Visa Required: Hamburg

Hamburg’s police force declared large swaths of the city a Gefahrengebiet—a legally designated danger zone—at the start of 2014, granting officers the power to stop and search anyone within the area without needing a specific reason. No suspicious behavior required. Just being there was enough. The zone blanketed entire districts, including the Schanzenviertel neighborhood, largely in response to protests around the occupied Rote Flora social center that had been simmering for weeks.

The internet responded with paperwork. People began filing mock visa applications for entry into Hamburg, writing formal letters to the German foreign ministry requesting official travel advisories for the newly designated hazard zone—the kind of documentation normally reserved for conflict regions and failed states. Some of the correspondence was published. The responses from actual civil servants attempting to process these satirical inquiries with straight-faced bureaucratic seriousness were, predictably, funnier than anything the jokers had written.

It doesn’t quite land as pure comedy for me, though. The legal mechanism is real and has been deployed in Hamburg before. You can be stopped because you exist in a particular postcode at a particular hour. The joke format works because it takes an absurd extension of police power and makes it visible through exaggeration—but the exaggeration isn’t as far from the actual thing as the satirists probably intended. The distance between "stop-and-search zone" and "border checkpoint requiring papers" is uncomfortably short once you start looking at it directly.