Autumn
There is no cinema in Sumte. There are no general stores, no pubs, gyms, cafes, markets, schools, doctors, florists, auto shops or libraries. There are no playgrounds. Some roads are paved, but others scarcely distinguish themselves from the scrub grass and swampy tractor trails surrounding each house – modest plots that grade into the farmland and medieval forests of Lower Saxony. There is no meeting hall. All is private and premodern.
One day in October, after a thousand years of evening gloom, a work crew arrives and lines the main avenue with LED street lamps. The lights are a concession to the villagers – all 102 of them – from their political masters in the nearby town of Amt Neuhaus, who manage Sumte’s affairs and must report to their own masters in Hanover, the state capital of Lower Saxony, who in turn must report to their masters in Berlin, who send emissaries to Brussels, which might as well be Bolivia, so impossibly distant do the villagers find that black hole of tax euros and goodwill.
It’s this vague chain of command that most alienates the people of Sumte. They are pensioners and housepainters. They are farmers, subsistence and commercial. They are carpenters, clerks and commuters who cross the River Elbe by ferry every morning, driving to jobs in Lüneberg or Hamburg, 90 minutes away. More than a few are out of work. Nobody tells them anything.
Which is not to suggest anyone here is unaware of what’s going on in the world in 2015. The people of Sumte are not hicks (or hinterwälder, as the Germans say). Word has reached Dirk Hammer, the bicycle repairman, and Walter Luck, the apiarist, about the capsizing trawlers, the panic in Lampedusa. They watch the nightly news. They’ve heard of this crisis. And they wonder where these people – more than a million of them – are headed. The streetlights, a long-standing request now mysteriously granted, make them suspicious.
Only Reinhard Schlemmer watches the workmen and knows for sure. A grizzled figure with a wild nest of silver hair, Schlemmer was once an officer in the East German army. These days he sells painting supplies out of the detached shed behind his house, a nominal business that mostly serves as an excuse to chat with neighbours. He may have lately fallen into the role of odd old man on the margins – the unreformed communist with his cans of primer – but he was Sumte’s mayor when the border came down, a decorated party member, and his bearing still suggests something of the phrase “pillar of the community”.
After reunification, as farming collectives dissolved and unemployment rose, Schlemmer came up with a shrewd plan to save Sumte from extinction. He convinced a rich businessman in Hanover to invest in the construction of a huge complex on its outskirts, a private village-within-the-village where East German women would train to become caseworkers for a debt-collection agency.
The plan worked. The office opened in 1994 and for almost 20 years, the agency provided jobs for 250 women from Sumte and neighbouring towns in Lower Saxony and Mecklenburg, becoming the area’s largest employer. But the 2008 financial crisis razed the debt market, and in 2012 the agency, now called Apontas, decided to consolidate its operations in Hanover. A few women moved with them. The rest lost their jobs. The complex has stood empty ever since.
Now Schlemmer thinks back to the moonless night a month ago when he was out in his yard, looking across the weedy lot at the blackness where the darkened Apontas buildings eclipsed a wedge of stars. He thought of that pitiful infant body lying in the Turkish surf. “All the children out in the dirt,” he remembers thinking. “And all of our halls standing empty.” He asked himself: what is to be done?
It’s an oddly warm October morning when Grit Richter, sitting in her modest mayoral office in Amt Neuhaus, gets a phone call from the interior ministry in Hanover. An administrator explains to her that Sumte will receive 1,000 asylum seekers starting at the end of the month, to be housed in the Apontas office complex. Richter isn’t sure she’s heard correctly. Yes, the administrator says, they know that Sumte is small. They also know that the complex is empty and disused. But the village has something that no other town in the area can boast: 21,000 square feet of dry shelter. Her options, she’s told, are to say “yes” or “yes”.
She hangs up. Like a lot of Germans, Richter is sceptical, pragmatic, stolid. Not much escapes her when it comes to the 4,700 constituents living in border hamlets from Stiepelse to Wehnigen, but she can’t keep track of everything. She doesn’t yet know that Reinhard Schlemmer has been busy making phone calls of his own, offering up the Apontas complex and setting this new idea in motion.
