Blog - Typisch deutsch

My ideal of Prussian womanhood has always been Maria Gräfin von Maltzan. I was lucky to meet her shortly before she died in Berlin, about thirteen years ago. She was a cigarillo-smoking animal-lover and had led the special life of a Prussian adventuress. Her father – there was a big portrait of him in her Berlin apartment even in the 1990s – had died in 1921; Maria was 12 and found herself in constant conflict with her widowed mother. Abitur, a doctorate in biological sciences, a trip across Africa in a battered Chevrolet; a short marriage with a  cabarettist, years in the anti-Nazi resistance. For three years she hid her Jewish partner Hans Hirschel from the Gestapo. After the war she became a vet for the Busch circus, touring the world.

Typisch preussisch? I think so: She was kantig, dry, big-hearted, a Hasardeurin. But the mystery for me has always been how such women emerged from Prussia. The Kingdom was, of course, a male domain: war, drill, discipline, a straight back in the saddle. You rarely hear about the women. As depicted in paintings and literature, they were respected for their beauty, their child-bearing stamina and (though this was rarely admitted in public) an ability to balance account books. One simple explanation for the strength of Prussian women could be the perennial absence of Prussian men. When they went out to  battle, it was the women who ran the household, fed children and, in the case of the last war, defended themselves and their family homes against Russian soldiers as they swept through Ostpommern.

Another explanation: Prussian manhood was not, in Wilhelmine times, quite what it used to be. We have all heard the stories of Prussian aristocrats (male) dressing up in ballet tutus at the Kaiser’s court (something I would like to see introduced in Merkel’s Kanzleramt). A new book describing the sexual goings on at the Jagdschloss Grunewald in the winter of 1891 – ending in a deadly duel – makes it clear that manliness and honour were getting a bit tangled up in the Berlin court. Confused Prussian males: sufficient reason, perhaps, for Prussian women to become more independent and outspoken.

But I couldn’t help feeling that there were more to learn about Prussian womanhood. Thank goodness for a new exhibition – Preussens Eros, Preussens Musen – at the old coachhouse in Potsdamer Neuer Markt. It is a collection of not particularly brilliant paintings, sketches and photographs depicturing Prussian women through the centuries. The pictures are linked to biographies in a very cleverly edited catalogue. And there the full melancholy and determination of the women is revealed. You can look into the eyes of Cecilie, the  Prussian crown princess, and see a kind of stoicism unusual in a 22 year old. Her hair is pinned up underneath a bonnet, she is fingering a sapphire necklace; Philip de Laszlo’s portrait seems to be conventional enough, the princess’ skin fashionably translucent. But there is a sense too that she knows of her husband’s adulteries and that she has decided to ignore them and get on with her own life. The marriage was effectively over by 1913 and Cecilie managed the household by herself from August 1914 until the Crown prince returned from exile in 1923. It is a royal portrait but also a picture of a frontierswoman, someone very practical and impatient of men.

Go to see these portraits: of Hedwig Weisbach, her shoulders bare, a fur lined leather  coat. Seemingly a straight forward oil painting of a Prussian beauty – but in fact an idealised image painted in 1884 at the orders of her husband. Hedwig, depressed, had run away from him. Or: Therese Ravené – her curled red hair looking more like the product of an Ossi Frisör ca. 1988 than Königsberg 1872. She too broke free from a marriage. Fontane wrote his L’Adultera about her.

What is specifically Prussian about these women? Christina Tilmann, writing about the photographs of Marlene Dietrich, sums it up: “Die Strenge mit sich selbst, die eiserne Disziplin und das Mütterliche wird sie behalten, auch als sie längst ein Star ist… das Pflicht und Ehrgefühl das sie von Jugend an gepredigt bekommen hat, bestimmt bis zum Ende ihr handeln.”  Until the end of her chequered life Dietrich considered herself an Offizierstochter, rather than a diva.

