Wee glimpse of the past in orderly Berlin

THERE was a kind of journalism, practised by the likes of Time magazine, whereby the reporter would spend a few weeks in, say, Germany, swanning around with members of the ruling class and sounding them out on the great issues. Thus he would seek to capture the mood of a nation.

Eventually there might be an interview with the Chancellor, who would be pictured on the cover of Time in visionary pose, alongside a quote from the article, something like: “Germany is not looking to the past, but to the future.”

Thanks for that, Mr Chancellor, you would think. Cheers, mate.

I was in Germany for the weekend recently, in Berlin, where I found myself gauging the mood

of the people at the heart of Europe in different ways. On a quiet street there was a man standing on a piece of waste ground, urinating. Being Irish, we felt no need to comment on this, or to chide him, assuming as we did that he wasn’t doing this for sport, but out of some terrible necessity.

Then we heard this shouting from across the street, coming from two Berliners who were letting the urinater know that he wasn’t getting away with it, that he was committing an offence. They seemed determined to fulfil the stereotype of the Germans being sticklers for the rules, an impression that was reinforced later when we saw a motorist — an Irishman, as it happened — driving the wrong way down a one-way street.

Again this shouting started up, from the one other person on the street — and note that this was not Friedrichstrasse, that no great disruption was caused, that the Irishman’s car was the only one moving on this leafy sideroad, that his error was easily rectified. Still you heard the shouting, the insistence that order be maintained.

And this was Berlin too, beloved of bohemians such as Bowie and Lou Reed and Leonard Cohen, the kind of men who would take urinating against the wall and driving the wrong way down a one-way street, and turn them into performance art.

But the most intriguing observations on the current state of the German soul came from this Berliner who was sitting near me in a restaurant, and who helpfully informed me that the restaurant probably wouldn’t take a credit card.

Yes, in Berlin, my Berlin, they sometimes prefer cash to card in much the same way that a pub in a remote part of Co Westmeath might be wary of a Visa or Mastercard — was it such an attitude which informed Germany’s implacable stance on “bailing out” the degenerate Greeks and Irish living above their means?

In conversation, my friend the Berliner spoke sadly of his belief that Germans are not as modern as they used to be, that they are no longer comfortable at the cutting edge.

I suppose you could say that Germany is not looking to the future, but to the past.