On 4 May 2026, a 33-year-old man drove an SUV into a crowd on a shopping street in Leipzig. Two people died and six were wounded. He had a criminal record and just a few weeks before had been reported by the police. There was no ideology, no manifesto, just an ordinary man with a history of violence. Leipzig was not an anomaly; it was a continuation of something that had started long before.

In Germany, people have to oppose two temptations simultaneously: the urge to reduce it to a migration crisis and present it as a random tragedy. Neither is accurate. According to Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), there were 29,014 recorded knife-related offenses in 2024, an average of 79 attacks every single day. Serious knife injuries admitted to German ICUs nearly doubled between 2014 and 2023. In Berlin alone, more than 3,400 knife attacks were recorded in a single year (PKS Berlin 2024). This data belongs to a state that has struggled to confront several underlying causes.

Street violence is easy to exploit for political purposes and challenging to avoid because it does not come from a single ideology or one type of person. In September 2025, a seventeen-year-old boy from Kosovo stabbed his teacher, a warden, and a homeless man on the street. Investigations showed that he had spent months absorbing extremist Islamist content on his phone, searching for Jews to kill near the city’s old synagogue. Some attacks are driven by........

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