The results of Germany’s recent elections sent shockwaves across the political landscape as the far-right Alternative for Germany party (AfD) surged to second place with 20% of the vote. That result doubled the support it received in the previous election and came despite a scandal, involving party leadership, that seriously damaged its credibility. Part of the far right’s dramatic showing owes to an unlikely source, a viral meme based on a single word drawn from Arabic: “talahon.” In 2024, the word entered the German lexicon and nearly won the country’s Youth Word of the Year competition. Talahon began as a seemingly innocuous episode but evolved into a cultural flashpoint, reshaping voter sentiment and rewriting the AfD’s fortunes in ways no one could have predicted. This is a story about the unintended consequences of memes.
The provenance of the word talahon is the Arabic phrase “taala hon,” meaning “come here” or “bring it on” in Levantine Arabic. It describes a specific stereotype: young Arab males, typically between the ages of 12 and 20, who travel in groups, engage in play fighting, wear Nike shoes, tracksuits and Gucci fanny packs and challenge others to fights with shouts of “taala hon.”
I first came across the meme in a July 2024 news video, posted to Instagram, that discussed the widespread use of the word in Germany. The term had become so prevalent that an AI-generated song by Austrian artist Butterbro, titled “Verknallt in Einen Talahon” (“I’m Crazy in Love With a Talahon”), about a German woman in love with an Arab immigrant who is a stereotypical talahon, topped Spotify’s charts in Germany for two weeks. The song featured racist lyrics like “a knife in his bag not for buttering bread,” referring to a 25-year-old Afghan immigrant who carried out a knife attack in Mannheim in May 2024.
Butterbro’s success was particularly significant because it was the second racist song to gain notoriety that summer. In May 2024, at the Pony Club in Kampen, an affluent town on the German island of Sylt, a group of well-heeled, white German youth chanted the lyrics to the song “Deutschland den Deutschen, Auslaender Raus!” (“Germany for Germans, Foreigners Out!”), with one of the young people placing an index finger over his upper lip to mimic a Hitler mustache as he gave the Nazi salute with his other hand. The incident gained national attention when prominent journalist Jan Bohmermann shared a 15-second video clip of it with his 2.7 million social media followers and asked for help identifying the participants.
Four months earlier, there was a national scandal when the media published leaked reports that the AfD leadership had discussed a plan, in terms reminiscent of the Nazis in the 1930s, for mass deportation of Germans with immigrant backgrounds. The “Auslaender Raus” incident became a focal point in Germany’s ongoing media discourse about unacceptable racism and xenophobia. The people identified in the video faced immediate consequences, including termination of their employment. But Butterbro did not suffer any consequences for the talahon song, which gave the impression that Germans did not consider all expressions of racism to be equally offensive.
I mentioned the song to a German Arab friend and we listened to it together on the metro, laughing at its lyrics. My friend confirmed that “talahon” was the first Arabic word to be incorporated into the German lexicon. Perhaps, he remarked sarcastically, the word’s popularity was a significant social development. So we are finally becoming an official part of Germany’s social fabric, I joked. My friend responded that Arabs were now on Germany’s radar and that “they” were “watching us.”
The talahon phenomenon began in February 2024, when Syrian-German rapper Hassan released a sequel to his 2022 song “Ta3al Lahon,” with lyrics in Arabic and German. Clips from the new song were used in countless TikTok memes, explainer videos, dances and comedy skits that either celebrated or mocked “talahon behavior,” which connotes aggressive body language and a blingy, label-conscious style of dress. The song’s popularity sparked an explosion of cultural output by Arab-German youth, which trended for months. One of many striking cultural moments was 14-year-old Syrian-German rapper Little M’s talahon song, which he performed on TikTok with a dance that included the “come here and fight” hand gesture. Videos of German tween girls performing the dance and Gen Z posters fetishizing the concept of a hypermasculine talahon boyfriend flooded TikTok and Instagram.
The popularity of talahon culture among German youth highlighted a generational divide, with older Germans rejecting the multiculturalism that young people embraced. This is exactly the type of cultural mixing and subversion that represents the AfD voter’s worst nightmare; notably, it occurred while the German state expanded law enforcement’s power to crack down on pro-Palestine activists who demonstrated against the war in Gaza, with police arresting protesters even in super-lefty Berlin.
Online searches reveal many videos that mimic Hassan and Little M’s songs as well as countless TikTok skits and videos that embrace the talahon identity — a defiant, provocative, hip-hop-coded, antihero macho persona. What many German observers miss is that most of these talahon videos, which are created by Arabs, are actually tongue-in-cheek commentary and self-parodies that mock stereotypes about Arab youth culture and sartorial style. They satirize cliches about young Arab males who supposedly hang out in groups, act like gangsters, wear Gucci pouches, shadowbox and loiter at street corners or hookah bars — macho, ridiculous and obsessed with fashion logos.
The Arab talahon content emerged in two distinct forms. One reflected Arab-German culture’s self-aware embrace of stereotypes about being image-conscious and group-oriented, while the other projected the aggressive stance of a minority that feels oppressed, discriminated against and othered. Rather than recognizing this as a moment of societal integration or an invitation for social dialogue with a community that feels marginalized, white German society, based on its media discourse, opted instead for a reactionary interpretation that misrepresented talahon culture as a purely negative phenomenon.
German liberals who criticized the trend and songs said they promoted violence and sexism. These are legitimate concerns about hip-hop music and culture in general, but because the talahons were Arab and Muslim the critiques of talahon culture took on racist and Islamophobic overtones. Rather than seeing the videos as typical hip-hop content, white German liberals said they were an expression of the violence, sexism and misogyny that were purportedly rife in Muslim-Arab society.
