Hater's Club

Aaah, another entertaining chapter of ze Germans and ze inferior races. Went to see a play (the premiere of Swiss playwright Lucas Bärfuss' "Die Probe" at the Kammerspiele, actually quite a relief after years of New York Broadway and realist author's theater hell, besides the fact that both theater and afterparty were filled with hordes of hip and pleasant young Munichians) and later back to Schuhmann's, where we joined a group of fellow cultural editors, some of whom I've known for literally decades.

One I'll name Django suddenly went on and on about the mosque they want to build in his neighborhood. This formerly pinko colleague went immediately over the rightwing cliff, talking about those elements who would crowd his streets and that even the Turks in the neighborhood were against it. He praised ousted governor Edmund Stoiber's and interior minister Günter Beckstein's succesful initiatives to block the project. Those two are the Bavarian equivalents to rabid culture war nuts Bill Frist and Tom DeLay. Well, according to them and Django worst of all is the fact that the mosque would be built right next to a Catholic church.

Now my most favorite of all neocons David would most likely agree witht hem, but he would have tried to outdebate me, which was always fun. Django backpedalled right away when I played the atheist card and complained, that those omnipresent Bavarian churchbells insult my secular sensibilities just as much as back in the roaming reporter days the omnipresent calls to prayer in Middle East countries. He switched to the parking space and trafic problems a mosque might create. Coward. At least stick to your guns. Only thing comforting about this was the sense that people at Schuhmann's are not just full of envy and spite, but equal opportunity haters in the old school German sense.