Several weeks ago a visitor to the town hall (Rathaus) in Oberursel attacked the people working there with a knife.  Only a day later I read that it was believed an attack  might take place at a grammar school in Frankfurt.

It’s not that these things don’t happen in Germany, but these two were too close for comfort – I even had a meeting the very next day at the town hall to attend!

It made me wonder if this sort of violence was on the increase.  Were these one-off attacks or threats?  I often read the local news and even the police press releases and can’t remember anything on quite this scale for a long time.

And yes, it worries me. (more…)

After over a year of protests, the residents of the state of Baden-Württemberg will be voting tomorrow in a referendum on the future of the main station in Stuttgart.

The project, called “Stuttgart 21″, plans to demolish part of the station and take the railway lines underground.  The so-called “Kopfbahnhof”, a station where the tracks end and trains go in and out of, would then become a “Durchgangsbahnhof”, where tracks and trains run through from one side to the other, resulting in a number of changes to the rail network in the area.

A year ago, the politicians were saying that the project had been decided on in a long planning process, and that nothing could be changed.  Then there was a conciliation process (“Schlichtung”) where alternatives where looked at, and apart from the railway being required to prove that the new station would really bring a benefit to the network, not much changed.

However after the local elections in March of this year, the political situation in Baden-Württemberg changed considerably, when the CDU/FDP coalition, who had been in favour of the project lost such a large share of the vote, that a new Green/SPD coalition was formed to take control of the local parliament. (more…)

Until recently, children in Germany were restricted in how loud they could be when playing, and being too loud could land someone in court.

For a private household, there is the ever-present problem of the local Rühezeiten, but if a group of children were playing together, then their level of noise could put them on a par with a factory building.

So building a playground or even a Kindergarten near a housing estate was a risky business, because there was always the chance that someone might start proceedings just because the children were too loud.

Of course, you could wonder who would be so annoyed by the sound of children playing, that they feel the need to go to court.

But, as they say, the law’s the law and (more…)