After the violent attacks on the police, fire brigade and rescue service on New Year's Eve, one thing quickly became clear to the Mayor of Berlin, Franziska Giffey: that "the situation was pretty bad" in other cities too and that "a Germany-wide debate" was therefore needed.

Oliver Georgi

Editor in the politics of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

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Home Secretary Nancy Faeser is currently collecting data and will soon present an overall picture of the night.

It is already clear: In Berlin there were by far the most violent riots with 47 injured police officers and 15 injured firefighters.

A firefighter had to stay in the hospital, a police officer was treated as an outpatient.

The fire brigade spoke of having been lured into an ambush in several cases.

In Hamburg, however, which is usually mentioned as the second stronghold of the riots, the police reported a "comparatively quiet New Year's Eve".

A police spokeswoman told FAS that there was "obviously a completely different dimension of violence" in Berlin.

The fact that firecrackers are thrown at police officers is also “not a new phenomenon”.

As in other cities, it was not the police in Hamburg who spoke of increasing violence, but the fire brigade.

She drove about 1,000 to 1,200 calls that night, during which there were five attacks on firefighters with fireworks, in which two people were injured and one could go blind in one eye.

There had been no injuries in previous years.

What else is "typical for New Year's Eve"?

In Hanover, Bochum and Hagen, emergency services were also surrounded and shot at with fireworks.

Sometimes worse than usual, but sometimes also in places where there had been similar violent clashes on New Year's Eve before Corona.

Large cities such as Munich, Stuttgart, Düsseldorf, Bremen and Dresden do not describe any incidents in their press releases on the New Year's balance sheet.

Frankfurt writes: “Again this year, isolated rescue workers were approached, including by throwing fireworks in a targeted manner”, but overall the night was “typical for New Year’s Eve”.

Typical for New Year's Eve, which means that it was tough for the emergency services.

But not much more violently than usual. As an example: Der Spiegel wrote in 2018 that “party lovers and drunks sometimes acted excessively against police officers, firefighters or paramedics”, including with pistols.

In the first Corona winter, the Berliner Zeitung reported on cobblestones and Molotov cocktails being thrown at officials.

Both in Berlin, mind you.

Even before Faeser's data were available, a debate about a new quality of violence against emergency services as a whole quickly developed this week.

Herbert Reul spoke of a "new dimension of aggressiveness".

Faeser called it "brutalization", Lower Saxony's Interior Minister Boris Pistorius said that it must now be a matter of restoring respect for the emergency services.

Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said the real problem was "the increasing brutalization of rioters and the dwindling respect for the police, fire brigade and emergency services".