Serious German media platforms published articles that quoted anti-violence trainers who claimed talahon culture was toxic, arguing that it promoted disrespect for police and “non-German values” and could lead youth toward actual crime rather than just viral videos. Critics worried that it would become a cult that didn’t represent German identity or values and would disrupt German social harmony. If this seems like an extreme overreaction to an ephemeral TikTok trend and a few rap songs by young Arab migrants — well, welcome to Germany. This was just the beginning.
With the war in Gaza hanging over the talahon discourse, alongside increasing German police harassment and arrests of Arab-German youth at pro-Palestine protests, the song and its culture have evolved into a marker of claimed identity. Talahon has been reconceived as a form of defiance, camaraderie, shared cultural experience and expression, supposedly similar to other historically pejorative terms that have been reclaimed by marginalized groups, turning it from a symbol of subjugation into one of self-definition, solidarity and community. Unfortunately, this analogy’s logic falls apart under scrutiny, since one cannot reclaim a term that wasn’t historically used as a slur to begin with.
German society is deeply conformist, so it isn’t surprising that the average German citizen will earnestly tell you that they are not racist toward immigrants — as long as the immigrants learn to think, act, speak and dress like the rest of the Germans. They are also remarkably sincere and consistent in their social contract with migrants who do make the effort to integrate into German culture. Despite the xenophobic elements of the recent election campaign, the percentage of immigrants elected to the Bundestag increased slightly, from 11.3% to 11.6%. Notably, candidates from immigrant backgrounds were elected in predominantly nonimmigrant districts, suggesting they had successfully demonstrated their Germanness.
Yet there is a persistent, widely held view that Muslim immigrants have in general failed to integrate into German society and that they are more prone than white, native-born Germans to violence. This attitude is reinforced when violent acts are committed by people of a Middle Eastern background. In December, for example, police arrested a man of Saudi origin after he deliberately drove into an outdoor Christmas market, killing two people. Since 2016, there have been fewer than 20 such attacks, the perpetrators of which represent a negligible percentage of Germany’s more than 1 million refugees and asylum-seekers. Meanwhile, German authorities reported 1,905 politically motivated attacks against refugees and asylum-seekers in 2024, of which they classified 237 as “violent.” Some of the most horrific attacks of the last decade were committed by far-right extremists, like the armed man who shot at a synagogue in Halle during the Jewish High Holy Days in 2019, or the one who opened fire in a Hanau hookah bar in 2020, killing nine people.
But just a few violent acts committed by disturbed individuals who happen to be Muslim can be exploited politically by anti-immigrant forces and fuel xenophobia. In August, after a Syrian who had been denied asylum carried out a knife attack in the western town of Solingen, killing three and wounding 10, then-Chancellor Olaf Scholz responded by reinstating border controls, while the AfD called for a complete halt to all immigration. Within weeks, the talahon hashtag morphed from being primarily used by Arabs for self-parody to being used by the far right to share anti-Arab content. Meanwhile, far-right politicians exploited the stabbing incident to engage in provocative acts, as when neo-Nazi politician Matthias Helfrich, previously a prominent AfD member, gave a speech in the Bundestag while wearing a parody of talahon gear — in this case, a flashy tracksuit embossed with the Gucci logo and a thick gold neck chain.
The war in Gaza exacerbated anti-immigrant tensions and, by extension, prejudice toward those who embrace or personify the talahon style and attitude. Germany, because of its Nazi history, has enshrined laws against hate speech that criminalize expressions of antisemitism. But in recent years, several states have passed legislation that defines criticism of Israel as a type of antisemitism. In response to controversy over the war in Gaza, new legislation enacted in June 2024 requires people applying for naturalization to acknowledge Germany’s historical responsibility for the Holocaust and affirm Israel’s right to exist. For Germans who believe their country’s laws and policies on antisemitism and the state of Israel are an essential element of its social contract, the talahon immigrants who participate in pro-Palestine protests and call Germany racist for its uncritical support of Israel and its war in Gaza are questioning that contract and therefore do not belong. From that point, it’s a very short step to calling for the deportation of immigrants who criticize Israel, which the government is already attempting to do.
The fall of the Assad regime in Syria offers a glimmer of hope in this grim situation. Almost every major German party campaigned on restricting immigration and asylum policies; they specifically targeted the talahons from Syria, knowing this was a politically expedient issue while Bashar al-Assad remained in power. But his sudden departure raises a critical question: What if the nearly 1.3 million Syrians in Germany decided to leave and repatriate?
Nearly a decade after then-Chancellor Angela Merkel opened Germany’s borders to Syrian refugees, they have become integral to key sectors of the domestic economy. Syrian doctors represent the largest group of foreign medical professionals, with 5,758 working in the country at the end of last year — nearly 5,000 of them in hospitals in smaller towns and cities. Gerald Gass, CEO of the German Hospital Society, has warned that entire sectors of Germany’s health care system would collapse if the Syrian population left the country. If even half these doctors were to leave, the health care system would be in crisis.
Syrian immigrants have become indispensable to manufacturing, hospitality, construction and trade, all of which are struggling in Germany’s sluggish economy. Their departure would also contribute to the country’s demographic crisis; its alarmingly low birth rate would plummet further, jeopardizing the long-term sustainability of the social welfare system.
If Syrian immigrants did choose to return to the country they fled a decade ago, right-wing voters would soon feel the impact on their quality of life. This could present an opening for serious politicians to address Germany’s real issues and offer genuine solutions, instead of running campaigns and winning elections by demonizing immigrants and capitalizing on TikTok trends.
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