It was now evident to me that each time I went to meet an Afghan friend, I ended up making a journey that was long and complicated (for Hamburg). There were no formal border crossings, but I was aware that I was moving from the centre to the margins, often quite literally.
To meet the singer Elias Shahna, my journey was longer and took me out of the city completely. But this time, the move represented increased prosperity and by implication, a more 'settled' life in Germany. Shahna represented a different generation of artists, those who had fled Afghanistan in the 1990s and built their lives as migrants under very different circumstances. It was of this era that a professor in Tübingen had told me, "The earlier refugees were not obviously Muslim." What she meant, perhaps, was that they had been affluent and educated, often fluent in navigating European society through previous visits.
Generations of Afghans had been arriving in Germany since the late 1970s as each successive conflict led to displacement. Afghans who had arrived in these years were described as being 'well integrated.' 40 percent of those who had fled then had received a German passport. "Remarkably, these Afghan immigrants did not have to face the high degree of anti-immigrant hatred exhibited in 2015/16," wrote the Kabul-based Afghanistan Analysts Network, in a 2018 report. But by 2016, the number of Afghans living in Germany had increased five-fold from the figures a decade ago to over a quarter million, and the perception of the community had changed.