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Flags at half-mast instead of rainbows.

  • 5 days ago
  • 12 min read

A German Problem: After the Attack on Berlin Pride


On Saturday evening, 25 July 2026, at around 10 p.m., a white van drove onto a footpath along the southern edge of the Tiergarten [Berlin's large central park, adjacent to the Reichstag and the government quarter] and into people returning from Christopher Street Day ["CSD" is the standard German name for Pride marches, after the New York street where the 1969 Stonewall uprising began; Berlin's is one of the largest in Europe]. It hit a tree, the driver got out and fled, reportedly carrying a machete. A woman — a Polish mother visiting the CSD with her daughter — died at the scene. The Federal Ministry of the Interior counts 29 injured; the Berlin fire service spoke on Sunday of five people in life-threatening condition and five seriously hurt. The Charité [Berlin's university hospital, the largest in Germany] reported mostly stab wounds. Another 45 people received emergency psychosocial care. At 10:15 p.m. the organisers called off the CSD.



On Sunday evening, a police tactical unit [SEK — roughly the German equivalent of a SWAT team] shot the suspect dead in a garden shed on Ruhlebener Straße in Spandau [a district in western Berlin]. According to the authorities, he ran at the officers with a bladed weapon. Federal Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt classifies the attack as Islamist terrorism. The investigation is being led by the Federal Prosecutor General [Bundesanwaltschaft — the office responsible for terrorism and offences against the state, above the ordinary state prosecutors]; legally, no motive has been established yet.


That closes the case, more or less, as far as policing goes.


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UPDATE:

Memorial plaques, rainbow flags, flowers, and other items are being destroyed or set on fire. Hate-filled slogans are being shouted at mourners during a memorial event. Nazi-style comments are being directed at the LGBTQ*+ community. This confirms the article written here and my own suspicion: the problem is not a lone perpetrator, nor is it a failure by the authorities or Islamism. The problem runs deeper; it lies in a society rife with hate.

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The political reckoning has already started, and the parties are twisting reality into whatever shape their agenda needs. They know exactly who is to blame: Islamism, foreigners, the failing authorities, criminal law that is too soft.


I have an opinion too. What outrages me is that the same people who refused to make any gesture of solidarity — so as not to upset AfD voters [Alternative für Deutschland, the far-right party, currently the largest opposition force in the Bundestag] — are now dismayed that the climate they have been seeding produces the results it produces. Flags at half-mast instead of rainbows; votes instead of a clear commitment. The same people speak of an "attack on our society" when the very part of society that was attacked here was, less than a year ago, dismissed by them as a circus act. I am not an opponent of the conservative camp, but if their behaviour was not malicious, it was naive and stupid.


More on my personal opinion later. First, step by step.


The attacker was not an import

Abdul B. [German media and officials abbreviate the surnames of suspects and defendants; this is standard practice under German privacy law, not a sign of missing information] was born in Germany in 2005. He was a German citizen from birth; his mother had been naturalised in 2002. Dobrindt said so himself at Sunday's press conference. The man has family in Berlin. He went to school here, committed his crimes here, was radicalised here. A child of the German system…


The authorities knew. B. had been listed for years as an Islamist Gefährder [an official police category for a person believed capable of committing serious politically motivated crimes — no charge or conviction required; it triggers surveillance and case reviews] and had repeatedly come up at the Joint Counter-Terrorism Centre in Berlin-Treptow, the standing forum where police forces and intelligence services compare notes on individual cases. The Federal Criminal Police Office had assessed him using Radar-iTE, the risk-prediction instrument for violent potential introduced after the 2016 attack on the Breitscheidplatz Christmas market [a truck was driven into a market in central Berlin, killing 13 people; the perpetrator had also been known to the authorities]. Dobrindt spoke on Sunday of a high volume of offences. Acting on a tip-off from German authorities, B. was arrested in Lebanon in 2025 and sentenced to three months in prison — he had tried to travel on to Syria to join the terrorist organisation Islamic State.


A court ordered him into deradicalisation counselling. Violence Prevention Network, an organisation specialising in exit work with extremists, confirmed two meetings to ARD [Germany's main public broadcaster]. Its director Thomas Mücke described him on the investigative programme "Report Mainz" as impossible to read. In May 2026, B. was released from juvenile detention and was at liberty despite a juvenile sentence, because of Vorbewährung [a construct in German juvenile criminal law: the sentence is imposed, but the decision on whether to suspend it is deferred while the offender remains free under conditions].


School, juvenile justice, domestic intelligence, a specialised prevention provider, an arrest abroad prompted by German intelligence. Five institutions had contact with this person. Two months after his release, he drives into a crowd.


This radicalisation ran its entire course under German jurisdiction. Deportation, "closed borders", whatever else — none of it would have prevented this. Anyone treating the attack as an imported problem is bending reality.



What the federal government is cutting in the same months

If the finding is that prevention failed here, the obvious conclusion would be to strengthen it. The opposite is happening.

