Author: Alex Norbrook (Page 1 of 2)

By Alex Norbrook

 

As Martin Kohler strolled down Sonnenallee, the main drag of the Berlin borough of Neukölln, he could not contain his dismay to the camera. Along the street, kebab shops sizzled, sending the aroma of roasting meat drifting through the cold winter air. Shoppers in heavy coats browsed clothing outlets that advertised headscarves and perused grocery stores that boasted halal meat. Kohler’s reaction was blunt: “No integration,” he said in English.

 

Kohler spoke about how immigrant-populated neighborhoods like the one in Neukölln were cropping up across the city, altering its character for the worse. His companion on the street, an up-and-coming conservative YouTuber from England, asked him in a concerned tone whether the average German wanted this expansion in a city like Berlin. Without missing a beat, Kohler replied, “No. Absolutely not.”

 

At least, that is what Kohler hoped to convey to the 270,000 viewers of the video his colleague produced. The reality in Berlin, though, is a little more complicated.

 

Kohler, a tall man with bright blue eyes and close-cropped brown hair, is a rising voice in Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, which is notorious in Germany for its hardline policies on immigration and ties to extremist organizations. Despite these associations, or perhaps because of them, AfD has surged in popularity. It now boasts of being the most popular party in the country. 

 

But Berlin, which counts as a state in Germany’s federal system, is different. The city is celebrated as the most progressive, multicultural, and migrant-friendly place in Germany—the kind of place where “Because we love you” is the motto of the subway system. The kind of place where, when Kohler approached a group of young people on the street in Neukölln, they flipped off the camera and cheered: “fuck AfD!” When the right surged during February’s federal elections nationwide, Berlin bucked the trend—it moved left.

 

When I spoke with Kohler in mid-October, he told me that this challenging environment only makes him more determined. “As a patriot,” Kohler said, “if you give up the capital city, you can give up the whole project of getting in power and conquering your country back.” With an election in Berlin coming later next year, his party is preparing to take on that project. What would it take for them to succeed?

 

***

 

The AfD has been on the rise since 2013, when the party burst onto Germany’s political scene with a populist conservative program. Its founders lashed out against Angela Merkel’s government for bailing out southern European countries during the Eurozone crisis. Then, when Merkel opened Germany’s borders to Syrians fleeing civil war in 2015, uttering her famous phrase “Wir schaffen das” (“we can do this”), AfD rebutted, suggesting Germany couldn’t—and shouldn’t. Soon, it unveiled its vehement opposition to migrants, especially to those coming from Arab countries.

 

Since its founding, AfD has evolved with the times, fanning flames of animosity against whatever coalition was in power. When Covid hit Germany, party leaders adopted an anti-lockdown, anti-vaccine position, allying themselves with the far-right group PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West). When energy prices began to soar after the Russia-Ukraine war, AfD directed its ire toward renewable energy, blaming climate policies that incentivized wind and solar energy installations. Party members even began to attack proposals to put speed limits on the Autobahn to save on gas. “They are really strategically clever crisis entrepreneurs,” said Manès Wiesskircher, a political scientist at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB), “rejecting all government policies in order to benefit from the dismay among significant parts of the population.”

 

With these strategies, the party has surged in popularity to become one of the largest and most energetic political movements in the country. It shocked the country with its performance in the 2025 federal elections, winning over 20 percent of the vote share. “There’s only three parties in all of the history of the Federal Republic of Germany who made it above 20% in a federal election,” said Robert Eschricht, an AfD state representative for Neukölln. “We really are up and coming.” The AfD now tops opinion polls as the most favored party nationwide.

 

But what is true for the country has not yet become a reality in Berlin. At the state level, a center-right coalition is firmly in power, a large left-wing bloc wields influence, and people are skeptical of the AfD’s restrictive approach to migration. [need a bit more context here]

 

“They think we are the devil,” said state party chair Kristin Brinker. As the 2026 federal elections approach, AfD’s mission in Berlin is to convince the public otherwise.

 

***

 

On a warm June evening in 2023, Peter Kurth hosted a party at his apartment and rooftop terrace in Berlin. A former state politician for the center-right CDU party, Kurth has deep ties with the Identitarian Movement, a pan-European neo-fascist organization that claims it seeks to protect white identity from multiculturalism and migration into Europe. Invited to the event were the who’s who of Europe’s radical right, including AfD’s top candidate for the European Parliament elections in 2024, a “right-wing extremist” publisher known for publishing a book called “Regime Change from the Right,” and an Austrian Identitarian politician. The attendance of one partygoer was more of a surprise. That person was Kristin Brinker.

 

Few people know when Brinker left the party. Brinker claims she made a quick exit, “shocked” by the evening’s discussions, which included tk. Others say she stayed for quite some time and enjoyed herself, with one AfD politician recalling that he spoke with her until “a very advanced hour that evening,” according to a local publication. 

 

Either way, the optics of the face of the AfD in Berlin appearing at a private right-wing extremist event were less than ideal. When the story broke that Brinker attended the party, Berlin’s otherwise-doughy political scene erupted. The scandal threatened to undermine the self-presentation Brinker had worked hard to establish for herself, and her party in Berlin. 

 

Brinker, an architect by trade, joined the AfD in 2013. Sporting bright blond hair and speaking with a warm, cheerful tone, Brinker possesses a calming demeanor that could not be farther from the stereotypical image of a far-right politician. Brinker is highly aware of this image, referring to herself as “not the typical AfD politician.”

 

“She’s not a very radical person,” said Robert Kiesel, a columnist on Berlin politics at Taggesspiegel. “ She is a professional politician.” 

 

Brinker, who describes herself as “more liberal than my colleagues,” became chair of AfD Berlin in 2021, after a fierce internal leadership competition between her and Beatrix von Storch, a duchess and the maternal granddaughter of Adolf Hitler’s finance minister. Von Storch is known to be more radical than many in the party on the national stage. But in Berlin, she lost to Brinker by two votes. 

 

Since then, Brinker has pursued several strategies to try to moderate AfD’s image in Berlin.

