Welcome to the Danger Zone
Hamburg was being called Germany’s most dangerous city at the time. That’s what people kept saying. If you believed it, the place sounded like a war zone—chaos, vicious cops, danger at every corner. Tourists got nervous about visiting. The horror stories kept piling up, each one more terrible than the last.
It got so absurd that people actually started applying for government entry permits to Hamburg. Entry permits. Like it was a hazard zone or a quarantine area. When I saw the letter exchange with the Foreign Ministry, I realized what I’d always suspected: the government had completely lost the thread. No idea what people actually feared, what actually mattered to anyone, nothing.