Choose Your Haircut: Skinhead or Hitlerjugend

Bitch Week at Dunkin' Berliner continues with today's installment: "Waaaah!  I'm in the Hitlerjugend!"

I believe you can only get two haircuts in Berlin:  The Skinhead and The Hitlerjugend.  I know this because no matter how many times I have gone in to any hair salon in Berlin and no matter how much German I’ve tried to learn or how much English the stylist spoke—these are the only options. I want the cut faded up the sides and back and neatly short—but not jarhead—on top.  I couldn’t explain it to them no matter how hard I tried.  Even when the stylist spoke perfect English, her clippers would slam to a halt at my occipital ridge at the back of my skull.  The scissors were picked up and a hard line between neck and crown formed. The result was the infamous look of the 1930s Hitlerjugend.  If I deigned to complain about this, they would abruptly slam the scissors on the table, pick up the previously-discarded shears and proceed to buzz cut me into skinhead land.

After a while I grew tired of this.  Colored people and foreigners were suddenly crossing the street or diving into the suicidal Berlin bike lanes.  I thought it was because I am large and scary, but my friends laugh at the thought of me scaring anyone.  I started wearing caps and hats until the hair grew back.  Eventually I bit the bullet and bought a buzz cut machine of my own at Rossmann.

The guide marks on the clippers I bought show 10 marks.  But you already know there are only two (even if you didn’t read ahead).  The ‘medium’ marks don’t cut anything and neither does any mark above the medium level.  I tried to shear the back of my own head in the mirror and the only setting that worked was the skinhead setting.   This means that if you continue over your entire skull, you will be branded a skinhead, be invited to shop at Thor Steinar and have Nazi cops buying you donuts (well, this could be a benefit for a Dunkin’ Berliner I suppose).  My clippers slammed into the occipital ridge again.  I didn’t want to go further out of fear of total skinheaditude.  So I stopped.  The familiar ridge formed on the back and sides of my skull. Jahwohl, you guessed it:  I looked like something between a Hitlerjugend and the Pope.  My friends commented on it.  I gave excuses and blamed the Skinhead-o-Cut 2000 machine I used.

Today I went back to the same hair salon I had been before.  I decided to give them another chance.  There was a different woman there:  60 years old, piles of poodle hair, jowls and a look on her face like she was shitfaced drunk.  Or DDR communist.  Or both.  I sat down in the chair.  I had spent an hour on the internet locating and printing a picture of the cut I wanted.  She laughed and told me to put it down.  She had everything under control.  The clippers slammed into my occipital ridge so hard I think chunks of dandruff and skin must have flown out.  I let her continue.  She buzzed the edges of my ears and hit my head several times with the scissors as I held my eyes shut.

I can’t show you a picture of me in this blog.  I am not quite Hitlerjugend, not quite skinhead, but worse:  some kind of mutated mole who was in a fight with a hedge clipper.  I will be wearing my hat again so the nice colored people and foreigners won’t have to dive into the treacherous Berlin bike lanes as I walk down the street.

Nazi Freedom in Berlin

Stepping Out for Donuts, Running Into a Wall of Cops

MAY 1, 2010, 15:00    It is now the fourth hour of the lockdown. I cannot leave my own street in Prenzlauer Berg because a bunch of fucking bonehead Nazis have the freedom to march in our fine, leafy, breeder-ridden streets. And the cops protect them. And all of this in a country where Nazism is technically illegal. Apparently there’s a bureaucratic form for everything, even illegal activities. Just sign the appropriate forms and you can waste police money and time for any asinine belief system you follow. Sure, they can’t wear the swastika. Nope, they can’t do the ‘zieg heil.’ But what the hell does it all mean when they can just wear black and obtain permission to walk the streets anyway? It’s as if a group of child rapists got to walk down the street freely and proudly. As long as the cops don’t see any child rape t-shirts on them and they don’t rape a child directly in front of them, alles gut. Same logic, different lowlife.

I saw there was nothing to eat in my flat and naturally I thought of going out to grab myself a fistful of lard-and-fake-fruit-sugar ecstasy as any Dunkin’ Berliner would do. So I stepped out to find a fence at the end of my street with a wall of cops in riot gear behind it. They weren’t letting anyone through—unless they were on their way home and they showed the cops their id with their address on it. We waited. I snapped pics of cops in various bored poses. At least I was able to take their pictures without having my skull tenderized by batons. Try taking a picture of a cop in America and see if you don’t wake up in the hospital with your camera up your ass.

