Racism and xenophobic attitudes

Racism and xenophobic attitudes in the novel shape how people read danger, decide who belongs, and determine whose account deserves belief. In Neukölln, Lukas experiences the neighborhood as a constant calculation of looks, routes, and possible threats; at school, Herr Reinicke turns racial identity into a crude test of loyalty and suspicion. Against that pressure, Gabi’s memories of racist harassment and her appreciation of a more diverse community offer a counterpoint, without making the prejudice surrounding the characters disappear.

Everyday Threat and Racialized Perception

When Karin asks Lukas how her son Fabian should respond to people who might target him, Lukas recognizes the question as a version of his own daily life. He describes the strain of being blond and unfamiliar to others in Neukölln: monitoring who is looking, judging whether to hold eye contact, choosing a subway carriage, and weighing whether to give up a phone, run, fight, or endure a beating. His account does not present danger as a single incident that can be solved once and for all. It is an ongoing discipline of anticipation, in which ordinary movement through public space becomes a sequence of risk assessments.

Lukas advises Karin that Fabian should take a longer bus route through Alt-Buckow rather than travel where the people troubling him gather. The advice is practical but bleak: he sees avoidance, not negotiation or protection, as the available option. His answer reflects the limits of his own experience and his conviction that someone without local connections may not be able to defend himself. The scene connects xenophobic and racialized hostility to geography and routine: the threat is encountered along a journey, and the proposed remedy is to change that journey.

The school setting carries a different form of pressure. When Lukas is stopped at the gate for having forgotten his student ID, he protests that he attends the school and argues that the security rule should keep outsiders and weapons out, not exclude a student. The guard refuses to let him in, and with the bell approaching Lukas gives up and leaves to meet Gino. The scene establishes an exclusion produced by a rule applied without regard to his explanation; it does not, by itself, establish that the guard acts from racial prejudice. That distinction matters beside the novel’s more explicit examples: institutional control and racial hostility coexist, but the text does not treat every obstacle as having the same cause.

Suspicion, Rumor, and Belonging at School

After the school break-in, police officers tell the class that computers and monitors worth several thousand euros have been stolen. Residents reportedly saw three male figures in black hooded jackets carrying the goods in a shopping cart toward U-Bahnhof Zwickauer Damm, and gunshots were heard nearby. The officers say they do not yet know how the burglars entered or whether the shots were connected. Their account is cautious and incomplete; the racialized certainty that later appears in Herr Reinicke’s conversation is not part of the information they present to the students.

The announcement makes Lukas fear that the investigation will uncover his involvement. Herr Schiezeth declares that everyone involved, including those who knew about the burglary and did not help investigate, will be punished. Around Lukas, classmates’ looks and whispers make suspicion feel public before he knows what anyone actually knows. A classmate’s teasing suggestion that Lukas was responsible briefly intensifies his fear, then dissolves into a joke. The sequence distinguishes rumor from proof: insinuations can make him feel exposed, but no one has yet openly established what he did.

When Lukas returns to school with Sanchez, students point, whisper, and accuse him of being involved; one calls him Tony Montana. Sanchez tries to reassure him, but Lukas believes that everyone knows. Then three police officers emerge from a stairwell, and Herr Reinicke, a teacher he has not had in class that year, asks to speak with him after the first lesson. The accumulating glances and official attention make Lukas read the school as a place where his reputation may be decided before any direct accusation. His fear is intensified by the fact that the crime is real and he is implicated, even as the racial dynamics around the investigation create another, separate line of suspicion.

Herr Reinicke’s Racialized Appeal

In private, Herr Reinicke says that a teacher’s key was stolen from Lukas’s class and treats this as evidence that the burglars must have been students there. He then abandons evidence-based inquiry for an explicitly racist appeal. He describes the other students through ethnic slurs, assumes they will protect one another, and casts Lukas as the class’s sole German student. On that basis, he asks Lukas to listen for information and report back. His approach is not simply an expression of prejudice: he uses the prejudice to try to turn a student into an informant, presenting ethnic solidarity as the proper answer to an unresolved theft.

Reinicke widens his attack from the class to the school and its neighborhood. He associates the school’s high proportion of students with immigrant backgrounds with its daily troubles, treats the burglary as the latest proof of that association, and invokes the phrase Klein-Istanbul as a disparaging description. He further frames the suspected students as outsiders who must be taught that German law applies to them. The contradiction is stark: he claims to be defending rules and civic order while sorting students into racial categories before the investigation has established who is responsible.

Lukas is unsettled by Reinicke’s words and recognizes them as racist. He also registers an uncomfortable practical consequence: if other teachers share Reinicke’s assumptions, they may dismiss information passed along by immigrant students, including what Lukas has heard through Taner. That bias could delay suspicion falling on him and his friends. The possible advantage does not make the arrangement feel acceptable to Lukas; he considers it unjust and repellent. The scene therefore refuses a simple division between prejudice as an external threat and prejudice as something that can never benefit the protagonist. Lukas’s safety and his moral unease occupy the same moment.

Gabi’s Memory and a Counterpoint

A conversation with Sanchez’s mother, Gabi, supplies a family memory that makes racism concrete beyond the school’s present crisis. She recalls living in Hellersdorf and says that she and her sons, who have darker skin, had to endure hostility there. The most vivid incident occurred when she was shopping with the boys as small children: strangers followed them and shouted a racist insult. When Gabi turned around to challenge them, they told her to leave before she became Black too, as if proximity itself could change her identity. Sanchez remembers the incident, confirming that it remains part of the family’s shared experience rather than a story detached from the children’s lives.

Gabi says she finds Neukölln comparatively acceptable and likes that there are more foreigners there than in Hellersdorf. Her response does not imply that Neukölln is free of racism; it shows that a more diverse environment can feel preferable after direct experience of racist abuse. Lukas reassures her that Nazis would not last long in the area. Set beside his account to Karin, however, that reassurance is not a claim that everyone is safe: he has just described a neighborhood where racialized suspicion and fear govern daily choices. The scenes place community pride and genuine insecurity beside one another.

Narrative Significance

The novel develops its account of racism through contrasting forms of speech and knowledge. Lukas narrates threat from close range, through the small decisions required to move through the city. Gabi recalls a specific act of abuse and its effect on her family. Reinicke, by contrast, turns racial generalizations into an institutional strategy, using his position as a teacher to solicit information from a student he has selected by ethnicity. These perspectives make clear that prejudice can operate as remembered violence, ambient fear, public labeling, or an attempt to recruit an ally.

The theft investigation sharpens the contrast between what is known and what is presumed. Police describe witness observations and openly acknowledge uncertainties; Reinicke converts those uncertainties into a story about immigrant students as a group. Meanwhile, Lukas’s own involvement gives him reason to fear exposure, so racialized assumptions may shield him even as they distort the search for the truth. The result is not an uncomplicated portrait of a tolerant or intolerant neighborhood, but a depiction of how belonging, danger, and credibility are negotiated under conditions where rumor and racial prejudice can travel faster than evidence.