The federal programme "Demokratie leben!" ["Live Democracy!"], launched in 2015 as a response to the murders committed by the National Socialist Underground [a neo-Nazi cell that killed ten people between 2000 and 2007 while investigators spent years pursuing the victims' families instead] and today the largest state funder of extremism prevention and exit work, is to receive only 170 million euros in 2027, down from 191 million this year. That is what the draft budget approved by the cabinet in early July 2026 says. Federal Family Minister Karin Prien is restructuring the programme at the same time; according to the associations that run the projects, more than 200 of them face closure. In Rhineland-Palatinate [a western German state], the casualties include "Kompass gegen religiösen Extremismus", run by the Muslim-Jewish education charity Maimonides and funded with 250,000 euros a year. Precisely the kind of work that should have caught someone like Abdul B.


The same movement on the other side. The action plan "Queer leben", adopted by the cabinet in November 2022 and the only nationwide funding programme for queer concerns, has been classified as completed since January 2026. This emerged from the federal government's reply to a written question by Maik Brückner, an MP for Die Linke [the Left Party]; the Family Ministry declared the process finished as planned. The 70 million euros a year once promised were never paid out.


Islamism prevention cut. Queer anti-discrimination work discontinued. Same fiscal year, same ministry.



Picture by Signalbleed Creative Commons 4.0 CC-SA



Who has been demanding these cuts for years

In April 2026 the AfD parliamentary group published a statement headlined "No taxpayers' money for CSD propaganda". In it, they call on Minister Prien to suspend "Demokratie leben!" and reform it drastically. Three months later, the cut is in the cabinet's draft budget.


The AfD works this topic systematically. In January 2025 they tabled five anti-LGBTI motions in a single Bundestag session. September 2025 brought the motion to repeal the Self-Determination Act, which since November 2024 has made it easier to change one's legal gender marker and first name [it replaced a 1980 law that required two psychiatric assessments and a court ruling]. Their 2025 federal election manifesto demands a ban on puberty blockers and the elimination of all public funding for what they call "trans cult, early sexualisation and gender ideology". The state manifesto of the AfD in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, adopted unanimously in spring 2026, would ban rainbow flags and gender-inclusive language.


What is remarkable is what happens alongside this. The Self-Determination Act was passed against the votes of the CDU, CSU [the Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party — the mainstream conservatives, currently leading the federal government] and the AfD. Its abolition was in the conservatives' manifesto before the AfD wrote it into theirs. The coalition agreement between the conservatives and the Social Democrats brought forward the law's review to 31 July 2026, explicitly focused on women and children — a formulation that adopts the frame of the AfD's motions: trans people as a risk that others need protection from.


When Chancellor Friedrich Merz defended Bundestag President Julia Klöckner's decision not to fly the rainbow flag for CSD on ARD in July 2025, comparing the Bundestag to a circus tent [more precisely: saying it would become one if the flag were raised], the AfD's chief whip Bernd Baumann told ZDFheute [the news service of the second public broadcaster]: "He's still learning from us."


He was right. Klöckner is holding the line in 2026. The Interior Ministry's flag decree was amended in April 2025 so that the rainbow flag may be raised on federal buildings only once a year. Rainbow flags visible from outside MPs' offices remain prohibited.


None of this is a call to attack, or direct harm. But it is a climate. A climate in which hatred and agitation against minorities, against the LGBTQ+ community, is enabled, in which it gets talked about, in which even the largest and governing party is free to rail against it. And perhaps we still remember this from school: the kid everyone already picks on is the one you can take a swing at without consequences. Which means the AfD and the CDU are playing straight into the hands of the far right and of extremists.


Incidentally, participants also identified a number of far-right figures without any Muslim background along the route, and according to those observers they appeared very well organised…



How words become acts

There is no straight line from a sentence on a talk show, or in the news, or in a social media comment, to a van on a footpath. But there is research on how public devaluation and real violence hang together.


Karsten Müller and Carlo Schwarz published a study on Germany in 2021 in the Journal of the European Economic Association, a peer-reviewed economics journal. The starting observation: in municipalities with heavier Facebook use, violence against refugees rose whenever right-wing pages were posting heavily against refugees. On its own that says little, since both could stem from the same underlying mood in the region.


What mattered was what happened during large-scale internet and Facebook outages. In those periods the excess violence disappeared — even though nothing had changed in local attitudes. Same attitudes, no distribution channel, no additional violence. Resentment alone is not enough; it needs a public that confirms it and keeps it circulating.


The study is about violence against refugees, not against queer people. Transferring it to anti-queer hostility is plausible but not proven. Even so, I believe it holds for every form of social agitation: social media, and what other people supposedly think about it, changes your behaviour and changes your expectation of how an attack will be received.


So you have to be clear about who this kind of thing is addressed to and what you expect from it. In a debate where two sides argue in a differentiated way about how to treat trans people, and where trans people are cast as a putative danger, almost nothing of the substance sticks. What sticks, above all with the people not affected, is the frame: there are two defensible positions here, and one of them regards trans people as a danger. That is the outcome even if one of the two sides has 95 per cent of people behind it, the better arguments, the better intentions. Two sides remain, and they feel like 50:50, not like 95:5.