So , say the Potsdam curators, it is possible to be both Prussian and a sensual women. Forget, please, Bavarian Barbaras and Ruhrpott Renates. Prussian women are practical and fearless  and erotic and despite all that gute Kerle. Beate Uhse? An east Prussian adventurer. Stefanie von Guttenberg? A Bismarck. That is Prussia for you: bewaffnet aber sexy.

Roger Boyes next book is: “To Prussia with Love”, to be published next April by Summerdale press.

This is the story of a country smashed by 20th century wars; forcibly split into two states, the proxy battlefield of the superpowers. A country that has pulled itself out of the mud by sheer hard work.

Yes, that’s right, Vietnam. I have had a soft spot for Vietnam ever since reading Graham Greene’s novel about the last days of French colonial rule, the Quiet American. The hero was Thomas Fowler, a Times correspondent in constant conflict with his distant Redaktion. Even when he was played by the irritating Michael Caine in the 2002 film, Fowler always seemed to me to be a sympathetic character: cynical, yet capable of love.

I wanted to go to Saigon, hang around the seedy Continental Hotel where Greene used to write his articles for the Times – apparently it has not changed that much since the 1950s – but I never got round to it. Instead Vietnam came to me. You buy flowers from the Vietnamese and every half-way interesting street in Berlin now has a Vietnam restaurant. The Wilhelmstraße? The Heritage! The wilmersdorferstrasse? The Saigon Today and Viets.How strange it is to eat at Monsieur Voung on the Alte Schönhauser Straße, peer up at the large photograph of Dat Voung as a teenager and order dishes from the Mekong Delta. As schoolboys we followed every twist and turn of the war. For me, the Mekong doesn’t mean Tofu and ginger it means the frightening efficiency of the Viet Cong, the smashing of Ban Tre and the terrible statement of some long-forgotten American major: “sometimes it is necessary to destroy a town in order to save it.” Hah! But Mr. Voung’s soup based on Mekong recipes are just fine.

Most Berliners of a certain age know how the Vietnamese invaded the city. Some were Boat People who had fled the communist state. And others had been contract workers in the DDR, helping to pay off the Ostblock loans to communist Vietnam by building oil and gas pipelines or doing the dirtiest work in the Rostock shipyards.  The second group was probably the most exploited group in Europe during the 1980s. They lived in primitive hostels, were underpaid by the DDR and out of that income had a big chunk deducted by the Vietnamese government. From what was left, they sent cash home to their families. After the Wende, many of these Vertragsarbeiter stayed, some of them illegally trading and smuggling (cigarettes from Poland); but all, legal or schwarz, managed to save money.

Out of this Kraftakt, 20 years after the Wende, has come the Vietnamisation of Berlin’s low-cost Gastronomie. And their children- now usually fluent in German – are taking over. Prenzlauer Berg is so densely populated  with Vietnamese cafes it could just as well be Ho-chi-minh Berg.

A perfect model of immigrant assimilation, you could say. Twenty years ago they were exploited by the DDR; fifteen years ago many inhabited a judicial grey zone; now their offspring are paying German taxes, providing a useful service to Berliners and even employing native Germans.

But here is the problem: the Vietnamese are so sensitive to the market they have adapted their menus to what they think are German tastes. Eating at the Heritage last week I was offered Rindfleisch gebraten mit Ananas, süß-sauer for 5,80 Euros. Not exactly the authentic flavour of Asia, but a favourite, apparently, in the Wilhelmstraße. Alarm-bells should surely sound if you see a café offering Viet-Thai-sushi from one kitchen. I am not being snobbish about this. Britain’s favourite dish (Ahead of fish and chips) is, after all, the pseudo-Indian Chicken Masala. And I remember in the 1980s eating in Warsaw’s “Shanghai” restaurant “gefillte Fish Chinese style” (the cook had once worked with the Polish ambassador to Peking, came back with him to Warsaw and married a Polish-Jewish girl – the cuisine suffered accordingly).