 

We waited some more. We walked up and down the streets and saw that we were blocked in from all exit points. A friend of mine called me to see if I was going to Kreuzberg for the Annual May First Anarchy March and Yuppie Vehicle Roast.  I said I couldn’t go as I was locked down. My friend asked what I was going to do and all I could think of was raiding the police vans in search of stray donuts. There MUST be a box of Berliners in one of those riot vans.

 

I finally managed to obtain a Snickers Bar and a bottle of Sternburg beer from the only shop open within the police blockade. They had no real food and definitely no donuts, so I grabbed the bottle and the candy and walked down the street trying to blend in with all the other helpless victims of Nazi atrocity. One old drunk was babbling like a village idiot to each and every passerby. At one point he even took his drunken diatribe to the police line. They just laughed at him and rolled their eyes. The cops had special pockets in their riot vests for their juice drinks and apfel schorle. How cute. The drunk? Only a bottle of Sternburg*, no special pockets. No wonder he was ridiculed.

*This Dunkin’ Berliner blog post was brought to you by Sternburg Export Bier aus Leipzig. Discriminating Berliners who know strong, cheap beer choose Sternburg Export. Mmmm, Sternburg….. not just for drunken punks anymore.

Photos copyright Dunkin' Berliner

Berlin Cops Adore Nazis, Push Antifascist Demonstrators Around A Bit

I've always heard that Nazi or Neo-Nazism is illegal in Germany. Wearing the swastika or other Nazi symbols, singing 'Deutschland Uber Alles' and doing Hitler's high-handed salute, are all verboten.

Recently I've come to realize that this is total bullshit. I first had my suspicions several years ago on a visit to a small town in the former East Germany. There was a large tent with a party going on and a bonfire outside. After waltzing into their tent for some fun, I noticed that everyone was bald. With bomber jackets, camo pants and high-laced boots. I had walked into a skinhead party in a village field. So, casually, I ate some of their munchies, drank a few of their beers and slowly strolled away without speaking to anyone.

Upon my arrival in Berlin a couple of months ago, there was a fashion issue of the local English rag 'Exberliner.' I despise fashion as any red-blooded heterosexual from the States would (ich bin ein Redneck), but I picked up the mag anyway hoping to find ads for pubs and grub. I found that they covered all areas of fashion in Berlin, including NAZI FASHION. WTF? I thought this Nazi b.s. was unacceptable. Well, the clothing had some mods (I dunno, maybe a pretzel on the armband instead of swassie), but it was undeniably clothing for goose-stepping fools with too much time on their hands.

Today I was awakened from my Saturday afternoon nap to the sound of shouting. Usually the Berlin party crowd waits til after midnight to begin their drunken howls under my balcony. Not today. I stepped outside to see a large crowd of young whippersnappers wearing black clothes and bandannas pulled over their mouths, marching. Various street punks joined in to provide some local color. I was drowsy as any fat slob who eats pizza and beer all the time would be after a nap, but I snapped to attention when a white-helmet-sporting-cop started pushing one of the protesters around. The kid wasn't doing anything. In fact, he was headed AWAY from the shouting youth. But the cops wanted him fenced in. I went for the camera and took a couple of mediocre shots from the balcony. I headed down to the street to find out what was going on, and while people were milling around on the street corner I discovered the following: the shouting miscreants were various members of anti-fascist groups protesting the opening of a new(neo?)Nazi clothing store. I have to wonder where these brain dead boneheads get the money for designer fashions (one such brand I read about is Thor Steiner, a Norwegian designer who makes clothing for fascists)? Maybe they pay for their swag with gold teeth ripped from the mouths of dead Jews.

I hung around to get some snaps, but I got a bit nervous when one of the cops started video taping me as I was taking pics (see above left). I'm not usually keen on photographing cops in any country, especially ones where the cops actually wear jackboots and grimaces as part of their uniform. Today's coppers wore jumpsuits and helmets as well. In a country where Neo-Nazism is technically illegal, why does the largest city in Germany not only tolerate fascism, but recruit some of them as cops?