This should have been the busiest day of the year here at the Alter Markt – the Old Market – in the heart of Magdeburg.
Otto’s Gluweine Bar, Hartung’s donut hut, the Ferris wheel, the carousel, the medieval miniature village, the garlic baguette stall, the Thuringian sausage stall – they should all have been packed with cheerful locals of all ages.
On the last Saturday before Christmas there should have been laughter, organ music and high-pitched shouts of excitement on the carnival rides or from Santa’s grotto.
Instead, they all stand empty and soulless. Oddly enough, one or two still have their lights on, but only because no one managed to turn them off the night before. They were too busy running for their lives.
There is a heartbreaking silence over this entire East German city, here on the banks of the Elbe. The Alter Markt is still littered with trash: paper plates, bottles, bits of half-eaten hot dog, blankets and what appears to be enormous gold-colored wrapping paper. Only it’s not for wrapping presents. It is foil to wrap people in to keep them warm in emergency situations.
The previous evening these sheets covered some of the victims of an atrocity that has left the whole of Germany astonished, tearful and enraged. Last night the death toll stood at five, while the number of injured exceeded 200, requiring air transport to hospitals around the world. More than forty people were in critical condition.
Mourners lay flowers outside St John’s Church, across the road from the horror scene
What was it then that possessed a political refugee from Saudi Arabia, a German resident for eighteen years and a doctor no less, to rent a car and then drive it at highway speed through a pedestrian square full of families?
That he did that just five nights before Christmas somehow creates an even greater sense of outrage, if that were possible.
We know that at least one of the dead was a nine-year-old boy. The thought of a child wide-eyed with Christmas excitement one moment and then mowed down into a hellish landscape of abject, screaming panic the next only makes this even harder to understand.
Among Magdeburg’s 240,000 residents, many are simply speechless, as I discover when I arrive at the grand old Johanniskirche, the 1,000-year-old St. John’s Church, across the street from the crime scene. Since first light, this has become the de facto memorial to the victims and by mid-morning the steps are full of flowers and candles. Most people are still too traumatized to speak.
One person who agreed to talk to me is Stefan Spyra, 31, an ophthalmologist, along with his wife Corinna, 30. They brought flowers and also their year-old son Leonard, who is in a baby harness around Stefan’s neck. He is an exception. During the day I notice a clear shortage of children in the center of Magdeburg. This atrocity has clearly hit parents particularly hard. I feel a widespread determination to keep them home this weekend.
“All we have in our minds is this image of that little boy who died,” Corinna says. “And we want everyone who has suffered to feel love and hope.” The couple and their baby had been here the night before, but had gone home shortly before the attack. “We had a lot of gifts to take with us, so it was time to leave,” says Stefan. ‘Otherwise…’
The words falter, but ‘different’ needs no further explanation.
Before they leave, they want to add something. “We must not be overwhelmed by hatred,” says Stefan.
The ‘gold foil’ of a sheet used to keep a victim warm lies among the rubble in Magdeburg’s Old Market
I certainly expected to encounter more anger here, but most of Magdeburg is still in too much of a state of shock for that.
Last night, several dozen far-right anti-migrant demonstrators took to the streets chanting “Deport!” chanted. A larger group marched in silence elsewhere. The vast majority of the city, however, remained sad and reflective. Earlier in the morning, beleaguered German Chancellor Olaf Scholz arrived to walk through the Alter Markt and meet emergency services. “There is no place more peaceful and joyful than a Christmas market,” he told reporters. ‘What a terrible act it is to injure and kill so many people there with such cruelty.’ He couldn’t say more.
His government fell last week, forcing elections to take place in two months. The migration issue would always remain an important issue, even more so now.
Many blame the liberal establishment, epitomized by Scholz and his center-left SDP party, for the continued presence of more than five million migrants in Germany. Many point the finger at former Chancellor Angela Merkel of the center-right CDU, who opened the country’s borders in response to the legions of refugees pouring through Eastern Europe in 2015.
I’ve spent much of the past week in other parts of Germany, reporting on the widespread – often noisy – consternation following the disruption of several Christmas markets by large crowds of Syrian demonstrators in recent days.
Although they were merely (and understandably) celebrating the fall of the Assad regime, their unregistered protests, in which thousands of young men made their way through Christmas markets singing in Arabic and demonstrated a lack of sensitivity to an openly Christian tradition, has won them few friends.
It has all contributed to the debate over whether it is time to encourage some of the million Syrian refugees and asylum seekers in Germany to return to post-Assad Syria.
Harder politicians, not all of whom are far-right, are now calling for financial incentives and, in some cases, deportation.
The somber scene as police surrounded the deserted market in Magdeburg yesterday
The far-right AfD is benefiting from this increasing hostility towards mass immigration. It does especially well in places like Magdeburg, industrial cities in once-communist East Germany.
In this year’s municipal elections, the AfD trailed the winner, the CDU, by one percentage point. So I wonder if Mr. Scholz will be greeted with some of the hostility now prevalent on social media. He’s not. Instead, he is confronted with the same gloomy silence that pervades every part of Magdeburg.
However, the questions come quickly in the media and online, as do the conspiracy theories. The initial knee-jerk reaction was to assume the killer was an Islamist jihadist, like the Tunisian asylum seeker who killed 12 people in 2016 when a truck crashed into a Christmas market in Berlin.
Yet the attacker from Magdeburg appears to have been obsessively anti-Islam and even appeared to express support for the AfD.
So he faked it while being a sleeper for an extremist Islamic organization? Or, as some of his online posts suggest, he was an extremist right-wing lunatic driven by that sentiment
Germany became too pro-Islam? Too early to tell.
On a more practical level, how on earth did he manage to get his hands on a rented BMW at a Christmas market? Since the Berlin massacre, Germany has taken serious steps to close off large pedestrian areas to vehicles.
So far this year the biggest fears have been knives – after four deaths in two Islamist knife attacks. However, huge concrete barriers surround the Magdeburg grounds, whose festive red and green paint jobs fool no one.
Yet a madman had no trouble getting past them on Friday evening. How? The answer is trams.
At the main entrance to the market, next to the traditional Christmas pyramid – a giant rotating windmill-cum-wedding cake with huge toy soldiers and angels – there is a main road where no traffic has access. However, there are several tram lines.
It appears that the attacker simply drove over the tram lines and made a sharp right turn into the market. Another set of tram lines meant a clear exit on the other side.
Gruesome video footage shows him tearing through the crowd like a mower before turning and leaving the market.
Around the corner, his car was blocked on the main road and he was arrested – without a fight – in front of the sportswear store Delikat.
The manager, who does not want to be named, tells me he witnessed chaos and a lot of shouting. “They were afraid there might be a bomb,” he says. He has decided to open today even though there is no one in his store – except me. “You have to open up,” he says. ‘Otherwise terror has won. And it won’t win.’
On the other side of the city, away from the closed Alter Markt, the situation is much the same.
I walk through the indoor shopping center. It has the hustle and bustle of a Monday morning in January. There are no stores that play music. There are no queues at the cash registers. As many people tell me during the day: ‘Christmas is over in Magdeburg.’
Although an ancient city, much of it was razed by the RAF during the Second World War, when the city served as a major producer of synthetic oil.
Then the place was rebuilt by the communists, with their signature brutalist style and sensibility. It means that a lot of it is modern and unattractive.
But Magdeburgers have always had the cozy, atmospheric neighborhood around the old market place and the old town hall. Together with the cathedral, which houses the remains of Holy Roman Emperor Otto I (and where an emotional candlelit memorial service took place last night), the Alter Markt represents the heart of this proud city.
Now that heart has stopped.