Before long, news of the thousand refugees has spread up and down the Elbe. Richter’s phone starts ringing and doesn’t stop. She schedules an emergency meeting at the Hotel Hanover, Amt Neuhaus’s only inn.
That evening, she leaves her office and crosses the town square to the hotel. The banquet hall is classic 1970s GDR, a mauve-and-faux-wood assemblage fit for a politburo confab. The fake flowers are sun-faded, the parquet is as worn as a roller rink. Just now the room is in chaos. Four hundred local people have crammed themselves inside, backed all the way to the foyer.
Someone has also alerted the media, and Richter eyes without affection the journalists who are pressed against the back doors, interviewing her constituents. The story, it seems, is a perfect metaphor for the crisis – 1,000 refugees to 100 villagers, an overwhelming invasion – and Richter knows that the journalists are hoping to capture a panic. She walks to the stage and starts talking as calmly as she can.
Until the moment Richter received the phone call, the most contentious municipal issue Amt Neuhaus had ever faced was the proposed construction of a bridge across the wide and placid Elbe – a project that has united residents against the feckless local government for approximately a century and a half. A bridge would shorten commute times and attract more investors. A bridge could change everything for these dying towns. Now imagine that your mayor gathers the entire community into a cramped and crumbling East German banquet hall and announces that the federal government has ordered not the long-desired bridge, but a refugee centre, one that will require expensive renovations and have unknown consequences. The atmosphere in the room is not good.
At the back of the hall, two agitators from the National Democratic Party (NPD) unfurl a large “Germany for Germans” banner and heckle the crowd with cries of “asylum terror”. Other locals are quick to escort them out of the hall. There is no swell of support around here for the extreme right, unlike in many neighbouring areas. But it’s too late to keep the press away. Interviews with the two men accompany most of the articles on Sumte in the days to come, including in the New York Times.
Once the NPD activists are gone, Richter distributes cold facts: the EU is taking on 5,000 new migrants every day, and is expected to have received at least 3 million by the end of 2017. Germany will have 800,000 new migrants by the end of this year, and it appears that most will be allowed to stay. There are tough decisions to be made in every town in Germany and this much has been settled for them: the building complex in Sumte will be leased for one year to the Workers’ Samaritan Federation (ASB), a private charity that specialises in disaster relief. Maximum occupancy will be maintained throughout the year. They will all regroup and reassess next October.
Jens Meier, director of the regional ASB office, speaks next. Meier is a warm, lumbering keg of a man. The ASB runs dozens of relief programmes in Germany and abroad, and just a glance at Meier makes it clear that there can be nothing amateur or florid or evangelical about any of them. He tells the crowd that he will permit no mischief in the Sumte camp, and tolerate no intimidation from outside. They’re going to hire Arabic-speaking guards and set up perimeter fences. The residents will be free to come and go as they please, but townsfolk will need an invitation to enter. It’s an isolating tactic, but a necessary one, he says. The asylum seekers, who will soon arrive from Syria, Albania, Sudan – 18 beleaguered countries in all – must be protected. But there’s good news, too, he says. There will be somewhere between 60 and 80 job openings at the camp, from janitors to German instructors.
The people are not placated. “I have two daughters,” a woman says. “How can I protect them?” Others want to know about the doctors’ offices and kindergartens in Amt Neuhaus. Will they be overrun? There’s no police station closer than Lauenburg, 20 miles away – what if there’s a sudden mob? An assault? Even the plumbing in Sumte will need to be overhauled. Still others are worried about the safety of the refugees themselves. Dirk Hammer, the bicycle-maker and handyman who sits front and centre at the meeting in a crisp gingham shirt, says he’s sick to his stomach with the thought of what could happen, not just in Sumte but throughout Germany, if the far right organises against refugees. His family has lived in Sumte for 400 years.