 

Part of that effort involves in-person interactions. During election seasons, she can be found on the street under a light-blue AfD umbrella, handing out leaflets to passersby with a smile. This effort, Brinker hopes, makes the AfD seem more approachable. “A lot of people say, ‘oh, I saw something on TV, and then I make my opinion about the AfD,’” she said. But if she can speak with people face-to-face, she elicits a more favorable reaction. “Many people say to me, ‘wow, you are the AfD? It’s okay what you say. I can understand it,’” she said.

 

Brinker told me that she has also forged closer relationships with the media. For the past two years, she has held a parliamentary conference in Copenhagen and invited journalists to come. “It shows the journalists that we are thinking in a normal way, [that] we are normal people,” she said. “They can call me, I can call them.”

 

In doing so, she has diverged from her party’s longstanding mistrust of mainstream media. The AfD has traditionally __[context tk]_. “As a journalist working for serious media, it’s very hard to find people who are willing to talk with me,” Kaisel said. “Because for them, serious media is like an enemy.”

 

Under Brinker’s leadership, the state party has stuck to a coordinated messaging strategy to emphasize its moderation, according to Agnes Sundermeyer, a journalist at RBB who covers Berlin state politics. Extreme statements from national leaders are not reflected at the state level. Where AfD co-chair Alice Widel calls for “remigration,” the forcible return of migrants, including German citizens, to their country of origin, AfD Berlin’s parliamentary group has avoided the term. “Under the leadership of Kristin Brinker, it avoided appearing with radical or neo-right-wing positions,” Sundermeyer said. “Anyone within the parliamentary group or the state branch who does so is not allowed to put themselves in the spotlight.”

 

To some commentators, though, Brinker’s personal image has more sinister effects, distracting from the more radical figures in the state party. “You have this Brinker in the front for the serious masquerade, but in her back you have really tough guys,” Kiesel said. Other Berlin Parliament members have traveled to Russian conferences or tk tk tk. But according to Kiesel, Brinker’s tone draws attention away from her colleagues.

 

If anything, Sundermeyer suggests that Brinker has tolerated these right-wing elements in her state party, rather than cracking down on them. “She pursued a strategy of integration and inclusion,” Sundermeyer said. But it is unclear whether Brinker could marginalize AfD Berlin’s right flank even if she wanted to.

 

The question of how long Brinker stayed at Kurth’s party remains unresolved. So does the question of her motivations. Brinker may not publicly voice an opinion on more contentious topics like remigration. But her silence does send a message of what she is willing to tolerate in her own party. “She’s not saying, ‘this is not what I stand for,’” Kiesel said. 

 

***

 

Standing in a plaza in the eastern district of Lichtenburg, Gottfried Curio, an AfD member of the Bundestag, riled up a crowd of supporters waving German flags and cheering. Do you know how many Syrians there are in Germany? he asked his 200-person audience. One million! Even if 0.1 percent are criminals, that’s a thousand people. A thousand assassins. Do we want them in our country?

 

The immediate target of Curio’s ire was a block of hotels in the neighborhood, which the Berlin state government was planning to rent out to shelter 1,200 migrants. The move was part of Berlin’s strategy for addressing the surge in migrant population it has faced since 2015. Within a year of the original migrant surge, Berlin was reported to receive more than 10,000 refugees in one month; since 2016, the country as a whole has received an average of 210,000 new asylum applications per year, excluding Ukrainians. This influx put strain on Berlin’s already tight housing system, prompting the government to act. 

 

Among a slate of policy measures, Berlin began to rapidly build new shelters and convert existing buildings to accommodate migrants. The state government even transformed a former airport into refugee housing, in addition to office buildings, houses, hostels, and hotels, like the one in Lichtenburg. When new conversions are announced, Kiesel noted, “the AfD will go there and try to make some noise.”

 

According to Kiesel, these policies have been rushed, and are inadequate to the scale of the housing crunch at hand. Mainstream parties fumbling the ball on migrant shelter has opened up room for attacks on the right. “We have people in Berlin who came as refugees years ago and they are still living in camps because German politics was not able to make solutions,” Kiesel said. “It’s a very easy play for the AfD.”

 

Berlin’s AfD has used these shelters as political ammunition for its anti-migration mission. Representatives frequently make shelter conversions the target of their ire, and point to the level of government spending required to support refugees—through housing, and also government-funded stipends for migrants seeking work. Of Berlin’s $40 billion annual budget, Brinker noted, more than $3 billion is spent on migration-related expenses: “only so that people can live in a flat, in a hotel, in a tent, whatever.”

 

Concerns about the cost of support for migrants soon blurs into racialized fears about how well migrants “integrate” into German society. On Kohler’s tour through Berlin with his English influencer, he stopped by another building that was soon to be converted into new accommodations: 950 for asylum seekers, and 550 for students. “I asked the mayor of this district, ‘would you put your daughter, when she goes to university, into a house with 950 Afghans, Syrians, and so on?’”

 

[one graf about integration fearmongering]

 

By focusing on these migrant shelters, local AfD members seek to capitalize on a generalized anxiety around immigration. But in cities like Berlin, the effectiveness of this strategy has been mixed, according to Katja Salomo, a research associate on far-right extremism at the Social Science Centre Berlin (WZB) who studies anti-immigrant messaging and voting behavior in German cities. Oftentimes, the people most persuaded by anti-immigrant rhetoric are those who do not live in areas with low immigrant populations, such as wealthier districts, and who encounter immigration mostly through media platforms. “You just have this fearful media discourse and no immediate personal experience” with immigrants, Salomo said.  “When it comes to immigration, people fear the unknown.”

 

Meanwhile, when urban residents live among immigrant communities, they are more likely to interact with them: interactions which studies show reduce stereotyping and fear. “As soon as they live with [immigrants] in their neighborhood, these foreigners become neighbors,” she said. In these cases, support for AfD tends to weaken. 

 

In Berlin’s poorer districts, though, Salomo found that the decline in AfD support is less pronounced, as lower-income individuals in these areas are drawn to the AfD because of its economic populist messaging: a trend that is ubiquitous across Germany, according to tk. “They are very, very dissatisfied with the economic outlook and the economic situation and are therefore more susceptible” to the AfD, Salomo said. 

