I Sleep in Hitler's Room Read Online Free PDF Page A

should be permitted.”
    Is it forbidden?
    While this dialogue is going on, a fellow marcher chimes in. “It’s about police brutality,” he offers.
    Not about lemonade?
    “No! The lemonade part with the alcohol,” he explains, “is just a play on words. But it’s not about lemonade. Nobody here is marching about lemonade. No. No!”
    So, is this about police brutality?
    “Yes!”
    OK. We’re getting somewhere. The lemonade guy is giving in. Brutality? Brutality! I must admit that I don’t get it. How did you get from lemonade to brutality, if you don’t mind me asking you?
    “Where you from?”
    Jordan. Today I am Jordanian.
    This man, too, likes Jordanians, and he gets patient with me, a stupid but lovable Arab. “Police here are brutal. They don’t think for themselves. Only follow orders.”
    It’s rainy and messy and I’d like to know how far we still have to go. I ask him if he knows where the parade is heading.
    He doesn’t know.
    So where are you going?
    “Where everybody’s going.”
    Follow them?
    “Yes.”
    Like the police, following orders?
    He smiles. “Yes,” he says. “I, too.” He lights up a cigarette, drinks a bit more beer, and stares at me.
    Jordanians are not that stupid after all.
    We arrive at a place called Sternschanze, a place on the planet. Nothing special happens. More beer. And more beer. If you are not a capitalist, I conclude, you drink beer. Lots of it. “We are waiting for the night,” somebody finally confides in me.
    The night finally arrives. The kids, who have been drinking beer like camels for hours, decide they would like to have an extra bang for their money: pleasurable use of the empty beer bottles. Why not? They paid for it. They throw the bottles. Everywhere. On cops, at stores. Anything that moves or doesn’t deserve an empty bottle. And then some stones. Or whatever. Anything that can hurt or kill. Right next to me I see a young man bleeding on the street, lying between two cars. Nobody cares. It’s a war zone. A battle. And in this battle between the young beer drinkers who want lemonade and the police who don’t, the latter seem the weaker. The police fight back with water-canon trucks but use them sporadically. Spritz and then stop. Spritz. Stop. But not only water, as they also use video cameras. This is something amazingly beautiful: The cops charge into the crowd with video cameras. Between the lemonaders and the cops, it’s the cops who are afraid to go to jail. That’s the way it works here, I guess. The cops here must document their “good behavior.”
    Bottles splinter at the landing next to me. I ask the lemonaders to explain to me why they are doing this. They tell me they believe in freedom, in peace, and in love.
    I hope they don’t fall in love with me. This is love with no limits. And as the night wears on, the lovers/lemonaders start using explosives. Boom! Boom! Boom!
    This is the first day of my journey into Germany, but I feel totally lost. I spend hours here and I understand nothing. The only thing I figured out so far is this: I am a witness to a battle between lemonaders and video-camera carriers, where either side can potentially end up in the hospital or in the graveyard. But I don’t get it. Why can’t these two sides drink and take pix together in peace? I must be missing something here. I urgently need to find myself someone who can explain it to me. Who might that be?
    I leave this Boom! Boom! Boom! techno/rap concert and go to the train station. Problem: the trains do not operate. No taxis either. I have to use my feet, like Adam and Eve. Not exactly: The streets here are littered with broken glass, this is no Garden of Eden. How did we get from a fresh fruit salad to explosives?

    I get to the apartment where I live in Hamburg in one piece. It’s a student dorm, known here as WG (
Wohngemeinschaft
). Maybe I should ask them to explain to me what I’ve just seen. But before I open my mouth I take a closer look