Blog - Typisch deutsch

There are times when I become quite nostalgic for the Sass brothers, Franz and Erich. Not because of their profession obviously – it would be difficult to make a Plädoyer for bank robbery in such a respectable newspaper – but because of the precision and intelligence of their work. They were Meistereinbrecher and frankly: it is difficult to get real Meister-werk nowadays even, or especially, in the criminal milieu. The Sass brothers: the way they cracked into the basement Tresorraum of the bank in Wittenbergplatz; their tunnels, their perfect alibis, their ingenious hiding places in the Moabiter Hinterhauswohnung.

            You don’t get criminals like that in Berlin , not anymore. Instead Berlin has become the capital of stupid crooks. Anyone with a machete or a baseball thinks he can become rich by walking into a supermarket and demanding money. In Düsseldorf you have clever Immobilienhaie, in Frankfurt you have inside traders; in Munich you have Hochstapler. But in Berlin , you get the criminal equivalent of the intellectually deprived candidates for DSDS. Las month in KadeWe a man pulled a gun and demanded a Gutschein for his girlfriend. You stage armed robbery (at least five years jail) – to steal a Gutschein? Not exactly the crime of the century.

            As for the Potsdamer Platz Pokerraub, I thought, briefly, that we might be dealing with an Ocean’s 11-type coup. My pulse fastened. The trial soon put me straight. There was the young man called Jihad (his parents obviously had a glowing future in mind when they named him) who complained that he was irritated to be woken up at ten o’clock in the morning by a man proposing the robbery. Right! Ten o’clock! What kind of time is that to ring Jihad? Later, the boys meet in Mc Donald’s for a Big Mac and to get their masks. There are not enough serious gloves to go around and one of the gang is left with yellow plastic washing-up gloves. He refuses to wear them because he doesn’t want to look ridiculous. Right! Respect! No wonder this bunch of clowns allegedly left behind a bag containing half a million euros; it was a classic Berlin crime conducted by criminals who would rather have been smoking a water pipe in Wedding and watching girls in the street.

            Still at least they managed to get into the headlines. And keep their money for more than a day. Most Berlin thieves don’t get that far. Remember the four men who broke into a Lagerhaus in Lichtenberg to steal cigarettes and Viagra? They didn’t notice there was a police car parked outside. The cops were able to arrest them and return to their breakfast before their coffee even got cold. And this week: three men decided to break into a Geldspielautomat in Charlottenburg. Three men for one lousy machine – and still they didn’t manage it. They put on masks in front of the video camera and police were in any case standing outside the “casino”.

            It could be that this low IQ-crime is simply a statement about the poor standards in Berlin ’s schools. Or it could be Darwinian natured selection. Since there is nothing much to steal in Berlin , serious thieves leave the city and head for Hamburg . We are left with the slow-thinkers. That seems to apply to the Berlin political class- why not the criminal class too?

            I have a different explanation. The crimes that we hear about are the ones being solved. Berlin is short of policemen – the BZ reported the other day that only three patrol cars were available in the whole of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf (population 320.000, the equivalent to the entire population of Iceland ). That means only the easily solved crimes get taken seriously.

            There are two side-effects from this interesting policing policy. The first is that a lot of precious police time is spent sitting in patrol cars eating Dunkin’ Donuts to go. I blame Tatort for this, but also screenwriters for NYPD cop series. Sitting in the patrol car waiting for a Funk message is the moment, on television at least, when cops vent their emotional problems. In Berlin this works quite well since most thieves seem to break into bankautomaten situated near patrol cars. Hence, the special Berlin phenomenon: increasingly fat cops are chasing increasingly stupid criminals.

