When Angela Merkel stepped out of her car into the melee outside an asylum seekers’ shelter in Spandau, Berlin in September 2015, Anas Modamani, an 18-year-old Syrian refugee, had no idea who she was when he approached her to take a selfie.
“I assumed she was someone interested in seeing who we were, how we were doing,” he says, referring to the hundreds with whom he had arrived in the German capital the previous day, after a long and arduous journey from his war-torn homeland.
“I said to her: ‘Let’s make a picture.’” He gently leaned in, and took a selfie with the then chancellor.
“A second later people were crying out: ‘Mama Merkel’… only later did I find out who she was: the woman behind the historic decision to not close Germany’s borders but instead let in refugees from Syria.”
The image of the picture being taken, with Merkel smiling towards Modamani’s phone as he placed his arm around her shoulder, went around the world.
“I never could have imagined the power a single selfie could have,” says Modamani, now 27.
After an image of the selfie moment was included in Merkel’s recently published autobiography, Freedom, Modamani was inundated with messages from friends and acquaintances with screenshots of the page. He says it is a welcome acknowledgment, “meaning it’s now going to be part of history forever”.
Since the fall of Syria’s dictator Bashar al-Assad in December, Modamani, who has successfully built a new life for himself and now works as a video producer in Berlin, has been regularly called upon as one of the most prominent of Germany’s almost 1 million Syrians, to sum up the emotions of his compatriots.
“It is unbelievable. I feel like a new person,” he says. “Not having to worry any more like I have for years about my family in Syria, and enjoying the fact I now have two accessible ‘Heimaten’ [the German word summing up homeland and belonging].”
Many German friends and neighbours, he says, had joined in the celebrations. “They recognised the importance, it was for us what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for them.”
The German “Willkommenskultur” (welcome culture) with which Syrians were greeted in 2015 remains an enduring sentiment, he believes, even as he says he was shocked at how within hours of the regime collapsing, politicians of the far-right AfD, and the conservative CDU/CSU – who are expected to lead the next government – were pushing for the return of Syrians. As snap elections are expected in February, it has already become a leading issue. Authorities, meanwhile, have put decision-making on outstanding asylum applications from Syrian nationals on ice.
The uncertainty is causing much anxiety, he says, for many of the tens of thousands of Syrians in the German workforce, including car mechanics, heating engineers and about 6,000 Syrian doctors and thousands more care workers.
While expressing his gratitude to the German state, which paid for his studies, provided language lessons, covered his rent and gave him access to German citizenship, he also acknowledges how painful at times the experience of being a refugee has been and how he has suffered at the hands of Germany’s far-right populists due to the selfie.
The image was doctored by the far right in Germany to make Modamani look like a terrorist and he was linked in disinformation campaigns to terror attacks in Berlin and Brussels. The reports were picked up by Arab media who repeated the lies.
“It was the worst time of my life,” Modamani says. “I spent about a year hiding at home, afraid to come out, losing the will to speak to people, because of the lies on social media, which said I had killed people.”
Even worse was the pain it inflicted on his mother, he says, “who read in Arab media ‘Anas is a terrorist’. My mother wept for days, as she was bombarded with messages from people telling her ‘your son is a terrorist in Germany’. So having initially been happy about the image, my mother said to me: ‘I never want to see this picture again.’ I’ve since explained to her how many very positive sides this picture has, and she’s now come round to my point of view.”
Modamani is returning to Syria in February. German television teams will follow as he visits his family for the first time in nine years and their destroyed home in the Damascus suburb of Darayya, the scene of mass killings by government forces.
He plans to rebuild the house with his savings and contribute to the rebuilding of Syria, which he hopes “will become more modern and just as open to the world as Europe”.
The bottom floor will be for his parents; the top floor for Modamani and his girlfriend, Anna, a mechanical engineer from Kyiv, whom he met in Berlin during his studies and whose family he helped bring to Germany after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
“We talk about how we might divide our time between Berlin and Damascus – and Kyiv, once the war is over there,” he says. He maintains Berlin – “the place in which I grew up” – will remain his main home “as long as the AfD doesn’t get into power”.
He muses on what he would say to Merkel if he met her now. “That I didn’t disappoint her. I made a success of the chances I was given.” To coin her own phrase used at the height of the refugee crisis, “Wir schaffen das” (we can do this), he says: “Ich habe es geschafft [I succeeded].”
