Editors at Europe’s best-selling tabloid proudly boast of feeling the emotions of their readers and listening to their hearts.
When 1.1 million migrants arrived in Germany in 2015, Bild Zeitung launched a ‘welcome’ campaign, echoing the sentiments of then-Chancellor Angela Merkel, who had unilaterally opened the country’s borders to Syrians fleeing civil war in their homeland.
The German people answered the call. They hung bunting on lampposts, waved balloons, offered food parcels and put up campbeds for the newcomers in sports halls, churches — and even in their own homes.
Which makes the new campaign by Germany’s favourite paper, known to everyone simply as Bild, quite extraordinary.
Under the front-page headline ‘Germany, we have a problem!’, it has published a highly controversial 50-point manifesto telling migrants how to behave as the country experiences a national culture clash.
‘Our world is in chaos, and we are in the middle of it,’ says the paper.
‘Since the terrorist attack of Hamas on Israel on October 7, we are experiencing a new dimension of hatred, against our values, our democracy and against Germany.
‘In our country, there are many who oppose our way of life. People who celebrate the murder of innocent civilians.
‘Those who teach their children to hate others because they are ‘infidels’ (non-believers), those who forbid women from wearing trousers; those who listen to radical preachers because they want a different society. Germany must say no!’
Though Bild calls its manifesto a ‘sort of house rules’ for everyone living in Germany, it is clearly aimed at migrants. And its significance cannot be overstated.
With its racy pictures and eye-grabbing headlines, Bild — which sells one million print copies a day — has a massive impact on the German people’s mindset.
Twenty regional editions serve every corner of the country and each month its website attracts 25 million visitors, almost a third of the nation’s adult population.
‘It is the chosen literary fodder of politicians,’ I was told by a seasoned commentator in Germany this week.
Mrs Merkel’s predecessor, Chancellor Gerhard Schroder, once said in a memorable testimonial: ‘To govern, I need Bild daily, the Bild Sunday edition, and the TV.’
And, as a senior minister in Mrs Merkel’s cabinet during the 2015 migration crisis, the now European Commission president Ursula Von Der Leyen even turned up at Bild’s Berlin headquarters for its editors’ influential dinner parties.
And so, when the paper’s manifesto appeared on newsstands a few weeks ago, everyone sat up and took notice.
The move marked a sharp turning point for Germany and its increasingly uneasy relationship with mass migration.
Since the beginning of 2015, three million asylum seekers and illegal arrivals have come with far-reaching economic consequences.
This week, as Germany flirts with recession, the Federal Employment Agency announced that six out of ten welfare recipients are migrants who are fit and able to work.
Many are aged between 16 and 25, and many are women who have been in the country for years.
Germany will have spent £30 billion in 2023 alone on their housing costs and a wide variety of welfare handouts — from unemployment benefit to ‘integration’ classes — at a time when Europe’s former manufacturing powerhouse faces huge green energy costs and declining living standards.
For decades, Germany racked up one economic success after another as it dominated the global market for luxury vehicles and precision machinery.
Half the economy ran on exports and the average worker could afford a house, a nice car and an annual sunshine holiday for the family.
No longer. A recent poll showed that many small and medium-sized businesses plan to move abroad, while car-making giant Volkswagen — an icon of German engineering — this week predicted job cuts, citing low demand for electric vehicles as incomes are squeezed by soaring household energy bills.
Now worries about the state of the country’s social fabric can be added to the mix as Germany comes to terms with the impact of a prolonged period of near-limitless migration.
The ‘new Germans’ are being blamed for spiralling crime, a plague of sex attacks on women — notably at festivals and swimming pools — and the proliferation of knife-carrying, gun-toting gangs.
They have created virtual ‘no-go’ areas in some cities, which even the police are wary of entering. Besides the hostility experienced in these areas, police say they don’t have the officer numbers to react to every crime committed there.
There are fears that Germany has been split into two parallel societies: the first, an ordered world where citizens work and pay their taxes; the second, one where few hold down a regular job, often relying on benefits out of choice.
A report on Germany’s migrant population produced by Harvard University warns that, instead of adapting to the liberal way of life in their new host nation, many remain attached to the austere conservative Islamic customs of their countries of origin.
Women are often controlled by their menfolk, or face domestic violence. Some have ‘never even learned how to hold a pencil’, the report says.
Add to this dismal analysis, the warning words of Henry Kissinger, the late foreign policy guru, who, as a Jew, fled Nazism for the U.S. in 1938.
In October, just weeks before his death on Wednesday aged 100, Kissinger gave what turned out to be his final interview to German media outlet Die Welt.
Appalled by German street celebrations for Hamas atrocities, he said: ‘It was a grave mistake to let in so many people of a totally different culture, religion and concepts because it creates a pressure group inside each country that does that.’
In truth, the unravelling of Merkel’s dream of a German multicultural utopia began within weeks of the first major influx.
At New Year’s Eve celebrations in 2015, there was a mass sex assault by 2,000 males, arranged in gangs, on 1,200 women in the magnificent cathedral square of Cologne.
Police said it was a ‘completely new dimension of crime’, claiming those responsible were young men of ‘Arab and north African’ origin who had planned their sexual invasion meticulously.
Fireworks were thrown into the crowd by the mobs to disorientate and frighten their female victims before they pounced on them.
Unnerved, Merkel said the scenes were ‘abominable’.
Franco Clemens, who ran a Cologne migrants’ centre, later told an online forum: ‘It felt like the ground was being pulled from under our feet. Many people who had broadly supported the welcoming culture were suddenly fearful. A lot of support [for migrants] was lost.’
In the intervening years, such reservations have become more common.
