In 2015 and 2016 alone, a total of 1,164,000 people submitted initial asylum applications in Germany
Anas Modamani, who as a teenager fled the brutal civil war in Syria to seek safety in Europe in 2015, is one of many who ended up in Germany, where he still lives and now has a passport.
Sitting in a Syrian café in Neukölln, a culturally diverse neighborhood in the German capital, Modamani is smiling and well-groomed.
He works in information technology, and in his spare time he is busy creating content for his thousands of followers on TikTok. However, he is no stranger to media fame. Just a few days after arriving in Berlin, the selfie he took with then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel went viral and became a symbol of the mood at the time.
