Everyone Looked Out the Window

Sara, a Berlin blogger at DragstripGirl, posted something I haven’t been able to shake. She was on a regional Deutsche Bahn train—middle of the day, other passengers around her—when a woman started shouting. Not muttering. Shouting. "Germany for Germans." A man from Thuringia, shaved head, nodded along, pleased to have found someone to harmonize with.

The things the woman said next I won’t soften. She called for Black people to be put in ovens. She said foreigners should be gassed "like the Jews." She was cheerful about it. The smile on her face, Sara wrote, had the quality of someone reciting a prayer they’d been waiting all day to say out loud.

Sara screamed back. Not argument—just screaming, the kind that fills a train car. She turned on the silent passengers too, the ones performing neutrality, careful not to take sides. She named what they were doing. The racist woman threatened to stab her. Nobody moved. The train pulled into a station, people got off, the woman walked away.

That’s the shape of it: no climax, no consequence, no one getting what they deserve. The small racism doesn’t need a dramatic ending to do its work. It just needs everyone to look out the window.

Almost seventy years on and the ideology hasn’t gone anywhere—it just becomes more or less willing to say itself in public depending on the weather. The people shouting it probably can’t picture what the world they’re nostalgic for actually looked, felt, or smelled like. They just want permission: to hate loudly, in daylight, in a train car full of witnesses. Sara didn’t give it to them. That’s not nothing. It might be everything.