Three teenagers board the U-8, carrying a crate of beer. They clank it to the ground- most of the bottles are already empty. They’ll be able to get a decent bit of change for the contents of their crate at some recycling center along the line. They are each holding a half-empty bottle, swaying in the aisle, reeling drunk: a kid with greasy semi-long hair wearing a green army jacket covered in sharpie-scribbled lyrics, a girl with a nose piercing and fire-engine red sideways haircut, and, drunkest of all, a guy with a home job mohawk and combat boots, who pulls an elaborate chunk of technology out of his pocket and begins searching for tunes to blast.
“Arch Enemy!” he says. “No, no,” the more sensible one in the army jacket cautions.
“Rammstein!!” Suggests the mohawked one. “Or else what? What do you want to hear?”
“Pink Floyd,” suggests the army jacket kid, seeming to be the voice of reason, the only one in that crowd talking an approximation of sense. “I don’t have any LAME music!” the mohawk snarls. They reach consensus on some kind of teutonic variant on pop punk, blasting the music over the tiny speakers of the phone/music player, rocking out and singing along. I look around in the train car. There are no authority figures in here. No one to stop these teens from acting like they are partying in their room while their parents are out of town, here, in public, on mass transit.
America, objectively, has a few things going for it over Germany. #1 would be the USA’s rigorous fire codes, which prevent you from ending up at a crowded concert or some such event with doors that swing open only towards the inside, causing a massive human logjam when the panicked crowd tries to flee after Great White sets the building on fire. Fire codes seem a strangely obvious human interest to neglect legislating, especially so for a country that seems so otherwise efficient in such realms; whose laws concerning bicycle safety, for instance, are so stringently ingrained into the norms of society that people will try to perform a citizens arrest on you if you are biking without a headlight.
Then there is the minimum wage, also a great idea for a society that cares about the survival of its citizens, and doesn’t want its fast food franchise workers, for instance, to be paid $2.50 an hour. There is no minimum wage here, which is another strange oversight of the German social set-up, schizophrenically combining a darwinistic free market approach to wages with a liberally apologist unemployment benefits package. That combo makes it a terrible deal to work, since you’ll probably make more if you don’t. The current unemployment rate in Berlin is almost 20%. The cafes are filled with listless masses, staring into space; the trains are filled with young bums carrying around crates of Sternburg export, 45 cents a bottle, including an 8 cent deposit, redeemable at recycling machines located in grocery stores all over the city, the cheapest beer available, the camo malt liquor of Berlin.
I’m not sure how I feel about the drinking age. Is it good or bad, a bonus or a minus? In the USA, the legal age for alcohol consumption is, admittedly, too high. Barring people from alcohol until the age of 21 creates a binge-like “catching up” atmosphere in the early twenties, plus it seems like unfortunate timing to introduce young adults to free and unfettered drinking right when they are supposed to be finishing school and making life career choices. USA has a problematic relationship with alcohol in general—all that underage partying is done in secret and shamefully, and even adult society is subject to puritanical restrictions on drinking in public, effectively cordoning the practice off into the private sphere or into smoky, seedy, dimly lit establishments. The long-term burden taken off of the German medical system due to averted stress-related illnesses because that guy over there can loosen his tie and pound a beer on the train home from work is an incalculable savings. One point for this side.
But, on the negative side, all this freedom has a price. The European concept on how to socially regulate alcohol consumption is minimal, with no or only very laxly enforced legal drinking ages, no restriction or even particular taboo against drinking in public, or for that matter drinking at ungodly early hours in the morning. So, while a certain level of social tension is resolved by this lax attitude, a new and different social tension is revealed. All the secret drinking goes public. You see businessmen getting hammered at 8 AM on the way to work. You watch people stumbling through the afternoon in a shambling coma, the kind of wasted you can’t even imagine being, the stuff of fraternity house legend or hidden family shame. You find yourself on the train, sometimes, standing in the middle of a posse of belligerently drunken teenagers.
Listening to them banter, watching the glee with which they annoy their fellow-passengers, I can’t help but feel sympathy for them, remembering my own antics and attitude at that age. Some people argue that letting kids get drunk early on acclimates them to it, gets the youthful folly out of their system, so that they can “handle it” when they are adults. But in Germany I see adults along the entire age range publicly not being able to handle it, shattered fifty-five or sixty year olds, who, in their early teens, found a good friend in alcohol, a solution to their problems, a ready and willing life partner. Of these three in front of me now, who will outgrow it, or learn to cope with it and integrate themselves into “adult, socially responsible” drinking? And who has found their path, is making a life commitment to erasing themselves, to being nothing forever?
