Background
22 people were injured, some of them seriously, in the right-wing terrorist NSU nail bomb attack in front of Özcan Y.’s hairdressing salon on Cologne’s Keupstraße on 9 June 2004. It was only by chance that nobody died. The “Keupstraße is everywhere” campaign group distinguishes between these 22 people directly affected and the numerous people indirectly affected, who were physically unharmed during the attack, but who suffered psychological damage as a result of what they saw, which still restricts their quality of life today.
Instead of taking the statements of those affected seriously, which suggested a racist motivation for the attack from the outset, the authorities played down a terrorist threat from right-wing extremist networks, instead investigating the shop owners and residents themselves and deliberately silencing them through intimidating interrogations. This was followed by years of stigmatisation and denigration of the Keupstraße as a “criminal milieu”, which was accompanied by its economic decline.
However, those affected managed to break through the imposed space of silence. The uncovering of the NSU in 2011 was a decisive turning point, as they were now officially no longer suspects, but survivors of the bomb. Encouraged by the “Dostuk Sinemasi” campaign group, the residents and business owners of Keupstraße shared their traumatic experiences publicly for the first time at an anti-racist film series in 2013 and denounced the racist police investigations and the media smear campaign against them. Together with supporters, they began to organise themselves in the “Keupstraße is everywhere” campaign group and fight for remembrance, clarification, justice and, above all, political consequences.
The campaign group initially set itself the goal of supporting the many co-plaintiffs in the NSU trial in Munich, which has been ongoing since 2013, and bringing their perspectives to the public. This had an enormous impact and subsequently encouraged other survivors of racist, right-wing and anti-Semitic violence to share their stories publicly. This newly created space for discourse also triggered a change in public perception, in which the perspective of those affected rather than the narrative of the perpetrator was placed centre stage.