 

AfD support in Berlin is currently highest in the economically disadvantaged boroughs in former East Berlin. Gläser told me that this was because they could discern elements of East Germany’s authoritarian ambitions in the policies of the city’s left-wing parties. But if people support the AfD for economic concerns, rather than migration-related fears, then the party’s migration messaging may be less useful than it believes. And the party may be more vulnerable as a result, Salomo said.

 

But the political power AfD generates by critiquing migration policy has already left a mark on Berlin. Nearby the Lichtenburg apartments, a derelict building was slated to be converted into another refugee shelter. After AfD pressure, the local council pivoted to building a school there, instead. 

 

***

Sections TK:

1. Youth
   1. Young AfD – Kohler. 
   2. 2 other young AfD people
   3. End with chaotic launch
2. Covid movie scene – focus on inflammatory rhetoric and being a minority party critiquing everything.
   1. Gläser
   2. Eschricht
   3. The guy I spoke with at the event
   4. JWM

 

***

 

Berlin will hold state-level elections again in 2026. The AfD members I spoke with were optimistic about their chances. If federal elections were held tomorrow, the AfD would gain 26% of the vote and tie with the CDU, Chancellor Merz’s party, according to DW. In Berlin, the party is projected to surge from 9% to 15% of the electorate, pulling ahead of the Greens. 

 

[TK here]

 

“All we ask for is a fair trial,” said Eschricht.

As Martin Kohler strolled down Sonnenallee, the main drag of the Berlin borough of Neukölln, he could not contain his dismay. Along the street, kebab shops sizzled, sending the aroma of roasting meat drifting through the cold winter air. Shoppers in heavy coats browsed clothing outlets that advertised headscarves and perused grocery stores that boasted halal meat. Letting loose a grim laugh, Kohler’s conclusion was blunt: “No integration.”

Speaking to the camera held by his companion on the street, Kohler spoke about how immigrant-populated neighborhoods like the one in Neukölln were cropping up across the city. “First,” he said, “it’s one kebab shop. And then on the opposite side there opens a shisha bar, [then] a shop for halal meat. And even more, you have a street where Muslims are feeling quite well. And then more are coming.” His colleague, an up-and-coming conservative YouTuber from England, asked him in a concerned tone whether the average German wanted this expansion in a city like Berlin. Without missing a beat, Kohler replied, “No. Absolutely not. That’s why so many Germans [are] leaving Berlin.” 

The video that the YouTuber published from his tour with Kohler, titled “Germany is Out of Control,” garnered more than 270,000 views. In it, Kohler, a rising voice in Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, claimed that Berlin was under attack from a hostile population of Muslim migrants that chose to reproduce their own culture in Germany rather than assimilating into the existing society. 

Kohler has made it his mission to reverse this trend. So have his colleagues in AfD Berlin. They face headwinds: Berlin is Germany’s most progressive, multicultural, and migrant-friendly city, after all. But that challenge just makes Kohler more determined. “As a patriot,” he told me, “if you give up the capital city, you can give up the whole project of getting in power and conquering your country back.” With an election coming later next year, can their far-right project have a shot in Berlin? 

***

The AfD has been on the rise since 2013, when the party burst onto Germany’s political scene with a populist conservative program. Its founders lashed out against Angela Merkel’s government for bailing out southern European countries during the Eurozone crisis. Then, when Merkel opened Germany’s borders to Syrians fleeing civil war in 2015, uttering her famous phrase “Wir schaffen das” (“we can do this”), AfD rebutted, suggesting Germany couldn’t—and shouldn’t. Soon, it unveiled its vehement opposition to migrants from Muslim countries.

Since its founding, AfD has evolved with the times, fanning flames of animosity against whatever coalition was in power. When Covid hit Germany, party leaders adopted an anti-lockdown, anti-vaccine position, allying themselves with the far-right group PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West). When energy prices began to soar after the Russia-Ukraine war, AfD turned its ire on renewable energy, blaming climate policies that incentivized wind and solar energy installations. Party members even began to attack proposals to put speed limits on the Autobahn to save on gas. “They are really strategically clever crisis entrepreneurs,” said Manès Wiesskircher, a political scientist at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB), “rejecting all government policies in order to benefit from the dismay among significant parts of the population.”

With these strategies, the party has surged in popularity to become one of the largest and most energetic political movements in the country. It shocked the country with its performance in the 2025 federal elections, winning over 20 percent of the vote share. “There’s only three parties in all of the history of the Federal Republic of Germany who made it above 20% in a federal election,” said Robert Eschricht, a state representative for Neukölln. “We really are up and coming.” The AfD now tops opinion polls as the most favored party nationwide.

 But what is true for the country has not yet become a reality in Berlin. At the state level, a center-right coalition is firmly in power, a large left-wing bloc wields influence, and people are skeptical of the AfD’s restrictive approach to migration. Internally, the state party has faced difficulties, too. Plagued by a history of infighting and candidate controversy, its leaders have tried to improve the party’s professional appearance and break ground among new voter groups. [potential TK about intra-party conflict]

“They think we are the devil,” said Berlin party chair Kristin Brinker. As the 2026 federal elections approach, their  mission is to convince the public otherwise. 

***

 After the lights came on in a crowded AfD field office, Ronald Gläser took the stage in front of a muted audience. A dozen rows of people had come to the office in Pankow, an hour’s train ride from downtown Berlin, on a cold October evening. Sitting on folding chairs facing Gläser, their faces were sober. They had just watched two hours of alarming documentary footage: protestors getting beaten up by police in body armor, diagrams of needles entering arms and injecting black particles into bodies, men in lab coats speaking in assured tones about the dangers of government-sponsored vaccinations. 

Gläser, an unassuming man with a prominent scar on his nose and a red cravat tucked beneath his collar, was the host for the evening’s event: a screening of a Covid vaccine-skeptic documentary called “Just a Prick: In the Shadow of Vaccination,” followed by a Q&A with its director. Now, it was time for Gläser, an AfD representative for Berlin in Germany’s federal parliament, to field questions and comments from the audience to the director. 

