On Saturday afternoon in Magdeburg a man stood outside Johanniskirche (St John’s church), contemplating a lake of candles, flowers and soft toys. Then he loudly voiced his disbelief. “And then they say he supported the AfD. As if. You just can’t believe the media any more.”
People had gathered here to mourn. The photo of a dead nine-year-old boy was being shown around. Used rescue blankets piled up at the roadside as police guarded the now empty market.
St John’s, the oldest church in the city, now deconsecrated, has a special place in the hearts of Magdeburgers. We, even as atheists, mark important family events there: it is where I had my formal, secular, coming of age ceremony – just like many others in this part of eastern Germany do. But after Friday night, this place, just metres away from the scene of the attack, carries a new scar.
That evening, a man drove an SUV into the nearby Christmas market, killing five people and injuring 200.
Magdeburg is, naturally, still in shock. The Christmas market was a popular meeting place in a city that lost its historical core in the second world war and got rebuilt as a rather airy, wide-open space. The angry man at St John’s church echoed how its people struggle to make sense of this violence – and especially of what has become known about the attacker since.
Once the suspect’s nationality became public, representatives of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland wasted no time. While Magdeburg’s mayor, Simone Borris, could not hold back tears during a Friday night press statement, the AfD declared that an attack like this would have not happened before 2015, the year of the big migrant surge. There were calls for “consequences” and blame for the ruling parties.
As details emerged about him, however, the image of Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, a 50-year-old Saudi, became more blurry. The psychiatrist arrived in Germany in 2006 and was later granted political asylum which – in theory – makes him one of the very few “truly vulnerable” people that even AfD-hardliners have claimed they would allow into the country.
But Abdulmohsen appears to have been a prolific activist who posted various crude theories on his X account. A recurring theme there was open sympathy for the AfD and its anti-Islamic and anti-migrant stance. Some AfD politicians have called mentions of these claims a “morally reprehensible abuse” of the attack to undermine the party’s chances in federal elections in February.
But politics are at play and even as AfD officials laid down wreaths at St John’s the party’s MEP Arno Bausemer called for “remigration”, a far-right concept to push migrants out of the country. An AfD rally and a silent march announced for Monday night will be a familiar sight.
Over the past nine years I’ve witnessed the AfD repeatedly taking to the streets of my home town. From early on it has managed to draw crowds of 1,000 people or more. The topics they have rallied around have varied over the years, but the noise they make has only got more radical. On one occasion in 2023, at a gathering labelled a “peace rally”, a prominent speaker declared: “When we have a government that wages war against us, then we wage war against this government.” He was talking about Germany’s support for Ukraine.
Initially, the rallies helped the then freshly formed party gain a shocking 24.3% in the 2016 state election. Today the AfD is the only serious challenger of the governing conservatives, but still, at a local level, it sticks to the groundwork. When – during the Covid pandemic – authorities tried to suppress semi-spontaneous mass demonstrations for public health reasons it was the AfD that offered cover through their own rallies – and presented themselves as troubleshooters both on the streets and in online chat groups. The rise of Covid conspiracy theorists seemed secondary at that time.
In working-class cities such as Magdeburg and even more so in smaller towns, this continuous offline presence offers a chance to recreate something historically rare in the former East Germany: identity via party affiliation. The far-right party also capitalises on a certain kind of scepticism towards authorities and media that many supporters claim is a legacy of their German Democratic Republic past. The AfD’s more extreme positions are often either ignored, downplayed or celebrated.
Two stabbings in the west German cities of Mannheim and Solingen propelled previous AfD campaigns. Now, after Magdeburg, the party leader, Alice Weidel, can set the tone for her’s. The AfD lead candidate for the national elections has recently been attempting to rebrand the party’s image in a Marine Le Pen-like fashion.
Weidel’s most recent statement does not focus on the suspected Magdeburg attacker’s background but on the role of the authorities who seem to have ignored more than one warning before the attack.
Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, an AfD politician in the Saxony-Anhalt region (of which Magdeburg is the capital), may take a different approach. On Facebook, Tillschneider called for a “roll-back of globalised migration flows” to fight the arrival of those who are “culturally other”. No word from him on how the AfD might have influenced Abdulmohsen.
But Magdeburg is already finding other ways to mourn. On Saturday evening local people gathered in the gothic cathedral for a commemoration service. “It’s like darkness falling,” said Friedrich Kramer, a bishop of the Evangelical Church. Outside, thousands of Magdeburgers listened silently. Kramer had a message for them. “Don’t open your heart to hate speech and violence, but keep it generous.”
I have seen enough of how the AfD operates on the ground to know they will not only platform grief and incomprehension but also anger to their advantage. I’ve watched the city being turned into a training ground for the party’s mass mobilisation.
Just a few blocks aways from where the bishop was urging restraint, hundreds attended a demo organised by outright neo-Nazis. And migrant organisations reported a sudden increase in threats and insults against people in Magdeburg who are presumed to be Arabs or Muslims.
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Thomas Vorreyer is a Berlin-based journalist with a focus on East German politics
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