The Boy Germany Watched for Five Years — and Still Couldn't See
I wasn't at Tiergarten when the van hit. I'd taken the U2 to Bülowstraße around 19:10 that evening, heading toward Nollendorfplatz and the parade route — but the streets leading to Straße des 17. Juni were already scattered with broken glass and crowded with police cars and officers, and I turned back before I reached Tiergarten. Hours later a friend's text — we're all fine, friend — made no sense until I opened The Guardian and saw why he'd needed to send it.
By Sunday morning, Abdul Ballout had a face on every screen in Berlin-Mitte, a nationality, a neighborhood, a verdict already forming. Bild ran a neighbor's line in enormous type: In diesem Viertel sind alle radikal! — everyone in this neighborhood is radical. A far-right outlet reduced him, more quietly, to a genealogy: not Heinz, Jürgen, Michael, Sven — but Abdul B.
What almost nobody printed that weekend is the part that should worry Germany more than any of it: the state had been watching this young man since he was sixteen. Germany's domestic intelligence agency tracked him. His phone was wiretapped. In 2024, he began posting ISIS propaganda online — the ideology was real, not incidental. He served time in Lebanon, was arrested the moment he landed back in Berlin, sentenced to nearly two years for preparing an act of violence — then released on probation into a 26-session deradicalization program. Two evaluations had already concluded he was progressing. A third was scheduled for July 27. He was shot dead on the 26th.
This is not a story about a system that looked away. It is a story about a system that looked, continuously, for five years, and still could not read what it saw. Thomas Mücke, from the institution that ran Ballout's deradicalization program, told reporters afterward that caseworkers found him "a very composed, very cautious, very controlled, and very friendly" young man — "and these are exactly the criteria by which we notice: we don't really get close to the person." Composure was the symptom. Nobody had a protocol for that.
I recognize the reflex that followed his death, because I've watched Europe perform it before. The cultural theorist Gloria Wekker, writing about the murders of Theo van Gogh and Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands — killed by attackers from opposite political poles — described how such deaths get folded into one civilizational story: the West, wounded again by its enemies within, restating its own innocence. Berlin did this in under twenty-four hours. Politicians who agree on almost nothing — the far-right AfD, the center-left SPD, the president — found instant, unanimous language for what Ballout was. Nobody found language that fast for what the deradicalization program had missed, or why a search of his home three weeks earlier, prompted by a weapons-law tip, turned up nothing but a toy gun and was quietly closed.
I am a migrant here myself, queer, and Pride was where I was headed that evening before I turned back. The morning after, I spent four hours helping a friend finish her German citizenship application — two years in the making, and suddenly, for reasons neither of us said aloud, urgent. Nothing will be the same again, I told her. Not because I think she is in danger. Because I know how quickly "everyone in this neighborhood is radical" becomes policy, not just a headline — and because the people likely to pay for Ballout's crime in the months ahead are migrants applying for papers, not the institutions that monitored him and still missed him.
Germany does not lack surveillance capacity. It lacks a way to act on what composure conceals — and a media cycle willing to sit with that discomfort instead of resolving it into a story about civilizations at war. The Brandenburg Gate was lit in rainbow colors the night after the attack, under a banner reading Berlin, Stadt der Freiheit — city of freedom. Freedom, this week, mostly meant the freedom to look directly at a five-year record of watching, and still not know what we were looking at.
Photo credit: © Christoph Soeder/DPA/Picture Alliance