Category: Uncategorized (Page 2 of 20)

At ten years old, while kicking a soccer ball on a field in Berlin, Nabil Rayk could already sense he was the “other.” The opposing team’s parents, “the Proper Germans” as he puts it, would shout insults from the sidelines. “Kick that Arab, kick that N-word” he recalled. 

“For them,” Nabil said, “sometimes sport is a replacement for war.”

A decade later, this same hostility has gone beyond the boundaries of sport. Divisions are now making their way into parliament debates and campaign rallies. These divisions are not new to European football, but their resurgence reflects the growing influence of far-right parties such as Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which has gained momentum across Germany through its anti-immigrant rhetoric.

For many immigrants and people of color, this prejudice is forcing their ethnic, religious, or racial identities and even their gender or sexual orientation into the spotlight. It leaves them questioning whether Germany truly sees them as part of the nation or as outsiders.

“Football is the real heavy tradition in Germany, it’s really hard to change something here in the football system, ” said Stenny Bamer, a social worker for the fan scene of  BFC Dynamo, a football club based in East Berlin, at Fanprojekt der Sportjugend Berlin. 

Fanprojekt is an independent initiative created by the Berlin Sports Organization to engage football fans aged 14 to 27 whose home teams are either BFC Dynamo or Hertha BSC, another club based in Berlin. It hopes to foster inclusion, anti-discrimination, and a sense of community through football culture.

“I see a change in the fan scenes. They are getting more conservative, more right-wing.  There is a real influence of the AfD policy on the football fans,” Bamer added.

In Germany, a football club’s reputation often carries political significance and fans play a major role in shaping it. Eastern clubs like Dynamo have traditionally been linked to right-leaning politics, while many Western clubs are seen as more left-leaning.

Prior to meeting Bamer, when I mentioned to a German sports journalist that I planned to attend a BFC Dynamo match for this story, he warned me not to go as a person of color, as it might not be safe. 

“I would never say to an immigrant person, go to a BFC Dynamo game because there are a lot of far right extremists,” Bamer said.

Bamer wants the unwelcoming atmosphere at clubs like Dynamo to disappear. He’s not alone as journalists, representatives from local NGOs, and club officials I spoke with also called for a more inclusive football environment where immigrant players are celebrated and immigrant fans feel welcome rather than treated as “others.”

Across these conversations, two main strategies for change emerged: change driven by club leadership or change as a result from the pressure of supporters. 

“In some clubs, it [change] can come from the top down. But in others, like St. Pauli, it came from the fans themselves,” Bamer said. 

St. Pauli, unlike Dynamo, is a liberal stronghold shaped by fan activism. During the 1980s and 90s, as neo-Nazi hooliganism spread through European football, more left-wing activists settled in Hamburg’s St. Pauli district and publicly stood against fascist values in the stadium, rejecting racism and extremism. 

Their pressure led the club to become the first in Germany to ban right-wing nationalist displays inside the stadium.  Today, St. Pauli remains committed to equality and diversity, and was one of 12 German clubs to publicly condemn the AfD earlier this year. 

Dynamo, in contrast, did not speak out against the party.

At Dynamo, the shift towards inclusion has been slower. Anti-immigrant sentiment and nostalgia for old identities sometimes coexist with loyalty. Bamer recalls how a Nigerian player was renamed by fans with a German nickname because they could not pronounce his last name. “Everybody loved him,” he said, “but I always had the feeling it was also a little bit of making a joke out of his name.”

Germany has 84 million people, 25 million with immigrant backgrounds, yet many including AfD supporters resist diversity.

The night the news broke that Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s longtime dictator, had fallen, Hesham Moamadani felt his world tilt. On the desk beside him lay his freshly minted German passport, issued only days earlier, its polished red cover catching the light of the TV. Nearly a decade had passed since he’d crossed into Germany’s borders with nothing but the clothes on his back, fleeing Assad’s dictatorial regime and indiscriminate violence. That day, he sat in his Berlin apartment with a document that confirmed his place, only for the very reason he’d fled to flicker out into the oblivion of the German evening news. A mix of conflicting emotions—joy, overwhelm, and disbelief—washed over him, soon followed by anxiety for his other Syrian friends who still lacked passports.

Moamadani was one of nearly 300,000 people who were granted German citizenship in 2024, a record for the nation. A large number of Syrian refugees who arrived during former German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s border openings in 2015-2016 became eligible for naturalization that year, and Moamadani was one of them. 

What most didn’t anticipate, though, was that the dreaded Assad regime would collapse abruptly, mobilizing a stream of disputes within the German government on whether or not to repatriate Syrian nationals back to their home country. Particularly inflamed by the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment throughout the West, German politicians remain divided; and Syrians, many of whom have lived in Germany for years but are yet to receive their citizenship, remain in judicial limbo, with many fearful that the regime’s fall continues to serve.

“The … welcoming culture is no longer the dominant force in German political opinion,” said Jonas Wiedner, a German sociologist who studies social stratification and integration issues faced by immigrants in Germany. “There’s a large majority of people who want to see migration limited, and also want to see foreigners, particularly refugees, reduced in Germany.” 

While there’s credence to the claim that Germany’s rightward, anti-immigrant shift is a part of a broader shift observable in many Western countries today, Wiedner noted that Germany stands in a particularly unique position. With their open-border policy history and relationship to Syrian refugees specifically, Wiedner believes that the border policies from 2015 played significantly “into the hands of the far right.”

