"I am proud to be a German" – 27-year-old Silvio Meier from East Berlin and his three friends clashed with a group of neo-Nazis over this slogan on a patch. Finally, they tore the piece of cloth off of the jacket of one of the right-wing extremist youths. It was the night of November 21, 1992, at the underground station Samariterstraße in the eastern Berlin district of Friedrichshain.
The squatter and former GDR opposition member Meier and his friends wanted to ride towards Alexanderplatz and go dancing that night. Due to the quarrel, they missed the train. As they wanted to leave the station again, they encountered the neo-Nazis once more. These then attacked them with knives – and stabbed them. Silvio Meier bled to death on the intermediate level of the station. Two of his companions were critically injured.
Silvio Meier was one victim among many. At the beginning of the 1990s, numerous acts of violence by neo-Nazis shook the nation. Young people organized hunts against people who corresponded to their image of the enemy: non-white people, left-wingers and homosexuals. In Hoyerswerda and Rostock-Lichtenhagen, pogroms were directed against contract workers and asylum seekers. Almost 30 people were killed in attacks by right-wing extremist thugs and arsonists in 1992 alone. Many more were seriously injured, insulted and threatened.
The eastern federal states were particularly affected. There, the initial euphoria about Unity gave way to deep uncertainty. People lost their jobs en masse. The right-wing extremist scene, which had been hushed up in the GDR, came to light and gained popularity. The neo-Nazis often wore combat boots, carried baseball bats and shouted their hate slogans in public. At the beginning of the 1990s – now also called "Baseballschlägerjahre", in English "Baseball Bat Years" – they dominated the urban landscape in many places in the East. The scene networked nationwide, but the trend to the far right went beyond them. Right-wing extremist parties celebrated election successes. The sharp rise in the number of asylum seekers and the debate about the right of asylum polarized politics and society.
In October 1993, the Berlin-Moabit Juvenile Criminal Court sentenced the 17-year-old main perpetrator in the Silvio Meier case, Sandro S., to four and a half years in prison for manslaughter. Two accomplices received three and a half years as well as eight months probation. The court did not see a political background to the crime – the judiciary did not assume right-wing extremist violence in other cases either. For Meier’s environment, however, it was clear that the perpetrators belonged to the organized right-wing extremist scene and had acted from that understanding.
Already on the day of his death, Silvio Meier’s friends organized a vigil at the Samariterstraße station, lit candles, and laid down flowers and letters. He quickly became an icon of Berlin’s left-wing alternative and left-wing extremist scene, a symbol of the fight against violence from the right. There were also demonstrations to commemorate Silvio Meier. Following a private initiative, there is now an official memorial plaque in the underground station. Since 2016, a street directly next to the underground station also bears the name of the man killed.