The problem is that real Vietnamese cooking is distinguished by its use of  seasonal vegetables and fresh herbs: mint,Zitronengras, ginger. Berliners reluctant to pay  more than five Euros for a meat dish are  being served up rubbish. They go home with painful stomachs and end up hating the Vietnamese. So it was a relief that I discovered a brand new Vietnamese snackbar on the Oranienplatz in Kreuzberg. It is called Babaubè – meaning three friends – and has been set up by three white boys from Wilmersdorf who have thoroughly researched Vietnamese cuisine. Graham Greene would certainly have gone there – it is the first attempt in Germany to revive Franco-Vietnamese cuisine, offering for example the Banh Mi sandwich which uses a special variation of the French baguette and marinated Vietnamese ingredients. “We bought the recipe for the bread from an old Vietnamese baker in Saigon,” one of the founders, Moritz Duettmann told me. It is delicious.

So: three German Germans bring to Berlin the French food that was introduced to Vietnam in the colonial occupation of Indochina. And it is going to compete not only with the eingedeutschte Vietnamese food cooked by Deutsch-Vietnamesen, but also with the doener and the currywurst (R.I. P.) as the fast food of the capital. Immigration is a complicated business, nicht wahr, Monsieur Sarrrazin?

A year ago a Turkish entrepreneur set up a Kebab shop, just opposite my baker, at the entrance to the S-Bahn Grunewald tunnel. First there was döner and burek, then he expanded to include newspapers, coffee and grilled chicken. Finally, he sold Currywurst. Last week the shop was shut. A sad development but the business plan was not exactly brilliant: Grunewald is not famous for its thriving Turkish community, there is nobody under the age of 68 living in a half-kilometre radius and if you tried to communicate in Kanakendeutsch with your neighbours they would call the police. One rumour is that it will be replaced with a high quality sex shop selling red satin dessous. And why not? The nearest brothel is just a short walk away, in the Hagenstraße. We could call the shop Chez Thilo and dedicate it to  increasing the German birth rate.

Thilo Sarrazin has of course been on everybody’s lips in our sedate and resolutely conservative Kiez. He has become a kind of martyr, a truth-teller; a hero in the struggle against suffocating political correctness. I know that the story is a little more complex than that. He organizes his expertly analysed statistics to make a variety of contradictory arguments and in the end it is not clear whether he is trying to tell us something about intelligence and race, about education and finance, about the science of natonal decline; the book is a bit of a Stammtisch jumble. But I have always liked Mr. Sarrazin. You can’t be a bad person if you have an English grandmother and you have been sacked by Hartmut Mehdorn. And he is no racist, merely a trouble-maker. After all, he carries the Huguenot gene.

He is, however, naïve.

There are two ways to defend a book that no one has read. You either make clever 90 second statements (The Americans call these ‘soundbites’) that say nothing of importance. Or you stay silent. Mr. Sarrazin is not  a master of either of these techniques. Instead he tells his critics: “Read the book”. But Mr. Sarrazin has been in Berlin long enough to know that this is pointless advice. Berliners, in particular, are very suspicious about the reading process. They buy books for three reasons: a) to give as presents, demonstrating their depth of knowledge. Nowadays, a book is cheaper than a bunch of flowers ; b) to clinch an argument in the pub (“Schließlich habe ich das Buch zu Hause!”); or c),  in the case of intellectuals, to see if their names figure in the index.

Very few people in Berlin–and I’m not talking about Anatolian drug dealers–read books. The honorable exception, my publisher tells me, is women aged between 28 and 56. Visit the house of ,let us say,a bright young architect, run your finger along his book shelves and you will find a line of books that were once supposed to be essential reading– Charlotte Roche, the Roadkill girl, Big Franky Schirrmacher, Generation Golf–and you will find that most have not been read beyond page 17. There will be crumbs, or a hair, marking the spot where the reader gave up.