            But the second factor to take into consideration is the rise of “happy Living” league tables. The latest has just come from the magazine Monocle, but there have been several others this year. Berlin always does well ( Munich was top of the list in Monocle this year but Berlin was ahead of Oslo , all US cities, London etc), in part because of its low crime rate. It doesn’t even have many murders, and the ones that are committed here are quickly solved. Why? Berlin murders follow a pattern: jealous husband kills wife; ex-lover kills wife; husband kills himself; frustrated son / nephew/ carer kills pensioner for her savings; Russian kills Russian; mother kills babies and puts them in flower pot / freezer. These are the only murder variants in the city. Paul the Octopus could find the killer. Complicated murders are carried out elsewhere in Germany .

            And so Berlin gains a reputation internationally for having a brilliant police force. Crimes are solved, the culprits efficiently sent to JVA Tegel and Moabit. But we know the real story, don’t we? As long as Berliner crooks are focussed on stealing KadeWe Gutscheine, everything has its own quiet order. If anything really serious happened – like the grisly Frauenzerstückelung in the 1920s around the Schlesische Bahnhof – the police force would fall apart. It has been kaputt-gespart (a phrase that exists only in the German language).

Manchmal denke ich wehmütig an die Brüder Sass, Franz und Erich. Natürlich nicht wegen ihres Berufes – undenkbar wäre in einer so respektablen Zeitung wie dieser ein Plädoyer für das Bankenüberfallen –, aber wegen der Präzision, mit der sie ihrer Arbeit nachgingen. Sie waren Meistereinbrecher und, mal ganz ehrlich: Es ist heutzutage fast unmöglich, noch echtes Meister-Werk zu bekommen, nicht einmal im kriminellen Milieu. Die Sass-Brüder: wie sie sich in den Tresorraum der Bank am Wittenbergplatz hineingearbeitet haben; ihre Tunnel; ihre perfekten Alibis; ihre einfallsreichen Verstecke in Moabiter Hinterhauswohnungen.

When I first came to Germany many years ago, nobody outside Bavaria trusted his father or grandfather. Certainly, there was no question of asking an old man for advice. The 1968 generation was of course, not specific to Germany ; in America , it was World War Two and Korea veterans who planned the military campaigns in Vietnam and effectively sent young, mainly working class and black Americans to their death. In Britain , the  complacency of the older generation had  wrecked our international competitiveness. So, no, we didn’t want to hear what old people had to say.

            Now the pendulum has swung and there is an exaggerated respect, in Germany  at least, for the supposed wisdom of 80 and 90 year olds. No other country, with the possible exception of Japan , celebrates Senioren-genius quite as thoroughly. Study Sandra Maischberger’s talk show partners: it is like a guest- list from the crypt. Hans-Jochen Vogel (84) and Heiner Geissler (80) addressing the political state of the nation; Norbert Blüm (75) on pensions, Arnulf Baring (78) on everything; Ingrid van Bergen (79) on Tierliebe; Otto Pfister (72) on the Weltmeisterschaft; Wolfgang Völz (79) as an expert on alcohol abuse. When I watch the talk show I half expect a nurse to walk on half way through, handing out pills and changing bed-pans. Lisa Fitz appeared the other day and it almost came as a relief (she claims to be 58): the much-needed voice of youth.

            I want to be fair about this: the Opa -Quote finde ich gut. It is right that old people are on television and not just banished to radio or the columns of the Rheinische Merkur. But this reversal of the 1968 ethic has gone too far. Fine, the Schlag-den-Raab generation needs to be exposed to people with authority and experience. If they don’t read books, they can at least listen for a few minutes to a wise man. That was probably the idea behind Giovanni di Lorenzo’s “Auf eine Zigarette mit Helmut Schmidt”: instead of the dangers of passive smoking, a little bit of passive knowledge. The formula of the Lorenzo-Schmidt dialogue stays the same – some biographical revelation(Lorenzo: Ist tägliches Duschen dann in Ihren Augen Verschwendung?” Schmidt: „Mir genügt ein Bad in der Woche.“) coupled with 30 seconds weltpolitischem wisdom (Schmidt O-Ton: „Ein heute neugekauftes Auto kann man dann nicht essen”), and already the Marlboro-Methol is ausgeraucht. A joint with Helmut Schmidt would probably yield more.