But the far right is no longer the only demographic embracing anti-immigrant policy in Germany. The AfD (Alternative fur Deutschland), or Germany’s populist far-right party, gained significant voter traction after embracing mass deportation policies. Even the traditional center-right political powerhouse, the CDU/CSU (Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union), whose members hold the largest share of seats in the German Bundestag, has begun ceding to the anti-immigration narrative, too.

After a visit to Damascus, Syria, earlier this month, Germany’s Foreign Minister and CDU member Johann Wadephul said in a statement to German news network Deutsche Welle that “hardly anyone can live here [in Syria] with dignity.” During a meeting in parliament, Wadephul allegedly made a remark that said today’s “Syria looked worse than postwar Germany.” 

Wadephul’s statements irked other high-ranking German politicians in the CDU/CSU party, drawing scrutiny from many of his more conservative colleagues. Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz, whose pointed remarks appeared to address Wadepuhl indirectly, noted that “there is no longer any reason for [Syrian] asylum in Germany, and therefore, [Germany] can begin repatriations.” 

For now, voluntary repatriation and deportations of Syrians with criminal records remain at the forefront of the CDU’s policies. But only 0.1% of Germany’s Syrians have voluntarily returned to their homeland a year after Assad’s fall. Those like Moamadani know that they are lucky. But to the hundreds of thousands of Syrians under more precarious circumstances — such as those with temporary residence permits or a subsidiary protection status — small shifts can feel potentially life-altering.

*** 

I’ve been sitting in an empty Zoom conference for 15 minutes when a pixelated apparition of Stephan Mayer’s round, doughy face emerges from the void. The flickering lights of German apartment buildings flash by in his car window. He mutters a sentence in German — I respond that I can only understand English. “ Make it quick,” he says. “I only have a few minutes.”

Mayer, who has been a member of the German Bundestag since 2002, stepped down from his role as Secretary-General of Germany’s CSU party in early 2022 after making death threats to a journalist for reporting on his illegitimate child. Under Chancellor Angela Merkel, Mayer served as the Parliamentary State Secretary in the Federal Ministry of the Interior from 2018 to 2021. Now, he is a ‘Spokesperson for Sports’ of the CDU/CSU party. As part of his former Parliamentary State Secretary position, however, Mayer said that determining the CDU/CSU’s stance on migration policy was one of the key aspects of his job.

“I followed the discussions about migration, and especially illegal migration, very intensively within the last decade,” he said. “I am deeply opposing the theory that there [has been] a shift in [Germany’s] Willkommenskultur.”

Critical to the argument for Syrian repatriation — a policy Mayer remains a strong proponent of — is the notion that a post-Assad Syria is safe for return. “Fortunately, we now have quite [a] stable government in Syria,” Mayer said. “I just had a briefing with the Federal [Foreign Office], and they are very confident that the al-Sharaa government is stabilizing.” The meeting presumably included Johann Wadepuhl, Germany’s Foreign Minister, who opposed Syrian repatriation after making contentious comments about Syria’s safety after the fall of Assad.

But if Syria is truly safe for return as Mayer and some of his colleagues propose, there seem to be other strong incentives keeping return rates at bay.

In the early 1990s, the Yugoslav Wars — a series of ethnic conflicts, wars of independence, and insurgencies in the Balkan region that lasted over 10 years —  sparked a major refugee and humanitarian crisis in Europe. Generous estimates put the number of refugees at nearly 1 million. Germany received a large number of refugees — around 700,000.

[TK: more on Germany’s successful repatriation of refugees after Yugoslav Wars; But Syrians have been here for 10 years (as opposed to 3-4) and Germany has invested billions of Euros into their integration. In Wiedner’s words, only now is that ‘investment bearing fruit’ — Syrians have stable jobs, speak fluent German, many of them have graduated from German institutions, etc…]

When Nazira Khairzad, former goalkeeper of the Afghan Women’s National Soccer Team, flew out of Germany, she risked never being allowed back in. On October 31st, she and her sister, Nazima, were three days out from the Ultra-Trail du Mont-blanc, a technical 26-kilometer race through Mallorca’s Serra de Tramuntana mountains. Nazira’s legs were still sore from the marathon she’d run the week before. But as she waited to display her refugee travel document to the security officer at Frankfurt am Main, Nazira had bigger concerns on her mind. 

Nazira’s status in Germany is tenuous. After the Taliban took over Afghanistan, she fled to Italy, where she obtained asylum. In 2023, she moved to Frankfurt, reuniting with her family after nearly two years of separation. After over a year of waiting, her asylum application was processed–and then, rejected. By EU law, refugees can’t apply for asylum in two countries. A non-resident, Nazira now straddles a bureaucratic contradiction. “Exclusion of deportation (Duldung),” it says in German on her ID. And under that: “No residence permit! The holder is required to leave the country!” 

Nazira is not alone. According to the Federal Statistics Office, over 177,000 others have duldung, which means something like “toleration.” Similar to the U.S.’s Temporary Protected Status, Germany’s duldung shields holders from deportation while denying them residency. Duldung may be issued to people without passports or documents, people who are too sick to travel, or people who face danger at home. As soon as the grounds for duldung go away, the German government may revoke its protections. In other words, duldung offers some safety–but only for as long as Germany deems it necessary. 

On the day of her flight, Nazira took little comfort in her tolerated status. She turned to her sister in line for security and said, “What about if the police catch me?”

