Xenophobic Stain: Hoyerswerda Gets Second Chance with Refugee Hostel

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http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/twenty-years-after-attacks-hoyerswerda-gets-new-refugee-home-a-944154.html



The city of Hoyerswerda made international headlines during a wave of attacks against foreigners in 1991. Twenty-three years later, a new hostel for asylum-seekers is opening. The far-right is campaigning against it, but many locals are fighting for tolerance.

Xenophobic Stain: Hoyerswerda Gets Second Chance with Refugee Hostel
By Lisa Erdmann
January 17, 2014 – 05:09 PM

In September 1991, a mob of right-wing radicals armed with Molotov cocktails, tracer ammunition and stones attacked hostels for contract workers and asylum-seekers in the city of Hoyerswerda in the state of Saxony and terrorized residents for five full days. The young men who attacked the home, filled with frightened people from Mozambique, Vietnam and Romania, were brimming with hatred.

The attacks made international headlines not only because it raised the specter of xenophobia in the states that once belonged to East Germany, but also because local residents simply looked on as the violence escalated. Some even applauded the thugs. Police in Hoyerswerda were unable to get the situation under control and ultimately officials at the hostel removed the foreigners and took them elsewhere.

Hoyerswerda marked the beginning of a wave of violent outbreaks against foreigners that continued during the early 1990s, with shameful attacks in Rostock, where an asylum-seekers' home was attacked, but also in the western German cities of Solingen and Mölln, where a total of eight people of Turkish origin were killed when arsonists attacked their homes.

A Second Chance

Twenty-three years have passed since the attacks that brought shame on the entire country. Now, the city of Hoyerswerda has announced its plans to open a new hostel in a special education school that closed last year and is currently being renovated to provide accommodations for asylum-seekers. Under the current plans, the first refugees could move in by the end of January.