Germans are right to refuse to be cowed by terrorists

bald descriptiveness of individuals struggling to process the extraordinary information of their eyes and ears: the speed of the vehicle as it careered through the crowds (one British tourist estimated 40mph); the broken glass; the wooden huts destroyed like paper.

One man, a senior journalist at Berliner Morgenpost newspaper, saw fluid on the ground. “Could be red wine, could be blood, I don’t know,” he said, his words painfully encapsulating the horror of an attack on people at their most defenceless. These were men and women who were simply trying to enjoy themselves, and relishing the escape that the festive season offers from the realities of a troubled world.

Words fail. Dozens of families must face Christmas in the throes of an agonising bereavement or conducting an anxious wait by a hospital bed, and all for no rational reason.

For the terrorists, of course, there is a purpose – to strike fear into hearts and suspicion into minds, but they have not had their way, at least, not entirely. Within hours of Monday’s atrocity, it was announced that while Berlin’s Christmas markets would remain closed, other markets in Germany would open as normal.

This calm, dignified defiance in the face of bitter hatred is deeply moving, reflecting the response of Londoners to the 7/7 bombings and Parisians to last year’s attacks in the French capital. It represents a refusal to be cowed.

Fear and anxiety tend to spread like a virus following such incidents, and how could it be otherwise? It is almost impossible not to imagine the worst, however briefly. Perhaps you’re walking along a busy street, moving at a snail’s pace behind Christmas shoppers and feeling overwhelmed by the tide of bustling bodies. What if it happened now? Or maybe you’re standing in a busy concert venue, packed shoulder to shoulder with other fans, wondering how you would escape if you had to. Commuter trains, bars and restaurants, airports: wherever people gather to go about their daily life there is an unspoken tension.

This is the intentional legacy of terror attacks, to make us all quiet catastrophists, playing out the worst case scenario in our heads, the hypothetical footage of an incident running in our mind’s eye like a news feed. It is normal to think like this, but how mistaken it would be voluntarily to sequester ourselves like offenders in an open prison; that is the result the terrorists want.

It is true that the security services cannot prevent every attack, especially one as low tech as this latest atrocity, but we can at least be partially reassured that security measures are being heightened once again. Perhaps we also need to remind ourselves that our sense of vulnerability to terrorist attacks is heightened by the publicity surrounding such events.

“We do not want to allow ourselves to be paralysed by terror,” said German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The alternative is to live like the besieged and that is not much of a life at all.

Sadly, there are too many politicians who stand ready to exploit such fears for their own ends. The knives are already out for Mrs Merkel, who has staked her reputation, career and legacy on principled support for a liberal immigration policy, giving safe haven to somewhere round a million refugees. Although it is not yet known who carried out the Berlin attacks (a man who arrived in Germany from Pakistan last year was in custody but has been released) speculation abounds that it will prove to be a refugee. Figures in Germany’s

anti-immigration Alternatives Fur Deutschland (AfD) party have already blamed Mrs Merkel personally, remarks echoed with distasteful relish by international meddler-without-portfolio Nigel Farage.

Mrs Merkel is clearly shaken by what has happened, her pain evident in her short statement, saying it would be “particularly repugnant” if the perpetrator was someone who had been given safe haven in Germany.

The AfD have jumped the gun: after all, there was similar speculation that refugees would be responsible after

the Nice and Paris attacks, but

in those cases, the attackers were predominantly Belgian and French nationals. Yet even if it is a refugee, as

it may prove to be, the actions of one individual are no more indicative of the group as a whole than in any other walk of life.

Unfortunately, that message is struggling to find traction following

the storm of publicity that has accompanied a number of other incidents in Germany involving migrants and refugees over the last year, starting with the sexual assaults last New Year against women by crowds of men, many of them migrants.

There was also a spate of gun and machete attacks over the summer, with three carried out by refugees (though not all were motivated by terrorist sentiment). Most recently, a young woman who was volunteering with a refugee charity in Freiburg was raped and murdered. A young man who recently arrived in Germany from Afghanistan is in custody, though the case has yet to come to court.

Cultural dissonance between Germans and some refugees is clearly

a problem. Undoubtedly, many men from the Middle East, central Asia and North Africa bring with them attitudes to women and girls that are misogynist. Where this spills over into harassment and assault, it must be met with the strongest response. But once again, not all male refugees – by any means – are responsible for such attitudes and behaviour; the guilt of the few does not justify the demonisation of the many. As Mrs Merkel and many others in Germany know only too well, nothing does.

Chancellor Merkel has no choice

but to continue urging Germans not to scapegoat migrants and focusing on doing all that is humanly possible to prevent other terrorist attacks. Calls for restraint are always drowned out by strident fear-mongerers in the wake of tragedies, but in her private moments, she might well reflect that such an attack might have happened even if she had taken a hardline approach to refugees, in retaliation at that stance.

We will never know. What we can say is that the tide of opinion feels to be against her. President-elect Donald Trump has waded in qwwith typically intemperate remarks about attacks on “Christians” by Islamic State, adding in a tweet that terrorist attacks were “getting worse” and that “the civilized world must change thinking!”. For that, read a blame game against immigrants.

It remains to be seen how these tensions will play out. In the mean time, as the festive season wears on, and those families in Germany struggle to come to terms with their terrible losses, we must each choose how to respond personally to this insidious threat and how to direct our anger. Our decision, now and in the future, will shape our society for years to come.