Nazira is used to hiding. As a young girl, she and her sister started the first girls’ soccer team in their native Bamiyan, a city in central Afghanistan. They snuck off to early morning practices multiple times a week, telling their parents they were going to an English class that met before school. Mostly in secret, Nazira’s love for sports took hold. At 11, she won a 10k, crossing the finish line in a long dress and tattered sandals. Her parents only discovered she ran when, after a race, she was broadcast on their home TV. 

Born in 2004, Nazira came of age after U.S.-led coalition forces ousted the Taliban regime. In the two decades that followed, women ran, swam, and biked in triathlons abroad. Powerlifters won gold medals in India and Kazakhstan. The Afghan Women’s National Team formed in 2007, and won its first international match in 2012. By 2013, female Afghan athletes had accumulated some 100 medals. Through running, soccer, and skiing, Nazira added to that tally. As a female athlete, she was a minority in a conservative culture. But for most of her life, she was safe. 

That changed in early 2021, when the Taliban started to gain control of the provinces surrounding Kabul. One night, Nazira woke up to her phone ringing. It was a driver from Free to Run, the organization that sponsored Nazira’s first race, offering to help her escape. Talib soldiers had entered Bamiyan, he said while calling from the city center.

In recent months, violence had escalated in Bamiyan for the first time since the Taliban’s regime. In September of 1998, Taliban soldiers first entered Bamiyan and killed an estimated 500 people. Three years later, the group exploded the towering Buddhas of Bamiyan, hollowing out a cliff the height of a ten-story building. This history fresh in her mind, Nazira pushed a desk in front of her door. She changed into a long black dress, threw clothes into a small suitcase, and gathered the trophies, medals, and certificates that adorned her room, tying them up in a tapestry. 

For hours, Nazira paced the room, scared that Taliban soldiers were waiting outside her door. Her soccer teammates, many of whom ended up escaping into the mountains surrounding the valley city of Bamiyan, called to ask where she would flee. At around 4:30 in the morning, her father called to tell her their neighbors were driving to Kabul. “You should go with them,” she recalls him saying. 

When Nazira got to Kabul, she joined her sister Nazima, who’d left home months earlier, in the basement room she was renting with several other women. For months, they shared a twin bed, their heads resting on opposite ends of a top-bunk mattress. It was around this time that Nazima–an athlete with a unique hunger for adventure–ventured into the black market. She’d won a scholarship to study in Malaysia, and needed a visa so she could travel to Pakistan for her appointment at the embassy (there is no Malaysian embassy in Afghanistan). Between odd meetings with a network of fixers, she traveled around the country, giving tours to English-speaking tourists. In May of 2021 she moved to Pakistan, narrowly escaping her country’s fall to the Taliban. Meanwhile, Nazira joined the Afghan Women’s National Team as a goalkeeper and started training for a match in Tajikistan, set for the end of August. 

These plans were upended on August 15th, 2021, when the Taliban reached Kabul. As a high-profile female athlete, Nazira was especially at risk. During this time, photos were circulating online of Mahjabin Hakimi, a volleyball player, her head severed from her body. The message was clear: women in sports should fear for their lives.   

Nazira took refuge with her ski coach, Gul Hussain Baizada. Through his work as a tour guide, Baizada had contacts outside the country who he said could help them flee. Nazira called her parents from the airport. “If you stay in Afghanistan,” she recalls them telling her on the phone, “the Taliban will kill you.” 

It was family, not escape, that brought Nazira to Germany. After the Taliban took over Afghanistan, she fled to Italy with her ski coach. In a matter of months, she obtained asylum and made plans to take college courses, and in February of 2023, earned a spot on AC Milan. “I see football like a member of my parents, like my brother or sister,” she said in her introductory video for the team. “I cannot live without football.” 

But just when she started gaining a sense of stability in Italy, everything changed. Her sister, Nazima–who went to Germany on a short-term Schengen visa, after her visa to Malaysia was denied–had been dizzy for months. She blamed her symptoms–vomitting, fatigue, and short, acute headaches–on stress. But soon, her illness became impossible to ignore. On July 27th, 2023, Nazira left her new team, her asylum status, and her college career in Italy to reunite with her family after nearly two years of separation. On August 21st, Nazima underwent an emergency operation to remove a brain tumor. Nazira stayed in the hospital for three months as her sister recovered, sleeping in a small chair in the room or a supplies closet. 

As her relatives obtained asylum one by one, Nazira adapted as best she could to her second country of refuge. As she had in Italy, she started to learn the language and joined a team, FC Mittelbuchen. In August, the opportunity arose for her to play at the professional level, for FIFA’s newly inaugurated refugee team. Selection camps would be held in Australia and England. By duldung rules, Nazira was supposed to stay in Germany. But for Nazira, the risks of leaving Germany–a country that seemed to want her gone–were worth it. 

Next steps: 

• Context section about the shifting relationship between German government and Taliban 
• Scene: Nazira’s selection as goalie 
• What’s next? Italian asylum expires in a year 
• Conclusion: race in Mallorca

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.

Christopher Tamm, 25, is sitting on a chair next to an anti-racism bench in Germany as he looks at the camera wearing sunglasses in an Instagram post dated March, 2025. In the caption, Tamm has included the calculation for the estimated cost for the “so-called ‘benches against racism: no room for racism—for diversity!’” as he criticizes their installation using taxpayer money. 

In July, Tamm posted a photo of himself sitting on a couch, reading a book titled “Remigration,” and wearing a Make America Great Again hat. “Remigration” is a term used by the far-right to express support for state sanctioned mass deportation for immigrants. 

