Three weeks ago, Andreas Tölke’s Berlin apartment was photographed for a life-style magazine. The next day, the fifty-five-year old architecture and design journalist turned his Armani sofa into a makeshift bed, laid some mattresses on the parquet floor, and called up an actress friend who was coördinating emergency housing for refugees. “I thought, ‘I have one hundred and twenty square meters for myself, I have enough space,’ ” said Tölke, who specializes in writing about luxury goods. “I work at home, but there’s availability.”
Half an hour later, three Egyptians, a Bosnian teenager, and a Moldovan rang his bell. Tölke, whose German-Jewish mother lost her entire family in the Holocaust, handed out shower kits stocked with Aveda products and Italian cologne (“I’m not one of these hippies in Jesus sandals—my guests sleep on Armani/Casa sheets”), and served lentil soup. “They were completely frozen,” he said of the five men. “They had been on the road for months. This was the first time they sat down in a German kitchen, and had someone listen to them talk about what they had been through. That makes a difference.”
A wry man with a good-natured French bulldog, Tölke has, in the weeks since, hosted thirty-eight refugees for one to three nights apiece. Hailing from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Albania, his guests have included a comparative-literature student who spoke five languages and a large rural family that had never used a Western toilet. “Once you start, it’s like a whirlpool,” said the journalist, who helps his guests with their byzantine German-language paperwork, accompanies them to the hospital, takes them grocery shopping, and finds them longer-term places to live while they cycle through the “jungle” of German bureaucracy. He also advises them on winter wardrobes and lends an ear as they describe experiences like surviving with their families in an overloaded boat to Greece after the motor quit mid-journey. “You can’t stop. In Germany, we only have the luck of being born at the right time in the right place. This is a society where people really understand that.”
No one knows how many Berliners are taking refugees into their homes, but Tölke estimates that he is one of a thousand. For Michael Bongardt, an ethics professor at Berlin’s Free University, these people are part of a larger cultural movement—one that registers both as a repudiation of the acts of right-wing violence that have targeted refugees and as a hands-on political critique of those government structures seen as reacting inadequately to the problem. “I am sure that a majority of Germans agree with the people who are helping the refugees,” said Bongardt. “Many have the impression the government has completely failed. Indeed, it is very difficult to live with refugees in your flat. But people are willing to do it.”
Certainly, when the refugee crisis hit Berlin, in late August, regional authorities proved woefully unprepared, and they have been roundly criticized for relying on an outpouring of citizens’ good will to cope with refugees’ basic needs. In the middle of a heat wave, a tent camp with no facilities sprang up around the understaffed State Office for Health and Social Services, known as LaGeSo, where every refugee has to register (this involves waiting outdoors all day, every day, sometimes for weeks, until their number is called). A volunteer neighborhood organization called “Moabit Helps!” stepped into the breach, providing water, thousands of meals, medicine, emergency shelter, and other services; “Moabit Helps!” is credited with having kept the refugee-registration system from collapsing entirely.
Bowing to pressure from social-welfare groups and other organizations, the government in Berlin recently provided shelters for nearly all of those waiting to be registered. Still, some fall through the cracks—families that arrive in Berlin at night, for example, often have only two options: Either private citizens respond to alerts put out over Facebook or via phone trees and pick them up, or they sleep on the street in front of LaGeSo. While the logistics are imperfect—after 3 A.M., even the hardiest volunteer monitors have gone home—the desire to help is there. “Berliners are pounding down our doors to take people in,” said Laszlo Hubert, a co-founder of “Moabit Helps!” “Everybody wants to help. But not all help is helpful.” (Take, for example, the “wild Berlin folks” who “just show up and snatch people” and give them a place to stay—something that, for a refugee who does have a shelter bed, can throw a wrench in the bureaucratic works).
Jule Mueller, a blogger and photographer, and her flatmate in the trendy Neukölln neighborhood took in four young men from North Africa three weeks ago. After seeing a TV news report, Mueller collected money and donations to drop off at LaGeSo. But when she got there she stayed, helping to coördinate private rooms for between fifty and two hundred people each night—mostly young men travelling alone. “It was heartbreaking,” she said, “when there weren’t enough beds to go around.” Now she sleeps on the sofa, or the two flatmates share a bed, in order to take in more refugees. But Mueller doesn’t mind the inconvenience: “I consider these lovely boys my friends, as well as family, now.”
Stephan Detjen, a journalist at Deutschlandfunk, the German public-radio station, said he thinks family is, in fact, the key to Germans’ eagerness to help. “Germans have this experience in their own families,” he explained. His wife’s mother fled East Germany, while his own great uncle’s inability to bring his Jewish father to safety in Switzerland was a tragedy that haunted him to the end of his life. “This is a generation that, confronted with refugees and misery, knows that they themselves are just incredibly lucky,” said Detjen.
Of course, the relationships that develop go both ways. Nora, a journalist, gave her college-bound daughter’s room to a Syrian literature student named Ahmad, earlier this year. (Nora and Ahmad are both pseudonyms; Nora requested that I not use their real names as her family is in the process of trying to bring Ahmad’s family from Aleppo to Germany.) Now twenty-five, Ahmad fled Syria when he was conscripted into the army. “Just after Ahmad moved in, my husband got sick,” said Nora,. “It was a hard time. And Ahmad, he was very, very nice and helpful, emotionally.”
“I have my family in Syria, and now I have a new family in Germany,” agreed Ahmad, bespectacled and soft-spoken. Sitting on Nora’s couch, in a comfortable single-family house with hardwood floors, oriental rugs, books, and plate-glass windows looking out onto a green garden, he said he had talked to his little sister that morning. It was hot in Syria, and there was no water for washing. “I said, ‘Please, be patient.’ ” “It really made us think about integration,” added Nora. “You can’t just say, ‘The rest of the family stays in Aleppo.’ ”
For the illustrator Christoph Niemann (who has often provided cover art for this magazine), inviting a young Iraqi family to spend a few nights in his family’s guest room ended up being a welcome respite from a chronic feeling of helplessness in the face of so much terrible news. “Every single article you read about the refugee crisis, the problems are so complex and complicated,” he said. “This interaction was so nicely simple: This family, they sleep at our house, and we have dinner and breakfast together.”
Interactions like this one—which came about after he and his wife ran into a friend, the novelist Annika Reich, at the supermarket, and she told them she was trying to organize a room for a pregnant woman, her husband, and their child—are not going to change the plight of millions of people, Niemann added. “But you see your own kids, and you think, It could be you.”
