Nymphenburg to Turkenstrasse in 17 Minutes
An Uber Driver’s Perspective on The State of Munich, America, and Cyclists
One November, I found my way to Munich: a modern city filled with wooden clocks, minimalist art, and early-morning alcoholics. I think my grandfather’s family hails from this corner of the earth, but he was a man almost no one trusted with geological information. He had claimed almost every ethnic group on the map as part of his long and noble heritage, from the Swedes to the Balochs to, most recently (and peculiarly), the Ainu of Hokkaido, which, of course, was added after a sojourn to the north of Japan. Nevertheless, here I was in a city of at least some relation to familial lore. I had originally come to this place with a traveling band of students hell-bent on cheap Instagram clout, and so for the first three days in the city there was a rush to take as many pictures drinking in the most stereotypical German locations: a beer in the Hofbrauhaus, a beer by the Glockenspiel, and more beer by the Schwabingerbach; it was tiring. So, for the last day I separated from my companions and headed into the city, attempting to connect with the city on a deeper level than shallow tourism could provide. It was during this solo adventure that I would find Bavaria.
The 16th century was a period of rapid change in Europe. The discovery and subsequent conquest of the New World, Gutenberg’s printing press, and the rumblings of the Protestant Reformation all shaped a Europe that was both ascending to modernity and descending into chaos. Amidst this rapid social change, something else was happening: a group of travelers had arrived at the gates of Munich, vagrants who would later herald the greatest migration of people Europe had seen in almost a thousand years.
The city of Munich was almost completely destroyed by the end of the Second World War. Following this utter annihilation, the city was rebuilt in a manner that, unlike most European cities, made it completely unwalkable. So, as any reasonable person would, I tried my hand at public transit.
I failed miserably to understand the vast mesh of letters that make up the German lexicon, and was left stranded in the outskirts of the city. With a two-hour walk from my Airbnb, and with the sun starting to set, I began to feel a slight panic. It was in this state that I hastily ordered an Uber. Much of our modern media about Germany focuses on the danger of Europe in its current state. Typically, I tend to be pretty skeptical of that sort of news. However, being stuck in an unfamiliar city alone, far from the tourist section where the people all speak English, fears tucked away in the in the back of my head got to me. I climbed into the Uber, must and with my hand readily fixed on my phone. My driver, dark-bearded and husky, introduced himself as Amir and I as Colin, but that was about it for the first part of our ride, until Amir almost hit a bicyclist turning a corner that eventide.
When discussing the history of the Iranian plateau, there is no better source than the Shahnameh, a massive poem that transcribes the history of the Persian people from the creation of the world up to the Arab Conquest. It’s an epic poem filled with adventure, mysticism and, thankfully, for the purpose of this essay, the origins of one of Europe’s oldest ethnic minorities. You see, King Bahram the Fifth of the Sasanian Empire was a good king. In his twilight years of the 420s A.D., he decided that his people should be able to enjoy the luxuries that he had access to. So, he requested a king in India to send 10,000 musicians to his kingdom. The king gifted these musicians with enough food and animals to live free and play music for his people. Yet they returned, starving, only one year later, having eaten all of the animals and wasted the food given to them by the king. Furious at their short-sighted attitude, the king banished them from his lands. This tribe wandered westward for the next thousand years, from the Middle East to Anatolia to the Balkans and eventually to Germany, and are the origins of the Romani, the Gypsy.
Now, this German cyclist had ran the stop sign which Amir had just crossed, causing them to nearly collide in the intersection. Amir rolled down his window, and for an incredibly awkward three minutes for myself, Amir and the biker yelled at each other in German. At that moment, all I wanted was to get out of the car, but with a phone low on battery and with almost no clue of where I was, I held firm and tried to avoid eye contact with either side. The spat eventually came to an end, and we continued down the road. Amir fumed in the front seat, stewing quietly, perhaps as an attempt to preserve some form of professionalism. But eventually, he broke the silence.
“You, you’re an American right?” he blurted.
