Now the time has come. The terror has reached Munich. My city. The perpetrators have not yet been caught. As I write this, police cars are driving around in convoy three floors below me. Münchner Freiheit is one of those places that now need to be “avoided”. Places where people meet. Public spaces.
Münchner Freiheit is being avoided. It is empty. It’s raining. People would probably have gone home anyway. But half an hour ago, when we came back from a pizzeria, it was still busy down there, at least a little. Even the outdoor chess players were still playing. They don’t have smartphones. Maybe they didn’t even notice much of the terror. Of the attack on their city.
It was a comforting picture, the outdoor chess strategists with their castling and beer bottles. They are not interested in politics, and probably not particularly interested in religion either. They simply belong to this city and in this city. They are the breeding ground for the normal. They nurture and cultivate an urban feeling of unagitated nonchalance.
A feeling that Monaco Franze also cultivated. The mild smile of his statue in the Münchner Freiheit café looks sad today. But there is also defiance in it. This mixture of laissez-faire and cosmopolitan resilience characterizes our cities. And it will continue to do so in the future.
It is precisely this normality of the chess players and Monaco Franze, this “eternal Stenz”, against which terrorist attacks like the one this evening are directed. They are perpetrated by panic-stricken people who have long since lost this normality. To be honest, I’m not so interested at the moment in whether they were Muslims or not. I don’t want to delve too deeply into the feelings of the perpetrators or what they might think is religious. I don’t care about them. Unlike the people around me. Unlike the inhabitants of this city. Unlike the chess players. I want to see them play again tomorrow. And I’m sure they’ll be back. Cities are resilient. Terror affects them. But it does not defeat them.