2013 I started to take images of unaccompanied minor refugees.
2014 more and more refugees were crossing the German borders,
everything seemed to get out of balance then.
The authorities tried to keep control over the situation,
one of their measures was to keep me out of the now utterly
crowded camp, where I had had visited the unaccompanied minor
refugees.
One year later countless smaller camps popped up all over
Germany, two of them in my little posh suburban community.
Quite a lot of citizens started to help these strangers around.
An association (Verein) was founded, a chairman elected,
lots of different committees founded, some of them collected
clothes, others fixed bikes, some started to teach German to all
these strangers.
I became a part of this group, partly out of curiosity,
partly because I was hoping to pick up my photographic project
again.
We held parties then for the refugees, tried to help them going to
school, find jobs and to learn a profession.
Some of the refugees soon found work,
and a while later a few of them started with apprenticeships.
Those were the good times.
Over the years an extremist right wing party got some popularity,
and the main right-wing party, here in Bavaria, afraid of losing votes,
turned more and more restrictive on the refugees.
Those who are not accepted as asylum seekers under the German
asylum laws, are now condemned to do nothing.
They lost their working permits.
There are no regular schools for them.
Those of them who had jobs, now lost them.
Those who could have learned a profession,
are not allowed to do that anymore.
Day and night, they hang around now in their noisy
and cramped mass accommodations,
waiting for nothing to come.
They won´t be permitted to do anything here in Germany
and they won´t leave back home.
Because there is no home for these people.
For years to come human lives will be wasted,
here in the middle of posh suburbia,
in the middle of posh Germany,
humans will be destroyed because of an ideology I don´t care to
understand.
A part of the German population and the ruling parties seem to have
forgotten, that we are dealing here with people, with human beings.
They are easy to hurt, as we are too.
We have big camps again, hundreds of refugees crowded together,
guarded by securities, a big fence all around and barbed wire,
just twenty kilometers from my home.
Two families in one room.
The doors to the rooms can´t be locked.
No separate bathrooms for men and women.
The people are fed in a central canteen.
For two years I took pictures in the suburban village I live in.
Now I stopped doing that.
The refugees start to keep to themselves again.
They lost all hope.
I don´t feel like taking pictures of them anymore.