In mid-September, Tamm is pictured at a vigil for Charlie Kirk and Iryna Zarutska, with the caption #whitelivesmatter. In an accompanying post, Tamm says that Iryna did not receive public embrace after her death because she was white. 

Tamm’s most popular post, which has received over two million views, was published in late January. In this compilation video, several people introduce themselves with their pronouns including they/them, followed by Tamm’s commentary that he is “right (straight) and German.”

Tamm is one of many German social media influencers for the far-right Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party. The AfD party was formed in 2013 as a single-issue party in response to global financial crisis policies that provided bailouts for struggling countries. The AfD promoted beliefs of nationalism that have intensified over the years, with their focus shifting to immigration issues in 2015. 

During the Syrian Civil War, the German government had opened its doors to refugees seeking asylum. Many families were driven from their homes, and the Assad government tortured many who did not support the authoritarian regime. Almost 300,000 Syrian refugees entered Germany in 2015, with an overall 46% migration increase from 2014. Amid this major immigration influx, the AfD shifted focus to anti-immigration politics and began dramatically increasing their party support. 

Tamm resonates with key AfD messaging, specifically “remigration.” He feels that immigrants, specifically Muslim practicing immigrants, do not belong in German society.

“If you’re somebody who wants to wear a hijab, you don’t fit into Germany.”

Though Germany does not recognize any specific religion, many women are discriminated against for wearing a hijab, and certain states have banned women from wearing hijabs in government, public education, and clerical positions. While Tamm believes a hijab is a symbol of female suppression, many Muslim women disagree. 

Tamm said that immigrants should migrate to countries in which they are most culturally similar, and that leaving one’s country due to hardship was “weak.” For many Syrians, however, Germany offered the greatest promise for opportunity and leaving Syria was not a matter of choice, as they faced torture. 

To recruit others to the AfD cause, Tamm has taken to posting images and short-form videos on social media. He sports a coiffed short cut with a sharp side part and a short mustache and beard. Along with several “remigration” posts and messages in support of the MAGA movement, Tamm also targets LGBT+ groups. 

Though LGBT+ sentiment is mixed within the AfD, and party co-leader Alice Weidel is openly lesbian, anti-immigration messages are uniform throughout. Influencers like Tamm, who is only 25, have helped generate a new wave of AfD support primarily from young, white German men. 

Jasmine, who is a graduate student in Berlin, noticed her younger brother has been pulled to the political right by his social media feed. Her brother, a 17-year-old who now lives in the US but was born in Germany, has been telling her that more deportations are needed and immigrants are going to “replace us in the culture.” She believes that social media algorithms can “indoctrinate you into [an] anti-migrant racist.”

She also explained how the AfD made refugees “scapegoats” for a wide range of problems, as the party advertised that “if we stop the migrants coming in, then suddenly everything will be better.” And far too many, she believes, fell for this promise that she considers a trap.

For Tamm, he wears provocation as a badge of honor: “I like to be the provocateur.” Tamm approaches his social media posts like a “business” with his videos making fun of left wing beliefs. “If you want to be successful, you have to do something that nobody is doing, and you have to find a niche that isn’t occupied. I found a niche with my provocative videos.” 

Provocation is not an idea unique to the AfD party. In the US, the MAGA movement has been using similar strategies to attract younger male voters, and the Trump administration has similarly cracked down on illegal immigrants. It is unsurprising that the two groups have begun to show signs of unity. 

Back in early 2025, Vance spoke out against the firewall that had formed in Germany against the AfD, stating that it was challenging free speech in the country. 

Since then, Deputy leader of the AfD Beatrix von Storch and AfD Politician from western Germany Joachim Paul had a meeting in September with representatives of the national security council, the vice president’s office and the State Department. Most recently, German influencer and MAGA advisor Alex Bruesewitz visited Berlin in early November and spoke with AfD leaders about their shared goals. 

The spreading popularity of this movement was on full display following the assasination of social media influencer and far-right supporter Charlie Kirk on Sept. 10, as protests and gatherings drew large crowds across the country and in Europe. 

Country leaders and officials have posted reactions to Kirk’s death, many of which are aligned with the far-right rhetoric. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán described the left as “hate mongering,” Santiago Abascal, a Congressman in Spain, wrote that the left “wanted this assasination,” and Germany’s Alice Weidel, co-leader of the AfD party, posted on X that “liberal’s hate the left’s way of life.” 

“I am totally not surprised that a party like the AfD that’s still on its way up trying to take power, is going to try to learn everything it can from ideologues and activists in other countries who are singing from the same sheet of music,” one former Foreign Service Officer in the Department of State told me.

From here, my plan is to move into AfD ties with Russia then concerns about antisemitism. End with kicker of Tamm at protest in Nazi salute. 

On the morning of March 31, 2025, Ekaterina Fomina waited anxiously in Berlin. She was expecting a message from her lawyer, Yulia Kuznetsova, with an update on her case. It was only the fourth session, and her lawyer had not yet been allowed to present their defence.

Then her phone flashed. It was not her lawyer, but a colleague. More notifications followed. Fomina’s name began to appear across Russian media. Within half an hour, the Moscow court handling her case had sentenced her in absentia to eight and a half years in prison for “spreading fake news” about the Russian army, one of the heaviest penalties under the law.

“I was crying a lot,” she said. “Because it is not about committing a crime and receiving a fair sentence. It is about realizing that your country calls you a terrorist.”

