I will tell you a story here. I will write about the theme of this story in later posts, but for now I will only tell this story and maybe another one and then I would like to dive into the theme.

I met a friend of mine a few days ago. We ate, talked football, drank Diet Coke, talked about the marvel of Sling Box (the eighth and most important wonder of the world), and just when we were about to leave, he stopped me. “I am reading your post”, he said, “I must tell you a story”.

He told me that he was invited as a guest to a symposium conducted by a local politician in Mitte. He shared the stage with another ten speakers, sitting on chairs that together shaped the figure of a half moon. The moderator was sitting in the middle. There were around 200 people in the audience. “middle-class, very educated”, he said.

For two hours they talked about what Jews and Germans like to talk about: Holocaust, memorial, guilt, compensation, what have we learned, how come you can live in Germany.

After the talking the microphone opened for the audience’s questions. “Nothing unusual there”, my friend tells me. “But after seven or eight questions a woman got the permission to ask a question”. She was in her fifties, round glasses, greyness was invading her blonde hair. She had very soft voice.

“She start apologizing first and declared that she is a very good and kind woman”, my friend remembers, “and then she said ‘you know I am really really trying, but I don’t know how to get myself a Jewish friend’

“And all of a sudden it hits me how thoughtless and self-absorbed she was. She wanted to get herself a Jewish friend, just like people would like to get themselves a dog or a cat”.