Pfffff, what a fucking month. It got so bad (any of you remember the earthquake in New Zealand?), that we decided to skip Berlin for a few days in Rome.

On the way back, we grabbed a German newspaper, and I let myself dive into the minor news. Wasn’t ready yet for the fire and smoke, the green and the nuclear. In this section I ran into a delightful piece of news about a bakery in Saxony that decided to advertise its new campaign for chocolate cake, and accompanied it with a picture of young black baby.

What really fascinated me was the company’s response. “Something went wrong with this offer, but despite this, one doesn’t have to criticise shop workers or destroy posters,” said the company’s lawyer.

The bakery itself was unapologetic on its website: “The child which you see on the adverts is the little Sofiyha, whose mother Lina and father Timotheus are our staff. Because our connection with the people who work with us is very important and we are one of the most fecund companies of the region (an average of 17 births per year), the staff often make photos of their children, or the staff themselves, available for our weekly offers.”

It continued: “these photos are then used for adverts or on the side of delivery trucks with the aim of attracting attention, which it says is generally positive. Sadly there is in Germany a small group of over-sensitive fellow men who accuse us of spreading racist thinking. This is expressly not the case.”

The lights went off as we were descending toward the airport. I folded the paper and joked to myself that the bakery should have called the cake “nigger”. On the way from the bus I thought that this is one of these cases where Germans really don’t get it. That they are not racist on purpose, they just don’t get it.

We approached the exit when a policewoman stopped us. She identified herself and asked to see our documents. My wife pulled both of our passports and handed them to the policewoman. She took both, leafed through my passport, saw what she wanted, handed them back to us and wished us a good night.

She didn’t bother, in the name of courtesy or just for the sake of pretending to be not biased, to look into the passport of my wife (which was also foreign). They just don’t get it.