Berlin, where Fomina now lives, has become the informal capital of this fractured press in exile. Since the war began, hundreds of Russian journalists have relocated to the city, supported by a fragile network of advocacy groups and NGOs. From co-working spaces and temporary studios, they continue to publish and broadcast for audiences that often need VPNs to access their content. Yet safety abroad comes with a different kind of constraint: distance. The very freedom that allows them to keep speaking also severs their connection to the country they are speaking about.

The rise of Berlin as a media hub is inseparable from the collapse of independent journalism inside Russia. The transformation began in February 2022, when nearly every major outlet that reported on the invasion was blocked, branded a “foreign agent,” or forced to shut down. Article 207.3, the “fake news” law, criminalised any reporting that contradicted the Ministry of Defense. 

TK Grigore Pop-Eleches / someone else on Russian media ecosystem and how it isolates and fosters distrust towards independent media

Fomina’s sentence is part of this sweeping campaign to silence independent journalists who reported on the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  As domestic space for journalism collapsed, the profession reassembled itself abroad. Outlets that once operated in Moscow or St. Petersburg now produce their work from Riga, Vilnius, Tbilisi, Amsterdam, and especially Berlin. TK quote on how this dynamic works

Against this backdrop, Fomina’s own reporting stands out. A former reporter for Important Stories and now a documentary producer for the Russian-language TV channel Dozhd (TV Rain), she had long expected prosecution. She had investigated war crimes in Bucha and Andreevka during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. One Russian soldier confessed to her that he had killed a civilian, and she verified the victim’s identity. “There could not be any coincidences in this situation,” she said. “But the truth does not matter for this case.”

Understanding her conviction requires understanding the logic of the system that produced it. Reading the case materials, what struck her most was how easily the state could assemble a conviction. “They even did not know how to write Bucha,” she said. “They wrote it with a mistake.” When she saw that the male voiceover from the video had been attributed to her, she understood that accuracy had no place in the proceedings. “They simply did not care,” she explained.

For Fomina, this confirmed something she had sensed long before the verdict. “I actually realised how other cases are built,” she said. “There is no evidence of people’s guilt. They simply can say in the case ‘she is against the regime.’” At a certain point, the legal details barely matter because the outcome is already defined. “The decision was written in advance,” she stated.

TK on how these trials work and what consequences have on reception of the journalists’ work.

TK how some journalists are discouraged from their profession → Anastasia Kortokova (not getting credit for her work)?

Berlin’s emergence as a media center is visible in the rhythms of daily work. Reporters who once worked in established newsrooms now move between borrowed offices. A network of NGOs supports them by offering co-working spaces and financial, legal, and emotional support. For newly arrived reporters, these spaces are often the first sign that a profession still exists for them. Danila Bedyaev, who helps run the NGO MiCT’s Exile Media Hub in Grunewald, described the early months after the invasion as a period of relentless arrivals. TK more on NGO support networks. Many came with only a backpack and a laptop, unsure of how long they would stay or whether they would ever work again. Berlin offered neither stability nor guarantees, but it offered a starting point. “People could walk in and know they were not alone,” he said. For many, that mattered as much as the practical support.

Yet the city’s role is not only logistical. It has become a cultural and psychological center as well. Exiled journalists spend their days reporting on a country they cannot return to, for an audience that cannot openly read or watch them. The collapse of domestic journalism has transformed their work into something more fragmented and improvisational. Teams coordinate across time zones. Producers cut footage in Berlin from material recorded secretly in Russia. Reporters verify stories through encrypted calls, blurred screenshots, and documents sent anonymously through Telegram.

Berlin is also a place where the emotional cost of exile becomes visible. Nearly everyone describes a version of the same split. They live in one society while working entirely inside another. They follow two news cycles, carry two contexts in their heads, and write for a country whose physical landscape they no longer inhabit (change, repetitive). TK quote Anastasia Korotkova and spotlight on her.

Exile forces a reconsideration of politics and identity. TKTKTKTK. The story of Russian journalism in Berlin is not just the story of flight but of reconstruction.

In Russia, the accused disappear. In exile, Fomina found that her only defense was to keep talking.

Notes: include more journalists earlier

By the time Tahmina Ataee arrived at Bard College Berlin, she had already studied under three education systems, crossed two borders, and learned four languages. But the opportunity that once made her journey possible has disappeared for nearly all Afghan girls, as the door that once led to education and brighter futures is being forcibly shut.

Over the past two decades, a remarkable generation of Afghan women proved what was possible when educational doors were open. As Afghan sociologist Abdul Wahid Gulrani explains, the transformation of women’s education after 2001 was not simply academic. “Girls who grew up in dusty courtyards and unsafe neighborhoods suddenly entered classrooms, universities, and public life. They became teachers, journalists, and community leaders,” he said. For women like Tahmina, it meant the chance to imagine a different future.

Today, Afghanistan stands out tragically as the only country in the world where secondary and higher education are forbidden to girls and women, according to UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. The agency estimates in 2025 that “nearly 2.2 million girls are now barred from attending school beyond the primary level,” a reality UNESCO warns “almost wiped out” two decades of steady progress for education in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, “women have been banned from universities” since December 2022, cutting off one of the few pathways for higher learning, UNESCO reports. The consequences of these actions are profound. UNESCO estimates the “suspension of women’s higher education alone is expected to cost the country up to US$9.6 billion in lost potential by 2066.”

