Microcosm of German society

I’m at Frau Moller’s. Yes, that Frau Moller’s on the corner of Lange Reihe and Schmilinskystrasse in Hamburg.

I don’t know who Schmilinsky was but he’d be disappointed with the street named after him. It’s a suburban nothing. Lange Reihe, on the other hand, has the whole of Germany on show, men and women by the thousand just going about their daily lives, and lots of obedient German dogs. They follow their owners down the busy street without a leash and refuse to be distracted by cats, lamp-posts, other dogs or scraps of food. German discipline has jumped the species gap.

Frau Moller’s menu, like every menu I’ve seen in Germany, is a hymn to meat and potatoes. I ordered schnitzel and chips and while I awaited my food, Lange Reihe served me up by way of entertainment a minor traffic accident. It involved a solid German bicycle and a Volkswagen delivery van. I didn’t see the moment of impact but it was clear what happened: the van was reversing into a parking space while the bike was coming along behind it, with the result that the rear bumper of one and the front wheel of the other met.

The rider of the bicycle was a woman of middle years and sturdy build. The word hausfrau came straight to mind, though for all I knew she might have been a nuclear physicist. Whatever the truth, she could hardly have looked more German.

The impact knocked her from the saddle, but she suffered no noticeable damage and was quickly on her feet. Then the delivery van door opened and out stepped the young male driver. And on the instant a trivial misfortune that would have been resolved in seconds transformed into a microcosm of the central issue in German society. For the driver was black.

The woman’s attitude transformed. It was as if the youth’s skin colour had ripped a mask from her. In a second she went from upset but contained to furious and abusive. Her shouting rang above the traffic noise. I could make out only the occasional word but translation was not necessary.

Germans passing by turned their heads to take in what was happening but, like their well-trained dogs, resisted the urge to linger. Those brought up elsewhere, however, showed no such self-denial. Thus the little knot of people that gathered to gawp was of varying shades of olive skin and brown – Middle-Eastern youths with slicked hair and tight jeans, a couple of African women, Turks with cigarettes – all enjoying the sport.

The black youth was not daunted. He fired back at the hausfrau in pidgin German, then picked up the bike – it was as black as he was but probably a little older – and shook it and bounced it on its tyres to demonstrate its unharmed condition, then held it out as if to say, so, what’s your point?

For the first time the woman looked around for support and saw the mixed-race crowd and looked weaker. The black boy had had enough. He propped the bike against the kerb, jumped back into his van with lithe insolence, revved the engine and powered away with a sneering squeal of tyres.

The woman was powerless. The crowd was drifting away. What was done was done. Her resentment still seething, she remounted her bike and pedalled off up Lange Reihe through a Germany she saw as changing for the worse.

Shortly thereafter Frau Moller’s waitress brought my very German brunch and it was splendid.