(To the right, Munich's Rathaus in the heart of the city)
A memory I’ll carry to my grave is the three-in-the-morning walk I took from my tiny apartment on Wilhelmstrasse in Munich, Germany’s Schwabing district to my brother John’s apartment on Türkenstrasse several blocks away on October 30, 1974.
Unlike me, my brother had a television, and we were going to watch live the Muhammad Ali-George Forman “Rumble in the Jungle” fight in Kinshasa, Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo). We watched boxing history as Ali knocked out Forman in the 8th round.
What’s remarkable today is that I had no fear of walking the dark streets of an inner city in the wee hours of the night. The thought of a robbery or attack was the furthest thing in my mind. I only thought about the fight I was going to see on television.
I lived in Munich from 1972 to 1976, studying philosophy at Ludwig-Maximilians University (the University of Munich) and working part time in the warehouse of the Lindberg appliance and music store. I’ve been back to Munich several times since those days, and the city is still as beautiful and exciting as it was then.
But is it as safe? Instagram and other forms of social media create a picture of modern-day Europe as an increasingly dangerous cesspool full of angry, criminally minded immigrants. Recent studies show that Western Europeans by and large believe crime is up. Yet studies also show that crime rates, particularly murder rates, have been on the decline since the year 2000, and even before.
According to studies cited by The Guardian newspaper, Western Europeans—with the exception of the English—generally have faith in their law enforcement agencies. It’s apparently well-founded faith. The murder rate in France, Germany, Italy and Spain has dropped more than 50 percent since the late 1990s and 30 percent since 2000.
In fact, the city of Munich is considered the safest city in Germany and one of the safest in Europe. Maybe I could still safely take that late night walk from Kaiser-Wilhelm Strasse to Türkenstrasse.
Still, Europe is changing. Immigration is a major issue across the continent, and violent encounters aren’t simply tabloid exaggerations. Is this centuries-late revenge for centuries of European imperialism, the revolt of the descendants of those who suffered under colonialism?
Economies are stagnating—in great part to due to European leaders’ blind allegiance to the war in Ukraine against Russia even at the expense of losing comparatively cheap imports of Russian oil and gas. Europe’s longtime economic leader, Germany, is de-industrializing at a staggering rate.
Europe is hotter, that’s for sure. The Germany (it was West Germany back then) I lived in had little use for air conditioners, and Germans lived to tease me about the America writer Henry Miller called the “air-conditioned nightmare”. Europe just experienced a record-breaking heat wave, reaching as high as 41 degrees Centigrade (105.8 degrees Fahrenheit) in places like southern Germany. So climate change is an issue that’s changing Europe.
Still, the biggest change in Europe today, I believe, is the quality of its leadership. Willy Brandt (West Germany chancellor from 1969 to 1974) and Helmut Schmidt (West German chancellor from 1974 to 1982), please come back from the grave!
What chance would a Willy Brandt with his “Ostpolitik” and reconciliation policies toward what was then Communist Eastern Europe have today? Russophobia rules in the legislative halls of Europe today, a blind and unfounded fear that Vladimir Putin aspires to make the nations of the European Union (its modern-day neoliberal version and war-mongering NATO are both a major problem with today’s Europe) vassals of the Russian state. The truth is those nations are vassals of the U.S. imperium, and their leaders don’t seem to have a problem with that.
Perhaps if I took that nighttime walk along the streets of inner city Munich today, the biggest difference would be the thoughts going on in my mind. I wouldn’t only be thinking about a boxing match on television. I’d be thinking about how I missed the Europe of my youth.
And I’d likely be worried—like Europeans in general--whether a mugger might come out from one of those alleys I passed by even if no such mugger ever appeared.
