When the great orientalist and religious scholar Annemarie Schimmel was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt in autumn 1995, she expressly thanked Mevlüde Genç in her speech: The Solingen Turk, who forgave the murderers of her family, embodies them tolerant Islam "which I have known for decades".

Peter Philipp Schmitt

Editor in the department "Germany and the World".

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A year later, Mevlüde Genç, who had lost two daughters, two granddaughters and a niece in the arson attack in Solingen, was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit with Ribbon.

Other awards, including a Mevlüde Genç medal, which the state government in North Rhine-Westphalia has donated annually since 2018 for special services to tolerance, reconciliation between cultures and the peaceful coexistence of religions, were to follow over the years.

The cowardly murders of Solingen were a beacon.

They followed the right-wing extremist attacks in Hünxe, Mölln (the first people died in a xenophobic arson attack in Germany), Hoyerswerda and Rostock.

But the act in Solingen was particularly shocking.

Chancellor Helmut Kohl, meanwhile, refused to attend the funeral service for the dead because, as his spokesman said, his government did not want to fall into "condolence tourism".

Where the house number 81 of the Genç family once stood on Untere Wernerstraße, there is still a vacant lot to this day.

Five chestnuts were later planted there for the dead.

On May 29, 1993, 17 other family members suffered injuries, some of them very serious, and were marked for life.

Why did Mevlüde Genç still stay in Solingen after that?

"Five of my children went to paradise from here," she told Die Zeit three years after the attack.

In 1973 she followed her husband to Germany

Mevlüde Genç grew up in a small village on the Black Sea in the Turkish province of Amasya and was engaged by her parents at an early age – at the age of 14 – to her cousin Durmuç, whom she later married.

When her husband went to Germany in 1970, he was welcomed as a guest worker with a brass band at Düsseldorf airport.

She followed him three years later, initially without the four children.

In 1980 they bought the house in Solingen and moved in as a family with seven children.

13 years later, four men came to the "Turkish house", as they later testified, poured out petrol and set it on fire.

The survivors around Mevlüde Genç nevertheless avowed themselves to their homeland of Solingen.

A Turkish building contractor built them a new, well-guarded house while the trial against the four assassins, aged between 16 and 23, was still going on at the higher regional court in Düsseldorf.

After 125 days of trial, three of them were sentenced to a maximum youth sentence of ten years and one to 15 years in prison.

The victims' mother, grandmother and aunt, Mevlüde Genç, sat in the courtroom most of the time.

She found the punishment to be fair, and the perpetrators have long since served it.

Two were released early due to good behavior.

Mevlüde Genç never questioned that either.

But the pain remained.

"But I want to set a good example," said Mevlüde Genç when the attack was 20 years ago.

"I wish,

As early as 1995, the Genç couple acquired German citizenship.

Mevlüde Genç never lost her trust in the German state and the German judiciary, not even when the right-wing extremist series of murders by the NSU against migrants shook the country.

Peace Ambassador Mevlüde Genç died on Sunday at the age of 79 in Solingen, her adopted home.