I Sleep in Hitler's Room Read Online Free PDF

around: The place is full with empty beer bottles. Everywhere I look is beer. Must be hundreds of bottles. I probably shouldn’t waste my time discussing anything with more drinkers. How these students get to study anything is beyond my capacity to comprehend.
    Upstairs on the top floor lives an old lady, a woman who can hardly walk. Young German students congregate next to her apartment, drinking, smoking, and having sex. The old lady won’t sleep tonight, the noise is simply unbearable. But the young students are having fun. Only that they don’t call themselves “fun people,” Like the Boom! rappers in Sternschanze, these students call themselves Anarchists too. And these anarchists want to change Germany. Because, as I work hard to understand, life is very hard here. There’s no Freedom, they tell me. The only way I can explain it is this: German Authorities force these youngsters to drink, smoke, and have sex. All the time.
    I don’t know, I’m a tourist here.
•••
    For the next few days I ponder this question: Why am I here? Without an advanced degree in psychiatry or some other related field, I stand no chance to understand anything. Why did I take this assignment? Maybe I should see a movie, I say to myself.
    A poster for a movie at a theater called Abaton shows two gay Orthodox Jews in Israel. The movie is called
Du Sollst Nicht Lieben
(Thou shalt not love). They even have an explanatory note in the window, claiming that, according to the Talmud, homosexuality doesn’t exist. I don’t know who taught them this particular item, since this is simply not true. Maybe they got confused by remarks the Iranian president, Ahmadinejad, made in a speech at Columbia University in New York the other day, where he said that there were no homosexuals in Iran.
    Perhaps I’m just too literal, perhaps there is depth here that is still lost on me. Maybe the anarchists are geniuses and I simply don’t get it. German culture must be so sophisticated that it takes extra care and concentration to understand it. This also makes sense, doesn’t it? Look at Mercedes, Audi, BMW. They’re all German.
    Bearing this new discovery about Germany in mind, I go back to the Sternschanze neighborhood to find some of the demonstrators and have them explain to me why they did what they did a couple of nights ago.
    I meet Ole, a young man, a kid, actually, next to a very ugly place called Rote Flora.
    Do you know the Rote Flora? That’s where young people with orange and blue hair jellied up in the form of knives stroll by. Know them? They are the ones who are dressed with torn leather jackets, dirty pants, piercings all over, and usually accompanied by big dogs and big bottles.
    Ole is glad to share his life philosophy with me:
A. He believes in peace.
    B. There should be no police to protect the state.
    C. Anarchy is good.
    D. Let the people decide.
    Next to where we chat there’s a handmade memorial to a leftist who died in the area. “
In stiller Trauer . . . Joe
” (In loving memory . . . Joe), it says on it.
    How did he die?
    “I don’t know.”
    What would you do, if there were no police and you caught a murderer?
    “Talk to him and try to make him repent in the hope that he won’t do it again.”
    And if someone rapes a woman, what should be done with him?
    “Same thing. The idea is that the people should decide, not the police.”
    Do you have a girlfriend?
    “No.”
    Did you have one before?
    “Yes.”
    Did you love her?
    “Yes. Very much.”
    If I raped her, what would you have done to me?
    “Kill you!”
    Wait a second! Didn’t you just say—
    “But that’s my girlfriend. It’s different!”
    Do you think you make sense?
    “I have to go. I’m sorry. I don’t have time.”
    I must figure these people out!
    I venture inside the Rote Flora. Like its exterior, the walls inside the Rote Flora are covered with graffiti:
No heißt nein
[No means no]
    No border, no nation
    Erst geschossen nie gedacht
. . .