Amadeu Antonio and the Dead Boy from Frankfurt Central Station

Before I read the op-ed below, I was quite familiar with Anetta Kahane and her privatized Stasi organization, the Amadeu Antonio Foundation, but I had no idea where its name came from. An extra layer of irony has now been added to the quasi-governmental body charged with enforcing goodthink among citizens of the Federal Republic.

Many thanks to MissPiggy for translating this piece from Henryk Broder’s website Die Achse des Guten:

Amadeu Antonio and the Dead Boy From Frankfurt Central Station

by Chaim Noll

Amadeu Antonio, a guest worker from Angola, was beaten to death in November 1990 by a group of young Germans in Eberswalde, Brandenburg. I remember the impression that this brutal and senseless act made on us. It seemed symbolic of the emergence of right-wing extremist moods in East Germany. In 2002, the former Stasi employee Anetta Kahane and the interest groups behind her founded the Amadeu Antonio Foundation — today nothing more than a poorly-veiled, state-subsidized institution for monitoring undesirable attitudes and thoughts.

The name Amadeu Antonio was thus not only used for dubious purposes, but also — and this is the positive aspect — saved from oblivion. And with it the atrocity that led to the death of the young African. It has entered the collective memory of Germany: Amadeu Antonio has a Wikipedia entry, documenting his death with newspaper articles and radio broadcasts, his case is mentioned in schoolbooks and contemporary historical works, a good dozen full-time employees of the Amadeu Antonio Foundation live off him, off the memory of him. This is what his name is all about. A name can become a symbol. But what happens if the victim remains anonymous?

The name of the “eight-year-old boy” whom another African bumped in front of a train arriving at Frankfurt main station on track seven on 29 July 2019 — i.e. deliberately murdered — hasn’t been disclosed. (I avoid using the sensitive word “push”, which Dirk Maxeiner pointed out was misused in a murder case a few days ago.) The German authorities — and with them the media loyal to the state — conceal the victim’s identity. There may be plausible reasons for this: Respect for the family, especially for the mother, who barely saved her own life, and whom one understandably wants to spare public attention. This argument is so serious that no reasonably considerate person will criticise the measure. However, there’s a hidden aspect. A clandestine side effect, which I assume will be well known to those responsible.

Remembrance is bound to names and facts

Anonymizing the victim is the guarantee that he will be forgotten. And thus the crime that led to his death. Every historian will agree with me: Memory is bound to indices, to names and facts. So far, the authorities and the media have only let us know how old the murdered boy was, that he came from the “Upper Taunaus District”, that he was on his way to Austria on holiday with his mother and that he has a twelve-year-old sister who was informed by the police immediately after the crime. On the other hand, the perpetrator has long since been named, at least with the first name and the initial of the surname, Habte A., whereby a name is mentioned, but his identity is still protected. We are provided with details about him, especially about his psychological state, his problems, his fears of persecution. Once again, symbolic things float in the air. He can thus be remembered. The victim is not.

And that leaves me feeling helpless. Isn’t this completely innocent child, who was cruelly murdered by an adult man of whatever motivation, a symbol? Not worth remembering? No memorable newspaper articles? No foundation in his name? Why not? Because, according to all conjecture, he was a white child, a genuine European, a German? I confess that it is difficult for me to live with it. We have to wrangle for some information from the authorities, his initials, a few details about his short life, a picture — even if it is pixelated — so that this senselessly sacrificed child does not disappear in the fog of namelessness and is forgotten in a few weeks.

11 thoughts on “Amadeu Antonio and the Dead Boy from Frankfurt Central Station

  1. I am administering a small news blog on a social network. I picked up all the old records concerning the Eritreans. This is some kind of special people – they still rape old women and animals.

    • I’ve known three Eritreans recently; two colleagues and a neighbour, all women. Two are lovely people, one an arrogant racist who looks down on “Africans” (!).

      What they all have in common is a Christian heritage (roughly half the population; no prizes for guessing the faith of the other half).

  2. Beautiful young boy , look very bright on the picture I saw , heartbreaking, I can’t even imagine a mother pain .. thanks to EUssr gulag , open borders and a specially to communist Merkel and Her mafia in Bundestag ..

    • Merkel is truly intent on destroying Germany and Europe. Why can’t Germans see this?

    • Will this cute boy be made the same symbol as that drowned Syrian child?
      You know the answer.

  3. The culture enrichers are basically pushing civilization in front of a train.

    I agree this boys name should be known and remembered if only for the sacrifice he made for all the mindless politicians and bureaucrats that let the culture enrichers in to rape and pillage.

    Hopefully his name is a turning point to send the pillagers and their enablers home or to hell.

  4. The boy’s name was Oskar. Oskar Leuten.
    https://www.journalistenwatch.com/2019/08/03/bahnhof-warum-nationalitaet/
    (This is another article very worthy of a translation because it explores the hypocrisy behind the silencing of victims’ names and perpetrators’ origins. I’m actually inclined but won’t be finished before its freshness wears off. If someone has the momentum to take it up right away, it would make for a fitting continuation to the above.)

  5. Some facts over the Swiss/Eritrean guy: He’d been in Switzerland since 2006. Just about everyone who knew him or worked around him….noted that he’d made a lot of effort to acclimate into Swiss culture, and learned the language. He’d learned a craft, and paid taxes….never being arrested or detained for anything. However, something occurred in late 2017/early 2018, and he went to some clinic for physiological care. Through local folks who knew him (not the Swiss authorities), the comment used is that he was showing signs of paranoid schizophrenia (which included hearing voices).

    Whatever the clinic did, is unknown. One might take a guess that they handed out medication. From early this year (2019), the same friends spoke of his hearing voices, and that he seemed to unable to grasp the real world around himself. So about three days prior to pushing the kid and mother in front of the Frankfurt train….he gets into some verbal confrontation at the apartment complex in Zurich…..a knife is displayed, and the neighbor calls the cop. No one says what the argument was about. Cops arrive but the guy has left the building, and appears to have gotten to the Zurich station, and boarded a train for Frankfurt.

    He’s married, got three kids, had a job, and things just appear that in 2017….he must have had some emotional breakdown. Zero mention of religion in life….doesn’t appear to be in any way a Muslim. Appears to be a classic case of paranoid schizophrenia. Just my humble view, but I think the Frankfurt prosecutor will pursue murder/attempted murder charges, but will be forced to agree on a mental exam, and the guy will fail it. Court will assign the guy to some mental hospital for the rest of his life, and the murder charge will never go through.

    My final two cents…..it would be curious to know what the medication was that the clinic gave the guy, and if he really was sane to start with or just suffered some breakdown.

  6. Why do shrill, obnoxious, intolerant communist women all look alike? I think you could colorize a picture of Rosa Luxembourg or fuzz up a picture of another ostensibly-retired Stasi operative, Frau Merkel, and interchange them with a photo of Stasi Anetta Kahane. News writers featuring shrill communist women in charge of bureaus enforcing conformity only have to pull a random photo of any communist woman from 100 years of photo archives, run it through a software photo editor, and publish it.

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