Within a few days, Richter convinces the ministers in Hanover to reduce the number of refugees from 1,000 to 750. The journalists report that there will soon be seven refugees to each villager in Sumte. “Sieben zu eins” (Seven to one) becomes a viral catchphrase. One columnist describes Sumte’s residents as the begrudging yardsticks of Willkommenskultur, the culture of openness that Germany has articulated for itself in response to the preceding century of geopolitical insanity. “The whole world is watching,” he says. And for a few weeks, he’s right.
Germany ratified its current constitution in 1949. Constitutions tend to reflect the conditions under which they were drafted and Germany’s is concerned with the threat of dictatorship and the plain, unambiguous assertion of human rights. The first sentence of its first article reads, in its entirety, “Human dignity shall be inviolable.” Its creators even added a clause enshrining the right to asylum for persons escaping political persecution. In 1992, during a wave of migration following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Germany’s parliament voted to restrict this previously unqualified right to asylum, but the clause remained in place, and the UN continued to affirm the rights of asylum seekers to find safe harbour “without discrimination as to race, religion or country of origin.”
Then, two years ago, more than a million asylum seekers crossed into Europe, and the UN had no idea what to do. The world’s displaced had been steadily growing in number for years, increasing by more than 50% since 2011 as crisis begat crisis. By the start of 2015, there were more displaced people than at any time since the second world war. Most of the externally displaced found refuge in other impoverished countries, as is nearly always the case; just 4% made it into any part of the European Union. It was still the largest migration into Europe since the fall of the Iron Curtain.
In August 2015, as 100,000 people stood at the closed Hungarian border, the Germans reflected on their constitutional duty. This was long before the rise of Donald Trump and the resurgence of a strain of nativist populism within Germany. The mood was sufficiently humanitarian in those days that Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, felt compelled to utter three now-infamous words: “Wir schaffen das.” (We’ll manage it, or We’ll do it.) Meaning: we’ll accept any legitimate political refugees who can reach us.
The words marked the beginning of a new kind of civic experiment. Countries do not always, or even very often, practise the ideals one finds etched into granite plinths around their capital cities. Now Germany was actually going to try to uphold the spirit of its 60-year-old constitution, with its singular concern for human dignity. I was living in Berlin at the time and among my friends, Merkel’s words felt like nothing short of a full-scale rewiring of the modern nation-state, which has always involved certain assumptions of ethnic solidarity. This new openness felt unprecedented.
Some saw Germany’s stance as an attempt to make a kind of ultimate atonement for historical sins: a radical penance underwritten by the guiltiest country in the modern world. But to actually revisit the summer of 2015 is to remember that Germany did not plan to act by itself. All members of the European Union were expected to uphold the commitments to international asylum to which they’d agreed. Merkel also defiantly predicted that wealthy, cosmopolitan countries such as Canada and the United States would take seriously the phrases written in their own founding documents and on the plaques of their harbour statues, opening their doors a little wider to these needful, these tired, these war-ravaged poor. It didn’t happen. A handful of rich countries with small populations – Sweden, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands and Denmark – did resettle comparatively large numbers of refugees. Otherwise, except for a paltry few thousand in France and Italy, and the 10,000 Syrians per year that President Obama added to the United States’ modest annual intake, none of it happened. Germany stood alone.
Winter
By December 2015, Sumte’s population has tripled – 102 citizens, 229 displaced and stateless guests. Asylum seekers are streaming into Germany, and those assigned to Sumte continue to arrive daily by the busload only to disappear into the fenced-off camp.
An Advent concert at St Mary’s, the Protestant church in Amt Neuhaus, offers the first opportunity for commingling. Villagers and refugees pack into the old brick church to listen to an evening of carols and hymns, and to satisfy their mutual curiosity. Near the end of the night, 70 well-rehearsed, mostly Syrian children rise to sing O Tannenbaum, and for a moment there can be no argument about the goodness of what’s being done here.
Behind the scenes, Jens Meier of the ASB is the busiest man in Lower Saxony. “I’m working like an American,” he jokes. He’d had just eight workers at the start of the renovations, but he’s since poached 14 from another camp to build bedrooms and a health centre. A sign on the community bulletin board in Sumte advertises openings for nurses, cleaning crews, drivers, caretakers, tutors, and social workers.
