Essen district of Altenessen-Mitte on Saturday morning just 36 hours after the New Year’s Eve riot. They have provisionally secured the completely demolished bus stop with red and white tarpaulin, the red paving stones are covered with shards of glass. The trail of devastation can be seen from the stairs of the underground station to Altenessener market: a dozen waste paper baskets, torn from their anchors and destroyed, lie on the ground. Of the two green dustbins set on fire in the middle of the market square, one is half melted. A little further on, the demolished neon sign with a pile of broken glass underneath.First the closed St. Mary’s Hospital, in some cases fights between Lebanese and Syrians, now the New Year’s Eve riots. The district is not calming down. “Something has to happen here, we definitely need more police,” says dog trainer Franziska Thelen, waiting for the bus and looking at the demolished bus stop. “A year ago they broke those windows on New Year’s Eve, too.”A passer-by stops by, pulls out her mobile phone and takes a photo of the sign of the outbreak of violence: the shattered bus stop. “Yes, it has become worse here,” says the woman who has moved from Oberhausen. The sight of the damage is terrible. Until now she had felt safe in Altenessen, but now doubts come up in her mind. “You don’t dare walk past here at night any more.The small area between the Alter Badeanstalt and Altenessener Markt is one of the busiest in the whole district. Three bus and two underground lines meet here, plus the busy Altenessener Street, and only a stone’s throw away is the highly frequented Allee-Center.Was the New Year’s Eve riot a spontaneous outbreak of violence or possibly a carefully staged and planned action? The “Tik-Tok video”, set to gangsta rap and composed with precisely edited riot images, speaks more for the latter. The sequence with the sledgehammer at the bus stop underpins this. No one goes to a New Year’s Eve party with a sledgehammer.”The police have to be tough,” says the taxi driver, who is of Turkish origin. And he adds: ” When I see the destruction here, it makes me cry. He is sure that young men with Arab-Kurdish-Lebanese roots committed the riot. Disrespect and violence – that’s what they learned from their parents. “The old tell the young: Nothing can happen to you, we are stateless”.
