Two and a half years after first arriving in Germany, Firas Alshater is still flummoxed by some of his day-to-day encounters. The 24-year-old Syrian refugee recalls the landlady of a flat he lived in who would frequently leave him notes. “If I didn’t put the toilet seat down, she’d leave a note – on the toilet seat – telling me off, or if I forgot to switch the light off, there would be a note next to the switch. It would have been quicker if she’d just spoken to me.” His friend Jan Heilig, a German film-maker who is with us, offers an explanation: “It’s because you’re a guest in her country, and you have to behave by the rules!”
But Alshater says he was paying her 400 euros a month for his room. “I wasn’t a guest!”
Nowadays, as probably the first refugee with a YouTube channel, he might better be described as a celebrity. He is certainly the most hugged refugee in Germany, having stood on Alexanderplatz in Berlin, blindfolded, with a sign that read: I am a Syrian refugee. I trust you – do you trust me? Hug me!
“I waited about one and a half hours and no one came up to me,” he recalls. Then the cameraman, who was patiently waiting for some action, came and embraced him. “And it kick-started others to do the same,” Alshater says, tucking into a chocolate muffin and sipping on coffee. The huggers kept coming and the video of his experiment has now been viewed more than 2.5m times. He was encouraged by the warmth shown to him that day, he says, but even more so by the responses online. Around 7,000 people have “liked” the video, compared to around 400 who “disliked” it. Heilig draws a diagram that shows Germany split into two halves – those in favour of refugees, and often labelled leftwing as a result, and those who are anti-refugee, or just sceptical, and automatically labelled Nazis. “What Firas has done, as someone from outside, is to breach the new ‘Berlin Wall’ that has been erected between the two camps,” he says. “He speaks to both sides.”
One YouTube comment reads: “I’m against refugees, but this video is really cool.” Another asks: “Where have you been all this time?”
Other videos, in which Alshater asks “Who are these Germans?”, have also been runaway hits. One shows a group of neo-Nazis being invited to a workshop to touch a refugee baby, a nod to the fear of contact with refugees that many Germans have, as demonstrated most recently when a busload of asylum seekers was blocked and taunted by an angry mob of protesters in the village of Clausnitz, Saxony.
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