In February 2000, three right-wing extremist attacks were documented within just a few days. 

February 16: A 14-year-old neo-Nazi stabbed another youth in the stomach with a knife at the bus station.

February 19: A politically active refugee from Cameroon and member of The Voice was chased and threatened by neo-Nazis while getting off the tram in Leipziger Straße in North Jena. He was able to save himself in his apartment, but the pursuers continued to drum against the door for a long time.

February 23: Twenty neo-Nazis pursued and chased four youths who had been waiting at Westbahnhof for a train to Gera.

Two months later, neo-Nazis who had seriously injured a man from Zaire with a baseball bat in front of his apartment door in Lobeda used the tram to flee undetected. In August, a tram driver racially insulted a passenger who had fled because he had forgotten to stamp his ticket. He also physically assaulted him.^*

A horrific scene from the Erfurt tram caused horror throughout Germany at the end of April 2021. In a short video, a neo-Nazi can be seen insulting and attacking a young Syrian man without being stopped by onlookers.^*

By October, the police were aware of two more racist attacks in Erfurt trams. In Jena, too, people are still being racially insulted and threatened on public transport. Some, for example, avoid speaking their native language on the tram because of this. 

Like all asylum seekers who came to Thuringia, Babayan and his family first had to spend three days at the central reception centre in Tambach-Dietharz, in the middle of the mountains of the Thuringian Forest, far from the nearest town.

When his family was one of the first to be relocated to the new housing in Jena Forest, it was a huge step toward the centre. The housing was once again in a forest on a mountain, but at the foot of this mountain was the third largest city in Thuringia, Jena.

In the interview, Babayan describes his arrival and life in the forest as follows:

After the family had finally received a temporary residence permit for humanitarian reasons, they moved into the city as soon as possible. For a short time, they lived close to the centre in a Protestant community centre on Magdelstieg.

Then, in a roundabout way, like so many newly arrived people in Jena, the Babayan family found housing in Winzerla. Once again, they had landed on the outskirts of the city. This time, however, the social distance to the city centre was more important than the physical distance.

The German Social Code II (SGB II) regulates the benefits paid by the state to unemployed people and to their dependent family members who are unable to work. This refers primarily to recipients of unemployment benefit II (Hartz IV) and social benefits (family members, especially children of people receiving unemployment benefit II). The SGB II rate thus roughly indicates how many people are only able to make a living with state support. 

Sociologist Wilhelm Heitmeyer has described the conditions above and other circumstances as „social disintegration“ and cited it as the main reason for right-wing extremist violence among the youth in East Germany.^*

Heitmeyer's theory, according to which right-wing youth need recognition and social integration above all, became the basis of youth work with right-wing radicals in Winzerla in the 1990s, which will be the focus of the next stop on the tour.

With his theory of social disintegration, Heitmeyer embodies one of the positions in the dispute as to whether right-wing violence in the 1990s is more attributable to continuities from the GDR (i.e. insufficient historical consciousness due to the myth of the anti-fascist state, a cover-up of the problem of right-wing violence by the SED regime, downplaying and depoliticisation as „rowdyism“ among other things^* ) or to the social ruptures, existential insecurity, and devaluation experiences in the transformation process after 1989.

While determining the causes of right-wing violence in East Germany in the pre-1989/90 period enables the West German majority society to project the problem of racist violence onto the already failed socialist state, East Germans use the reference to the consequences of the transformation as the main cause of right-wing violence in part to blame West German dominance and avoid critical self-questioning.

In this walking tour, we accept that the search for causes of right-wing violence in Jena is complex and will explore contributing factors both before and after 1989/90.

Which places in the city are described as fear spaces and by whom? Which places where radical right-wing attacks took place do we know other stories about, and which places are reduced to fear and violence in the narratives?

What do we associate with Johannisstraße in the city centre, which was a fear zone for visitors of the Junge Gemeinde Stadtmitte in the nineties on Tuesday evenings? What are the widespread associations with the prefabricated housing estate in Winzerla, where, at the same time, Samvel Babayan was racially threatened by his neighbours?

On 18 November 2011, the ZDF magazine aspekte broadcast a feature in which the Munich-based writer Steven Uhly visited Jena. He has a history of migration through his Bengali father. Accompanied by cameras at the Paradiesbahnhof and in downtown Jena, Uhly reported that he perceives „the East“ as a fear zone and does not feel safe, even in the university city of Jena.^* From his West German perspective, he questioned the city's internal symbolic division into light city and prefabricated estate.

Samvel Babayan, who now runs an asylum centre in Jena's Schulstraße, commented in the interview:

What made him, as someone who had lived in Jena for a long time and had many experiences with right-wing violence, so angry about the television feature was that the reporter felt threatened by right-wing violence in, of all places, a Turkish snack bar, a migrant space in the city.

The reporter overlooked the fact that this place was a safe space for Babayan, in a city that has many fear zones. The sweeping nature of the piece infuriated Babayan, as it did many other Jena residents. Uhly later distanced himself from the „undifferentiated report.“^*