Earlier this month, security police launched anti-terror raids on 54 mosques across the country in the belief some have been harbouring Middle East terror sympathisers stirring up anti-Semitism among worshippers.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Left-leaning government is also rushing a new Bill through the Bundestag to ramp up the deportation of foreign-born criminals and asylum seekers who do not have the right to live in Germany.
But Rainer Wendt, head of the country’s police union, reckons this is all too little, too late.
‘Around 50,000 people will be legally obliged to leave the country,’ he has said.
‘But it will take [at expected removal rates] more than 80 years to deport them to their homelands, during which time millions more will have arrived here. Every child who has mastered basic arithmetic recognises the deception.’
As the hard-Right party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), soars in the polls, its member of the European Parliament Maximillian Krah told the Mail he is equally concerned. ‘The events of 2015 in Germany were a mistake.
‘We can’t bring in everyone from the ‘Global South’ and give them money. It is the highway to hell, which will destroy the country if it continues.’
The 46-year-old, US-trained lawyer and widowed father of seven, adds: ‘Our party is second in popularity in all age groups under 60. We are first in the east of Germany. We are liked by youngsters who follow us on TikTok.
‘[Migrants] don’t change their views of life when they cross a border into Europe. If they believe in terror, they will continue to do so.
‘There are areas of Germany which are not safe even in daylight. There are second Syrias, second Africas . . . There is, I hope, still time to change things.’
That, to an extent, is what Bild wants, too. Its manifesto addresses a wide range of sensitive topics, from the scourge of bad manners to the mistreatment of women, homophobia, knife crime and rampant Jew-hatred.
The latter problem has spiralled in Germany since the attacks on Israel by Hamas terrorists. A Berlin synagogue has been firebombed and the Star of David daubed on Jewish houses.
‘Against the backdrop of the darkest chapter in our history [the Holocaust], Israel’s security is a matter of German national interest,’ declares Bild’s manifesto. ‘Standing up for Jewish people is non-negotiable.
‘Everyone can demonstrate peacefully here for their convictions. Free speech does not include threatening people, assaulting them, throwing rocks, burning cars or celebrating murders. Everyone who lives here permanently must learn German.’
Turning to women’s rights, the manifesto is even more forthright: ‘Women wear bikinis or bathing suits in the swimming pool.
‘And if they want to swim naked in the Baltic Sea, that’s OK, too! Women who have affairs are not ostracised here, let alone beaten or stoned! You don’t have to be a virgin to get married.
‘Germans don’t marry off children. Men can’t have more than one wife. Women decide — like men — for themselves how they dress, who they are friends with, whom they love, whom they vote for, and what job they choose.
‘How long or short a skirt is, is decided solely by the woman wearing it. We don’t wear veils; we look each other in the face.’
It goes on: ‘When a woman says ‘no’ to a man, it is final and absolute. Anything else constitutes sexual harassment or rape. Catcalling, like whistling or shouting out to women, is harassment.’
On love and sexual relationships, Bild takes a strong stand, too. ‘Men are allowed to love men and women to love women. Whoever has a problem with that is the problem.’
There has been no kickback at the manifesto (as there inevitably would be here from the Twitter-obsessed, pro-migrant, Guardian-loving Left). Quite the opposite.
Many Germans I spoke to in Berlin and Hamburg, as well as some Iranian migrants, believed its message is long overdue.
The manifesto is equally firm on cultural and religious issues. ‘Cheers, Germany! Beer and wine are part of our culture here. Respect it, and if you don’t want to drink, don’t.
‘For us there are no infidels. We don’t burn flags of countries we don’t like. Those who can’t tolerate the caricature of politicians, celebrities, gods or prophets are not in the right place in Germany.’
Finally, it turns to crime and the upsurge in people living off benefits. ‘We only use fireworks when it is allowed. Knives belong in our kitchen, not in our pockets. We pay taxes because we know they are the foundation of the State.
‘We expect everyone who can, and is allowed, to seek employment and provide for themselves. Social services help people in financial need who can’t work, not people who don’t want work.’
At least 250,000 migrants have arrived in Germany this year. Some will be genuine asylum seekers but many are not.
Berlin fears that Hamas terrorists fleeing Palestine and hoping to harm Europe are infiltrating the incomers.
Police checks have been re-introduced at four German borders, but the flow continues. The atmosphere is growing tense.
Berlin-based Iranian whistleblower Kazem Moussavi, who arrived as a refugee escaping Islamic persecution 30 years ago, has warned the German government for years that some mosques are fomenting hatred against Jews, Christians, women and the Western way of life.
He pulled me back into a Berlin coffee bar as I headed outside one evening this week.
‘Be very careful, this is a dangerous place for an outsider,’ he said after we had talked for two hours in Kreuzberg, a gritty multicultural suburb known as ‘Little Arabia’.
‘I watch my back when I leave home.’
The area’s Golitzer Park is a beautiful green space that draws tourists and locals by day, but drug dealers take over at night.
So it’s little wonder that some 6,000 criminal offences were reported in the park in 2021.
After we parted, Moussavi called the Berlin security police to his first-floor flat nearby.
As he lay in bed, a stranger — or strangers — had managed to get into his block, which has scores of apartments.
They had somehow obtained his flat number and shook the door handle for several minutes in an attempt to break in.
‘It was a threat to silence me,’ a clearly rattled Moussavi told me the next day. ‘I have told ministers about the enemies here who want to destroy Germany.’
He then showed me, on his smartphone, photographs of some of the preachers at the raided mosques whom he suspects are whipping up sympathy for Iranian and Palestinian terror groups.
He may be right. Whatever the truth, the Bild manifesto has said what has long been left unsaid.
Many ordinary Germans, who feel their past generosity has been hurled back in their faces, think it is an important message to send out in these very uncertain times.
