Poverty and Homelessness: Accusing and Evading

Anyone who criticizes poverty may be ignorant. That’s why the CDU expects its agitation against the poor to be successful beyond its own electorate.

Under an S-Bahn bridge in Berlin-Charlottenburg Photo: Matthias Reichelt/imago

Recently I was able to receive a large number of visitors: mother, father, two children. In my last apartment there was only enough space for one guest, today there is a whole family. Because good hospitality means more to me than just accommodating people, we set off to explore the capital. The children were happy that the distances in Berlin are long because for them every additional public transport means another adventure.

On the very first S-Bahn, the euphoric four-year-old sat down next to a man who looked sick, wore worn clothes and smelled of alcohol. Just as I was about to tell the parents to move him somewhere else, the man reached into his pocket. Then he tapped the child, who was gazing with fascination at the many construction sites in this city, with as much care as an inebriated person who posed danger would not do, and handed him a yellow action figure.

After the boy accepted it somewhat shyly, the man pulled another surprise egg out of his pocket, and another, and something else. The boy, who couldn’t carry so much, beamed more with each toy. His initial reluctance disappeared and over the remaining stations a kind of dialogue developed between the two, who assembled the contents of the eggs together. At the sight of the man’s dirty hands, I fought the urge to rip the stuff out of the child’s hands.

Less than five minutes on the road and I’ve already made my first acquaintance – that’s Berlin too, I thought later. What I also thought: how shabby of me to have almost made it impossible for my young guest to meet him because I thought the presumably homeless man was a danger. How shabby of me that I recently dodged another man in an S-Bahn station, where people often ask for money, with an unfriendly no before he could even say a sentence. If I had let him finish, I wouldn’t have had to be ashamed when he didn’t ask for money but for directions.

The CDU also relies on my lack of empathy

I had to remember that I now change cars when someone gets on the train and asks for money because I don’t want to expose myself to the visible and smellable distress.

It sounds banal, but perhaps I’m forgetting it because I take it for granted and thus end the argument: It’s one thing to denounce poverty theoretically, for example in this column. It is another thing to relate to this poverty in practice.

The fact that the Council of Europe criticizes Germany for poverty that is “out of all proportion to the country’s wealth”, that it explicitly problematizes homelessness and that Finland is successfully combating it with “Housing First” is something I can be sure of in the right way Standing aside, writing a lot. I can also get angry about the CDU, which wants to deprive people of even the minimum subsistence level.

But doesn’t this CDU expect its agitation to be successful because it relies on resentment that is spread far beyond its own electorate, as evidenced by cuts in citizens’ money due to the traffic lights? Also to my lack of empathy and ignorance, which the four-year-old has not yet been contaminated with.