There have been several attacks on left-wing private individuals and institutions in Bremen over the weekend and in the past few weeks. Between Saturday and Sunday evening, a total of four houses in the Walle district of Bremen were pelted with paint. All of them could be recognized from the outside by an anti-right poster on the front door or window. The state security service has started an investigation.
The Left party has issued a statement about the incidents – in addition to a house project and an “engaged citizen”, a member of the Left in the Waller advisory board, the district parliament, and two other Left members from the district are also affected.
The first incidents were a long time ago. The first person affected from Walle was the left-wing member Ibou, who only wants to use his first name. On December 23rd he noticed a large amount of brown liquid running down the front door and into the apartment. “Old motor oil, maybe,” he suspects. Unlike the other leftists now affected, no poster indicated his place of residence. But: Ibou is black, parts of the right-wing scene had apparently already targeted him.
Already in the summer, Ibou was confronted and filmed by a cyclist on his street; the video later ended up on social media under the tag “Invasive People”; Gerald Höns, former member of the Waller advisory board for the AfD and citizens in anger, shared the video on Facebook before Ibou and a neighbor who was also filmed filed a complaint for insult and violation of the right to their own image.
Those affected had all hung the same anti-right poster with the slogan Bremen remains stable on doors or windows.
That wasn’t the end of it: Höns and the creator of the video, who had sat on the advisory board for the AfD a few years earlier as a “knowledgeable citizen,” walked through his street repeatedly afterwards. “I see this as an attempt to intimidate me,” said Ibou. A week before the incident with the brown liquid, two men in the neighborhood were said to have searched for his house number with a photo of him. And on December 24th, the day after the attack, Höns and the videographer walked through the street and looked into the houses, says Ibou.
“It was important for us to place the ads,” says Ibou. “Both in the summer and now. This is the picture for the police.” Whoever perpetrated the attack with the oily liquid in the end: “In any case, there was sentiment against me in right-wing circles beforehand.”
There have been no further incidents on his street since Christmas. This is why there were paint attacks on the houses of party colleagues in the district over the weekend. Those currently affected had all hung the same right-wing poster with the slogan “Bremen remains stable” on doors or windows. Christmas tree balls or eggs filled with yellow and red paint were thrown at the houses.
Jörg Tapking, member of the Walle advisory board for Die Linke, is also affected. “The paint attack on my house is not only directed against me personally, but explicitly against my anti-fascist stance,” he says. This is particularly worrying: “I want to be able to act politically freely, without fear of repression, threats or violence.”
Whether all incidents are related is still under investigation. The police have not yet commented on this – but in any case, in all cases, including the video distributed on Facebook, the state security agency is investigating, which is deployed if the police suspect political motives.
A lot of work for state security
Nelson Janßen, domestic policy spokesman for the Die Linke faction, calls for quick clarification and above all for the authorities to take the incidents seriously and describe them as a series of right-wing attacks. “We expect that the state security service has learned from its significant mistakes in the investigation into the arson attack on the Frisians and is effectively preventing the everyday threat from right-wing radicals in Bremen,” said Janßen. After the arson attack on the left-wing youth center, they came Authorities only discovered the right-wing perpetrators through tips from the left-wing scene.
There was also an attack at the southern end of the city at the weekend, albeit with a different signature: On the night from Saturday to Sunday, previously unknown people broke the windows of a restaurant in Huchting and spray-painted the outside walls with swastikas, the fascist code number 88 and a racist slogan. State security has also started investigations here.