So Mr Sarrazin’s  true error was not to offend the muslims and the jews–anyone can do that–but to imagine that he was going to be the spearhead of a movement that will ask suppressed questions about the meaning of immigration. In fact he has merely filled(along with a supposed cannibal resturant and Frank-Walter Steinmeier’s kidney) the Spaetsommerloch, the critical ten days between the end of holidays and the beginning of the school term. This is when newspapers have to reclaim their readers after a long summer absence. As soon as Mr Sarrazin has been formally sacked from the Buba by the president, he will have fulfilled his function : the creation of outrage. He will sell books but will not convince the political establishment that it needs to change.

The SPD Vorstand would be stupid on Monday to run after the Buba and expel Mr Sarrazin. If I understand my (borrowed) copy of the book correctly, Mr Sarrazin is primarilly concerned with the Underclass. Immigrants, as we know, form a significant chunk of this class but so do Germans who can trace their roots back to the Middle Ages. One section of the Sarrazin book calls for the withholding of  welfare payments if parents do not send their children to school. That is the punitive Sarrazin, and you can love him or hate him. His underlying case however is that the Unterschicht should be opened up, made more socially porous. Work has to have meaning;  individuals have to take their lives into their own hands. This, surely, is a core message of the modern Social Democratic party. Mr Sarrazin is not some kind of right-wing fanatic.

Perhaps he would have been given more credit if he had accepted that some immigrants do indeed make determined efforts to rise in German society(look at the Vietnamese for example) or if had suggested ways in which the Turkish community could be better motivated. I have written before about a friend, Ayfer, who is now a fashionable hair-dresser in Mitte. One of many children of a gastarbeiter family, she left school early but discovered a passion for hair dressing. The zweite Bildungsweg–far superior to anything we have in Britain–allowed her to catch up with her Abi.Then Vidal Sasoon, Tony and Guy, Meisterbrief. She decided to open her own salon but the bank rejected her as a bad credit risk(single, female, hairdresser, Turkish). Ayfer’s parents then  gave up their savings–intended for their retirement in Turkey–so that she could open up the salon. Today she employs four Germans and is of course German herself.

What does that show us? That the German system really does open up chances for the ambitious–but that it can also throw up obstacles. And that you don’t have to know a single line of  Walter von der Vogelweide in order to commit yourself–as Ayfer’s parents did–to a German future for their German-Turkish daughter. These are the mechanisms of social integration. They have to be understood and refined but we are still a long way from Sarrazin’s Abschaffung of Deutschland. A young woman I know, a Sarrazin fan, told me the other day:”Kulturpessimismus ist doch geil!”

But it isn’t reallly. Let’s just remove the hysteria ftrom the debate, look at the problems unblinkingly(that’s why we need Sarrazin to stick around), and see what can be improved. Every major European society has similar issues; it is time that Germany exchanged experiences with some its neighbours, and opened up. It is no use pretending that everything is perfect.

There was a long wait at the cafe on the Spinnerbruecke and you had to be careful not to have your foot crushed by a studded Dallas Cowboys motorbike boot. “Maenner muessen Stinken” said the patch sewn on to the collar of the Kutte of the man in front. He was certainly consistent: his greasy greying Pferdeschwanz smelled of, well, Pferdeschwanz. A sweaty business riding a motobike in the summer. Especially when you are  120 kilos of tatooed flesh packed into a tight leather sausage skin. Remember that bon mot about Arnie Schwarzenegger the Terminator ? That he looked like a brown condom stuffed with walnuts? That is what the queue looked like; lots of condoms, lots of walnuts.

When it came to my neighbour’s turn to order I expected him to ask for a raw chicken so that he could bite its head off, apparently a common Hells Angel practice. Instead he ordered the Schoko-Pudding.

