Co-opting the threat: Racist discourse and calls for denaturalisation after Berlin Pride attack

Guest post by Luise Freitag and Selmar Krug. Luise and Selmar are PhD candidates in Cultural Anthropology/Law and research fellows in the interdisciplinary Research Training Group “Mobility Rights in the Global Context of Multiple Crises” at the University of Göttingen, Germany. Luise examines how social welfare law is used as a tool of migration control in Germany, especially asking how legal frameworks and political narratives work together to exclude migrants despite the welfare state's claim to inclusion and dignity.

Selmar explores crimmigration law inside German prisons. They ask how the legal limbo resulting from looming expulsions and deportations is handled on the ground against the backdrop of a hostile populist discourse, conflicting legal logics, and individual rights. 

The queer community in Berlin and worldwide was hit with intense grief after a 21-year-old man targeted the Berlin Pride march on 25 July 2026. A few hundred feet away from the main nighttime celebration, he drove a van into the crowd and attacked people with a blade-like weapon before fleeing the scene. He killed one person and injured 31 people, seven of them severely. After an extensive manhunt, the police later shot and killed the attacker, who had been under close police supervision, including until the day of the attack, due to his classification by the police as a ‘potential offender’ (Gefährder in German). 

The German chancellor Friedrich Merz and the Minister-Presidents of Bavaria and Saxony-Anhalt, Martin Söder and Sven Schulze (all members of the conservative centre-right CDU/CSU party), were among the first to raise the demand to revoke citizenship from potential offenders. This sparked an immediate public debate about denaturalisation – despite the politicians knowing that any legal change would not have affected the status of the attacker, who solely held German citizenship. Nonetheless, they were quick to instrumentalise the incident by positioning denaturalisation as a pathway to deportation and, as such – allegedly – providing the ultimate solution for terrorist threats. This feeds into a wider racialised discourse about belonging in Germany and beyond. 

The right to have rights

Citizenship establishes one central form of belonging in the modern nation-state system. While it has always been a state mechanism for filtering society's composition and creating a hurdle to accessing and exercising rights, its crucial status persists and, at least theoretically, serves as the entry ticket to full acknowledgement as a political subject. Hence, the international legal sphere protects both citizenship and the status of stateless persons. Equally, Article 16 (1.1) of the German Basic Law prohibits the deprivation of German citizenship – a lesson learned from the Nazi regime’s systemic denaturalisation of Jews. This is why the current legal terminology carefully distinguishes between deprivation and loss of citizenship. The latter is possible (pursuant to Article 16 (1.2)) provided doing so does not render the individual stateless. The scope of denaturalisation is therefore generally limited to cases of dual citizenship. Additionally, it must be connected to specific actions by an individual, such as active engagement in combat for terrorist organisations abroad (e.g., ISIS, as laid out in section 28 of the Nationality Act). 

In Germany, the denaturalisation debate has increasingly been shaped by securitisation discourses that cast migration as a threat. This began long before dual citizenship became more widely accessible in 2024. In the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks, the term ‘potential offender’ (Gefährder) emerged as a technical police term. The police apply it broadly to individuals for whom “certain facts justify the assumption that this person will commit politically motivated crimes of significant importance”. It is essentially a ‘pre-crime classification’ based on national and terrorist threat assessments. The subsequent introduction of section 58a into the German Residence Act laid the groundwork for detaining and deporting Gefährder through an expedited process. This provision has been increasingly applied since the attack on a Berlin Christmas market in 2016. For years, scholars have critiqued the Gefährder label's indeterminate nature, particularly its potentially severe consequences. The application of section 58a must be seen in the context of a heated political climate with repeated calls for the deportation of migrants with criminal convictions as well as those deemed to be a threat to public security.

Who gets to belong?

The debate around revoking citizenship from potential offenders was reinvigorated after the recent Berlin Pride attack. On 27 July 2026, the Minister-President of Bavaria, Martin Söder declared: “We need to significantly tighten the reins when it comes to issues such as Gefährder. […] Being classified as a Gefährder should prompt a reconsideration of whether German citizenship should be revoked, so that a Gefährder with dual citizenship can ultimately be expelled immediately.” Chancellor Friedrich Merz asserted that this could be pursued without further constitutional change. Sven Schulze, the now outgoing Minister-President of Saxony-Anhalt, expressed the same call during an election debate: “I no longer want people to have dual citizenship – German citizenship and their own – if they live here as Gefährder.” Ulrich Siegmund, his contender from the far-right AfD party, voiced his approval, while adding: “Our citizenship is currently being thrown out the window. It's being given away.” None of these politicians have been known as outspoken supporters of the queer community. It therefore seems far-fetched to attribute these rallying cries to a genuine concern with showing solidarity and responding to the growing threats faced by pride parades.

Another crucial sticking point: the kind of denaturalisation they call for would not legally apply to the attacker, who was born in Berlin to a mother who had been naturalised years before his birth. The fact of the attacker’s unequivocal birthright citizenship exposes the underlying incentives to use the attack as a springboard for an Islamophobic, racialised, and hostile discourse by marking individuals as foreign — regardless of residency status or passport. The us vs. them bifurcation invoked by Söder, Merz, Schulze and Siegmund is a commonly known discursive and legal instrument to draw racialised lines of belonging.

Citizenship on probation

We argue that this denaturalisation discourse (virtually unheard of when German right-wing extremists cause harm) serves to co-opt the threat under the guise of protection of public security and order. In this regard, dual citizenship, residence status, or even distant migrant family history are invariably mobilised as grounds for exclusion. The case of the attacker at Berlin Pride shows that even when revoking someone’s legal status is out of reach, the mere allusion and aspiration to revoke citizenship to enable deportation trumps its actual implementation. This demonstrates that it is certainly possible to socially strip individuals of their national belonging in a discursive fashion – regardless of practicalities. 

While the racial undertones in this debate may vary from blunt to implicit, they all stir up the question of whose German citizenship truly has no caveats. This discursive strategy reproduces a persisting essentialised and racist understanding of German identity. The conditionality of citizenship and belonging puts the entirety of Germany’s population who does not conform to a racist script under suspicion, and their behaviour on a status of constant probation. 

The risks posed by ethno-nationalist agendas that whip up hate have become even clearer, when viewed alongside the recent landslide wins by the far-right AfD in various state-elections. This also sits against Germany’s lengthy journey to acknowledge itself as a country of immigration – and attempts by the far-right to politicise, and weaponise, conversations on migration.

Debates about migration, terrorism and denaturalisation in Germany are ultimately undermining any real political effort to spread solidarity with the queer community. They also stymie attempts to reckon with violent, criminal and terrorist transgressions from the entirety of the population. While some politicians put forward a racist logic of co-optation and division to advance claims that contribute to a hostile discourse, Berlin’s diverse queer community – which knows the struggles with restrictive residence and citizenship rights all too well – showed mutual care instead. They did so by self-organising support and grief circles, and by firmly objecting to the instrumentalisation of their pain— among others, by taking to the streets of Berlin on 2 August 2026 with a protest under the motto “transform grief to anger to resistance”.

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