MY FACE-OFF WITH DRUNKEN GERMAN SKINHEADS: O’Day’s Travel Woes #47

May, 1995 (continued): From Weimar, Germany, I had to travel to Berlin. Rather than drive the hour back to Leipzig, fly an hour to Frankfurt, and then change planes and fly another hour to Berlin, I had the bright idea of taking a 4-hour train ride from Weimar to Berlin.

As I arrived at the train station, I noticed scores of police officers, outfitted in riot gear.

“Gee,”  I thought, “my departure must be a big event here.”

It turned out that a soccer match had just been played in Weimar, and 150 visiting fans were returning to their homes in Berlin. Almost exclusively young men, many of them bearing (and baring, as they went shirtless so people could view them) many tattoos. A number of whom definitely would be classified as “skinheads.”

They had just attended a soccer match, where their emotions had run wild. It was a hot day, so they had consumed (and continued to consume) a lot of beer.

And their team had lost.

And they were to be my companions on the four-hour train ride.

I asked Andy Schneider, who drove me to the train station, if I should be concerned about this. No, he replied. Because there was a police officer for every fan, and the police would be traveling on the train, too.

Also, he said, I’d be in the First Class compartment, and the soccer fans would not.

(By the way, while waiting to board the train, I learned about a quaint custom of loud, drunken young German males: howling at the sight of a woman. They howled {like a wolf} at every woman they saw — including the riot gear-clad female police officers.)

So I got on the train, made my way to a First Class compartment in a non-smoking car, stowed my luggage, and sat down. An attractive woman in her 30s was the only other passenger there.

For about 2 minutes.

Then five skinheads spilled into our compartment. They were rather boisterous and, at first, amused themselves by teasing the female passenger — primarily by pretending to grab her purse and by making various comments in German (which I didn’t understand literally but the substance of which I could guess at).

I sat and watched, trying to figure out what to do about this situation. And then one of them — “the ringleader” — lit a cigarette.

Now, harassing a defenseless woman is one thing.  But lighting up in front of me in a non-smoking car is something altogether different. I immediately stood up, approached the smoker, pointed to his cigarette, smiled slightly and in a firm voice said — depleting fully half of my German vocabulary —  “Bitte…Nein.” (Please….No.)

The ringleader looked at me in shock, calculated his response…and then shrugged and extinguished the cigarette. And they stopped teasing the woman. They remained in our compartment for the 4-hour journey; I suspect the train was sold out. Although they remained high spirited, they didn’t bother either of us again.

This group’s make-up seemed to be modeled on “juvenile delinquent” movies of the 1950s: There was The Ringleader…The Sullen Guy…The Dumb Guy Who Would Do Whatever The Ringleader Told Him To Do…The Fat Guy Who Would Do Anything To Be Accepted By The Others…and The Sensitive Guy Who Knows He Really Doesn’t Belong With The Others.

Upon arriving in Berlin, I managed to gather up all of my belongings (suitcase, computer, tote bag of audio tapes, etc.) and stumble off the train. Just as it pulled away, about a dozen young German men stuck their heads out the windows and yelled at me, “Yankee go home!”

I’m pretty sure they meant it as a joke.