The Spinnerbruecke on the Spanische Allee is not my natural habitat. It overlooks the Avus where bikers used to hurtle down the track producing factory levels of noise. I suppose the people looking down from the bridge were the Spinner. Perhaps it was the bikers themselves. In any case the speed limit has put an end to seriously irresponsible bike-racing but the cafe has remained Germany’s most active meeting point for rockers in leather. The bikes are paraded outside like carefully manicured well-bred hounds in a dog show. The smell of petrol clings to the beer garden.

There,surrounded by the hum of traffic, Bernie was waiting for me. He is my Biker-Buddy, and I wanted reassurance from him.

I have just read a best-selling(but ultimately worthless) memoir of Bad Boy Uli, a dissident Hells Angel from Kassel, who makes it clear that his clan is basically a front for organised crime. This may not surprise ordinary readers but it was upsetting for me. As conventional white British teenagers in the 1960s we had admired the Hells Angels as romantic outlaws in a corruptly run United States which was waging an illegitimate war in south-east Asia. Of course the Angels weren’t really heroes–their bikes, their glistening Harleys were the stars of the show–but we craved some of their wildness, their lack of respect for authority. There were 20 pupils in our boarding school dormitory and as a concession to our individuality the teachers had allowed us to pin any non-pornographic poster of our choice on the side of our cupboards(Spind). One half of the dormitory pinned up Marianne Faithful in a leather catsuit because she had just appeared with Alain Delon in “Girl on a Motorbike”. The others had had a picture of Dennis Hopper leaning back on his chopper in Easy Rider. In 1969, just about every teenager in England was committed either to Marianne Faithful(briefly Mick Jagger’s girlfriend) or Dennis Hopper; it was one of those elemental choices that stayed with you for decades. Pepsi or Coke? Rolling Stones or Beatles? Marianne obviously looked better than Hopper but her film was existentialist rubbish. Easy Rider on the other hand was the film of our lives: a quest for freedom.

I was a Hopper fan and so was Bernie. He is a Rechtsanwalt from the Ruhr, specialising in  insurance fraud, but he lives for his Ducatti. I had once mentioned Easy Rider in an article, he had spotted a mistake and we had started an occasional email correspondence. We hadn’t met since since Hopper’s death last May, so Bernie drove up the autobahn for a chat. As usual he looked ridiculous in leather.

“Did you read the confessions of Bad Boy Uli? I asked him. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Maenner muessen Stinken slurping down the last of his pudding. It looked quite good.

“Yeah,” said Bernie.”Rubbish.Bad for bikers. Soon everyone will think that only criminals ride motorbikes.”

Bernie was beginning to feel uncomfortable in the sun so we went inside where he could keep a proper watch on the Ducatti.

Then, for an hour, we talked about Dennis Hopper. His films–he was in “Rebel Without a Cause”, in “Giant”, in “Apocalypse Now”, he was in David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet”, he was the bad guy in “Speed”. Why do some actors get stapled to the imagination, while others just fall away? He was wild–and clever. That was the point about Easy Rider, and the symbolism of the motorbike, an essentially masculine bit of engineering that allows you to speed away from problems.This is not just about actors and cinema. When I was young even chess had its rogue heroes–Bobby Fisher and later Gary Kasporov. Now wildness is seen as destructive of talent and the first instinct is to throw a drug taking singer like Amy Winehouse into jail and cancel her advertising contracts. In  the late 1960s and early 1970s  rebellion and talent seemed a natural mix for singers, for student revolutionaries. There was a sense that we were all driving very fast.

Bernie looked at his watch. I looked at my Blackberry: three missed messages. He offered his spare helmet and a lift into town but I declined; the bike years have gone, you can’t hang on to them . Schoko-Stinker got onto his bike and left with a explosion of noise that resembled a mortar atatck. I should have asked him what he did.”Bound to be a Realschullehrer, ” said Bernie, zipping himself up. “Who else would have time for Pudding at four in the afternoon?”