Aside from Meier, the most visible figures that winter are dozens of teenagers from the camp, who move through town in a vaguely threatening cloud of pubescence. They’re restless. There is no school save the overstuffed and optional German classes held in the camp, and their days pass in unstructured idleness. It’s clear that before long a scandal will occur, and one evening a group of boys and young men walk the two miles to the supermarket in Amt Neuhaus, where they buy a few bottles of liquor. There is no drinking in the camp itself, nor any smoking so back in Sumte they park themselves at the derelict concrete bus stop on Hauptstraße. There the boys do what boys do in cramped bus stops, and in the morning all the bottles, cigarette butts, and generous blazons of vomit are discovered by the village children on their way to school.
Not exactly mob or murder, but it’s a piquant enough event to ride the latticework of gossip that connects village to village along the Elbe, and the news soon reaches Meier. He learns who is responsible, and by nightfall the boys have dutifully snapped on latex gloves and are cleaning up the bus stop with mops and brooms. For the next few weeks, the people of Sumte speak of little else.
All but the sourest villager agree that the event is a clear victory for Meier, who by acting swiftly and with paternal firmness seems to have proven something important about the whole endeavour. “It’s all right now, Jens cleaned it all up,” one shy housepainter (I’ll call him Thomas) tells me, and from that day forward I can’t find anyone willing to utter a harsh or even ambivalent word against the ASB chief. He has proven himself. Meier also sets up a teen centre in an empty wing of the camp, transforming it into a recreation hall with ping pong tables and a rink for skateboarders, after which all incidents of roosterish adolescent enmity seem to subside. “We’re learning as we go,” he says, pleased.
By Christmas, the camp hallways echo with the polyglot cries of 189 children. They shout, they wail, they sing O Tannenbaum ad nauseam. Outside the camp, extended families come home for the holidays. Sparklers, bottle rockets, and flutes of sparkling wine herald the new.
A few weeks later, on a bus in Lower Saxony, I scroll through reports about the mass sexual assaults at New Year’s Eve celebrations in Cologne. By now the eyewitness accounts have given way to rightwing demagoguery. The perpetrators, it is believed, included several refugees, or if not refugees at least Muslims – at the moment, no one seems sure. Although the attack is an anomaly, and although most of the refugees have been peaceful and law-abiding, the national mood toward Merkel’s asylum politics has curdled. The rightwing populist party Alternative für Deutschland agitates for the removal of refugees and the closing of borders. There commences a string of attacks on asylum shelters that police seem unable to stop.
The bus drops me off on the edge of Amt Neuhaus. Chicken coops are quaggy with snowmelt. I leave my things at the Hanover Hotel and stop in at the town hall to see Mayor Richter, who is her usual unflappable self. The most pressing issue, she tells me, is to teach the arrivals German so that they might have a chance on the job market. This seems a little premature. Has there been much integration between the towns and the camp? Are there any plans or programmes to help them understand the German job market? “You’ll have to ask Jens about that,” she says. “He’s more involved. There are many nice things he can talk about.”
In Sumte, the villagers’ attitudes toward the camp manifest in strange ways. The horse farm across the street has posted signs in German, Arabic and English asking passersby to please not touch the Arabians. I call out to a man I’ve decided must be the farm owner, but he waves me away. People are sick of journalists. Dirk Hammer, the bicycle-maker, has told me they’re unhappy that they’ve been portrayed as racists, when the truth, he says, “is that we’re simply concerned”. Some take note when the district police car from Lauenburg is parked outside the camp, a sure sign, they believe, of another scuffle between grown men, one of whom can’t abide the other’s nation or faith. There are occasional fights – always catalysed by alcohol, Meier says – but months later, on my last visit to Sumte, a guard will tell me that the camp is by far the most amicable of the four or five he’s worked at. Most often the police come by to enjoy a cup of coffee, which a secretary offers me as soon as I walk in the door.
