By SALLIE SATTERTHWAITE
sallies@juno.com

The incident at the Bahnhof appeared in neither that evening’s TV news nor the next day’s paper.

I thought little of it after returning to the States, until the footage of Philadelphia cops swarming over a figure on the curb brought it back to mind.
To set the stage: Until recently when shopping laws relaxed a bit, the Bahnhof, or train station, was the only place in a German town where you could buy a loaf of bread or a bottle of wine after 6 p.m. Open ’round the clock, those in large cities have bakeries, groceries, a post office, a bank, florists, book stores, restaurants (both white tablecloth and stand-up) — almost anything you’d find in an American shopping mall.

The Bahnhof in Kôln, or Cologne, was recently remodeled and is bright and immaculate, always crowded, with the cleanest public toilets I’ve ever seen anywhere. You may stroll in from the street and never guess that it’s a train station until you take an escalator up to the platforms or down to the subway lines.

The Bahnhof incident was startling to me for two reasons: I have rarely been eyewitness to force directed against another human being, if you don’t count restraining the kids when they got their inoculations. And of all nations on earth, Germany is certainly one of the most civilized; order, dignity, public propriety are the rule.

With time on my hands while visiting our daughter last March, I was returning from a day trip to Aachen. As my train pulled into the station in Kôln, I noticed two German police officers stopping a couple of young men who got off as I did. The encounter was unremarkable, the officers polite and calm, the youths extremely cooperative.

I went down the steps to the street level and noticed two more cops there, scanning the crowd. They were at least six feet tall, young, neat and dignified in their green uniforms. But I had commented only the day before that I rarely saw police anywhere, and four in one location surprised me.

Mildly bemused, I began walking past the shops, when I heard running feet behind me, despite the throng. Kids, I thought, and a tall fellow ran past me on the right, and I heard him yell something that gave me the impression he was saying, “I’m not going with nobody!” although of course that was unlikely. I did think he was grinning and I still thought I was seeing horseplay, when around me on my left a policeman came running.

Catching up with the first guy, he grabbed him and threw him to the tile floor, and in a flash, another cop was on top of them. It took both of them to restrain him, and he kept on shouting, sounding really desperate. He appeared to be one of the many Turks who work in Germany. His eyes were pleading, and he struggled until they finally secured his hands in the back, with those plastic twisties, I think, not cuffs.

Two more police arrived on the scene, one a woman, who tried to break up the crowd that I admit I was part of: “Continue with your Reise, your journey,” she said. We onlookers were so astonished to see anything “out of order” in public in Germany that we took just a few steps before stopping to stare some more.
I have no idea why they were after the man; my hunch is that it had to do with a question as to his documentation as a foreigner. Nor do I know whether there was a connection with the boys’ being stopped earlier. They were university-aged, obviously German, tall and blonde and fair-skinned, but it was clear they were being asked for identification. (I realized uncomfortably that I had no ID with me, by the way, other than a credit card. It seems so unnecessary to carry one’s passport nowadays, and I don’t like to have anything in my bag that could possibly be snatched, so all I carry of value is plastic and a few bills in an inside pocket.)

But the thing that struck me about the incident in the Bahnhof was that it seemed that the police were using just exactly as much force as they had to, to do their job, and not one ounce more. No weapons were drawn, no voices raised — they were completely neutral and businesslike, as though they were getting a newspaper out of a rack. By the same token, the guy was struggling to get away, and really did look kind of pitiful, desperate, embarrassed, but it did not seem to me that he was trying to hurt the cops, and he did not seem to be aiming his words (or spit or teeth) at them.

Maybe I imagined it. Maybe I’ve seen too many American scenes of cops kicking or bludgeoning the perps, and the perps trying to kill the cop. But that was not the case here. It was as though this guy’s job was to get away and the cops’ job was to stop him, and for them there was nothing personal or emotional about it.
An onlooker picked up one cop’s hat and held it until the policewoman came and took it. She also retrieved the Turk’s shoe that had come off, and they led him away, and that was that.

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