Home is playing today - Dortmund is playing today!

The Nordstadtliga youth project took a special approach to remembrance on May 6 in Dortmund. This year's Mehmet Kubaşık Cup was played in the 1999 to 2006 age groups. None of the young people involved in the ten teams from the north of Dortmund knew Mehmet Kubaşık himself. To honor and remember him, however, they played for the Respect Cup, asked about his story and the background to his death. They not only mourned, but also laughed and fought for goals. Every soccer fan's heart can only open when they see how young people learn the basic rules of a society based on solidarity on the pitch.

When the organizer of this cup competition, Mirza Demirović, pressed a sticker for the cup into my hand, I had to remember a special day and evening from the year 2000. At the time, I was invited by a youth group to Neustadt (Orla) in Thuringia. At the time, the right-wing extremist Thuringian Heimatschutz, from which the NSU emerged, was raging in the town. At the time, there were acts of violence in the small town against supposed left-wingers who, in conversation over a coke and coffee, presented themselves as intelligent, courageous and humanistically oriented young people.

The victims of this violence received support from their friends and also from many adults and invited me to a public event that day as an external guest. I was asked to develop a strategy for the city and then moderate ways to achieve this. The hall was packed and the police had to protect the event from the right-wing extremists marching outside. It soon became clear that I wasn't going to have much to do. The young people had done a great job. They had won over a local entrepreneur for their idea. He took a stand at the meeting and called on the local mayor and local politicians, among others, to support the young people and take a proactive approach to the issue, which they then did.

After the event, we met up at the only Italian restaurant on site and took a deep breath. I couldn't help but think of its owner in Dortmund, because he came to our table in the evening, visibly moved and emotionally charged. In his hand was a decades-old bottle of wine from a stock that, according to him, usually only made it to the table at very important family celebrations. We were allowed to taste it and he told us about his fear of the local right-wing extremist terror and his gratitude towards the young people in whom he saw a future for a social and democratic culture of togetherness and without hatred and violence. This owner could just as easily have been murdered as Mehmet Kubaşık and the other victims of the terror group. Despite his fear and experiences, he trusted in the strength of the next generation and that humanity would prove stronger than hatred and racism.

I imagined what it would be like if this restaurant owner (whose name I unfortunately don't know), together with Mehmet Kubaşık, had been given the chance to watch these young people in Dortmund compete on the pitch, have fun, test boundaries and ultimately agree on rules of respect and fairness. I didn't get to meet Mehmet Kubaşık, but from what I've heard about him, I'm sure they would have both loved the sight. These young people are exactly what the NSU wanted to fight and what the right-wing extremists are still afraid of today. They are the next generation of an urban society shaped by immigration and therefore the future of this country and the city. They can be reached with the ball on the square and thus commemorate Dortmund's Mehmet Kubaşık in their own way and show that a culture of remembrance can also be youth-oriented and without ritualized wreath-laying.