There was a time when I enjoyed August in Berlin. Sleepy drinks next to Kreuzberg canals, the city is on low metabolism. Comatose but in a positive way, a kind of opium slumber that brings enlightenment in your dreams. But August is also the month that I was born and it is the time when I become aware that my senses are dulling. I have to wear glasses to read the subtitles of Japanese films; can hardly hear my own voice at a busy vernissage. Other senses compensate, of cause. Now I can smell much better than when I was a 20 year old; sometimes I feel like the murderer in the Süsskind novel. What is my nose telling me at the moment? That Berlin stinks in August.

The U3 from Heidelberger Platz (the station is already famous for its pigeon droppings) to Nollendorfplatz smells of creosote and antiseptic; the after shave lotion from Hell. Don’t ask me why. And the smell of diesel clings to the streets. In a pavement café, the chances are that some pungent perfume rises up from the sewers. To like Berlin in August you have to like the smell of urine: cats, humans. It is warm enough for the homeless to sleep aside, so even posh shop fronts smell, at 10 am, of piss and alcohol. As for the men who change the Dixie Klos, they have gone on holiday (maybe to the same place as the workers who have set up construction works in every major road). When there is a slight gust of wind, the Dixie scent catches the back of your throat like some milder variant of the poison gas used in the First World War (which broke out, of course, in August). Perhaps the Senat should impose a tax on public urine, like the Emperor Vespasian’s law, the vectigal urinae.

Or perhaps there is just a case for going on holiday in August and abandon the idea that there is something romantic about staying alone in the city accompanied only by the tourists in their flip-flops and ill-fitting Zara shorts. “What dreadful hot weather we have!”  writes Jane Austen, the English novelist, “it keeps one in a continual state of inelegance.” It’s not just the nose that wrinkles; the whole aesthetic apparatus collapses. You notice things in the end-of-summer light that are best left unnoticed. In the apartment, the piles of yellowing newspapers behind the sofa (not to mention the hole in the sofa), the spiders web, is suddenly lit-up; August sun is as unforgiving as neon, strips away charm. Outside, the trees – you see for the first time – are coated with a thin dust. Birds don’t sing in August. Not in Berlin.

Whoever said August was supposed to be a benign month?  Nagasaki, Mauerbau, Jahrhunderthochwasser, S-Bahn strike. It’s the month when nothing is supposed to happen and therefore the perfect moment for bad men to do bad things. Or for the gods to go crazy. It’s the month when you realize that some of the most interesting people in your life have small children and are therefore absent from Berlin, enjoying the fresh air somewhere else. It’s the month when I’m stung by wasps.

Time to surrender, perhaps, and see if there might not be some last minute escape from the city. There is desperation to the mission; like the people trying to clamber onto the last helicopter out of Saigon before the Viet Cong marched in. At a certain moment the August choler defeats dignity and commons sense. You reach for the phone and call a Reisebüro. But the phone rings and rings…and you know, that the Reisebüro people have also given up on the city. I remember seeing a sign on the locked door of a London travel agency: “Please go away”. Like migrant birds the travel professionals have a unique sense of timing. August, they know, is a lost cause. If you are still left behind in Berlin in August, there is nothing further that can be done. You are beyond medicine. All you can do is wait for August, the dumme August, to pass and for normal life to resume.

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).

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.

Dentists are a barometer of economic crisis. Thanks to the corrosive effect of sugar, dentists are never short of a euro. And they are always on the lookout for safe investments.

So obviously I paused for reflection recently when I saw a dentist acquaintance in Berlin loading up his car. His wife, formerly his assistant, was ticking items from a list, just as she used to register the cavities in patients’ molars and incisors. Crate of mineral water? Check. Crate of beer? Check. Picnic cooler bag? Check. Bicycle rack? Check. Blankets, two portable thermos flasks, a portable television (for the Germany vs Australia match). An inflatable dinghy. Mosquito spray.