The room had the feel of a group therapy session, as individuals within the crowd of mostly older people stood up to share stories of how their lives were disrupted by Germany’s pandemic lockdown. Some lamented that they could not travel across state borders during the lockdown, while others spoke of health complications they experienced after receiving a Covid vaccine dose. 

Gläser nodded at each testimony in sympathy, interjecting every now and then to provide his own perspective as a member of the Bundestag. He channeled frustration at Germany’s response to the pandemic into a generalized attack on the current governing coalition and its civil service. “They are so cheeky. They come up with all kinds of lies,” he said, his voice rising in outrage. 

Gläser is not new to this game. A journalist by trade, he cut his teeth in politics while organizing against Germany’s adoption of the Euro during the 1990s. By 2010, when Germany prepared to bail out Greece to prevent a financial crisis in the country, he had gained experience in holding protests. That year, Gläser organized a “Berlin Tea Party,” where about 20 people emptied jars of Greek olives into Berlin’s Spree river in imitation of America’s infamous Boston Tea Party and its contemporary Republican-party revival. Three years later, the AfD was founded with a similar anti-establishment purpose. Gläser joined the party and was elected to Berlin’s state parliament on its roster in 2016.  

Since then, he has worked to package AfD’s messaging in a politically palatable format. As AfD’s representative on media issues, he hosts movie nights biweekly and other community events. 

[TO EXPAND HERE!!! With more events, grassroots activities.]

 This kind of grassroots work distinguishes AfD from its mainstream counterparts, according to Jan-Werner Müller, a Politics professor at Princeton University. “That party has had a very strong local, on-the ground-presence,” he said, contrasting AfD’s approach with that of more its more mainstream counterparts.

 To people worried about associating with far-right extremists, social events with listening sessions can be a way to feel more welcome into the party. People who may be deterred by the prospect of engaging with fringe actors or “neo-Nazis” on the right “if it turns out they’re all nice—they’re your nice neighbors who are helping you address a real-world issue—that changes the perception,” Müller said.

 Toward the night’s close, a woman who helped produce the documentary stood up to thank Gläser for his work. “This event, close to the citizens,” she said, “is so important because you do your job to educate, to process and above all to bring people together.”

 “The AfD is the only party that is involved for us people,” she added. After she finished speaking, the room burst into applause.

***

Where I’m going from here:

1. Section about engagement with voters with a migrant background — quotes from Kohler and Eschricht
2. Section about youth voters
3. End with youth org forming in November
4. I also need to sprinkle in information about AfD’s difficulties actually governing in parliament — being blocked from committees, etc.

As Martin Kohler drove toward the Berlin neighborhood of Neukölln, he gave a warning of what the man sitting next to him was about to witness. “Germany is changing really fast,” he said. The passenger, Wesley Winter, nodded at Kohler’s words, listening with rapt attention while training his video camera on Kohler.

Soon after the duo stepped out onto Sonnenallee, Neukölln’s main drag, Winter could not contain his shock from the camera. “It’s almost like a parallel universe,” he breathed, as he pointed his camera at a barbershop with Turkish advertisements and a Palestinian flag swaying from a window above. Along the street, kebab shops sizzled, sending the aroma of roasting meat drifting through the cold winter air. Shoppers browsed clothing outlets that advertised headscarves and grocery stores that boasted halal meat.

Letting loose a grim laugh, Kohler surveyed the scene. His conclusion was blunt: “No integration.”

Walking past local food stores and community centers, Kohler spoke about how immigrant-populated neighborhoods like the one in Neukölln were cropping up across the city. “First,” he said, “it’s one kebab shop. And then on the opposite side there opens a shisha bar, [then] a shop for halal meat. And even more, you have a street where Muslims are feeling quite well. And then more are coming.” Winter, an up-and-coming right-wing YouTuber from England, asked him in a concerned tone whether the average German wanted this expansion in a city like Berlin. Without missing a beat, Kohler replied, “No. Absolutely not. That’s why so many Germans [are] leaving Berlin.”

The video that Winter published from his tour with Kohler, titled “Germany is Out of Control,” garnered more than 270,000 views. In it, Kohler, a rising voice in Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, could share his message with the world. Berlin, he conveyed, was under attack from a hostile population of Muslim migrants that preferred reproducing their own culture in Germany to assimilating into the existing society. This narrative, which Kohler’s party has been pushing nationwide to justify its hardline stance on immigration, catapulted AfD forward to become one of the largest and most energetic political movements in the country. Winning over 20 percent of the vote share in the 2025 federal elections, the AfD now tops opinion polls as the most favored party nationwide.

This narrative may find success among Germany’s electorate as a whole. But it’s a different story in Berlin, where Kohler stands as a party representative. At the state level, a center-right SPD/CDU coalition is firmly in power, a large left-wing bloc wields influence, and people are skeptical of the AfD’s restrictive approach to migration. Internally, the state party faces challenges, too. It has been plagued by a history of infighting and incompetence; one former member accused AfD Berlin of embodying “unambitious mediocrity and opportunistic indifference.” The confident authority with which Kohler spoke during Winter’s video belied these challenges, which have impeded AfD’s ability to generate and then capitalize on anti-migration fears in Berlin

Kohler, though, has not given up on winning over Berlin. “As a patriot,” he said. “If you give up the capital city, you can give up the whole project of getting in power and conquering your country back.”

What would it take for Kohler and his peers to turn AfD’s ship around in Berlin? And what would this mean for AfD’s national chances if they succeed?

Two of the main readings this week—The case of Jane Doe Ponytail and Aleppo After the Fall—tried to tell a story about a place as much as about people. In Dan Berry and Jeffery Singer’s piece, of course, the focus is on Song Yang—we follow her life story from her upbringing in China to her entrance into the massage industry and to her death on 40th Street. But what separates this story from, say, the one we read about Skalnik last week, is how much Berry and Singer embed Song Yang into her surroundings. Indeed, Berry claims that the “reason for being” of the piece was in the 12th graf of the piece—which conveyed “All this craziness is occurring in one little place and this city is so large and so complicated, and so distracted by everything else, that it doesn’t even see this.” The rest of the piece is a balance between this craziness and Song Yang’s story, requiring the writers to not crush her under the narrative weight of the place itself.

