Germany marks Hanau racist attack five years on

On February 19, 2020, a gunman motivated by his far-right, racist beliefs went on a murderous rampage in Hanau, a German city near Frankfurt. He targeted places associated with immigrant communities, shooting nine people dead and wounding seven more. Afterward, he turned his gun on his mother and himself.

The perpetrator had watched YouTube videos shortly before the attacks, including speeches by Björn Höcke, one of the most prominent figures in the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party and its leader in the state of Thuringia. Five years on, one of the victim's mothers says not enough has been done to prevent such tragedies from happening again. Serpil Temiz Unvar lost her 23-year-old son Ferhat.

"This tragic event has had resonance in society, but this resonance has been largely due to the efforts of the families affected, who have fought tirelessly to make their voices heard," she told DW. "These efforts, together with the solidarity shown by many, have contributed to society coming together in this case more than in similar events in the past. But these individual efforts, as important as they are, are not enough to bring about fundamental societal transformation." 

Remembering the victims

Soon after the massacre, Unvar founded an educational initiative named after her son to fight racism and empower young people. A raft of other social and political projects have been established in the city. Many were launched or supported by family and friends of the victims, determined to uncover mistakes that might have meant the attacks could have been prevented, to keep the memories of their loved ones alive and to turn the spotlight on racism in German society.

A memorial is also due to be erected by 2026 in a square in Hanau that will be renamed 19 February, a steel sculpture incorporating the names of the nine victims: Gökhan Gültekin, Sedat Gürbüz, Said Nesar Hashemi, Mercedes Kierpacz, Hamza Kurtović, Vili Viorel Păun, Fatih Saraçoğlu, Ferhat Unvar and Kaloyan Velkov.

This will stand outside the House of Democracy and Diversity, which is also scheduled for completion the same year and will be designed as a space for dialogue, education and commemoration.

 

Continuities and connections

The Hanau tragedy is not a one-off. Estimates suggest that more than 200 people have died in far-right attacks in reunified Germany alone. While the country is often lauded for its culture of remembrance around the Holocaust and the crimes of the Nazi era, many feel there is less willingness to confront the many acts of racist violence in the post-war era.

Furkan Yüksel, a member of the Coalition for Pluralistic Public Discourse (CPPD) and an educator working in the field of history and politics, is among those critical of Germany's remembrance culture. "I think that this German image of itself as a nation that has learned its lessons from the Second World War and successfully left its past behind is a bit deceptive," he told DW.

Mirjam Zadoff, director of the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism, stresses the need to acknowledge the connections between Germany's past and its present.

"It feels so necessary to show the continuities because people are being killed by the same ideology, and they are even sometimes from the same family — as in the case of Mercedes Kierpacz, whose great-grandfather was killed in Auschwitz and who became herself one of the victims in Hanau." Kierpacz, a 35-year-old mother-of-two — like two other Hanau victims — was a member of the Roma and Sinti community, a minority that was also persecuted under Nazism.

"This idea of a homogeneous society that perceives itself as German, while everyone else of a different religion or a different ethnicity remains an outsider — that is a continuation of both German dictatorships," Zadoff told DW.

Government reforms abandoned

When German Chancellor Olaf Scholz's center-left government came to power in 2021, the coalition agreement stated that the country's culture of remembrance would be expanded to include colonial and migrant histories.

Germany only officially accepted that it was a country of immigrants in 1999. Yet migrant workers began arriving in large numbers in what was then West Germany in the 1950s and in East Germany in the 1980s, and the history of the Black German community stretches as far back as the 19th century. 

While there are already two museums telling the story of German emigration overseas in the northern cities of Hamburg and Bremerhaven, the country's first museum about migration to Germany is only due to open in Cologne in 2029. Named DOMiD, it grew out of an initiative Turkish immigrants launched in the late 1980s.

Last year's proposals from culture commissioner Claudia Roth's office to widen Germany's remembrance culture were ultimately shelved amidst criticism, particularly from the heads of Holocaust memorial sites. They were concerned about the relativization of the Shoah, the systematic, state-sponsored murder of some six million Jews, along with Sinti and Roma, political opponents and other groups.

However, things are already changing in some public institutions. The Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism began to incorporate exhibits about right-wing violence in contemporary Germany after the 2016 gun attack in Munich, in which nine people were killed. And in 2024, it showed Talya Feldman's installation "Wir sind Hier" (We Are Here). Based on her ongoing digital map project of the same name, the work remembers the victims of far-right terror and police violence over the last 40 years, including Hanau. The US artist calls her project an appeal for "active remembrance."

Structural racism, education, political discourse

Yüksel would like to see transnational approaches to history teaching in German schools and a recognition that racism and right-wing extremism exist in all cultural contexts. He also called for antidiscrimination training to become an obligatory part of teacher training in Germany and for more awareness of structural racism in areas such as education, law enforcement agencies and medicine.

He also criticized the political discourse surrounding migration across the party spectrum in the wake of the AfD's controversial "remigration" debate, a reported plan for the mass deportation of millions of citizens.

"We need to create awareness that right-wing violence is not just a phenomenon involving crazy individual perpetrators," he said. "It is not just a drawn weapon that create violences."

Despite the Hanau murders of 2020, the AfD, parts of which have been classified as right-wing extremist by the country's intelligence service, polled over 18% in the 2023 regional elections in the state of Hesse, where Hanau is located, to become the second-biggest party.

Last autumn, a 27-meter wall painting of the faces of the Hanau victims in the state of Hesse's biggest city, Frankfurt, had to be restored after being smeared with a swastika and SS runes.

Even more menacingly, the perpetrator's father has repeatedly harassed Serpil Temiz Unvar with letters and contact attempts despite restraining orders. Last October, Unvar's lawyer called for an 18-month prison sentence, but the judge concluded that though Hans-Gerd R. was "without a doubt racist," a prison sentence was inappropriate. She said that while he would probably continue with his actions, this was "something that society had to tolerate."

Edited by: Ben Knight

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