Arab Germans, also referred to as German Arabs or Arabic Germans (German: Araber in Deutschland/Deutsch-Araber; Arabic: العرب في المانيا), are ethnic Arabs living in Germany. They form the second-largest predominantly Muslim immigrant group.
Today, by far the largest group of Arabs living in Germany is from Syria, with 1,281,000 people with a Syrian immigrant background alone in 2023.[1] Syrians mostly arrived in Germany after 2015, when the German government under Angela Merkel decided to keep the borders open to refugees from the Syrian civil war.[3] Since then, they have been by far the largest group of immigrants to Germany.[4] To a lesser extent, there has been Arab immigration before, most notably by Moroccans during the guest worker movement or by Palestinian and Lebanese refugees who moved to Germany, especially West Berlin, in the 1980s.[5] The majority of Arabs in Germany are refugees from the conflicts in the Middle East.
History
The first notable Arab-German was Emily Ruete, born 1844, originally Salama bint Said, a Princess of Zanzibar who became pregnant by a German man who was her neighbor.[6] Fearing retaliation, she eloped with him to Germany, converted to Christianity, and married him. She later published her autobiography, “Memoirs of an Arabian Princess”.[7]
Geographical distribution
The largest concentration of Arab people in Germany, can be found in Berlin, where they make up 2%–3% (100,000 people) of the population. The percentage is significantly higher in the Berlin neighborhoods of Neukölln, Kreuzberg and Gesundbrunnen. Other significant centres of Arab populations in Germany can be found in the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region, Frankfurt, Munich, Hanover and Hamburg.[8] Most Arabs reside in urban areas and cities in former West-Germany. The only place in former Eastern Germany with a sizeable number of Arabs is Leipzig, where people of any Arab descent make up 0.8% of the total population (4,000 out of 522,800).[9] Among the German districts with the highest shares of Arab migrants in 2011 were especially cities in the Frankfurt Rhine-Main Metropolitan Region (Frankfurt, Offenbach) and the Rhineland (Bonn, Düsseldorf) with large groups of Moroccan migrants.[10]