The piece is often at its best when it zooms out to describe 40th street. The “Night comes to 40th Road” section toward its end is almost novelistic in the saturated description of the street and the women along it. These descriptions bring us into the world that Song Yang inhabited, tell us something about her story in a way that quotes or narrative progression cannot. Something about the constant activity of the city escapes the traditional storytelling format: it is a character that moves somewhat independently of Song Yang’s life, that cannot be contained or controlled by individual human agency alone. Therefore, we leave the piece knowing that although Song Yang is gone, like everything in New York City, the street remains ever-changing as it has always been. That being said, the piece’s chief triumph is arguably making the reader feel Song Yang’s absence during its final scenes. Life goes on; the street takes on new forms. But, we will remember, it does so without Song Yang in the picture. And that matters.

Finally, one of the most innovative elements of the piece that I’d like to discuss more in class is the relegation of attributions to the note at the end of the piece. From a narrative perspective, this is an effective move, as it cuts through all the intra-piece attribution that slows down storytelling progression and mutes affective impact. But from a historical or investigative perspective, it can be a little frustrating, as we are not sure which pieces of information came from which source. It makes subsequent corroboration or elaboration difficult.

Meanwhile, Worth’s main character is a city in more explicit terms. That, I think, may be the reason why I, along with others in the class, grated at the piece at times. The introductory scene is astounding and expertly conveyed, but Worth swiftly moves the reader onto different topics. We are in effect gaining a composite view of the city, stitched together from several vantage points across varying periods of time, to see what it takes for a city to become lost. What we lose in the specificity of one person’s experience we gain in the comprehensiveness of multiple vignettes. Worth’s structure helped at times to convey this composite methodology, but I do think he could have clued the reader in on that method a little sooner—the end of the lede section, for example, lacks a nut graf that could orient the reader to the kind of piece to follow. Where this does create problems is within sections. For example, one section that began with a man who learned his military friends had all been killed then quickly zooms out to reflect on the lack of young men in the street and Assad’s political strategy, before moving to the issue of looting. The bridge between subject and story was slightly abrupt for my liking. Perhaps the unifier was simply: “soldiers’ actions in war,” but I would have liked a stronger orientation to that message. Perhaps the fragmented components of his piece were also intentional in some ways. Aleppo has shattered and Worth seems to be picking up the broken pieces, trying to put them into some shape again. Maybe he doesn’t entirely succeed in creating a cohesive whole, but maybe that’s not the point, because the whole doesn’t exist anymore.

This week’s focus on structure reminded me of Joshua Yaffa’s comments on the difference between top-down and bottom-up reporting. The pieces this week show us that we might think about the two styles of reporting as applicable to styles of structure in the resulting piece. Colloff’s piece on Skalnik follows a structure that makes it seem like it is a bottom-up story: through Skalnik’s exploits, we can get a glimpse of the broader problem of snitches in court trials. We spend virtually the entire story with Skalnik, the victims he prays upon, and the way that judges respond to his statements in court. I’m a little astounded at the sheer number of twists and turns in his life, and he seems like the perfect character for the story. Only in a couple of paragraphs and one or two sections do we read about how Skalnik is emblematic of a broader problem in the criminal legal system. In this sense, I would argue that it is a bottom-up story: the story stays close to him, and only occasionally zooms out. Whether or not the reporting process turned out to be bottom-up or top-down could go either way (to Colloff’s credit, I think, because it makes her storytelling feel more organic): the fact that Skalnik was mainly active in the 20th century, and the piece was written in 2019, suggests that Colloff may have been looking for a story to narrate the issue of snitching in courts, but on the other hand, the Dailey case’s recent developments may have prompted her to look into the longer backstory. In the end, I posit that the former seems more likely, as the moments where Colloff zooms out are backed up by relatively less extensive reporting.

By contrast, Schulz’s piece on The Really Big One is structured in a very top-down way: the piece is about an earthquake, and characters slot in every now and then between hand-based demonstrations of how subduction zones work or extremely vivid descriptions of the catastrophe that would ensue if an earthquake emerged from the Cascadia zone. They are merely one way of dramatizing the geologic story Schulz wants to tell. I suppose this makes sense: if your main “character” is an earthquake, it’s a little hard to ask it about its life.

The McPhee and Stewart pieces on structure seemed suited for the formats they were written for. McPhee jumps in and out of chronology, weaving in flashbacks and fast-forwards at every opportunity, though following a generally chronological pathway. By contrast, Stewart cautions against too many shifts in point of view or time period, presumably because the type of audio journalism he was writing for had less time to tell a story (in, say, a “This American Life” duration). A documentary like In the Dark shows you can get away with a lot more temporal flexibility with longform reporting, similar to McPhee’s work. I generally side with a more McPhee-style approach given my preference for longform reporting, but I see how Stewart’s piece may be useful when writing shorter-from content. Though when comparing the two styles of piece I much preferred Stewart’s, due to his mostly direct, informative approach. In this case, the information within McPhee’s showing and telling—his somewhat sprawling, narrative account—didn’t seem to warrant the length of the piece as a whole. Although perhaps that’s because I’m a Zoomer with no attention span.

How the AfD Plans to Win Berlin

“At the moment, almost every German is saying that Berlin is a shithole: There are too many crimes, there is too much trash on the street, drug addicts at the train stations, and so on,” Martin Kohler told me as he sipped a cappuccino in the basement café of Berlin’s state assembly building. Kohler, a tall, white man with round glasses and a cheerful demeanor that contrasts with his alarmist words, is an up-and-comer in Germany’s far-right party, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Currently the chair of a local AfD faction in Berlin, Kohler also used to head the state’s Young AfD group before it was labeled a right-wing extremist group by the German government and subsequently dissolved.

To Kohler, Berlin is the clearest example of what happens when the left is allowed to govern: it is a city dominated by the left wing, full of immigrants, and restrictive of the free market. But where far-right politicians in other countries may consider their capital cities a lost cause electorally and symbolically, Kohler takes a different view. “As a patriot,” he said. “If you give up the capital city, you can give up the whole project of getting in power and conquering your country back.”