The main hall of the camp is alive with the energies of the dispossessed. It is at peak capacity: 754 refugees, alongside about 60 employees. People have nothing to do here but practise their German and gather in the halls with cups of red tea, dispensed from a giant samovar sitting on the folding table of an ad hoc cafe. I find Meier. He says he’d still like more help but there haven’t been many volunteers from the village. I ask how many exactly. “I’d say it’s about sefr,” he laughs. Sefr is Arabic for zero. Among those who are helping out is Hammer, who has been collecting disused bicycles and fixing them for the camp residents. “But it’s not like you know them very well,” Hammer shrugs. “It’s like with other people in the village. You just say hello.”
I say hello, too, introducing myself to a few of the young men loitering in the main hall. They hail from Iraq, Syria, Palestine. They gesture to their sleeping quarters inside one of the attached warehouses, a vast warren of semi-private cells.
Sitting down with a coffee and the local newspaper later that day, I read that there’s been an arson attack on a small refugee camp in Barsinghausen, near Hanover. Back at the hotel, the TV news airs a segment on other arson attacks that followed a Pegida demonstration in Dresden. Meier’s anxiety about safety seems justified.
Yet the isolation in the camp feels extreme, especially in the middle of winter. There can be no neighbourly drop-ins from the village next door. Nor can families cook dinner together or cuddle in quiet repose. They must make do with their assigned “bedrooms”, a generous euphemism for the jaundiced mattresses and flimsy plastic room dividers each family enjoys. Despite Meier’s best efforts, he can’t force a community into existence. He is happiest when the residents transform the camp for their own use. When a trilingual Moroccan named Abo has the idea to open a shisha bar inside the camp, Meier relaxes his prohibition against smoking for the sake of general camaraderie. For weeks thereafter, wafts of pomegranate and strawberry trace a breezy scent from the front of the complex as far away as Schlemmer’s living room.
Spring
As the days get longer, meadows and paddocks come back from the dead. The refugees begin to venture out beyond the confines of the camp – in some cases leaving Sumte altogether. At first it’s just a handful of young men in February and early March. It doesn’t seem to bother the locals, most of whom are occupied during my next visit with the business of Easter.
On Holy Saturday morning I talk to Thomas, the shy housepainter, out in his driveway on the bridle path. A family feast is about to begin. He still hasn’t had much contact with the refugees. His wife has tried to visit the camp to volunteer, but the ASB guards are unfriendly and gruff. “It scares people off,” he says. “It’s like there are two towns living side by side.”
In Amt Neuhaus, Renate Schieferdecker is preparing her sermon. She shares a pastorship with her husband, Matthias. Rural towns in Germany no longer have the population to support a pastor in every rectory, so the ordained are spread across multiple churches. The Schieferdeckers manage eight Lutheran parishes of dwindling, white-haired membership.
I suggest to Schieferdecker that the arrival of so many new residents must have seemed like a unique opportunity to draw more souls into the Christian fold. She looks at me like I’m crazy. “We were naturally concerned when the news came,” she says. Most of the worries had to do with the financial burden on the town. And then there was the culture shock. She confides that she’s heard about some problems with western-style bathrooms (“Muslims have to wash several times a day, and they were getting water everywhere”), and with what she describes as Afghan-Persian infighting (“Any time you get an Afghan and a Persian together, there will be conflict”). Like everyone else, she praises Meier for handling things wonderfully.
On Monday afternoon, a brass band unpacks trombones and trumpets in the church transept. About 20 churchgoers show up to hear the musicians blurt their way through a half hour of hymns with appreciable enthusiasm, if not much skill. The last arrivals are four Iranian men in their early 20s. One is awkwardly overdressed in a powder-blue suit. They sit in the last pew and don’t talk to anyone. Most Iranians are not long in Amt Neuhaus once they learn of the diaspora in Hamburg.
“Yes,” Schieferdecker says after the concert, “the refugees are leaving.” In previous months, a handful of curious Muslims would stop by the church each week. She shows me Arabic and English versions of the parable of the sower she’d had typed up and printed. But now no one comes.
