Tens of thousands of people are expected to attend an anti-racism concert in Chemnitz, eastern Germany, following a week of far-right and anti-fascist protests triggered by the fatal stabbing of a German-Cuban man.
The event on Monday comes a day after Justice Minister Heiko Maas said that German society had become “too comfortable” and urged the “silent majority” to speak out louder against anti-immigrant voices across the country.
“Sometimes we must get up from the sofa and open our mouths,” Maas said in an interview with German newspaper BILD on Sunday, adding in a tweet: “When the Hitler salute is shown on our streets, that is a disgrace for our country. We must stand up against neo-Nazis and anti-Semites. The silent majority must at last become louder.”
Maas was speaking during a second weekend of protests in Chemnitz that saw more than 11,000 people take to the streets according to state police — the biggest gathering since the death of the man identified by police as Daniel H.
Following the 35-year-old’s death last Sunday, rumors quickly began to swirl in right-wing segments of the online community regarding the identity of his killers. When police announced that an Iraqi and a Syrian man were in custody, those suspicions appeared to be confirmed.
Several days of demonstrations and counter-demonstrations followed in the biggest mobilization over immigration in Germany in recent months. Some protesters were photographed giving the outlawed Nazi salute and others were seen chanting racist slogans such as “Germany for the Germans” and chasing foreigners in the streets.
Fault lines between those who welcome and those who reject immigrants have been exposed and become entrenched, with right-wingers accused of exploiting Daniel H.’s death for their own agenda and the opposition criticized for dismissing the anti-immigrant protesters as “Nazis.”