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THE IMMIGRANT TIMES
Solidarity Towns and Cities
in Eastern Germany
Already published reviews: Sweden || Italy || Eastern Germany || Coming soon: France || Spain || The UK
In this article on Solidarity Towns and Cities in Europe, The Immigrant Times features communities in the five Eastern German federal states. (Photo: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller, arguably Germany's most important writers and poets, worked together in Weimar between 1794 and 1805)
Introduction
September 2026: In recent years, Germany's five eastern federal states (Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia) have seen the far-right, anti-immigrant party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) emerge as the most vocal political force. Its anti-immigrant rhetoric appeals to a large section of voters, who have become increasingly hostile to immigration over the past 10 years.
Yet reducing eastern Germany to a single political trajectory overlooks the courage of those who resist far-right polemic. In university centres, de-industrialised towns, and rural communities, civic initiatives, local businesses, and multi-faith coalitions actively resist xenophobia by integrating newcomers into community life.
In these environments, acts of solidarity carry heightened significance: defending an asylum hostel, launching vocational apprenticeships for refugees, or establishing an open intercultural meeting house often requires sustained civic courage amid vocal local resistance.
The Immigrant Times' Solidarity Towns and Cities series highlights eastern German towns in Saxony, Thuringia, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Brandenburg, and Saxony-Anhalt, where residents and newcomers demonstrate that coexistence, civic decency, and solidarity remain viable and resilient forces on the ground.
Leipzig, Saxony
City data
With a population exceeding 620,000, Leipzig is the largest and fastest-growing city in the eastern federal states. Long an international hub for trade, printing, and classical music, the Saxon metropolis experienced a dramatic resurgence after Germany's reunification in 1990.
Anchor employers, including BMW, Porsche, DHL’s European logistics hub, and the historic University of Leipzig, have driven rapid economic revival, transforming the city into a vibrant cultural centre often colloquially dubbed the counterweight to eastern regional conservativism.
Immigration
Foreign nationals make up about 14 per cent of Leipzig’s population, considerably higher than the eastern German regional average but still below western metropolitan levels. The city historically hosted international students and contract labourers (Vertragsarbeiter) from Vietnam and Mozambique during the communist era. Following 2015, it underwent major demographic diversification. Humanitarian arrivals from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Ukraine settled across the city, joining a steady influx of European academics, international tech professionals, and students.
Integration
Leipzig adopted a deliberate municipal strategy of dispersing social housing to avoid the entrenched residential segregation that plagued western German suburban housing estates. The city established the 'Referat für Migration und Integration' to coordinate language schooling, adult vocational programmes, and anti-discrimination initiatives. Partnerships among the municipal chamber of commerce, local craft guilds, and employment agencies expedited credential recognition and actively integrated newcomers into logistics hubs and regional transport services, helping to alleviate severe skilled-labour shortages.
Solidarity in action
Grassroots civil society in Leipzig is exceptionally well organised, serving as an active civic buffer against regional far-right mobilisation. The city's multicultural eastern district around Eisenbahnstraße (Railway Street), often sensationalised in conservative media, hosts a high concentration of grassroots mutual aid networks, including the refugee-support initiative Pöge-Haus and the intercultural centre Frauenkultur (Women's Culture).
When asylum hostels faced protests on the urban periphery, civil alliances such as Leipzig nimmt Platz mobilised thousands of residents to form protective human chains and welcome corridors. Volunteer groups run decentralised bicycle-repair workshops, tenant-rights advisory clinics, and language tandems. The municipal House of Resources provides direct micro-grants and structural advice to immigrant-led grassroots organisations, ensuring that newly settled communities lead their own advocacy.
Friction and strain
The coexistence remains politically and socially fraught. While central and student-heavy neighbourhoods lean staunchly progressive, outer districts such as Grünau have recorded elevated support for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), reflecting resentment over the distribution of public resources.
High-profile incidents of street crime and localised drug dealing along Eisenbahnstraße prompted the creation of controversial municipal weapons-ban zones and heavy police stop-and-search regimes, alienating many young immigrant residents. Furthermore, Leipzig’s rapid gentrification has strained the affordable housing stock, intensifying competition between low-income established residents and newly arrived refugee households.