It’s hard to say how many refugees are left, Meier tells me – “a few hundred less than capacity.” He can’t stop them from leaving. Between the isolation and the shock of the frigid German winter, he says, the unmarried men, in particular, became despondent. The desire to leave outweighs their monthly stipend. Some knock on Schlemmer’s door to ask, in admirable if choppy German, how to reach Sweden or Hamburg. Helpful even in the face of failure, Schlemmer dispenses bus schedules. He doesn’t want anyone to get lost. But others just start walking, along the road or straight into a field. Before they leave they sometimes bare their souls to Meier, and in doing so they sound an awful lot like Sumte’s NPD pariahs: “There’s nothing here for a foreigner,” they say. No jobs, no opportunities, and – not a small matter – no way to meet women. Even Abo leaves, and without him the shisha bar closes.
In March, four countries – Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia and Macedonia – close their borders in response to the 123,000 migrants who landed in Greece at the start of 2016. This impasse slows the inflow of migrants to a trickle. There is no great outcry in Germany, where last autumn’s optimism has been replaced by the rise of populist parties and media reports, rarely impartial, of migrant crimes. Merkel’s “Wir schaffen das” has grown an ever-lengthening tail of asterisks and footnotes.
All spring long, in the world beyond Sumte, profiles of refugees appear in international papers. They’re almost interchangeable, these action-packed accounts of harrowing journeys to Europe. I read many of them and even write one or two myself. I notice that most stories of asylum by western journalists fall into the same trap of condescension: flattening their subjects into simple creatures of suffering and good intention. They want a roof, a job. They love Europe and democracy. They suffer nobly at the hands of German bureaucrats.
If it is a dehumanising lie to suggest that all refugees are criminals, as the rightwing press seems content to do, it is no less a lie to depict them as hapless victims. My own experiences suggest that refugees are as diverse as any other randomly assembled group of people. Between visits to Sumte I meet dozens of them while volunteering at an English-language class for refugees in Berlin, and while visiting other camps and activist groups around the country.
I meet and profile for a magazine a Syrian rapper from Aleppo who stands in awe of Run-DMC and Eminem, and who lives in a city on the Baltic coast. He’s lonely and depressed. He’s also a devout Muslim and writes anti-gay screeds on his public Facebook news feed, but when the photographer calls him out on his bigotry, my profile subject seems truly hurt. Later he tells me – without a trace of dissembling – that he’s reformed his opinions. He’s a European now.
I meet a 17-year-old boy from Afghanistan who speaks no English but is a ranked chess player and, based on what I’m able to gather from his friends, an academic prodigy. I befriend a committed Marxist from Tartus, Syria, who is not an asylum seeker but a graduate student in economics. And I become close with another Syrian, a former revolutionary from Aleppo who throws wild parties and whose parents, once wealthy industrialists, have been living in a refugee camp outside Berlin for more than two years.
These people would make good profile subjects, which is to say they aren’t the ones Germans – some Germans – are afraid of. Occasionally, I meet one of those. For a few weeks, at the language class, I teach English to a man from Libya who cannot bring himself to take instruction from any of the female volunteers or even shake a woman’s hand. He just smiles and shakes his head. Other men at the volunteer programme, though more willing to integrate, nonetheless fail to improve their English or German, even after several months of instruction. How can they hope to find work here?
I’m not sure it’s possible to tell any of these stories plainly, with open heart and without agenda. I wonder how much good it would do anyway. Everyone I talk to seems to have already made a decision about the “refugee question”: whether to open borders completely – No borders! No nations! – or close them to the masses of false refugees, secret terrorists and “economic migrants” who, according to politicians on the right, make up the majority of asylum seekers. It strikes me that if what Germany is trying to do is ever going to work, it will depend not on the purity or suffering of the migrants – where the media has chosen to rest its sights – but on the beliefs, prejudices, and fears of their hosts.
Summer
By May, Meier has corrected most of the shortcomings that had troubled the camp in its first months. The internet works. There is a fine canteen, not to mention a laundry service, shuttle buses to Amt Neuhaus, the teen centre, schoolrooms, a mobile phone shop, a medical centre, therapists’ offices – even a movie night, the programming of which is determined by a committee of resident mothers. (“They insisted that it should all be in German,” Meier says. It’s the first cinema Sumte has ever had.)
