A hit Netflix documentary about Germany’s favourite rapper demonstrates how popular the aesthetics of migrant life are – just as politicians debate how to remove it from inner cities
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.
