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If you want to understand the state of Germany in these last weeks of 2025, grasping the meaning of two entries in the German dictionary are essential: stadtbild and haftbefehl.
The first term technically means “cityscape”. But since chancellor Friedrich Merz gave a speech in the state of Brandenburg on 14 October, it has taken on a new political meaning. “We have come far with migration,” he said, “but of course we still have this problem in our stadtbild.”
It was a very different register from his predecessor Angela Merkel, who once said she could not determine whether someone had a German passport “just by looking at them.” Asked to clarify his comments at a press conference a few days after his speech, Merz doubled down: he told the journalists to “ask your daughters” what he meant – and refused to elaborate.
That one vague line has dominated Germany’s political discourse for over a month now. Public figures organised demonstrations and launched open letters rejecting what they saw as a racist dog-whistle by the chancellor. On political talkshows, politicians, actors and comedians rallied to Merz’s defence. And the far-right AfD celebrated the free PR ahead of next year’s regional elections, as the chancellor’s vagueness left plenty of space to connect his words to their vision of “remigration”, a far-right concept of mass deportation that amounts to ethnic cleansing.
The debate revealed something larger: how Germany’s ruling Christian Democrats, who govern in most of the country’s states, seem to view Germans of colour – not as fellow citizens, but as aesthetic intrusions into an idealised, sanitised vision of the German city. Party allies tried to brush off accusations of racism towards the Chancellor, yet never explained what Merz’s ideal cityscape looked like, or who exactly didn’t fit into it.
The second word, Haftbefehl, is equally loaded. Literally, it means “arrest warrant”. But it’s also the stage name of Aykut Anhan, one of Germany’s most influential rappers. The son of a Turkish mother and a Zaza-Kurdish father, born in Offenbach, Hesse, Haftbefehl built his career on brutally honest, yet also at times comedic depictions of crime, trauma and survival – in a language that fuses German, Turkish, Zazaki and English.
After nearly two years out of the public eye, Anhan resurfaced with a Netflix documentary, Babo – The Haftbefehl Story, an unflinching account of addiction, familial trauma in migrant families and mental illness in the upper echelons of the German music industry. It immediately jumped to the top of Netflix Germany’s charts, praised for both its film-making and its raw honesty.
The documentary’s success wasn’t surprising: in contrast to the UK or France, artists from marginalised communities are rarities in the cultural mainstream of Germany, and Haftbefehl has long been one of the few, if not only, gangsta rappers embraced by Germany’s cultural establishment while remaining rooted in marginalised communities. Yet the attention the film drew eclipsed even the debate about Merz’s “cityscape”. It’s a telling coincidence: at the very moment the ruling party is defining belonging as an aesthetic question – who fits visually into the German landscape – the nation is captivated by the story of a man whose entire art is born from exclusion.
It’s not hard to imagine that a figure such as Aykut Anhan – a former small-time dealer from an urban estate who’s battling addiction and depression – is precisely the kind of person Merz’s stadtbild rhetoric seems to aim at. The kind of person who may be perceived as a “problem” in the “cityscape” that a greater amount of deportations of asylum seekers would solve. The dehumanising view within Merz’s choice of words is hidden behind a language alluding to cleanliness and civic beauty.
That ideology has consequences. When people sense they are unwanted in the country of their birth, resentment towards the state follows. Haftbefehl captures this feeling in his music. “Human values don’t count, just your shiny Mercedes”, he raps in Depressionen im Ghetto (Depression in the Ghetto); “Fuck your integration, I’ll pop a bullet straight into your skull”, he sings on 069 (named after the Offenbach and Frankfurt dialling code). Anhan managed to turn the despair of being seen as alien into highly influential and lucrative art with his alter ego. He even left an imprint on German language, with the Zazaki word babo (“boss” or “leader”), popularised by his lyrics, becoming Germany’s “youth word of the year” in 2013.
Germany, it seems, loves the art born from this alienation – but not necessarily the people who create it. The same pattern of appreciating the aesthetic while erasing the originators appears elsewhere as well: luxury kebab shops selling “elevated” versions of the Turkish-German staple with truffle and asparagus; Berlin DJs sampling north African melodies; influencers wearing headscarves as summer accessories. The aesthetics of migrant life are endlessly imitated – while the people behind them remain suspect at best, a problem to be removed at worst.
German youth have come to recognise this: the student council of the city of Offenbach, Anhan’s place of birth, has petitioned to include Haftbefehl’s music in school curricula to reflect “post-migrant” identities and pop cultural debates. Unsurprisingly, Hesse’s ministry of culture and education has so far rejected the proposal due to Haftbefehl’s “propensity for crime”, as well as allegations of sexism or antisemitism, among others. “Haftbefehl is the answer to the stadtbild debate”, a student told the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, “I don’t relate to Goethe or Kafka.” Including Haftbefehl’s lyricism in the school syllabus would appeal to more students, and, ultimately, help to “integrate” them into German society.
The pressure to conform to an idea of integration is deeply ingrained even within post-migrant youth themselves. But as the chancellor muses about a more German cityscape, the question remains: what should integration look like? Will it ever include the perspectives of those who are pushed to comply or does the concept remain a dead end? And can those who don’t fit Merz’s picture of Germany ever feel truly at home in it, no matter how much they assimilate to a – more often than not vague – idea of Germanness?
One of Babo’s most moving scenes shows Anhan sitting on the floor, singing along to the traditional German singer-songwriter Reinhard Mey’s In Meinem Garten. It is a moment of quiet revelation: a man who will for ever be perceived as not belonging to the Chancellor’s ideal stadtbild, yet so deeply shaping and shaped by German culture, so very German in his tastes and sensibilities.