The AfD has been gathering momentum across Germany. During the 2025 federal elections, it won second place nationwide, receiving 20.8% of the vote. The party is gaining in the east, with polls finding that if an election were held today in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, AfD would earn a record 40% of the vote. 

But the party has struggled to bring its success to the nation’s capital, where a center-right SPD/CDU coalition is in power, a large left-wing bloc wields influence, and people are skeptical of the AfD’s restrictive approach to migration. Because of these factors, the party is a marginal force in Berlin’s state politics. It only holds 10 percent of seats in the Berlin House of Representatives. The regional government has set up a “firewall” to block it from performing basic functions, from serving in committees to relegating its federal offices to the farthest office building from the Bundestag. It has been plagued by a history of infighting and incompetence that one former member characterized as “unambitious mediocrity and opportunistic indifference.” 

If AfD plans to earn the right to call itself a national movement, it needs to make ground in Berlin. For my final project, I intend to write about how they plan to adapt to Berlin’s local particularities as they prepare for the 2026 Berlin State elections. Will people like Kohler try to court voters on the left that are concerned with the AfD’s hardline policies and connections with extremist groups, or will they stick to a more sympathetic right-wing base? How will they adapt their anti-immigration agenda to a voter base in which nearly 40% of citizens have a migrant background? Answering these questions will shed light on AfD’s capacity to “detoxify” its image, as well as its chances of successfully carrying out its anti-migrant policies. 

To write this story, I hope to build on the interviews I conducted with AfD state politicians and party representatives, especially those who represent or come from districts with large communities of people with migrant backgrounds. I plan to talk with political scientists who are analyzing AfD’s strategies and ask them about their thoughts on the chances of AfD gaining ground in Berlin. I also seek to learn from social media influencers who have boosted AfD’s popularity among youth voters. Finally, I hope to contact representatives from other parties in Berlin to learn about how they are responding to AfD’s success (or lack thereof) in the district.

A car riddled with dark holes is parked in the middle of a plaza in Berlin. Smoke billows from its shattered windows, partially obscuring the occupants inside. Out of one hazy window, a hand stretches. Its sleeve is stained with red. 

The installation, set up in Alexanderplatz, memorializes Hind Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian girl who the Israeli Defense Forces killed in a car alongside her family. A crowd of onlookers surrounds the car, peering into its shattered windows or reading the plaques that tell Rajab’s story. 

Clad in a blue reflective vest and wearing a Palestine-shaped pendant and a black headscarf, Assil El Haj Hussein weaves through the crowd, watching for any disruptors. A 24-year-old student living in Berlin, Assil encounters them often while monitoring vigils as a volunteer for the cultural organization Generation Palestine. “They are waiting for us to be aggressive,” she said. Assil has learned to not take the bait. “I’m not going to put more gas on fire. I’m like, ‘okay, we can talk about it.’”

The skill of communication under pressure is one that Assil has learned from a young age. Growing up as a third-generation Palestinian in a country that views the protection of Israel as its “reason of state,” Assil has navigated an upbringing where expressing her identity could lead to ostracization, but staying silent would mean complicity in the erasure of her culture. That upbringing has taught her to stand her ground. “I’m ready to fight,” she said. “I don’t want to hide anything just so the government or the German people can be comfortable.”

***

Assil has had to struggle for her identity to be recognized in a culture that sees Palestinian expression as a threat to Jewish existence. She recalls this struggle beginning in school, where some of her teachers would try to prove to her that Palestine did not exist. “Look, search: where is Palestine?” she recounts one of them saying after displaying a map of the Middle East. “There is no Palestine.”

According to researchers, the silencing of Palestinian identity in schools is common in German classrooms, representing one part of Germany’s complicated relationship with its Palestinian diaspora. The German government believes it has a “special responsibility” for Israel because of Germany’s genocide against European Jews during World War Two. As a result, the protection of Israel is central to the government’s understanding of its purpose.

To carry out this mission, Germany has moved to curtail public expressions of Palestinian solidarity that it considers antisemitic or a threat to the state of Israel. This policy reaches down to the school level. Teachers refuse to acknowledge the existence of Palestine as a nationality or cultural identity, according to Carola Tize, an anthropologist who has studied the Palestinian community in Berlin. The dynamic has only strengthened since October 7, with schools banning keffiyehs and the expression “free Palestine.” 

Tize said that Palestinian students like Assil get the message: “They’re raised to know that they’re not wanted.”

Assil has continued to fight for recognition during her masters program in real estate engineering. After October 7, a psychologist offered consultation hours for students affected by the massacre. As Assil found out, the hours were only open to Israeli citizens—and not her or any other Palestinian students grieving over Israel’s violent response. She brought the omission up to the dean, and was shocked by the response. She remembers him telling her, “There are many Palestinians that have the Israeli passport, so we see them as Israeli students.”

Despite a productive back and forth with the dean, the university would not change its policy. Assil told me that she had always tried to have faith in German society’s ability to accept Palestinians into its ranks. But this made her lose that faith altogether. 

“If you cannot even recognize my pain,” she said, “then how can I say I’m comfortable here with this country and with this government? How can I say I’m German?”

The answer, Assil has decided, is that she will not call herself German; instead, she refers to herself as a Palestinian who was born in Germany.

***

In a rented classroom at the center of Berlin, Assil helped host a seminar with a group of young Palestinian-German children. The children were encouraged to draw Palestinian symbols and stories on sheets of paper and small bags. While they drew and talked, Assil answered questions from the children about how much they could express themselves in public. Her sister pulled her aside and asked if she could wear a set of Palestinian earrings. Assil told her that she had every right to. “Nobody can tell you to take it off,” she recalled saying.

The event was hosted by Generation Palestine, the same cultural organization that hosted the Alexanderplatz vigil. Assil’s mother founded the organization in 2018, for two purposes. First, she intended to provide an alternative form of public Palestinian expression to the more militant protests in the streets. Each week, Generation Palestine installs vigils or public education exhibitions that highlight the victimization of Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank. “We want to change the German mindset. We don’t just want to show them we’re Palestinian. No—we want to show them why we are right,” Assil said. 