Today, formal schooling for many Afghan girls has been driven into hiding. According to NPR, some teenage girls now attend secret tutoring centers hidden in basements and private homes, where they study English, the Quran, and high-school level subjects. As Gulrani observes, “education in Afghanistan is not dead, it has gone underground.” “Across the country, girls continue to study secretly in homes, basements, and informal community classes. Some are taking online courses through their phones and laptops. Mothers are teaching daughters at home,” Gulrani said. This quiet but resilient movement, he says, shows that “while the Taliban can close schools, they cannot extinguish the will to learn.”

In this landscape of shrinking horizons, stories like Tahmina Ataee’s stand out as a glimpse of the talent and ambition now at risk. In Kabul, her education reflected the mix of schools that emerged after 2001, when private, international, and public institutions expanded opportunities for girls. She first attended a global private school, then an all-girls Turkish high school where, as she put it, “we had to learn everything twice, once in Persian and once in English.” She even enrolled in an American university in Kabul before her education was disrupted by the Taliban takeover.

Ataee’s path is not unusual for her generation. She is part of a generation of Afghan women whose lives were shaped by two decades of expanded access to education. Between 2001 and 2021, millions of girls entered classrooms for the first time as private and international schools opened alongside a growing public system. Many of those students later left the country, some as refugees and others on scholarships; however, their education enabled them to build new futures abroad.

Still, national progress often masked the realities inside individual classrooms. For Ataee, the experience looked very different from many of her peers. In Kabul, her classmates were often the daughters of politicians and businessmen, while she was the only Hazara student in her grade. The difference, she said, wasn’t only social. “They put a lot of emphasis on religion and like religious practice,” she said. “We even had a mosque inside the school. That was uncommon.”

Religious expectations felt unfamiliar to her. “I have not grown up to be like that,” she said. “My dad is a very, very non-religious person. My mom has had a bit of a background, but she’s also chill.” Yet pressure to conform was constant. “It’s also not peer pressure, but I guess it is, because they’d be like, oh, it’s lunch break, we have an hour-long lunch, and I would go eat first, but they’re like, no, we have to go pray,” she said. “I wouldn’t call it brainwash, but I was also traumatized, so I would call it that.”

At home, faith mattered less than education. Her father, who worked for a German nonprofit in Afghanistan, encouraged her to focus on learning. Tahmina recalls her father asking, “why would you like believe in such things?” Among Hazara families, this emphasis on education was common. “Not only just my family but friends I know and also relatives, they put a lot of emphasis on education,” she said. “They always like push their kids to study.”

Tahmina’s education was interrupted when the Taliban captured Kabul in August 2021. “We had to leave everything behind,” she said. “We used to live in a flat, and then everything we owned was gone. I don’t have that sort of attachment to materials anymore.” With help from her father’s German employer, her family left Afghanistan, first to Pakistan and then to Germany. “We were one of the first families they got out,” she said.

Arriving in Germany, Tahmina recalled, “it was a bit chaotic when we got here as well, because they thought we were undocumented or, like, illegally entering, which was not the case.” They spent their first weeks in quarantine camps, navigating new rules and procedures. “It was scary because you don’t know what’s going to happen,” she said. “One day they’d wake you up to do blood tests or like very procedural things, but like to us, I was like, what are we doing?”

As they settled, Tahmina continued her studies online. Before leaving Afghanistan, she had been enrolled “in an American school,” she said. “Then, because of the whole takeover, they were like, okay, our current students can continue their studies online without any tuition, so that’s how I was able to do two semesters while I was in Germany.”

When the university reopened a branch in Qatar, she realized she could not continue there. “I was like, this is not going to happen because I’d have to be there,” she said. “My brother was like, oh, there’s a branch here, you can apply.” At the time, she was learning German and preparing to apply to a local university. “Everyone had the same sort of plan,” she said. “You study German, get to university level, and then apply to a German school. That was my idea of how it’s going to be.” Ultimately, Bard College Berlin offered a different path. “I applied and I checked and I was like, oh, okay, I guess I got accepted,” she said, laughing.

Now at Bard, Tahmina is excelling academically, consistently earning top grades. She is also channeling her experience into research on Afghanistan’s brain drain, investigating why the country’s brightest students and professionals leave and how the loss of educated women affects Afghan society. “I’m trying to understand how the talent that was built in the country can be sustained, there is not a lot of research on it,” she said.

For Tahmina, this research is deeply personal. The barriers she faced in Afghanistan, and the millions of girls whose education is now stifled, inform her understanding of what is at stake. Her work highlights both the potential of educated women and the societal cost when that potential is denied. She hopes her future job will do more than study the problem as she hopes to work for an organization that helps people.

Jack Goldfrank was uneasy on his way to the German town of Neustadt – the same land his father had been forced to leave in 1933 for fear of Nazi persecution. 83 years old, he still wonders if his parents, gone for decades, would approve of this pilgrimage to their homeland almost a century after their escape. 

Upon arriving in Neustadt, Jack and his wife, Jane, were greeted by the Mayor, who announced that they were the second Jewish Americans to return to Neustadt in connection with their family’s history. Welcoming them into his office, he opened what he called “The Book of Remembrances,” with the name of every Neustadt Jew who had fled Nazi persecution from 1933 onwards. 

The Mayor then accompanied Jack and Jane to the town’s Jewish cemetery – a burial ground Jack called “not in pristine shape,” but “decent.” “There were a lot of Goldfranks in the cemetery,” Jack tells me. “But the last burial there was in 1937.” No Jews who escaped Nazi persecution had ever returned to live in Neustadt.

