Europe - migrants - Cologne attacks - The comments section on this Guardian article...

[DFW]

13. How Germany is reacting depends entirely on whom and where you ask.

In our town, just outside of Düsseldorf, we have had a "swimming pool" incident similar to others reported here, although no edict was issued against admission for refugees. Some of my friends who are retired spend their time volunteering to help with refugees, although that is where it ends. They do not invite them home, although, to be fair, before my wife retired, she was a social worker, and she said she would never invite her charges to our home, and at least a third of them were Germans born in Germany.

At the other end of the spectrum is another friend of ours now living in Köln. His wife left him nearly 30 years ago for a younger Moroccan (legal immigrant). He took it in stride, blamed his wife, not the Moroccan, and was not sympathetic when the Moroccan ended up mistreating his wife, who then re-appeared asking for financial support.

He was named chief correspondent for German Radio in Moscow from 1993 to 1998, and met a very nice Russian woman who is still his girlfriend. She has not moved to Germany. All her family is still in Russia and she speaks only Russian, and they both agree that she'd be very isolated if she moved to Germany. My wife and I both like her, although only I can converse with her, since my wife speaks no Russian. Our friend is comes from a working class family in the industrial town of Oberhausen. He is a Social Democrat from way back, and has voted SPD ever since he was of legal age.

He is also very highly educated, and went about learning Croatian when he started driving down there every summer. That's where we met in 1982. When he got his posting in Moscow, he learned Russian, which he found very difficult, but mastered. Knowing Croatian helped. A huge proponent of multiculturalism, when we meet for lunch or dinner in Köln, it is always at an ethnic restaurant. Usually Turkish or Kurdish, but sometimes Balkan or Vietnamese. However, he is positively livid at the current government's decision to bring in a million people who don't speak the language and don't know or respect Germany's way of life, and didn't take the measures to prepare them before settling them among the German population. He is now also retired, and worries about his fixed income pension, which is not generous like those of former members of the German or EU governments. His greatest joy these days is receiving friends from out of town and showing them around Köln, which dates back to Roman times. Any infringement on his ability to do this safely at all hours of the day or night drives him to angry ranting, something he never did. My wife is often there in her free time, and he now fears for her in Köln, since she looks 20 years younger than she is. She has never had a problem, but nor have we been there at night recently.

In our town, there have been minor incidents (like the swimming pool), but nothing major. The town is resentful at having the music school and a few sports facilities closed and turned into refugee centers, and our central town square has a number of bored young guys of Middle Eastern (not Turkish) origin wandering around at any time, but we have no real violent incidents. If we do, things will change overnight as they have elsewhere. We have gotten zero help from the Federal Government (Bundesregierung), and the state government (NRW in our case) has helped only to the extent that they tell us a day or two in advance as to how many more we should expect to arrive. It is tense, but nothing drastic has happened yet. As far as bad incidents not having occurred, no one expects it to remain this way. As far as the infringement on our lives goes, no one wants it to remain this way. The government's faceless bureaucrats, as overwhelmed and helpless as anyone else, tell the towns, in essence, "here they are, deal with it." To expect that every town will cheerfully do so is naïve at best.