Hundreds of candles, flowers and notes lined the steps of the Joseph-König High School in Haltern am See in western Germany on Wednesday as students paid tribute to their friends and teachers lost following the plane crash in the French Alps on Tuesday.
What should have been a day of happiness as the students welcomed back their friends from a trip to Barcelona turned to shock and sadness as the teenagers reeled at the news that 16 of their peers and two of their teachers had been on Germanwings flight 4U9525.
Leaning against a concrete ping-pong table also covered with red and white candles, a wooden board painted with words in white read, “Yesterday we were many, today we are alone”, while another board asked simply, “Why?”
“What is there to console us? They are dead, just gone,” one 15-year-old told Germany’s daily newspaper Bild. “They had so much in front of them. And now?”
In the small German town, the grief was palpable, tears flowing freely as the teenagers stood together outside a school, struggling to accept the tragedy.
“Every second student that you come across is crying,” 22-year-old Laura Jungblut, who works close to the school, told the local newspaper the Halterner Zeitung. “The town is small. We all know about it and can’t understand it.”
The headteacher, Ulrich Wessel, told reporters the school would never again be the same. “Last Tuesday, we sent off 16 happy students on this trip … what we thought would be an enjoyable trip has ended in tragedy.”
Meanwhile in Duisburg and Düsseldorf, the music world mourned the loss of opera singers Oleg Bryjak and Maria Radner. The two singers had been returning from Barcelona after performing a run of Wagner’s Siegfried at the Teatro Liceu. Radner was travelling with her husband and baby.
General director of the Deutsche Oper am Rhein, of which Bryjak was a member, expressed his sadness on behalf of the theatre community, “We have lost in Oleg Bryjak a great artist and a great man. We are stunned.”
While a full list of the passengers on the flight is yet to be made public, all over Germany, the mood was sombre as people reacted with shock at the news. Flags stood at half mast at buildings across Berlin and services were organized for citizens to pay their respects to those who had lost their lives.
At Berlin’s cathedral, around 150 met to take part a memorial at midday and to sign a book of condolence. Preacher Thomas Müller said the crash in France had left everyone stunned.
“The situation is so familiar to us,” he told Berlin’s daily newspaper, Tagesspiegel. “We ourselves have sat on a flight back from Spain, taken part in a school exchange. It shocks us, even if we are not directly affected.” Meanwhile, Germany’s cabinet observed a minute of silence for the victims before starting its meeting.
At Germanwing’s headquarters in Cologne, hundreds of workers joined together to grieve for the six staff, who also died on the plane. Holding hands, tears flowing down the faces of many, they marked a minute’s silence in tribute to their colleagues at 10.53am.
Pilots and crew that had been scheduled to man Germanwings planes refused to fly, many citing “personal reasons”, leading to several flights being cancelled.
Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel travelled with French president François Hollande and Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy on Wednesday to the crash site. Speaking at a press conference, Merkel said: “My thoughts are with all the relatives and friends, but also with the French people that live in this region and with big hearts offer help … Everything will be done here to find an explanation for what happened.”
Her words will come as some consolation as Germans try to overcome the loss of 72 of their countrymen.
“From one second to the next, the children are no longer there. And also the teachers,” said Karin Keysselitz, the mother of a child at the school in Haltern, whose son was taught by one of the teachers killed in the crash.
“When one hears of such accidents usually it’s so far away. Now it’s here in our Haltern,” she told German press agency DPA.
