Depression and Döner in Offenbach

Durch die Nacht—Arte’s long-running series where two people from entirely different worlds spend a night wandering through a city together—produced one of its better episodes pairing Haftbefehl, the German rapper whose work turned Offenbach into something like mythology, with Oliver Polak, a Jewish comedian who mines his own childhood with a precision that’s genuinely uncomfortable to watch. Both German. Both outsiders in different registers.

They moved through Offenbach and kept landing on the things that are actually difficult: depression, the specific weight of döner at two in the morning, what it means to have a mother from somewhere else, the uncanny nostalgia of a fairground that’s seen better decades. At some point Udo Jürgens came up, and Jews, and the way those two topics occupy more conversational space in Germany than almost anywhere else.

I’d spent the previous hours watching documentaries about ISIS and landed on this almost by accident. The contrast was stark—the scale of organized violence I’d just been watching against two men being honest with each other in a city most people would drive past without stopping. Good television doesn’t always announce itself. This one didn’t.