World Cup and Der Spiegel Online: German incident in an Italian hotel, 2004

None of us knows exactly how today's Italy-Germany match will go. Some folks are pulling even harder for Italia ever since Achim Achilles' "why bother" comments were published in his infamous (and now removed) column on Der Spiegel Online (DSO). (The last link is to a BBC story about the column.) I say "why bother" because, well, why bother writing and publishing such nonsense?? From what I read, the column wasn't witty and definitely was not funny. I won't say Achilles' comments came from all Germans because obviously they did not. Not to mention, as others have pointed out elsewhere, the name Achim Achilles isn't exactly culturally German itself. At the same time it seems his remarks aren't as isolated as most of us would wish. It's interesting to consider and discuss how such aggressively stereotypical thinking fits into "problem-making" versus the efforts at "problem-solving" that are going on simultaneously today across the globe, including in Italia and Germany. In his June 28 post titled "Heil Spiegel" Italian humorist/comedian Beppe Grillo ("GREEL-lo") writes about the Der Spiegel episode via his blog. To Der Spiegel Online's credit, two days after Grillo's post someone called "Roberto Longo" added DSO's apology - in 3 languages - on Grillo's site as a response to the "Heil Speigel" entry.

This forces me to recall the Italian press reports of the incident two summers ago (2004) in an Italian hotel (Il Tritone in Abano Terme, Padova) where German tourists actually demanded the hotel management remove from her job a young woman on a 1-month student internship working Tritone Hotel's front desk. If you read Italian, see Costantino Muscau's 24 May 2004 article in Corriere della Sera: "E nera, non puo stare alla reception". Translation: She's Black, she can't be [work] at the reception [desk]. The 18-year-old student worker was African and, for some reason, this particular group of foreign (German) tourists organised to get her fired; not because of anything incorrect in her work but because of who she was. Later the story came out of how her parents settled in Italy years earlier, her father, Ekoli Mahnge Zulu, being a former IBF welterweight world boxing champion. Unfortunately the Tritone hotel's management did cave-in to this crazy, racist pressure (from a group of German tourists no less), which justly brought lots of coverage and an outcry in the Italian media. This led to the young woman (Marlene Zulu, Zairoise by birth) being offered and accepting another "stage" at the "more appropriate" Rossini Hotel, also in Italy, in Pesaro. Daily injustices like this anywhere in the world and including Europe, Germany, Italy and elsewhere, should have such courageous outcomes far more often.

Comments

[Marian]

Thanks, Kenya. Meanwhile I'm working on another, related post.

[acolyte]

Nice post!Seems that some Germans are a long way from change!I mean if you discriminate against your fellow white folk then you have major issues!