While Chapter 1 addressed the social imaginaries that were at play during the long summer of migration in 2015, this chapter will reframe some of those events to spotlight the power imbalance between refugees and the local administrative state. In a very unique dynamic, the construction of social realities on both the side of Syrian refugees and the side of German residents, as well as the bureaucratic state, dictated the way in which relationships between the two would develop over the following years. This chapter focuses less on the individual narratives and more on public narratives about refugees. It will look at how public narratives influenced both policy and its implementation. More specifically, it frames key events that shifted the public imaginary and produced a reaction from the refugees, insofar as their subjectification as ‘the refugee’ led them to lose control of their own narratives. Chapter 1 moved quickly through the processes of asylum and the role of the local administration. This chapter will return to some of those periods to show how the bureaucratic formulations of policy and the arbitrary implementation of integration policy were seen at the local level, defying the portrayal of a unitary national integration process.

By reframing the events in terms of both shifting public discourse and power, I will draw on the large body of literature on waiting to describe the particular case of Syrians in Germany using what I call orientation stasis. This orientation stasis occurs in times of insecurity and inability to rely on previously learned (and embodied) behaviours – or, to use Bourdieu's concept, their habitus becomes something that disorients them rather than guides them. This chapter builds on previous theoretical work from Jackson (2005), who applies Bourdieu's concepts of illusio (feel for the game) to the situation of refugees arriving in new and unknown circumstances.

Refugees arriving in 2015 began to question the stability of their everyday ability to successfully navigate regimes of asylum and apply accumulated capital, which was compounded by the desire to continue (existentially) moving forward. This drove refugees to attempt to move, but the outcomes were often undesirable, so they remain existentially immobile – in other words, in stasis.