has embraced the prospect of deportation for those who fail the asylum test, especially those who commit violent crime.
In some of the strongest evidence yet of the shift, in late June, Nancy Faeser, Germany’s interior minister, confirmed that the government was in confidential negotiations with other countries, including Afghanistan and Syria, about taking back people to whom Germany did not grant asylum and who had been deemed a security risk.
At Mannheim’s Market Square, a memorial for the officer grew this summer, dotted with handwritten signs that called for peace and others scrawled with anti-Muslim invective. Cem Yalcinkaya, 38, a civil engineer who is the secretary of the Yavuz Sultan Selim Mosque in Mannheim, visited on a recent Friday to pay his respects on behalf of his congregation.
“Our members, they want to live their normal life. They are normal neighbors, normal sports club members, normal ordinary people,” Mr. Yalcinkaya said. “They want to live well here and be part of this country and city.”
The renewed hostility by some Germans toward the “other” is in his view not an aberration, or even new, but rather an unleashing of the same sentiments that have simmered since Germany’s Nazi past.
“After the Second World War, we didn’t hear them, but they were right here,” Mr. Yalcinkaya said. “They didn’t show themselves, but now they are getting louder.”
It is difficult, if not impossible, to parse the truth about immigrants and crime rates from political posturing. Last year, refugees — from all countries — a group that makes up less than 4 percent of the population — were responsible for roughly 7 percent of crimes in the country, many of which were minor, according to figures released by the federal police.
Asylum seekers are responsible for about 10 percent of “crimes against life,” which includes murder, manslaughter but also illegal abortions. But attacks by them are often given outsized attention, picked up by tabloids and then weaponized by politicians.
That complexity has not stopped anti-immigrant sentiment from pervading. “We have here in Germany a very big problem, and the problem is immigration — immigration from Islam, Muslims,” said Michael Heinze, 56, an airport worker at the AfD rally in the Parade Square in Mannheim in June. “This day started a wake up in Germany,” he added, in imperfect English.
He raised his voice so that it could be heard over counterprotesters on the other side of the square who were calling his group Nazis. “I’m not a Nazi or a racist,” Mr. Heinze said. “I’m a patriot.”
Not far away in another of the city’s beloved squares were a handful of informational placards. They featured information about Islam, and explainers about the faith, an initiative recently begun by Mannheim’s local Ehsan Mosque, in response to amplified hostility, said Adeel A. Shad, the mosque’s imam.
Since the attack, the congregation has decided to roll out the placards program across the city.
“We want to reach out to our communities, to our fellow citizens who are living here, so that we can show them what Islam is,” he said, seated in the sanctuary of his mosque after afternoon prayers. “To show them this mosque is not a threat.”
Upstairs in his home, his three children ate lunch and played with an abacus. “The situation I think will get worse and worse, and I am ready for that. I am ready for that,” Imam Shad added. “But I will not retreat.”