Jane adds, “The mayor was very nice. But, in my mind, I’m always remembering that these people, or their parents, were Nazis. It was always like, do they really feel this, or are they doing what they think is right? Does it matter? For me, it was confusing.” 

“My big feeling was discomfort,” Jack says. 

This trip was the first Jack Goldfrank took on his new German passport after reclaiming his German citizenship in the first months of 2025. This encounter with the mayor of Neustadt would fade in his recollection of the visit, overshadowed by lively memories of Berlin light festivals and museum tours. It wasn’t until sitting with me, his granddaughter, that he and his wife began to revisit the feelings of unease they experienced in Neustadt.

My family is just one of the many American Jewish families that have reclaimed their German citizenship in recent years. Since 2016, the German Consulate in New York City has reported a more than 300% increase in applications for citizenship reclamation, parallel with President Donald Trump’s rise to power. Yet for some Jews who return to Germany generations after their ancestors fled Nazi persecution, the reality reveals that the nation has not moved as far from its past as they once imagined – encountering an overextension of Germany’s “memory culture” around the Holocaust that can manifest in instances of fetishization of Jewish culture and an overperformance of repentance.

Many recipients of reclaimed citizenship are two to three generations removed from the  Holocaust themselves; these individuals do not connect reclamation efforts to a traumatic history, but rather an opportunity for smoother travel. Maya Shwayder, a journalist based in New England who reclaimed her citizenship in 2014, said she remembers thinking, “This is great! We can travel so much more easily. This is really, really useful.” 

Lara Moser, Texan author and former politician, laughs, telling me, “Why wouldn’t we want a second passport?” Moser continues, “The people who were my generation immediately started applying once we got it because, once you have all the documents and the place, everyone can get it. The older people did not get it right away.”

Jack Goldfrank is only one generation removed from the traumas Nazi Germany inflicted upon his parents, yet for him too “the driving force was really to have the ability to explore other countries pretty easily.” He continues, “My mother and father never talked about their life in Germany, and, shame on me, I never asked them. They never volunteered, and I never raised the issue… I’m not sure if my parents would be proud of what I’ve done, or if they would feel very negative.”

Younger Americans, with a less vivid and recent recollection of the Holocaust, make up the majority of those with reclaimed passports who then decide to move to Germany permanently, mostly for job opportunities or the hope of an improved quality of life. Shwayder and Moser are in their ranks. Sitting in a noisy Berlin cafe, Moser tells me, “There’s definite practical aspects [of living in Germany], like the schools here, and it really does have a functioning social democracy.” 

However, upon moving to Germany, Moser did not necessarily encounter the socialized democratic utopia she expected. Instead, she describes a very different reality. 

“They fetishize Jews,” she tells me. “The ones who don’t are lying. They’re like, ‘Oh, wow, it’s so beautiful. Thank you. Thank you so much.’ They feel exonerated… like they’re forgiven. And I’m like…no, I literally just wanted healthcare and like good schools…I don’t volunteer that I’m Jewish anymore.”

Germany often receives praise for the ways in which the nation has memorialized historical wrongs and continues to acknowledge the mass atrocity of the holocaust. There is even a word for it, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, which translates to “confronting the past.” 

American philosopher and Jew herself, Susan Neiman wrote a book in 2019 called Learning from the Germans, making the case that Germany had successfully faced its Nazi past and urging Western countries, the United States in particular, to follow the German example.

However, when I reached out to Neiman to discuss her thoughts on this topic, she told me that her views, and the world, had changed considerably since she wrote the book. “I’d have never written that book had I not thought that things were getting significantly better,” she says. 

In a stark contrast from her previous position, Neiman tells me that she believes German vergangenheitsbewältigung has gone too far. “It’s to the point that some of them call themselves the perpetrator nation. But, if that’s how you essentialize yourself, then there has to be a victim nation, and that victim nation is the Jews…The people who count as real Jews of the official Jewish community are constantly focusing on the victimhood of the Nazi Period.”

Upstairs, four college students sift through a pile of wooden planks and rubbery strips of wallpaper, occasionally landing on treasure; a dusty matchbox or crinkled movie poster; delicate bird skulls; a Hello Dolly vinyl; a bottle of liquor half-full. When they come across a roll of film, they hold it up to the window, angling it toward the sunlight to reveal faded images. Most of it is porn. The boys joke, “What kind of movie theatre was this place?” 

Downstairs, people of all ages are drilling holes and hauling branches into large red containers in the front yard. They are all far from home, here in Gummersbach, Germany. There are the eight Americans who signed up for a mission trip with First Baptist Church (FBC), a megachurch in Hendersonville, Tennessee. And there are the 20-or-so Ukrainians affiliated with Almaz Church, who have shown up on this dreary grey Wednesday to help out. All are intent on transforming this abandoned, cavernous theatre – still displaying signs for Indiana Jones 4 in its ticket booth – into a church. 

Among them is Almaz Church’s leader, Pastor Nikolas Skopych, an unassuming man with a wiry salt-and-pepper beard and kind eyes. Among the wreckage, you might find him wielding an electric floor-grinder, sparks flying behind him, or else quietly circulating to ensure everyone has a task. 

He spent a year praying to find a space like this. “I believe that God gave us [a] unique opportunity to buy this cinema,” he said. 