When Jewish Israelis or vocal supporters of Israel come to the vigil and begin to cause a scene, Assil is there to engage with them. She told me proudly of a time when she convinced a man that Palestinian children should not be shot alongside their parents. “I didn’t convince him to say free Palestine, but at the end of the day I worked something up in him,” Assil said. “Maybe in the next conversation he’s having with Zionists he will say, ‘okay, but not the kids.’”

The organization plays a similar educational role within the Palestinian community itself. Tize, the anthropologist, suggested that when communities face discrimination because of their identity, they “cling to that identity even more.” But as younger generations grow up with increasingly distant connections to their homeland, their sense of identity can become indistinct. “They are not educated about their roots. They don’t know the history of their parents,” said Alaa, another Generation Palestine volunteer. “You feel a very big disconnect.”

Generation Palestine’s volunteers hope to prevent that loss in transmission. As Assil put it, the organization teaches young people in the diaspora “how to be a Palestinian.” Assil and her fellow volunteers fill gaps in knowledge among children in their community, teaching them the original names of the places from which their ancestors were displaced. They also teach restless youth how to respond to criticism with evidence, rather than aggression. To Assil, this information will help young people in her community speak up when they face marginalization, rather than staying silent.

Assil plans to take this approach to her future career in building management. After she graduates from her master’s program, she plans to enter a line of work that will allow her to financially support her community in Germany and the broader Palestinian cause. Eventually, Assil aspires to start and lead a real estate engineering company in Germany. She hopes it will become large enough to make her impossible to ignore. “If this company will be successful,” Assil told me, “then they cannot reject me or silence me, because I made something of myself.”

“I’m big now. They cannot shut me up.”

Constructing a story by inhabiting the lives of its characters, as we read this week, is a potent form of journalism. There is a certain kind of credibility that a journalist can achieve by the simple act of saying, “I was there. I know what it was like. This is the story.” Caitlin Dickerson, for example, uses this tool in her piece on the Darien Gap, ending the nut graf with the sentence: “What I saw in the jungle confirmed the pattern that has played out elsewhere: The harder migration is, the more cartels and other dangerous groups will profit, and the more migrants will die.” Each clause of the sentence is important, but what provides it a unique rhetorical force is the first: “What I saw in the jungle confirmed the patter.” Each part of the ensuing piece, down to the last scrap of detail, is channeled through this clause and acts as evidence to support the rest of the sentence. Not only does embedded reporting lead to details in the piece (e.g., the story of the Vietnamese woman who lost her son, which Dickerson found out about by seeing a paper ad), it also adds the moral weight which distinguishes embedding from other methods of journalism. 

At the same time, I do think that this credibility-raising has its limits. Although I recognize that Natalie O’Neill’s was tailored to a rightwing audience skeptical of the US’s decision to send military aid to Ukraine, I do feel that the way she framed the embedding was a bit overdone. Dickerson used herself as a character to emphasize the danger of the voyage and as a lens through which the reader could see the world. By contrast, O’Neill’s description of the danger she faced seemed less organic; phrases like “I felt a journalistic duty to trade the safety of Washington for a war zone to discover why Western weapons are so critical to Kyiv’s fight” risked putting her own story over the story of weapons she was trying to tell, as did her interjections emphasizing the danger not of the war itself, but of her decision to go to the warzone. Perhaps Siyeon’s argument that “there is only so much you can understand about something you are clearly not” is at the root of my quals with O’Neill’s piece: she seems less conscious of this fact throughout the piece, acting as a universal explainer while spending less time hinting at the fact that her knowledge of the war is necessarily incomplete. That said, I do feel that when O’Neill was talking about the subject matter itself with less explicit framings in service of her argument, the narrative that she produced was powerful and did do the job. I imagine the reader of the New York Post may have less qualms than I do—the narrative of “the embedding journalist” may serve to amplify, rather than detract from, its message. Perhaps, then, there is only so much I can understand about the viewpoint of the reader of the Post because they are a kind of person I am clearly not.

Hessler’s piece was as much a snapshot of Cairo’s political and social systems as it was a profile of one man’s place within those systems. He managed to weave a compelling and at times alarming personal narrative of Sayyid Ahmed into a much larger tapestry, without letting that tapestry swallow up Ahmed’s story. Through exploring the astoundingly complex informal economy of waste disposal replete made up of subcontracts all the way down, we see the deficiencies in Egypt’s public sector, the cultural beliefs around the trade in sex drugs, and the religious and political turns of events that influenced the evolution of organic waste disposal; through Ahmed’s relationship with his wife, we see an oppressive patriarchal society at work. Indeed, the scene between Ahmed and the lawyer he consulted demonstrated the inner workings with uncomfortable detail, as the lawyer seeks to ensnare Ahmed by appealing to his masculinity, attacking Wahiba with exceedingly derogatory and violent language, and exuberantly showing Ahmed how he can ruin his wife’s life in a ploy to bring her back. I was particularly struck by how Hessler initially portrays Ahmed as a rather sympathetic, “friendly guy-in-the-street,” but as we continue to read the piece, we begin to see him as a much more complicated character, exposed to and complicit in misogynist ideology in a way that was difficult to read at times. Hessler makes us reassess Ahmed constantly throughout the piece; he was so effective in doing so that by the end of the piece I instinctively began to ask why Hessler would still drink and chat with him. 

Part of what makes this tapestry so effective is Hessler’s subtle transitions between the local and global, which often come without one noticing but can also serve several purposes at once when conveyed in a more active manner. For example, I thought the transition from his account of the killing of disposal pigs, followed by the sentence “For Sayyid, none of this—the people of the oasis, the wandering pig-raisers, the Exodus-style slaughter carried out by a dying regime—is exotic or unusual,” was effective because it brought us back to Ahmed, gave us a summary of the national political story with flair, and also allowed the reader to adopt a more Ahmed-esque perspective on that national story by describing it in an over-the-top, perhaps almost Orientalist, tone. Finally, the sheer amount of detail that Hessler could stuff into the piece made the whole thing more memorable. Details we glimpse early in the piece come back as kickers later on, like when we learn that zabaleen protested the slaughter of pigs by leaving organic waste uncollected, and then we travel to a lawyer’s office in a building surrounded by said organic waste. The repetition and interpolation makes the profile stick in one’s head.