            Now I am a great admirer of di Lorenzo and not just because he is the Verleger of this newspaper, but I fail to understand the fascination with Schmidt. As a young man I was in the London audience when he tried to explain the new dangers of Soviet missiles to the Strategic Studies Institute and as a Financial Times correspondent in Bonn I was invited to his concerts in the Kanzlerbungalow; I admired his fierce intelligence, his impatience with bureaucrats, his crisis management. But he lacked charm, over-rated his intelligence and made many clumsy misjudgements. He was not a great Chancellor but now he is being styled as one. More, the cult of Helmut is endowing him with almost supernatural qualities: Helmut der Retter im Not. Partly, I suppose it is the cigarette smoking (Lorenzo: Haben Sie nie versucht, das Rauchen ganz einzustellen? Schmidt: Nee. Ich bin doch nicht verrückt.). Anyone who so thoroughly defies political correctness that he chain-smokes  on television, must be fearless and a truth-teller.  Flawed logic, of course. And partly there is the sense, cultivated by both di Lorenzo and Maischberger, that one should squeeze as much out of the old generation as possible because soon they will die and their knowledge will disappear. In this sense, Helmut Schmidt’s smoking is part of a complicated metaphor: each cigarette is treated as possibly the last to be smoked  before the firing squad arrives.

            None of this should be sufficient  however to raise this ex-chancellor to the Sainthood. When he had power, he was interesting ; shortly after leaving power, he had useful things to say. Now, he is just a grumpy old man, with a selective memory. There are moments, as in the old days, when he exhibits a dry wit but nothing really that goes beyond the funereal WM contributions of Günter Netzer. The views and the knowledge of pensioners are important but they do not have to be packaged in this way. Frankly I would rather that young people just visit their grandmother more often and ask them questions. That surely must yield better  conversations than the following:

                                               Lorenzo: Haben Sie genug Liebe in Ihrem Leben?

                                               Schmidt: Ich beklage mich nicht.

                                               Lorenzo: Hätten Sie mehr lieben können?

                                               Schmidt: Das ist mir tatsächlich zu persönlich.

                                               Lorenzo: Sie haben aber sicher das ganz große Glück erfahren,

                                               ein erfülltes Leben gelebt zu haben.

                                               Schmidt: Mag so sein.

          Watching these veterans trying to edge back into the 21st century media world is  increasingly like stumbling onto the stage of a Samuel Beckett or a Harold Pinter play; the pauses and omissions are often more significant than the words. Leave Helmut Schmidt (and Marcel Reich-Ranicki and all the others) in peace; let them find calm solace beyond the television cameras and the bestseller lists. Old people, the Greek philosophers taught us, can enrich our understanding of the present day if they have discovered and can communicate universal values. What are these values?  How to deal with the loss of loved ones.  How to keep your nerve in a crisis. How to retain dignity when your body is betraying you .These, not Schmidt’s self-censored version of the NATO-Doppelbeschluss, are the kind of lessons we can learn from the older generation. We just need to ask the right questions, and switch the tape recorder off.

Als ich vor vielen Jahren zum ersten Mal nach Deutschland kam, traute niemand außerhalb von Bayern seinem Vater oder Großvater. Keiner wäre auf die Idee gekommen, einen alten Mann um Rat zu fragen. Dabei war die 68er-Generation kein ausschließlich deutsches Phänomen: In den USA waren es die Veteranen des Zweiten Weltkriegs und des Koreakrieges, die in Vietnam junge Amerikaner in den Tod schickten; in Großbritannien hatte die Gleichgültigkeit der älteren Generation das Land die Wettbewerbsfähigkeit gekostet. Deshalb interessierte uns nicht, was die zu sagen hatte.