The Holocaust was at the forefront of my mind as I completed this week’s readings. Of course, no other atrocity in human history compares, but German callousness towards the survivors of a brutal dictatorship is particularly horrifying given the country’s own recent history. Anand Gopal’s account of Abdul Hadi and Oday finding each other in prison, for instance, felt reminiscent to me of the accounts of Holocaust victims who reunited with their friends in concentration camps. For me, these stories amplify the paradox of how Germany has effectively integrated Holocaust remembrance into its civic infrastructure while turning its back on the kinds of vulnerable people that it systematically annihilated only eighty years ago. The surge of anti-immigrant hostility seems to render those memorialization efforts shallow.

I was struck too by the irony of European countries demanding the departure of Syrian immigrants while also providing sanctuary (if inadvertently) to the war criminals who precipitated their pursuit of refuge. Austria harbored Khalidi al-Halabi for years, but is now pushing for Syrian immigrants to return to Syria. I was fascinated that Halabi’s violent techniques were in part inherited from Nazis like Brunner who found refuge in Damascus, exacerbating my disgust that the countries that helped create a legacy of destruction and persecution have no interest in alleviating that wrongdoing by accepting asylum seekers.

While the AfD’s xenophobic bellicosity is particularly pronounced, I encountered a theme throughout the readings of a veneer of politeness masking sinister immigration policies and prejudices in Germany and Austria. The New Arab article highlights how the German government has offered to charter planes for immigrants returning to Syria, reflecting a theme in right-wing politics of couching racist policies in spurious benevolence. For me, this recalled Gopal’s characterization of Aleppo under Assad: “Beneath the niceties of neighborhood hookah bars and sports clubs was the true order, a hidden order, which dictated every breath and every step a human being might take.” Although Germans aren’t subjugated by a despotic regime, the undercurrent of racism in German society reveals the fragility of the social fabric. For instance, the Syrian ENT featured in the Washington Post article who was mistaken for a native-born German by a racist patient railing against foreigners corroborates how seamlessly Syrian refugees have been integrated into German society. I wondered if this increases or mitigates calls for these immigrants to repatriate Syria; their natural incorporation into German society is likely alarming for racist Germans because it emphasizes the lack of innate differences between ethnicities, but as a group, Syrians seem to conform to “model minority” myths and offer Germany tangible benefits, making it difficult for even the most vehement racists to argue that Syrians are a drain on the social welfare system.

I was also intrigued by Kingsley’s interrogation of the framework of a “refugee crisis” in discussions of the influx of migrants to Europe. I had no idea that the developing world is home to 86% of refugees, because the word “crisis” is usually only applied to migration to Europe. This suggests that in the West, we think of the “crisis” as beleaguering not the migrants who have endured unimaginable suffering and left behind everything they know, but the European countries being asked to welcome them. No one is talking about a refugee crisis in Lebanon; instead, the country is implicitly blamed for its own struggles, reflecting a neocolonial mentality of the innate superiority of Western European countries. This made me contemplate the journalistic obligation to correct misleading narratives while preventing opinion from encroaching on our storytelling.