“Ya, I’m, um, from Florida” I responded, trying to disengage.
Relieved, he loosened up a bit, “You know that guy, the Germans in general, they have all these rules, strict rules, like here, he wasn’t supposed to go, it was my turn to get through the intersection, but the Germans act like the rules aren’t for them, they’re for everyone but them.”
A bit nervous, I tried to go along with him, telling about the troubles I’ve had traversing the city and the unfriendliness I had met while trying to use English. When I spoke in the language, people looked as though they knew what I said but refused to answer. And I get it. If someone came up to me in downtown Orlando speaking German I probably wouldn’t give them the time of day. I get the annoying nature of tourists so up until that point I hadn’t really been bothered much by it. But Amir had a different perspective. “They all speak English,” he told me “they learn it in school, but they hate using it.” He told me about his mother who had only been in the nation for a few months and was almost refused service at the doctor due to her inability to speak German. He told me how he was constantly hounded early on, with locals asking him why he didn’t know the language. “But German is a hard language to learn.” he said in perfect English. I would try to shift the conversation after that to something more menial but I was too deep. It was at this point I got his life story.
Amir had been a translator for the American army during the ongoing war in his homeland, Afghanistan. He wanted to help his nation, and he saw the American forces as the best shot that Afghanistan had at stability. He told me that as the war continued to rage and peace no longer appeared a possibility, he had to get his family out. He applied for asylum in the States, but when that took too long, he fled Afghanistan with his family. He made it to Germany with the waves of migrants that crashed on the shores of Europe during the migrant crisis. I knew, at that point, that his mother had made it all the way with him, but I didn’t want to ask what had happened to the other names he had mentioned.
“I hate it here, I hate these people, and they hate me,” He finally said. I didn’t know how to respond to that one. As a white American, I think we have this idea that Europe is our cultural kin, that we, in many ways, are just an extension of the continent across the sea. With the way that ethnicity has been racialized in our nation, we somehow have a right to be seen as an insider throughout Europe. But for people outside of our nation, we are just Americans, outsiders, and for Amir, I guess I was enough of an outsider that I’d be able to relate to his struggles of assimilation and racism. I don’t think I fully could, the fiery things he had to say were born from much more than three blissful days of tourism and from attacks and hostility more overt than the slight jabs I had experienced. From this conversation, I gleaned a look into a world that I never believed I would or should have access to. Being Caucasian in the States generally means never being an outsider in a Western society, but abroad I was, for Amir, enough for this other outsider to let down his wall.
The Gypsies had made their way to Europe, where here they, as foreigners in a strange land, faced constant discrimination. Laws would bar them from many places, most work, and services, forcing them to the outskirts of society where they would stay. It’s been almost 500 years, and still, they face discrimination in housing, jobs, education and basic levels of respect in society. A constant underclass.
When we have these debates about immigration, our general gut tells us that we should let as many people in as possible. The solution to their problems is to bring them here. But isn’t that the lazy option? It puts a huge burden on the people that must leave their homes. To travel dangerous trails, to learn a new language, to adapt to new customs, to abandon their home, they must do all the work to better their existence in an unfair world. We’ve become so wrapped up in scoring “woke points” that we rarely think of the actual people. If we did, we would find solutions to the problems they encounter in a world that allows us to skip the burdens of migration and find safety and happiness in their own lands. Letting refugees and migrants come to our nation is easy. What is hard is a global redistribution of wealth, reparations, and increased aid and investment: things that would stop the pain felt by the immigrants. Amir wanted to stay in Afghanistan, but he couldn’t.
When we arrived at my Airbnb, the sun had just finished setting. As I climbed out of the back of his car, Amir told me one last thing: he wanted to go to America. The soldiers he had worked with back in the day had been kind to him, and he’d received the impression he and his mother would be treated better there. He told me he had applied for a green card based on his service, but he was still waiting on hearing back. I wished him luck, shook his hand, tipped well, went inside and had a bowl of cereal for dinner.
