Empathy and Angst in a German City Transformed by Migrants
ERFURT, Germany — The mood in the school gymnasium was turning. City officials had invited people from the nearby tower blocks, to explain that a group of mostly Syrian migrants had been housed in the neighborhood the night before.
An elderly woman stepped up to the microphone: “Will you be building a mosque next?” she demanded. “Will they wake us up with their prayer at 5 a.m.?”
A schoolteacher asked, “How do we protect our children?”
One young man did not even bother asking a question: “This has to stop,” he announced, to a smattering of applause.
“This” is an unprecedented stream of mostly Muslim migrants into a city that until recently was so white that a black man in the local Green Party was reportedly known as “Erfurt’s African.”
