Thre Nazi tales: III, people who wish to carry the fire in Europe

    Months ago I had planned Three Nazi tales: III as a small paranoia stressing analogies between 1930's and nowadays sociopolitical situations. Telling, for example, the festive Zeitgeist in Berlin at both times while Europe is/was sinking. Pieces from great movie Cabaret (torrent) would be placed among the intermittencies of today's techno-quantized Berlin night. It was indeed an optimistic tale dubbed People carrying the fire at Mauerpark. The climax was to be a scene I lived last summer: I saw how the spoke person of embryonic, demagogic party called Die Partei (The Party) was kicked out of a stage--the sacred stage where every Sunday the joyful Berlin youth (a youth which goes beyond any age) stands up to sing and play. I couldn't see at the time how resembling that scene was of the opening sequence of Cabaret, when a Nazi party member is spelled out of the club. The guys from Die Partei running desperate among the merry people exposing their crazy ideas about splitting the city into two again, rebuilding the wall. Meanwhile they looked down on me and my friends because we were Südländer (yeah, that word which dangerously approaches the semantics of Untermenschen). But people rejected those guys (that actually happened!) and that little stage at Mauerpark gleamed as a conspicuous torch with the fire that people were carrying.

    I wish to keep the optimistic point, but I'd also like to fine-tune the target of that fire that shone that last summer. Recently I visited Berlin again. A Tuesday at midnight a gang of Italian kids (age around 15) was traveling with the U1 metro line towards Warschauer Straße talking aloud and singing even louder. I've seen many such gangs in Berlin and one thing I can say: they don't know of nationalities. Whether Germans, Spaniards or Russians: they cry aloud and sing and play all the same. These just happened to be Italian. Also there was a passive-aggressive man (around 35 or 40) shutting them down, not by direct request as you would do with actual Menschen but with repeated "Ssshhhhhheses" as you would command dogs or Untermenschen. The kids ignored that man, so at a point he stretched towards one of them (I picture him out reaching the weaker of the boys) and punched him on the face. It wasn't an exaggerated punch, but it split the time into two and made patent all the violence that that train was bearing though the suddenly death-silenced night.

    I looked at the man horrified. In that moment, because of the unexpected situation, I didn't know how to proceed; and that embarrasses me. Nazism is in the details: a man capable of punching a kid to make him obey an unwritten law about being quite in the train at night. Nazism scales: as many more such men meet and recognize each other among nations a bird dark and cruel will raise its flight from the streets of Europe and eclipse the sun once more, screen that summer fire again. Nazism is in the absence of details: my inoperancy towards evil, the generalized passiveness towards evil encourages it and this is the hand which opens the jail for that dark and cruel bird which is already pecking in the rotten European apple. As always, the devil is in the details: let's don't let that happen. Let's carry the fire.