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Safety before common sense
By Andrew Flohr-Spence
spencand@mscd.edu

Early New Year’s morning I found myself at a rockabilly tiki bar on Wienerstrasse in Berlin, suffering from a slight case of culture shock. My wife and I had come to Germany for the holidays to visit her family, and after 12 days of Christmas on the farm with all the siblings and grandmas, we escaped to celebrate New Year’s with friends in the big city.

With only a few hours until our flight, I sat with the dreamy sounds of Del Shannon’s “Runaway” drifting through the smoke-filled room, the night’s celebration still vibrating in my bones. I remembered what a German friend had said earlier in the night.

“It sounds as if New Year’s in America is all very organized and boring,” he said. “America is the land of the free, but almost everything you are doing tonight in Berlin is forbidden there.”

Here I was in Germany – the land of rules and regulations – getting lectured on how well-behaved and obedient my country was. When I caught myself trying to explain that the laws are meant to protect us, I knew he had a point.

I was smoking in the bar, drinking after 2 a.m. A strange fragrance graced my nostrils of something other than tobacco being smoked publicly. Outside, the cherry bombs, rockets and things like sticks of dynamite continued to crackle in the night. Nearly everything I witnessed in Berlin was in some way illegal in Denver. What had changed in the United States, in Germany, in the world, that a German could question American freedom?

In America, we have been overcome with fear. We are jaded and apathetic – ready to bargain away our freedoms in return for safety. Fireworks are dangerous, that obviously had to be banned. Smoking kills and is stinky so we got rid of that, and drinking should only be done behind closed doors. Since Y2K and Sept. 11, because of the obvious dangers, large public celebrations have given way to private parties. Along with the rash of new crosswalks and plastic playground equipment, America has regulated and restricted everything we could think of in the last 20 years, and now we make the Germans look like reckless rebels.

In Berlin, perhaps because of the relatively recent bouts with death and destruction, the people seem to go about life more carefree, ignoring the possible risks involved. It is good to be alive, to be free.

Shortly before midnight, everyone tumbled outside onto the sidewalk with drinks in hand for the countdown. A glass of champagne in one hand and a cone-shaped cigarette in the other, I put my back against the wall and stood watching the mayhem around me. The streets were filled with people milling about, dancing, singing and tossing firecrackers in the air like candy. Through the gray smoke covering the street I could see flashes everywhere. The city whistled and thumped with explosions. Dust and cinders fell down like snow from the rockets bursting above. The chant of “zehn, neun, acht ...” rose up in the crowd, and at the count of “eins,” everyone cheered and began hugging and kissing. Champagne and beer were splashing everywhere, and glasses were broken.

The image of this public show of fearlessness struck me later that night. The fact that I was in a tiki bar surrounded by rockabilly hairdos, tattoos, piercings and leather jackets, and yet was supposedly in the land of lederhosen and spiked helmets, was a strange reminder of how small the world was getting. Fashion knows no borders. In this moment, what worried me was that in some ways the world was getting much more distant. Security was replacing common sense, and the fear of possible dangers was driving people to stay inside, yet life was on the street, embracing people and raising a glass to the new year.