He has more time to improve the camp now that so few residents are left to care for. Into the summer, more and more people leave of their own accord, not just men now but couples and families. Just 80 residents remain, mostly families with young children. The hallways are hushed.
“If only we’d had the internet from the very start,” Meier laments, citing a popular complaint among the early arrivals. People might have stuck around, learned the language, found some work.
I ask Meier whether he thinks the camp will continue to accept any new refugees. He takes a while to respond, and when he does it is with what seems like a non sequitur. He tells me he often thinks about Alberta. Have I heard of it?
We’re sitting in his office in the Sumte camp. The only window looks out on another window. On the door someone has taped a piece of paper that reads “Big boss”. Meier lives in Hanover but he eschews urban life and often finds himself thinking about Alberta, that pristine Canadian landscape. The First Nations people of Canada live there, he says, and I realise he may have rehearsed this monologue for just such an occasion. “The Canadian government offers them money, but they don’t want money,” he says. They want to live in an unspoiled landscape. They want to live at home. And this – this – is what people want all over the world: to stay at home, to continue to have a home.
“So now politicians in Europe have closed the borders,” he booms. Merkel has made her deal with Turkey. Yet none of the problems that created these mass movements of people in the first place have been solved. Assad continues to bomb his own citizens with impunity, he says. Afghanistan and Iraq are fracturing. “These are big problems,” he says. “Our families here come from war, they come from total poverty.” This is the world Meier is responding to: the world’s 65 million uprooted.
“So indeed, to answer your question,” Meier says, “it may be that we’ll get more refugees. If the minister calls me tomorrow and says, ‘Mr. Meier, you must take hundreds more,’ it’s no problem. We’ll see what happens this summer. But we’re ready: the camp, the town, everyone is ready. If the refugees can only get here, we’ll take them. We’ll take them all.”
In September the trees are heavy with pears, with apples, with powdery plums. A storm has passed over Sumte and the light is honeyed. At the camp a belated sign has appeared outside the front entrance: “Herzlich Wilkommen”. Through the fabric, it’s easy to make out the more apposite text facing the building’s doors: “Auf Wiedersehen”.
The refugees are gone. About 80 have settled around Amt Neuhaus in Soviet-era apartment blocks, but the rest have left. Angela Bagunk, the innkeeper in Amt Neuhaus, tells me she’s sorry to see them go. She enjoyed the liveliness that descended on the town for a few months. “There were even queues at the supermarket,” she says. Her business also benefited from the influx of news crews, the reporters from al-Jazeera and Der Spiegel sneaking about the woodpiles. (“All these reporters, tigering around,” Schieferdecker had told me.) Now it’s quiet again.
In her office, Richter says the camp was a great success. There were no Nazis, no mobs, no violence. That’s all she could have hoped for.
I drop in on Dirk Hammer, who is busy in his workshop. He feels ambivalent about the camp’s closing. A year ago he had railed against Hanover and Berlin in Facebook posts that mocked politicians with no concrete solutions to the crisis. But he had come to be one of the most recognisable faces in town when the media circus descended. He was the bicycle man, a welcoming figure. Now he stops his work to tell me that what the area really needs – what no journalist will dare report on – is jobs: not the 60 or 70 that the refugee camp provided, but hundreds. It’s sad that the camp closure will mean the loss of work, he says, but where was the public outcry when Apontas moved away? “It has nothing to do with refugees,” he says. “We need jobs.”
Which isn’t to say they wouldn’t do it again. “Of course we would,” he says, “but we wouldn’t necessarily be happy about it.” He thinks for a minute. “Although we did get the street lamps.”
In town the new lampposts are adorned with campaign posters for next week’s state elections. Candidates are once again promising a bridge.
All photographs by Valerie Schmidt
A longer version of this essay first appeared in the Spring 2017 issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review, which focuses on Europe’s migration crisis. To find out more, visit vqronline.org.