All dressed down and no place to go
As Germany comes to terms with the influx of migrants, Yves Vanderhaeghen takes time out to watch roller derby with a group of refugees in the city of Hanover
REFUGEES spend a lot of time waiting. Nothing happens fast. And so we wait, too, as our rendezvous time passes. We’re waiting to take a group of men to a roller derby bout in Hanover. They come from Syria, Palestine, Iran, Kurdistan.
Some of them are on their second transit, having been relocated to Hanover from other camps in other towns. Their home is a school hall that has been turned into a dormitory for 60 men.
Across the country, public facilities have been commandeered for the same purpose.
Our link person is Farhad. He speaks a bit of English.
I’ve been roped in because I speak English, and Jules, the volunteer who has organised the afternoon’s outing, speaks German, French and Italian, but no Arabic, and sketchy English.
Eventually he comes around the corner, flanked by Omar and two others in hand-me-down clothes. “I’m sorry,” he says. He says it again when he realises that half of the party are asleep and have to be roused from their bunk beds. Exhausted from having nothing to do, they shower, assemble, and then we run after the tram.
I ask Farhad what about roller derby.
“Nothing,” he says. “We play soccer. We’re very good, actually.”
Jules explains: “Roller derby is like rugby. For girls. On wheels.”
“If you want, maybe we can sign you up with the local soccer team.” What about kit? “That should be easy,” she says, adding that the organiser of the monthly evening skate and cycle event through the city had rustled up 150 bicycles for refugees, so a few soccer boots and shorts and shirts shouldn’t be a problem.
Volunteer
he
knows
I know that one of the players offers weekly German lessons, and ask if volunteer work is common.
“Yes,” says Jules, but she notes that most of it is by foreigners.
“Maybe it’s because they understand what it feels like to be outsiders.”
And how are the Germans responding to the million or so refugees who’ve transformed the human landscape so much that it’s impossible to turn around and not bump into them? “In some of the towns in the east, not so well. There’s a stronger neo-Nazi presence there, and welcome cards sometimes take the form of Molotov cocktails.”
Later that evening, in the pub, the subject comes up again, and I ask a patron about neo-Nazis in Hanover, and Pegida, the anti-Muslim movement spawned in Dresden and Leipzig.
“Oh, no. Not here. The anti-fascist movement is too strong here.”
In the east, the moral righteousness that communism was by definition anti-racist meant that no communists suffered from it, and so what was there to talk about? In the west, my interlocutor suggests, the long conscience of the war puts everyone on best behaviour: “They dare not say anything” about the refugees, although there are signs of a national anxiety about the number of asylum seekers.
In Hanover, certainly, there are many banners saying “refugees welcome”. Some official, some graffiti, some on government buildings.
They’re also on the walls of today’s roller derby venue, a school sports hall not yet converted into a shelter.
Other posters are less friendly. “Demolish. Destroy. Kill, kill, kill” is the motto of the home team, the Demolition Derby Dolls.
Their opponents are the Zombie Rollergirlz of Muenster. Their noms de guerre are less than demure: Candy Kills, Evil, Insane Elaine, Stitches, Serial Kill-her.
Explaining the rules to Farhad, over the sound of the heavy metal band in the corner, is not going smoothly.
“No elbows. No knees. No headbutts,” says the commentator in German, although the day will end with bruises, black eyes and tender knees. Sometimes there are broken ankles and collar bones.
I translate, but it doesn’t explain the game, which is about a designated player barging through a bunch of blockers and whizzing around the track on roller skates. Telling a legal move from a foul is impossible.
Farhad and the others cluster on the bleachers watching a game they don’t understand, played by immodest women in hotpants, being explained in a foreign language.
“This is nice,” says Farhad. “We’ve been made to feel so comfortable.”
It’s not just about being at the game. The suburb in which they stay is multicultural, with a strong Turkish weave and lots of shop signs in Arabic.
And while they are caught in a bureaucratic net in which their status is finely gauged, and their movements tightly circumscribed, they are part of a formal government programme that covers clothing, housing, food, a bit of what amounts to pocket money, and maybe, one day, jobs.
It also helps that they aren’t penned in the squalid holding camps along the Kos coast of death, or getting snarled on the barbed wire of nationalism on the SerbianHungarian border.
Most importantly, they have a status – “asylum seekers” – which has secured their precarious foothold far from the wars that have flung them here. Nevertheless, they are all skittish. No photographs, for example. Their families, in many cases, are still in Jordan, Turkey, and in nameless other places.
“We have to go,” says Farhad, pleading tiredness. It’s only half time. They don’t have to. He’s being polite. There’s nowhere really to go to, except somewhere among themselves.
Vanderhaeghen is a journalist and researcher based in The Hague. He is also the former deputy editor of The Witness.