Southern Germany - Land of Smiles
Southern Germany is conservative and a bit too far away from the real world for my liking, but while people look pretty stiff and sullen on the street, they are friendly, noticably so after a trip around Europe.
Tried to get a tram from Mannheim to Heidelberg a while back and had no change for the machine. The driver got out of the tram and, after inspecting the ticket machine and ascertaining that we (three people) did indeed not have enough cash, suggested we ride with him for a few stops, until the tram reached a stop where a more sophisticated cash machine would allow us to buy tickets. A few stations on, he helped purchase the tickets. The tram had by this time reached a different ticket zone, which saved us several Euros. The driver probably broke countless rules and laws to get us on board. A few stops later, the shift changed and the driver left the train, smiling like Bruce Willis at the end of Armageddon. An everyday rebel with a cause?
A few stops on, an old man who looked half mad, tried to lift a hopelessly overloaded wheelbarrow-type contraption onto the tram. Well, he would have tried, had he been able to open the doors of the carriage he was standing in front of. Next to the carriage door, a group of young street kids of Turkish origin, aged between 14 and 16, sat on a bench, dressed in track suits, heads shaved or nearly shaved, sharing a cigarette. When the boys realized the old man wasn´t going to make it, they jumped up, got the door opened, climbed into the carriage, heaving the wheelbarrow in after them, and made sure the old man had time to stumble up the stairs to a seat, before they skipped back onto the platform to return to their loafing.
Funny observations, at a time when a high profile representative of the establishment, one of the heads of the German Bundesbank, Thilo Sarrazin, spews out (unhindered but much lamented for now) racist vitriol against Muslims and Jews on an almost daily basis. While the German chancellor has criticized Sarrazin’s devisive rethroic, he is still out there, running around in a pin stripe suit, making the world a grimier place. Not that the Turkish kids at the tram station would have ever heard of him. They are hardly educated enough to read the paper, a fact that aforementioned bank manager Sarrazin has taken to heart and lists as a reason to stop the immigration of Muslims to Germany. For once, lack of education appears to be of use. Young turks are unlikely to come across the type of hate speech this representative of Germany´s elite is promoting. More recently Sarrazin claimed that Jews were 15 % more intelligent than other people because of the selective culling of their fellow people in Europe in recent centuries. Far right politicians across Europe are applauding and Germany is hogging international headlines.
So here´s my equally radical but more humane suggestion to deal with unpleasant extroverts like Sarrazin. Why not get all Germans to marry people of color? That would get rid of the bigots within a couple of generations. The same solution might work well in a whole bunch of other countries with community leaders that harbor supremacist delusions. I must admit, I didn’t think of it first. The American fiction writer Peter Mathiessen suggested the same as a solution to America’s racism in his seminal work Killing Mr. Watson.
























































