Adnan Ghafur is 26 years old, but he cannot sleep alone.

Someone has to be there all the time.

He leaves the lamp on the bedside table and the door open.

But even that doesn't help against the images in his head: chopped off heads, impaled on stakes.

Beheaded corpses, heads on their backs.

His uncle, riddled with seven bullets.

Justus Bender

Editor in politics of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

  • Follow I follow

    Livia Gerster

    Political editor for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

    • Follow I follow

      Ghafur laughs shyly. He would not have made that the topic himself, his buddy Bilal told it. The two are sitting at the table in a wood-paneled hotel restaurant in Frankfurt. Between them a large mountain salad with chicken. Lunch break. Then you have to go back to reception.

      Bilal is one of the friends who are there at night when Ghafur wakes up. Already at the age of 14 Ghafur fought against the Taliban in the Pakistani-Afghan border area. His uncle recruited him for the vigilante group. At night he kept watch in his village. But now it is day and Ghafur is in Germany. He looks like a good-humored young man, laughs a lot and speaks a lot, in pretty perfect German. He's been here for six years, and he's now doing an apprenticeship as an office clerk. It's going well for him, you might say. If it weren't for the nightmares and the constant fear of deportation.

      Ghafur doesn't know what to do about it.

      A doctor wanted to send him to see a psychotherapist.

      But he didn't go.

      “I didn't want to be pumped full of pills,” he says.

      He's never heard of a therapist just talking to him.

      50 to 85 percent are mentally ill

      In Baden-Württemberg, psychologists examined the residents of communal accommodation and found that 45 percent of them had depression and anxiety. Elsewhere, experts came up with even higher numbers. “One speaks of 50 to 85 percent,” says Patrick Meurs, director of the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt, a research institute for psychoanalysis with a focus on migration. “One can assume that most of the refugees are traumatized.” Physically, they are often healthier than the average German, but their psyche is deeply wounds.

      Refugee helpers warn that the situation is slowly getting tricky. The feeling of powerlessness from torture, death and displacement was followed by a feeling of elation for many refugees in 2015: They had freed themselves from their situation. They managed to escape to Germany. They were no longer at the mercy of dark forces, but masters of their fate. Then came the harsh reality: rejected asylum notices, hopeless letters of application and family members far away who may or may not be able to come soon. At the Frankfurt working group Trauma and Exile, the therapists make a gloomy diagnosis. “Now we are in a phase in which people have the feeling that they no longer know what to do next. It's a feeling of constant powerlessness. This also makes you mentally ill.This revives the trauma. "

      The situation would be less serious if enough could be done about it, but the therapists fail to deal with the diseases. There are simply too many patients and too few doctors. The social workers and helpers in the refugee shelters have to pay for that. They were hardly prepared for their task and have to work for little money and under difficult conditions. Often they are overwhelmed. “Social workers get burnout too often,” says Meurs from the Sigmund Freud Institute.