This the third in an occasional series of translations by Egri Nök about the ramifications of New Year’s Eve 2016 (Silvesternacht) in Cologne and other German cities.

The following article was published in Die Welt:

Cologne: The crushing insight of Silvester Night 2016 by Dirk Schümer Silvester 2016 had to happen under police protection. But a torturing long year of debates and accusations had barely any effect on those who arranged to meet to commit acts of violence. Silvester night 2016 was worse than feared. This does not refer to the hundreds of victims of violent excesses at Cologne Cathedral on the last day of 2015; the German police were able to prevent such widespread crime this time. But what was worse, nonetheless: A tantalizing long year of initial suppression, of debates and mutual political accusation did not have any effect at all on those who arrange to meet for acts of violence on Silvester. The same procedure [reference to “Dinner for One”] — they really tried it again. While it was possible in 2015 to have doubts that this worrying phenomenon was based on appointment and planning, such speculations are now obsolete. The many young men from Northern Africa, who were screened by the police in the days prior to Silvester, stated point-blank: They wanted to go to Cologne “to party”. What did they want in Cologne? After the dismissals by the police, which killed the mood, it can’t be ruled out that the Silvesterlust of all these men would just have come to a boozy Polonaise and a multicultural street party around the Cathedral of Cologne. But what is more likely is the crushing realization that the mass violence of 2015 was taken quite well by the perpetrators. And why not? As barely any perpetrator had to suffer legal consequences, there was no reason for them to postpone the party in 2016. The declarations by police and authorities of Cologne sound almost funny, that they were still not quite sure what the roughly 1,500 drunken and aggressive Northern Africans wanted in Cologne. What do you think? The reaction of the politicians of the “welcome faction” was equally predictable: have the “New fellow citizens” been terribly wronged by the ethnic narrowing of the range of perpetrators by the police? Strikingly few women on the streets As always in Germany, the control of the public dialogue was more important than the control of public safety. That Germany would “drastically change” — this proverbial statement by a Green senior politician [Katrin Göring-Eckardt] can be confirmed for Silvester 2016, with a lot of police and strikingly few women on the streets. This finding does not apply for the friends of the prayer wheel [idiom: repeating the same thing, over and over] such as the head of the Greens, Peter, or the SPD politician Lauer: The crimes in Cologne did not change them at all.