The future church would serve the community of Ukrainian refugees now residing in Gummersbach, estimated by Skopych to number 3000 individuals. This is just one of 64 Ukrainian Churches which have been “planted” in Germany since the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war. Overall, 152 Ukrainian churches have been planted across Europe since 2022, according to Almaz’ website. 

American missionaries have played a significant role in establishing and growing these churches. Michael McClanahan, head of missions at FBC in Tennessee, expressed his hope that this mission, and those like it, will extend beyond Gummersbach. “This will be a central training hub,” he said. “It will be an opportunity, not only for Ukrainian churches to be expanded, but also, I feel that this is the beginning of a revival of Christianity in Europe.” 

Though American evangelicals have flip-flopped in their views on Ukraine, often echoing U.S. President Donald Trump’s stances, the war is transforming the relationship between Ukrainian and American evangelicals, revealing the extent to which the groups are religiously and politically intertwined. In the U.S., American evangelicals have welcomed Ukrainian refugees into their home churches; a group of American evangelical missionaries has already begun  planning for the end of the war, preparing to dramatically increase mission trips to serve Ukraine’s post-war population. At the same time, churches like Almaz in Germany are revealing that the relationship between these nationalities is not confined to their respective countries — America and Ukraine — but is now seeping into Europe, where over 6 million Ukrainian refugees have fled and resettled. 

***

“EUROPE NEEDS NEW MISSIONS AND NEW CHURCHES,” reads the bolded text on a Ukrainian Missional Movement (UMM) Powerpoint. Pastor Nickolas Skopych presented it last April to the FBC congregation on his visit to Hendersonville, Tennessee, urging members to join the effort to grow and establish Baptist churches across Europe.

Pastor Nickolas grew up in Kyiv, Ukraine, born to parents who did not believe in God. At 18, feeling disillusioned and aimless, he stumbled across a few American evangelical missionaries on the street distributing brochures about Christianity. 

“I took [the brochures] because we didn’t have literature about Christianity. It was impossible to have the Bible, or New Testament,” Skopych explained. These brochures changed the trajectory of his life, infusing it with new meaning. “I take this brochure, and read it, and think about life. I understand that the very high meaning of life, I can only find with God,” he said. “It helped me.”

At the time, in the 1990s, American missionaries were becoming an increasingly common sight in Kyiv’s streets. Many American evangelicals, unable to speak Ukrainian or Russian, spent their holidays traveling to Ukraine, where they would publicly mime scenes from the bible. 

When Catherine Wanner, Professor of History, Anthropology, and Religious Studies at Penn State travelled to Ukraine for dissertation research, she pivoted topics when she realized the ubiquity of American evangelism in Ukraine. “Every single place I looked, I was sitting next to some missionary who was coming to Ukraine to engage in church planting,” she recalled. 

Church planting is the process of establishing a new Christian congregation in a community or region, typically involving evangelism and discipleship. In the 18th century, early religious movements were fueled by church planting in the United States. The term comes with a host of associations and understandings, not all of them positive. Wanner explained that during the Soviet period it was demonized as a bearer of American capitalism, but is now associated with democracy and the “valiant provision of humanitarian assistance,” Wanner said.  

This “small sea” of Evangelicals, as Wanner put it, shared a premise that “former Soviet citizens had been deprived of religion and were godless and wanted knowledge of the Bible and of God, and needed to create church communities.”

This message struck a chord with Pastor Nickolas and lasted. Decades later, having become a Pastor of the Almaz church in Ukraine, Pastor Nickolas was visiting a friend in Gummersbach. It was during that visit that Russia invaded Ukraine, leaving the Skopych family stranded in Germany. Hundreds of Almaz’s congregants followed, bringing their friends and family members with them. 

In March, 2025, Skopych met Bruce Chesser, the senior pastor of FBC. Chesser was on a visit to Germany seeking a “native, German-speaking” church with which to collaborate. But when he met Skopych, he was so moved by the Ukrainian pastor’s story that he changed course. A few months later, he returned with the head of church missions, who was similarly compelled by the family’s story. And a year after that, eight Americans from FBC found themselves in Gummersbach, stripping wallpaper from the walls of an abandoned theatre, trading Indiana Jones out for a house of worship.

. ***

Lede:

When he was ten years old, kicking a soccer ball on a field in Berlin, Nabil Rayk could already sense the divide. The opposing team’s parents, “the Proper Germans” as he puts it, would shout insults from the sidelines. “Kick that Arab, kick that N-word” he recalled, their racist comments disguised as team spirit. “For them,” Nabil said, “sometimes sport is a replacement for war.”

Nutgraph:

A decade later, the same hostility Nabil once felt on the soccer field continues to persist far beyond the boundaries of sport. Divisions along racial, ethnic, gender, and religious lines that have been present in playgrounds and smaller soccer clubs are now making their way into parliament debates and campaign rallies, as far-right parties like Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) gain traction and anti-immigrant rhetoric grows louder across Germany.

For many immigrants and people of color, this prejudice is forcing their ethnic, religious, or racial identities and even their gender or sexual orientation into the spotlight. It leaves them questioning whether Germany truly sees them as part of the nation or as outsiders.

In response, a renewed wave of protests and activism condemning far-right extremism has taken place in recent months, particularly within the stands of numerous football clubs’ stadiums. In Germany, football reputations carry political weight, which are largely created by the fans. East German football clubs have long been associated with right-leaning ideology, while those in the West have been labeled as left-leaning.