Weimar, Thuringia
City data
Set along the Ilm River in central Thuringia, Weimar has a population of approximately 66,000. World-renowned as the cradle of German Classicism, home to Goethe and Schiller, and the birthplace of both the 1919 Weimar Republic and the modernist Bauhaus movement, the city is a national cultural monument.
Its local economy rests heavily on cultural tourism, heritage conservation, the public sector, and higher education, with the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and the Hochschule für Musik Franz Liszt as anchors.
Immigration
For decades, Weimar was demographically homogeneous, with minimal post-war migration compared with western German hubs. This changed with the internationalisation of its universities and the intake of refugees from 2015 onwards, primarily from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, supplemented after 2022 by displaced Ukrainian families.
Today, foreign-born residents account for roughly 12 per cent of the city's population, with international students and academic researchers adding another significant layer of diversity. While modest compared with western metropolises, this rapid demographic broadening marked an acute cultural shift for an inland eastern German city.
Integration
Integration in Weimar has been driven by an unusual synthesis of municipal administration and high-profile cultural institutions. The municipal migration office partnered directly with the Klassik Stiftung Weimar (which manages the city's UNESCO World Heritage sites) and the university sector to dismantle barriers.
Rather than segregating arrivals in suburban industrial barracks, the city housed refugees in residential neighbourhoods and repurposed historic quarters. Educational institutions responded quickly: Bauhaus-Universität launched language tandems, guest-student programmes, and recognition pathways for foreign qualifications, while the local Volkshochschule (adult education centre) coordinated intensive integration courses that directly incorporated local democratic and cultural history.
Solidarity in action
Grassroots civic engagement in Weimar is remarkably dense, serving as a robust democratic buffer. The Bürgerstiftung Weimar (Weimar Citizens' Foundation) established volunteer mentoring networks that match local residents with newly arrived families to help them navigate administrative procedures, secure private housing, and support school enrolment.
Welfare providers such as the Arbeiterwohlfahrt (AWO) and the Caritasverband run intercultural meeting points, including the mon ami (my friend) cultural centre, where foreign-born artisans, musicians, and translators co-lead community workshops.
Local craft businesses and restoration firms, facing acute regional labour shortages, collaborated with the chamber of crafts (Handwerkskammer) to recruit and apprentice young refugees in carpentry, stonemasonry, and the metal trades, reviving traditional skills critical to preserving the city’s historical architecture.
Friction and strain
Weimar’s progressive civic model operates in an intensely polarised regional environment. Thuringia has been an electoral heartland for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), and regional political discourse is sharply hostile to asylum and municipal integration spending.
While Weimar has historically voted more moderately than surrounding rural districts, local tensions have surfaced over strained school capacity, deficits in specialised linguistic support in primary education, and competition in an already tight rental housing market. Civic groups and cultural workers openly express concern about political polarisation across the state, warning that right-wing regional electoral gains threaten public funding for intercultural initiatives and intimidate foreign students and professionals.
Greifswald, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania
Town data
Perched on the Baltic coast at the Bay of Pomerania, the Hanseatic city of Greifswald is home to roughly 60,000 residents. Dominated by the 15th-century University of Greifswald and major research institutes, including the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, the town functions as an intellectual and biomedical enclave within a predominantly rural, economically fragile federal state.
It has long balanced its historic maritime heritage with an academic community that accounts for nearly a quarter of its daily population.
Immigration
International diversity in Greifswald was traditionally limited to foreign university researchers, medical clinicians, and exchange students. However, the 2015 refugee crisis and the 2022 invasion of Ukraine brought several thousand humanitarian arrivals to the town and the surrounding Vorpommern-Greifswald district.
Today, foreign-born residents make up roughly eight per cent of the local population, with settled communities from Syria, Ukraine, Iran, and Poland establishing permanent roots in a district that previously possessed minimal experience with ethnic diversity.
Integration
Under Mayor Stefan Fassbinder, a Green Party local politician who has led the city since 2015, Greifswald positioned itself as an active, welcoming town (Sicherer Hafen), joining international municipal networks to welcome refugees beyond compulsory state allocations.
The municipality integrated language learning directly into civic spaces, deploying university student volunteers to teach German and provide tutoring. Foreign doctors and healthcare professionals were systematically fast-tracked into the University Medicine Greifswald complex, which relies heavily on international staff to maintain regional hospital services throughout the coastal hinterland.