Hessler used the authority he generated from these narrative techniques to conclude with an argument about Egypt as a whole: Ahmed’s eventual return to his wife parallels Egypt’s tendency to go through a revolution and emerge where it started. This kind of extrapolation in a profile is audacious. Yet Hessler pulls it off, thanks to the months he spent following the garbage man.

Last Wednesday, a German delegation traveled to Kabul to speak with Taliban government representatives about Germany’s efforts to return Afghan migrants with criminal records to Afghanistan. The meeting reflects the German government’s growing reliance on the Taliban, which it does not officially recognize but which it has relied on to help carry out its migrant deportation program. 

“This kind of diplomacy with the Taliban legitimizes terror and oppression and betrays those who have worked with us for a democratic Afghanistan,” Green Party representative Luise Amtsberg told Tageszeitung.

 The German government’s Afghan deportation efforts are one element of its broader hardline policies on immigration, which it has adopted due to pressure from far-right, anti-immigrant parties such as Alternative für Deutscheland (AfD). To carry out these restrictive policies, the German government has become an uncomfortable bedfellow of the Taliban, an organization widely condemned for its human rights abuses and restrictive treatment of women. Human rights organizations and other analysts have denounced both the government’s deportation agenda and its collaboration with the Taliban. 

The Wednesday meeting involved a senior member of Germany’s Interior Ministry and senior Taliban officials including Mohammed Nabi Omari, the first deputy to Taliban Interior Minister Sirajuddin Haqqani and a former Guantanamo Bay prisoner. 

A History of Deportation

Chancellor Friederich Merz’s government has scaled up efforts to deport certain Afghan migrants since it took power in February. Around 400,000 people who were born in Afghanistan currently live in Germany, which has been a center for Afghan migration since the Soviet-Afghan war in 1979.

The current government successfully carried out its first flight of deported migrants in August, removing 81 Afghans from Germany. “These are Afghan men who are legally required to leave the country and who have a criminal record,” the Interior Ministry said at the time.

Germany received international criticism for the move. Ravina Shamdasani, spokesperson for the United Nations Human Rights Office, stated in a press conference that it “was not appropriate to return people to Afghanistan” given continued human rights violations in the country. 

 Under international conventions, it is unlawful to deport people to their home country if it is likely they will experience human rights violations in that country. Human rights organizations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch claim that the Taliban’s rule has made Afghanistan an unsafe place for deportations, and that Germany may be violating international law by deporting people to the country, even if they have received criminal convictions.

 “For Afghanistan, it’s easiest to make that point that every return would amount to a violation of human rights non-return obligations,” said Julian Lehmann, Program Manager at the Global Public Policy Institute.

 Nonetheless, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt has since signaled his intention to accelerate the deportation of Afghan migrants, including to Syria. “My goal is to deport regularly and systematically,” he told DPA. 

The August flight was the second to have taken place since the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan in 2021. Merz’s predecessor, Olaf Scholz, deported 28 Afghan migrants in August 2024, following backlash after an Afghan migrant killed a police officer in a mass stabbing.

Before the Taliban took power, deportations of this kind were common. Between 2016 and 2021, Germany removed over 1,100 Afghan migrants from its borders.

A report from the time found that more than 90 percent of migrants deported to Afghanistan faced some level of violence upon their return.

Germany suspended its deportation program after the Taliban took control of the Afghan government, given the danger posed by deportation.

The Political Landscape

Merz’s government has made migrant deportations one of its core priorities. The ruling “grand coalition,” consisting of the center-right Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (CDU/CDU) alliance and the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), ran on a campaign pledge to “start deporting people to Afghanistan and Syria, beginning with criminals and dangerous individuals.”

Striking a balance on the issue of migration has been a challenge for the ideologically diverse coalition. To Martin Sökefeld, a migration scholar at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, its conservative voters have been pushed to the right on immigration by inflammatory rhetoric from the far right, which has identified deportation as an effective tool to control migration. “It has become a highly emotional and symbolic issue to try to deport people, particularly to Afghanistan and also to Syria,” Sökefeld said.

At the same time, CDU also faces pressure from the left to take a strong stance against AfD’s proposed solutions to that question, which the left describes as extreme. 

Lehmann said that CDU’s actions, including its collaboration with the Taliban, demonstrates that the party failed to strike this balance, and has instead followed an approach proposed by the AfD. “They haven’t walked the line,” he said. “They’ve passed it.”

Taliban Talks

Wednesday’s meeting is the latest evolution of a complex relationship between Germany and the Taliban government in Afghanistan.

On the one hand, Germany refuses to recognize the Taliban government because of its human rights violations. On the other, it has relied on the Taliban to carry out its deportation agenda. According to Georg Menz, a migration professor at Old Dominion University, it is difficult to facilitate the kind of deportations that Germany seeks without maintaining an open line of communication in Kabul. 

To balance these competing priorities, Merz has claimed that his government’s collaboration with the Taliban falls short of official recognition because it is of a technical, not political, nature. During the two deportation flights under the Scholz and Merz governments, Germany stated that it relied on communication with “technical contacts” in Kabul, mediated through Qatar. “Rather than formally recognize the Taliban and negotiate with it directly, Germany used Qatar as a go-between,” said Michelle Pace, an Associate Fellow at Chatham House and a professor in global studies at Denmark’s Roskilde University. 

Similarly, the German government emphasized that Wednesday’s meeting consisted of “technical talks” concerning the deportations.

Despite these moves, Germany has remained adamant that it does not intend to recognize the Taliban. “Diplomatic recognition of the Taliban regime is not up for discussion. That is simply out of the question,” Merz said at a press conference.

Nonetheless, the Taliban may yield further gains from its assistance to Germany in the long term. “In the absence of diplomatic recognition, Afghanistan’s Taliban government would welcome engagement on migration management as a way to build rapport with the West,” Pace stated.

“Engagement will likely come at the expense of those seeking protection from the Taliban regime,” she added. 

But potential consequences to deported individuals has not stopped the Merz government from pursuing deportations. To Sökefeld, it can react with a simple response: “It’s not our issue anymore.”