Brandenburg's blood sausage
Dear Reader,
Last week I drove out of Berlin with my family to go for a walk in Brandenburg’s endless pine forests. On our way back we stopped in at a restaurant in a small village to feast on the kind of classic Prussian dishes that are impossible to come by in cosmopolitan Berlin: fried blood sausage (Grützwurst), gelatin and pork (Sülze), sauerkraut and boiled potatoes.
The landlady was a kindly Russian woman who’d come to the area in the 1980s when she worked at the local Soviet military hospital.
Along with the only other guest in the establishment, an elderly man with a thick Brandenburg accent, she told us how good life was before the end of the Cold War. Back then the restaurant boomed as an unofficial marketplace for money-less trade in goods.
“After reunification everything died around here,” the old man said.
Before they started talking to us, they had been discussing how much of what appeared in the German media about the war in Ukraine was in fact a fake. The old man insisted that pictures of Russians driving through Chernobyl had really been filmed during the nuclear meltdown in the 1980s.
The landlady meanwhile said she’d seen on Russian television that the Russian army had discovered underground laboratories in Ukraine where secret research was being done by pharmaceutical companies like BionTech and Pfizer. Putin would soon show the world the proof - Schwarz auf Weiß.
Meanwhile, in the south of Ukraine they’d discovered luxury properties that belonged to President Zelensky and the Ukrainian oligarchs.
Was this encounter typical of opinion in rural east Germany? I’m not sure. But it’s unlikely that we just happened to walk into the only bar in Brandenburg where the locals believe Kremlin propaganda over what they’re shown by their own media.
Just a couple of days after this surreal conversation, a convoy of 400 cars drove through central Berlin waving Russian flags. At least one of them had the letter Z - the obscure symbol of Russia’s war - printed on its side.
The German government has since appealed to its large Russian immigrant population to source its news from local and international sources.
"No one should believe the disinformation campaign of the Russian state media with its cynical portrayals of the war," said Chancellery spokesman Wolfgang Büchner on Monday.
Der Unsterbliche
A man from Saxony is being investigated for fraud after receiving at least 87 doses of Covid vaccines. He allegedly sold his proof of vaccination on to anti-vaxxers who could then use them to enter venues would otherwise bar them from entering.
The 61-year-old man would visit up to three doctors a day to get a vaccine and the documentation that came with it.
Police believe that he removed the relevant pages from his vaccine passport and sold them on to his clients.
He was eventually caught after a member of staff at a Dresden centre recognized him from his previous visit and informed the authorities.
One can only imagine that incredulity of his customers at the fact that this brave and lucky man had managed to survive so many doses of the deadly and dangerous Covid jabs.
In other Covid news, the government’s plans for a general vaccine mandate have collapsed due to the fact that there is no majority in the Bundestag for such a law. The bill was supposed to be debated on Thursday, but its supporters conceded today that they didn’t have any realistic chance of obtaining a majority in the Bundestag.
The government is now pinning its hopes on a vaccine mandate for the over 50s.
Meanwhile, Hamburg and Mecklenburg did end up being the only states to make use of the hotspot rule to extend mask wearing and social distancing rules (see last Monday’s newsletter).
As I’m sure you will have noticed, that hasn’t done much to change people’s behaviour. Masks are still very much de rigueur in the supermarket.
Anti-Semitism claim collapses
Back in October, I reported on the case of Gil Ofarim, a pop singer who accused staff at a Leipzig hotel of refusing to check him in because he was wearing a Star of David around his neck.
As I commented at the time, politicians and media outlets from Germany and abroad created a scandal out of the story despite the fact that it was based on one man’s tearful Instagram post.
After months of intensive investigation prosecutors in Leipzig announced last week that they would not be pursuing an investigation against the receptionists - instead they had opened a case against Ofarim himself for defamation.
Conversations with guests and staff members, plus analysis of the CCTV evidence, had convinced them that there was no substance to the claims.
The investigators were able to reconstruct a detailed scene in which Ofarim flipped out due to a misplaced perception that the staff had let other guests check in before him. Several witnesses said that he proceeded to rant that he would create a video that would go viral on social media and damage the reputation of their hotel.
The case against Ofarim will now hang on whether there is proof that he made up a malicious lie with the intent of damaging the hotel staffs’ reputations, or whether he misunderstood the situation in his rage.