Solidarity in action
Civil engagement in Greifswald is personal, visible, and deeply institutionalised. Fassbinder's administration consistently engaged with local civil society to build civic bridges, earning him international recognition for municipal partnership and refugee reception.
The local association Greifswald Hilft Geflüchteten (Greifswald Helps Refugees) coordinates the distribution of emergency clothing and furniture and helps newly arrived families navigate bureaucracy.
Community centres such as the St. Spiritus cultural venue host regular intercultural encounters, shared meals, and public discussions to demystify migration for sceptics.
When national debate turned hostile towards asylum distribution, local churches, academic faculties, and trade unionists formed broad democratic coalitions to defend municipal reception centres and ensure that arriving Ukrainian and Middle Eastern families received rapid shelter, private homestays, and school enrolment.
Friction and strain
Pro-refugee municipal policies have provoked bitter political polarisation. The surrounding rural district consistently votes heavily for the far-right AfD, and proposals to build temporary container accommodation for asylum seekers sparked fierce, vocal protests outside the town hall, including personal threats against local politicians.
Critics accuse the academic and municipal leadership of ignoring the anxieties of non-academic residents, who contend with underfunded regional infrastructure, long waiting times for specialist medical care, and rising municipal debt.
Cottbus, Brandenburg
City data
Situated in Lower Lusatia near the Polish border, Cottbus (Chóśebuz in Lower Sorbian) is home to roughly 100,000 residents. The city is the cultural and economic capital of the officially bilingual Sorbian minority and has been the industrial engine of East German lignite coal mining for decades.
Today, Cottbus is navigating a federally funded structural transformation (Strukturwandel), pivoting towards high-tech rail manufacturing, scientific research at the Brandenburg University of Technology (BTU), and the development of Europe's largest artificial inland lake, the Cottbuser Ostsee.
Immigration
Historically defined by its indigenous Slavic Sorbian community and a small cohort of communist-era guest workers, Cottbus saw its foreign population expand rapidly after 2015.
International students and researchers at BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg, together with humanitarian cohorts from Syria, Afghanistan, and Chechnya, raised the foreign-born population to around 11 per cent. For an industrial border community that had suffered severe population decline and youth emigration since 1989, this sudden demographic shift was both structurally necessary and culturally jarring.
Integration
Cottbus faced acute integration challenges earlier than many eastern towns, prompting the regional government to temporarily halt new asylum allocations in 2018 to allow public services to recalibrate.
The city subsequently overhauled its municipal infrastructure, expanding school integration classes and linking technical apprenticeships directly to foreign-born students. BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg deployed international mentoring programmes to embed foreign engineering students in local rail construction plants, while the municipality actively engaged Sorbian cultural organisations to position the protection of cultural diversity as a natural extension of Lusatia’s bilingual heritage.
Solidarity in action
In an environment where anti-migrant sentiment has often been vocal, civic solidarity in Cottbus requires particular resolve. The civic alliance Cottbus ist bunt (Cottbus is colourful) brings together university faculties, trade union branches, church leaders, and independent artists to foster social cohesion.
Community spaces such as the Soziokulturelles Zentrum Buntes Schaf organise interfaith dinners, joint gardening initiatives, and homework clubs for migrant children living in prefabricated concrete housing estates (Plattenbauten).
When street tensions mounted, volunteer neighbourhood mediators and student associations instituted regular intercultural dialogues, while local sports clubs (Sportvereine) actively recruited young refugees into wrestling, football, and athletics teams to break down social segregation.
Friction and strain
Cottbus has repeatedly been a flashpoint for right-wing mobilisation. The city was the birthplace of the anti-immigrant movement Zukunft Heimat (Future Homeland), and the anti-immigrant AfD party regularly captures substantial shares of the local vote. Street altercations between local youths and young asylum seekers have repeatedly heightened police alerts and fuelled sensational national headlines.
Migrant residents frequently report verbal harassment on public transport and in outlying residential areas. Many local industrial workers view municipal integration investments with scepticism, questioning whether public resources are being diverted from the economic transition of domestic workers displaced by the national coal phase-out.
Wittenberg, Saxony-Anhalt
Town data
Officially styled Lutherstadt Wittenberg, this historic town on the River Elbe has a population of about 46,000. It is world-renowned as the cradle of the Protestant Reformation, where Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of All Saints’ Church in 1517.
