Shaam is an otherwise unremarkable-looking Middle Eastern restaurant. There’s a menu on the wall showing pixelated images of falafel and kibbeh; a hunk of doner meat rotates slowly by the window. But the restaurant has become a place for new arrivals from Syria to congregate. “The name feels like home,” says Mahmoud, a warm and chatty 28-year-old. “It introduces Berlin, away from your family and friends.”

Mahmoud is a Syrian of Palestinian heritage who fled the war in Aleppo in 2014 after being imprisoned and tortured by government forces. He is now a guide with Querstadtein, a group organising tours of Berlin, led by refugees.

The tours use the context of Berlin’s urban landscape to explain to tourists and locals alike the experience of being a refugee in Germany.

Querstadtein, which now has eight guides, was the second refugee tour to crop up in Berlin as the city reacted to the mass influx of migrants that began two years ago. Refugee Voices was co-founded in early 2015 by Lorna Cannon, a British tour guide living in Berlin, and her two friends, both refugees who now volunteer as guides. The tours are a way for “people to meet somebody who is experiencing this life as a refugee, and understand what that means”, Cannon says.

A tour given by the company Refugee Voices. Photograph: Project Fuel

The idea is catching on. Refugee Voices has since launched a tour in Copenhagen, run by an Eritrean woman and an Iraqi Kurd, and there are plans to spread to London and Paris in early 2018. It is volunteer-based and free. Querstadtein’s concept is similar, but it pays guides a wage of €200 a month and charges €13 per tour.

The cobbled streets of Neukölln, one of Berlin’s most diverse districts, hold a special significance for Mahmoud. “When you talk about the refugee crisis, then you have to talk about meeting points for these people,” he says. “There are always difficulties regarding the procedures and the linguistic barriers when you first arrive. So you have to find a person or place who can help you.”

In AfD areas, some refugees are afraid to leave the shelter after dark … or be visibly identifiable as a Muslim Dr Sina Arnold

For him, that was Neukölln. More than 40% of the neighbourhood’s residents have an immigrant background, and it is “one of most energetic areas in Berlin”, he says. “It’s the most demanded area for living, simply because it’s full of foreigners. If you are a migrant or come from outside of Berlin, you can find comfort here.”

Nearby Sonnenallee is a large thoroughfare bustling with loud shoppers and the hum of traffic. The street, once bisected by the Berlin wall, now represents a different kind of segregation. Home to Lebanese immigrants in the 1970s, Sonnenallee has become a hub for the city’s Middle Eastern communities, and is known locally as “Arab Street”. “This is the meeting point for all refugees and Arabs in the city. It makes them feel at home,” says Mahmoud.

In Cafe Sabah, just off the main road, Mahmoud calls for tea and coffee and jokes with the staff in Arabic. I ask if he knows them. “Can you believe that we’re related? He’s my cousin,” he laughs. “Arabs are overly sociable. That person I got to know is the grandson of the cousin of my grandmother. I had never met him before in Syria, even though I knew his father. But here we got to know that he’s a relative of mine.”

Karl Marx Strasse in ethnically diverse Neukölln district of Berlin. Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Since more than a million refugees crossed Germany’s borders, the city’s ethnic makeup has changed: Syrians are now the fourth-largest group of foreigners, behind Turks, Poles and Italians. New, refugee-owned businesses, such as the restaurants Alagami and Yasmin Alsham, have opened up as these new communities gradually establish themselves.

“It’s easy to say, ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’ It’s a very multicultural place – you feel like it’s your city,” says Mahmoud.

Though Berlin may be multicultural, it remains polarised. The diverse areas of Neukölln and Kreuzberg are a far cry from the far-right hotbeds of Marzahn-Hellersdorf, which are “no-go areas for refugees who look visibly ‘different’”, says Dr Sina Arnold, a researcher at the Berlin Institute for Migration. “It creates a climate of fear for people who thought they had arrived in a safe place.”

These fears have become even more prominent in the wake of September’s federal elections, when the far-right AfD won 12.6% of the vote. In the districts where AfD increased its share, “there is generally only a small percentage of migrant population, which also results in a lack of solidarity structures for refugees and migrants”, Arnold says. “It means that some refugees are afraid to leave the shelter after dark, or to walk outside alone, or be visibly identifiable as a Muslim.”

Protesters in Berlin demonstrate against the anti-immigration party Alternative for Germany (AfD) after its election gains in September. Photograph: Axel Schmidt/Reuters

There were around 3,500 attacks on refugees or refugee shelters in Germany in 2016. Arnold witnessed an assault in March last year in Marzhan, when a man poured vodka on a young Syrian, spat on him and gave a Nazi salute.

If people understand the context and history of refugees, they will deal with them differently Walid

Walid, a guide with Refugee Voices who asked for his name to be changed, says he’s afraid of what might happen. “[The far right] are getting more powerful; lots of people are believing them and starting to be more afraid,” he says.

The tours aim to offer a space for reconciliation, with the guides hoping that presenting their own views and experiences of Berlin will help cross the barriers of perceived “otherness”. “It’s really rare to find a normal way of interacting, because people have a stereotype,” Walid adds. “There’s a huge misunderstanding of what a refugee is. If people understand the context and history of what made people come here, they will start to deal with them differently.”

Do the tours also risk becoming what the Germans call Elendstourismus, or “misery tourism”?

“If I felt that people were giving that sense of ‘poor people’, I wouldn’t continue,” says Mohamad, co-founder of Refugee Voices. “This is not the point of the tour.”

Germans hurl stones against Soviet tanks during pro-democracy protests in June 1953. Walid sees similarities with the situation in Syria. Photograph: AP

Instead, he says, it is about forming a connection between experiences. Outside Berlin’s finance ministry on the corner of Leipziger Straße, Walid describes the June 1953 demonstrations here that were brutally suppressed by Soviet forces. Hundreds of people died “just asking for their basic rights”, Walid says. In Leipziger Straße’s scarred buildings Walid sees the streets of Hama, Syria, where half a million people gathered to protest against the government in 2011, an uprising that was violently crushed. “It’s a similar story of people trying to get their freedom, their rights, what they should have,” he says.

Walid left Syria with his brother Mohamad, also a guide with Refugee Voices, after he was blacklisted by the Assad government for being active on social media. “We got a tip from somebody that his name was on a list that if the government catches him at any checkpoint it will be very bad for him,” his brother says.



Upon arriving in Berlin, they stayed in a student dorm in Lichtenberg in the east of the city, which was converted into a temporary refugee shelter. While this area, like Marzhan, has a reputation for hostility to foreigners, Walid says the main problem was being in the limbo of shelters, not having your own place to live and socialise. “It’s hard to settle if you’re being moved to another camp.”

He eventually found a home in Wedding, a few U-Bahn stops north of the city centre, where he ends his tour at his favourite family-run Syrian restaurant, Mandi. “Berlin gives me hope,” says Walid. “This city was heavily damaged in the second world war, and in a few years it was rebuilt and there was democracy. That’s what gives me hope for Syria now: that one day we might be able to build it again.”

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