Alarm

I came home from IKEA Saturday afternoon to find a large orange notice taped to my (that is, the apartment building’s) front door. It was from the local police department, advising us that a rash of burglaries had occurred on the neighboring streets in the last two weeks and that on Friday evening, a man was observed going door-to-door on my street, trying doors, peering into windows, checking to see if the windows were locked... you know: casing the joint. The police were called and responded but he was gone by the time they got there. The notice included a description of the man and the car he was driving and the numbers of the local precinct to report any suspicious activity.

I feel very unsafe all of a sudden, which is ludicrous because I know that crime is not unknown to my neighborhood (or any other neighborhood, for that matter) and I already try to use common sense in my daily life. My doors are always locked, I pay attention to what’s happening on the street around me, I have my keys out and ready when I’m walking up to the door, I always push the building door shut behind me to make sure that no one slips in, and so on. And the first thing I thought was, Man, I wish Finbar was here, as though the burglar(s) somehow wouldn’t dare break in if Finbar was around. I hate feeling like this.

Do men feel this vulnerable when they live alone? Do they worry when they walk home at night alone? Sometimes I think that they don’t really ever even think about these kinds of things. I know I’ve had more than one conversation where the men present scoffed at the precautionary measures and concerns that the women present voiced in this regard. They think we’re paranoid or maybe just plain nuts. The women think we’re being cautious and using common sense.

When I lived in Hamburg, I lived in a semi-sketchy part of town. My host family there had built a home in one of the suburbs fairly far out from town, but still within the city limits. When they built their home, it was very bucolic—near a large cemetery, on the shores of a small lake, lots of trees and only a 15 or 20 minute drive to get to the nearest farms. However, in the 70’s, the German government built a very large high-rise public housing complex literally on the next street over. When these buildings were built, they were part of a revolutionary social service reform. The buildings are arranged in “neighborhoods”, there used to be green spaces in between (long since reclaimed by more building and general neglect), there are shops, the bus lines are accessible... in short, it was going to de-stigmatize public housing, re-integrate the poor into the social fabric of the country, and take the slum aspect out of public housing. However, by the time I moved there in the early 90’s, the dream had long since been deferred. It wasn’t exactly a slum, but it was kind of seedy in some areas, there was lots of graffiti, and most of the residents of the neighborhood were foreign-born or the children of immigrants. I have no desire to get into the issues of immigration and integration in modern-day Germany. You could write a multi-volume set of books on the subject. For those of you unfamiliar with the issue, suffice It for purposes of this blog entry to say that for the most part, immigrants are not integrated into German culture and even the third- and fourth-generation are often not integrated and not considered citizens of Germany. This leads to all kinds of tension and resentment.

Anyway, even with the fact that I lived in a neighborhood with more crime than average and populated by immigrants with a reason to be angry and resentful of their German neighbors, my host family felt no hesitation to walk around the neighborhood after dark or to let me do the same. I would take the bus to go out here or there and then come back, often very late at night, and walk the three blocks from the stop to the house alone. This frightened me very much at first. My heart would beat furiously, I would start at the slightest noise, and I carried my keys in my fist (ready to be used as a weapon, dontcha know). This amused my slightly-younger host sister to no end. It took months to get used to the idea that it was more or less safe for a young woman to walk around in the second largest city in Germany alone at night.

I don’t exactly let fear rule my life. I come and go as I please, I do all kinds of things alone, and I’ve lived alone for years and years. But I avoid certain neighborhoods and I don’t exactly walk around the streets of Our City at midnight. I try to use common sense and trust my instincts. Nonetheless, I have a fear of the possibility that I could end up as one of the victims in an episode of Forensics Files, discussed ad nauseum (under the name “Sheila”) in Professor Feedback’s class.