“You’ll need a whole caravan of camels – thank God, you don’t have children as well,” I said, displaying my usual diplomatic flair.

“Instead we have a house in the country,” said the dentist’s wife, casting a professional glance at my jaw structure. “In Brandenburg.”

Brandenburg, where else? At a stroke I had identified a new urban trend for Berliners: the weekend cottage in the countryside surrounding the German capital. A Prussian finca, if you will.

We have historically low interest rates (which is only fair since banks are getting their money for almost nothing), house prices are low, especially in economically depressed Brandenburg. What could be a better investment in uncertain times than bricks and mortar? The stressed Berliner is discovering the splendid isolation of the eastern German countryside.

Of course, the problem is that the big-city Berliners are finally putting down roots in the east, but without the slightest intention of making contact with the easterners, or Ossis as they’re still known. The new weekenders let their children play in the lakes and recover a kind of rural innocence but tell them not to play with the local kids. As for the adults, they seem to be treating their weekends out of Berlin as a kind of marital therapy. Away from their work, their over-ambitious friends and their Blackberries, couples have to talk to each other.

In case Dagmar wants to talk through their problems a little too intensely, Carsten takes a fishing rod and makes his way out of the house. He naturally hates the enforced stillness of fishing but it is surely better than going down to the village pub and getting to know the Ossi natives.

You will have likely seen the reports some weeks ago of Gabriela S., an accountant who had left communist East Germany in 1988 to settle in the Stuttgart area. She was turned down for a job and later saw the reason why: a handwritten note on her application form said “Ossi” with a minus sign next to it.

She took the company to court on ethnic discrimination. Her claim was rejected but it has gone into appeal; reason enough for Germans to debate as to whether Ossis really form their own ethnic group after suffering through 40 years of communist dictatorship.

And that certainly is how many of the new weekend colonisers are behaving towards the people that already live there. Brandenburg has become interesting for Berliners because of its spectacular landscapes and solid real estate, but not for its inhabitants.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter too much. The English have bought cottages in Wales for years, and looked down on the Welsh for centuries, yet the world has not collapsed. Buying up Brandenburg may eventually spark some curiosity about the lifestyle and attitudes of the natives. I hope so: I have always been confused by the lack of western curiosity about the east. Why is it that the average Rhinelander would rather go to Disneyland than Mecklenburg?

That is why I would like to see Joachim Gauck, a former civil rights activist in the east, as the next German president. He has the ability to develop intelligently this rather clumsy and unfruitful two-decade-old conversation between the two halves of Germany.

With the government’s proposed austerity programme likely to hit eastern German communities harder than those in the west, the country needs someone with political authority to explain to easterners that the federal government is not fundamentally against them.

These days not even Chancellor Angela Merkel seems to speak up for Ossis even though she’s from the east herself. Make Gauck president and I guarantee that within four years The Left party, which has its roots in the formerly communist half of the country, will have lost half its support.

I am of course aware that my credibility as a prophet has been under strain since my last prediction that Germany’s teen singing sensation Lena Meyer-Landrut could not possibly win Eurovision. The numbers were against Lena as they are against Gauck, who has little chance of being elected later this month. But happily I was wrong about Lena. Hopefully I’ll be wrong again.

Roger Boyes’ new novel, “Ossi Forever” (Ullstein) is now available.

Just to show you that I am not infallible…

I am not a violent man but whenever I see Dieter Bohlen’s face I feel a powerful urge to hit him on the nose. It is not just his grillhähnchen face or his nasal voice; I think rather, it is that permanent sneer. 

  Instead of stalking him at one of his many villas, I tend to just throw a shoe at the television screen, in loose imitation of the Arab journalist who assaulted George W. Bush. With Bush, it was the sneer too.