Even if you only feel yourself to be on a side holding 45 per cent, you are not in some small minority — you are respectable. Possibly even the one bringing enlightenment.


The message that would actually be needed is banal, and it still barely gets sent: these people belong to this society, as self-evidently as everyone else. Not as the result of a balancing exercise, but as the starting point. That, however, is neither a headline nor news, and on social media an honest and balanced message like that generates about as little reach as it would as a front page.


Unfortunately that is how the media works, and anyone who wants political attention and lacks the imagination to earn it simply plays the cards their opponent deals, without reflecting on what holding the opponent's hand does to them, to their credibility, to their own will. Anyone who thinks they can win that way has not understood the game and is damaging everyone.


One thing became clear as early as the preparations for the CSD events: many of them struggled significantly to find sponsors, and corporate support plummeted by nearly 50%. Less pinkwashing, or simply a lack of support?



The shock of those who are part of the problem

On Sunday, before the memorial service at the Marienkirche [a medieval church in central Berlin, near Alexanderplatz, used for state occasions], the Chancellor spoke of an attack on society. Governing Mayor Kai Wegner [the head of Berlin's city government] called it an attack on a free and cosmopolitan Berlin. Fine.


Both belong to a party that decided two months earlier that the rainbow flag would not fly over the Reichstag building for this CSD. The Chancellor underpinned the justification for that in 2025 with a circus tent comparison and has never apologised for it.


You can hold both things at once: grief over one dead woman and nearly fifty injured people, and the conviction that a flag on parliament would go too far. The effect from the outside is a different matter. Whoever declares the visibility of a minority to be a bargaining chip declares the minority to be a bargaining chip. Whoever then demands unity after an attack is demanding something they themselves cancelled.


No, Merz and Klöckner are not to blame for the attack. But they have contributed to the conditions under which perpetrators like this feel confirmed, feel unintegrated, and find a legitimate target surface — one that others visibly do not accept either. That does not produce an attack. It does make one easier.



Why the origin of the hatred is secondary

Here, violence and hatred against LGBTQ+ people came from Islamists. But it is stoked, and thereby legitimised, by plenty of others: the AfD, right-wing associations, fundamentalist Christians, pseudo-feminist movements, and in places from within the community itself, aimed at individual groups within it.


Hostility towards queer and trans people is not a property of any one group. It exists in Islamist networks, in evangelical congregations, in far-right Telegram channels, in trans-exclusionary currents of feminism, on football terraces, in families.

And hatred of other people is, sadly, found almost everywhere, whether right or left, religious or liberal.


The common denominator is a claim: the entitlement to determine how other people live. Those who make that claim differ in method and severity. In the underlying assumption, they do not.


And everyone needs to be clear that hate leads to more hate, and that a climate of accepted hate produces corresponding consequences.


An attack and a social media post are not the same thing. Not legally, not morally, and obviously not in the number of dead. What connects them is the direction in which they shift the climate, the way hatred of people becomes acceptable. An Islamist organisation radicalising German citizens and a politically anti-queer statement are also two entirely different things. But they pay into the same account. The amount differs, the account is the same. The interest falls due for all of us.

So having taken on less guilt is no reason to act as though you were free of it, and anyone who refuses to acknowledge their complicity misjudges their function and responsibility in society. Not because they did it, but because nipping something like this in the bud is part of holding a leadership role.



What happens now

Nobody will take responsibility, of course. Others will be blamed and it will turn into a large game of ping-pong. There will be no real consequences. And those who are, from my perspective, responsible will fail to live up to that responsibility and will not even become aware of it. They see themselves as administrators rather than as leaders — a problem for the entire country. Small culprits will be hunted down inside the agencies and the larger picture will simply be ignored. None of that is new, it is just how it is: frustrating.


Over the coming weeks the Berlin scene will be asking how to go on with events, how much security small collectives can shoulder, who pays for it. That question will not be decided in the Bundestag but in backyards and at board meetings of associations with no reserves. We are right in the middle of it.


With more headwind than tailwind, it will be a hard fight. Politics is turning its back on us, and the corporations did so first. The economic slump and the general uncertainty do their part. And yes, we carry our own share of the blame when we work against each other instead of with each other.

It stays interesting. Let's stay confident.




Quellen

Tat, Ermittlungen, Tatverdächtiger

Fallzahlen queerfeindlicher Kriminalität

Förderprogramme und Kürzungen

Regenbogenflagge, Union, Kanzleramt

AfD-Anträge, Unions-Programmatik, Selbstbestimmungsgesetz

Wissenschaftliche Studie

  • Müller, Karsten / Schwarz, Carlo (2021): Fanning the Flames of Hate: Social Media and Hate Crime. Journal of the European Economic Association 19(4), S. 2131–2167: https://doi.org/10.1093/jeea/jvaa045


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