Gen Z protests: teenagers in sneakers

Juvenile delinquency has always existed. Young people tend to rebel against social norms and can sometimes get into trouble with the law. This usually goes away over time. Even Friedrich Merz remembers his youth wistfully when he was said to have made his hometown, Brilon in the Sauerland region, unsafe on his moped with his long hair, as he once said. You can see what he has become: a more or less recognized member of this society.

We don't know what Alexander Dobrindt did in his youth. However, the film “Die Halbstarken” from 1956 is recommended to him – with Horst Buchholz, who became a teenage idol as a result. It is about a gang of young petty criminals who pass their time with fights, thefts and provocative behavior and thus “revolt against their integration into middle-class life,” as it is said in film encyclopedias today.

Today's youth scenes are more strongly influenced by migrants, and in metropolises like Frankfurt the vast majority of children and young people today have a migration background because their parents or grandparents immigrated. It is therefore no wonder that most of the young people who were arrested there after the weekend's riots have a migrant background.

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But that doesn't make these riots a "migrant" problem, as Dobrindt and other politicians from the CDU/CSU to the AfD and conservative commentators from the FAZ to BILD suggest. This adjective is stigmatizing and leads in the wrong direction. A few hundred young people broke windows and looted shops in Frankfurt and other cities last weekend. They were particularly targeting shoe stores with branded sneakers.

What is not new is that there are occasional problems with rioters in some cities. What's new is that many of them now have a migrant background and like to wear sneakers. What role the origin of their parents plays in explaining or preventing their actions remains the secret of Dobrindt and Co. What is more important is that then, as now, it is mainly men who behave like this. Maybe the Interior Minister should start there.