Migrant Resistance in the 1980s and 1990s
Along with the increasing atmosphere of racism, the number of racially-motivated assaults and murders increased during the 1980s. Young immigrants defended themselves against neo-Nazis and racist skinheads by forming gangs. These gangs also provided the youths with a sense of agency in a society that shut them out from many places and cut them off from many opportunities. Some gangs in Hamburg were the Champs in St. Pauli, or the Red Bombers in Bergedorf.
‘The best-known gang was the Wilhelmsburger Türken Boys, the WTB! Nazis wouldn’t set foot in Wilhelmsburg.’
Perihan Zeran from the Initiative in Memory of Ramazan Avci, in ZAG – antirassistische Zeitschrift
The government and the police took a much harder stance against the gangs than against the organised skinheads, whose brutality was often de-politicised and seldom punished. Many of the gangs disbanded fairly quickly.
In December 1985 Ramazan Avcı was beaten to death on the street in Eilbek by racist skinheads. His death saddened and angered people of Turkish heritage living in Germany. Turkish cultural societies, sports clubs, mosques, and left-wing groups banded together to form a non-partisan Bündnis türkischer Einwanderer (Union of Turkish Immigrants), and called on the public to join a large demonstration on 11 January 1986. The Union demanded not only a halt to the racist violence, but also legal changes such as the right to residency for the foreign workers who had been living in Germany for decades. In the following years the Türkische Gemeinde in Deutschland e.V. (Society for the Turkish Community in Germany), a special interest group for Germans of Turkish heritage, developed out of the Union.
The Volkshaus der Türkei (People’s House of Turkey), in which various left-wing groups from Turkey had joined forces at the end of the 1970s, was also involved in the Union. In the wake of the 1980 military coup in Turkey, many more people came to Hamburg, bringing their political experience with them to the Volkshaus, which they set up in the former cattle market building in St Pauli. Many initiatives against racism started there: in 1991, the Widerstandsinitiative gegen Rassismus (Resistance Initiative against Racism) was founded, which campaigned for a street to be named for Ramazan Avcı as a symbol against racism. After Hatice Genç, Hülya Genç, Saime Genç, Gürsün İnce and Gülüstan Öztürk were killed in the racist arson attack in Solingen on 29 May 1993, activists from the Volkshaus organised a day-long general strike in Hamburg. On 2 June 1993, many shops run by immigrants remained closed and thousands of people, mainly young immigrants, demonstrated at the Rathausmarkt. For more than 30 years the Volkshaus was an important place for immigrants, refugees, Sinti and Roma as well as left-wing activists to organise and gather.
Sinti and Roma had organised in Hamburg as early as the mid-1970s, in the Rom und Cinti Union e.V. Officially registered in 1982, the association has since campaigned for a reappraisal of the Nazi persecution of Sinti and Roma, against antiziganist discrimination, and for the right to stay for Roma threatened with deportation. They have organised a variety of actions, including hunger strikes and occupations.
Many of the actions protesting racism and far-right violence in Hamburg organised by the groups mentioned here were collaborations with other political organisations, such as refugee groups. They demonstrated together, for example, in 1993 after the Asylum Compromise was passed, which is criticised as the de facto abolition of the right to asylum in Germany.
