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FOREWORD

“Berlin Notebook: Where Are the Refugees?” started as a straightforward journal transcription of my experiences in Berlin during October 2015, a time when the influx of refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Libya into Germany and the rest of Europe was peaking to become the largest since World War II. The Notebook posted daily at the Los Angeles Review of Books throughout February 2016. But by then, the situation had changed. A terrorist attack in Paris, in November 2015, left 130 dead, many more wounded, and shook the world with another careful coordination of simultaneous strikes against multiple targets. In January 2016, over New Year’s Eve, hundreds of women were sexually assaulted in the crowded public squares of Köln by asylum seekers believed to be from North Africa. Then, in early March, two Afghan asylum seekers sexually molested two teenage girls at an aquatics center in Northern Germany, an incident that repeated similar attacks at the same location two years earlier. A shadow had passed over Willkommenskultur. “The situation has become very hard here,” a friend in Berlin wrote in an email.

I decided to return to Berlin in April to see for myself. A week before I got there, while I was traveling in Spain with my family, multiple timed bombings at the Brussels airport reverberated across Europe. We talked about it in lowered voices with our friends in the public markets of Barcelona. The day this spring that I arrived in Berlin, the first refugees were being sent back to Turkey from Greece as part of the deal the EU had struck with Turkey to control migrant movement. Borders had closed, and were closing. At the same time, I discovered more programs in place in Germany to help with integration, some quite inventive; the “subject” of refugees had also become hot, with at least a dozen new titles stacked on bookstore tables throughout the city. The refugee crisis had itself migrated from the political arena to the larger realm of culture. The refugees were now being sheltered all over the city in hotels and public buildings; everyone could answer the question, “where are the refugees?” Why, down the street, around the corner, not far from here. The two weeks in Berlin in April resulted in new material—interviews, travels, little personal social experiments—that I’ve added to update the Notebook for its republication as an e-book. It maintains the form of a chronology.

I have tried to be as faithful as possible in my reporting of interviews. I have not tried to verify the facts that people presented (when they told them to me); I have tried, rather, to convey the experience of talking with them, what it was like to be there, and to listen, to ask. The form of the interviews may seem to move like the “streaming” metaphor one finds everywhere in use to describe the movement of people across national borders.

Washington, DC

April 13, 2016