So  I should have known better. What was I doing watching Gottschalk on Sunday evening? I could have been reading a book. Or peeling potatoes. Then Bohlen appeared on the sofa (placed for some reason in a Majorcan bull fighting arena) and demanded that the Greeks give 12 points to  Lena in the Eurovision song contest tonight because ,well, Sie wissen schon, we have given the Greeks so many billions of euros. That’s when my shoe flew and my wide screen Phillips hasn’t been the same since. I hope it can be fixed before the World Cup.

Bohlen was maybe trying to be funny. Germany of course is spending its money not in order to give the Greeks an easy life, but to save the euro, its own currency, from the consequences of some really bad decisions . Decisions that  were made together with the Schroeder government . Let the Greeks vote how they want, please.

The real problem at the moment is what I call Siegerwahn. Germans feel so badly done by, that they want to win something, anything, that rewards their talent, their modesty, their innate goodness. First there was the illusion that Angela Merkel was somehow the Queen of Europe. Verpufft! Then came the idea that Bayern München was the best team in Europe , verpufft! Schumi ? Forget him. Now through a kind of mass psychosis there is the idea, in every German living room, that Lena will win the Eurovision song contest. Thus establishing that Nicole, all those years ago, was not some kind of freakish event.

 It so happens that I quite like what  I have seen of Lena : she is cheeky, seems to understand what she is singing and has the fresh-faced charm of someone selling bio-ice cream on the Ku’damm.

But she can’t win. It is delusional of the Germans to believe that she – indeed any German – can defeat the voting juggernaut of Eurovision. Do you really believe that the best song (even supposing that “Satellite” really is the best) wins in this strange contest? Not for the first time in its history Germany has failed to understand geopolitical realities.

Read the scholarly works of Dr. Derek Gatherer, perhaps the word’s best Eurovisionologist. There are, he says three voting alliances that now dominate the contest. And Germany does not belong to any of them . The first is the ever-expanding Balkan bloc which really took off after the collapse of the Yugoslav state. Croatia is at its heart. It includes Macedonia(voted out in the semi finals), Slovenia and–despite the bloody war fought between Zagreb and Belgrade–Serbia. Turks vote for Bosnia(because of the muslim community), the Bosnians for the Croats, the Albanians for the Macedonians, the Greeks for the Serbs, the Cypriots for the Greeks.

What chance does Lena have against this tangle of neighbourly back-scratching, blood feuds and mutual dependencies? Thanks to the inevitable large vote for Turkey, Germany has actually become a Balkan player, but not a big enough  one to attract large numbers of  votes for Lena.

The only major challenger to the Balkanistas is what Dr Gatherer calls the Viking Empire. Icelanders vote for Danes, Danes vote for Norwegians, Norwegians vote for Swedes, Swedes vote for Latvians, Latvians vote for Lithuanians, Lithuanians vote for Estonians, Estonians viote for Finns. That is how the hard rock Finnish band managed to win in 2006. This is more than just a comfortable Eurovision arrangement–it reflects real life trading patterns and political  decision-making across the Baltic sea.

The third bloc isn’t of much help to Lena either–the re-invention of the Soviet Union as an association of singer-states. Its hub is in Russia, obviously.  Ukraine always benefits from this league, so does Belarus. This year Azerbaidjan may finish high up with a song called “Drip Drop”. I can hardly wait.

Winners of Eurovision nowadays attract votes from more than one bloc. Last year’s winner, Alexander Rybak, for example came originally from Belarus and was therefore guaranteed East European votes. His perfect Norwegian brought in all the Vikings. To mimic that success Lena would have to change the name of her song from “Satellite” to “Sputnik”( a guaranteed 12 points from Moscow) and smuggle in an ABBA phrase for the Nordics. Maybe “Money, money, money makes the world go round.”

Alas it has not happened. Victory will probably go to the hairy chested Greek Giorgos Alkaios. Which will mean that next year’s contest will be staged in Athens. And part of the bill will be picked up by the European Broadcasting Union, one of whose principal paymasters is Germany. That is the new Europe. We will have to make sure that Dieter Bohlen gets invited.