Beyond its heritage tourism and UNESCO World Heritage sites, Wittenberg’s economy relies on an extensive chemical park at Piesteritz, agro-industrial manufacturing, and regional healthcare facilities.
Immigration
Until the mid-2010s, Wittenberg’s non-German population was negligible, rarely exceeding two per cent. That dynamic shifted with the national distribution of refugees, which brought hundreds of families from Syria, Eritrea, Iraq, and later Ukraine to the Elbe valley.
Combined with skilled European chemical engineers and foreign healthcare workers recruited to staff the regional hospital, this influx has increased the foreign-born share to roughly six per cent, a modest proportion in western European terms but a perceptible change in a historically uniform Saxon-Anhalt town.
Integration
The town council, regional craft chambers, and the SKW Piesteritz chemical complex coordinated targeted vocational pipelines, creating pre-apprenticeship programmes that paired technical German lessons with direct on-the-floor training.
The municipal housing authority renovated vacant housing units in the Piesteritz settlement to accommodate newly arrived families, thereby preventing isolated migrant enclaves and ensuring that children were evenly dispersed across local primary schools and day care centres.
Solidarity in action
The town’s historical identity as the birthplace of the Reformation provides a compelling ideological and moral foundation for local solidarity. Drawing directly upon Luther’s legacy of civic duty, conscience, and social accountability, the Protestant church community (Evangelischer Kirchenkreis Wittenberg) became the primary engine of community reception.
The church established the Begegnungszentrum (encounter centre), where retired schoolteachers volunteer to offer daily language tuition, homework help, and bureaucratic support to asylum seekers.
Local parishes initiated interfaith roundtables with Muslim residents, deliberately countering xenophobic narratives by hosting joint community meals and public lectures on religious tolerance in historic Reformation venues.
When administrative deportation threats loomed over settled, working families, local church wardens and community employers intervened with official petitions and church asylum protections, arguing that community solidarity superseded bureaucratic inflexibility.
Friction and strain
The September 2026 election in Saxony-Anhalt confirmed deep political polarisation across the state, with anti-immigrant rhetoric resonating with more than 40 per cent of the electorate.
Public anxiety in Wittenberg has often centred on the visibility of asylum seekers in the historic town centre, with vocal critics expressing concerns about public safety and the preservation of traditional German culture.
Local civil society activists and church volunteers who assist migrants have faced online intimidation and vocal opposition from far-right factions. Furthermore, economic anxiety linked to high energy costs at the local chemical complex has fuelled a zero-sum mentality among some residents, who argue that municipal and national funds should be directed to domestic industrial subsidies rather than integration budgets.
Key sources & documentation
Official data: Federal Statistical Office (Statistisches Bundesamt – Destatis), statistical offices of the eastern federal states (Statistisches Landesamt des Freistaates Sachsen, Amt für Statistik Berlin-Brandenburg, and the Statistisches Landesamt Sachsen-Anhalt), and municipal integration monitors from the cities of Leipzig, Cottbus, Greifswald, and Lutherstadt Wittenberg.
Civic & NGO documentation: Project records and activity reports from the Sächsischer Flüchtlingsrat, Cottbus ist bunt e.V., Greifswald Hilft Geflüchteten, Flüchtlingsrat Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Evangelischer Kirchenkreis Wittenberg, Netzwerkstelle Demokratie und Vielfalt, and the Thuringian refugee council (Flüchtlingsrat Thüringen e.V.), Bürgerstiftung Weimar, Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Flüchtlingsrat Thüringen e.V., and local project reports from AWO Landesverband Thüringen.
Local & regional reporting: Investigative reporting and regional news coverage from Leipziger Volkszeitung, Mitteldeutsche Zeitung, Lausitzer Rundschau, Nordkurier, Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (MDR), and Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (rbb).
About this series
Articles in the series 'Solidarity Towns and Cities' examine how immigration affects communities across Europe. We chose economically and culturally significant hubs, as well as towns and cities that receive little attention but have shown that, despite many obstacles, immigration has benefited and enriched their communities. Solidarity between locals and newcomers is key to success.
Readers are invited to suggest other European towns and cities that they feel The Immigrant Times should feature.
Already published reviews: Sweden || Italy || Eastern Germany || Coming soon: France || Spain || The UK ||
Further reading from The Immigrant Times: Immigration in Germany || What would Germany be like without immigrants || Foreign doctors in Germany || Teaching refugees in Germany ||
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