God help us.

A few days ago, there was a guy with a microphone standing on Alexanderplatz, the big square in the eastern part of Berlin. He was shouting about the end of the world and how the only salvation for Germany was Jesus. No one was paying all that much attention, but I noticed him because he's the first of his kind I've seen here. The Germans I've talked to tend to think of Americans as incredibly religious, and there is, to me, a conspicuous absence here of "Jesus Saves" bumper stickers and public debate about things like abortion and school prayer. The boys in the seventh grade class I teach weekly told me that their favorite school subject is religion. When I asked why, they said, "Because we don't have to do anything in it."

And I'd never heard any street prophets and doom-sayers here, either. In Chicago, there's one who totes his microphone about a block from where my mother lives. Whenever I passed him, he always seemed to be going on about how you wouldn't get to heaven if you were a homosexual or smoked cigarettes (Freudians would have a field day with that jutxaposition). The guy on Alex didn't seem to be pushing a particular program of abstaining, just urging the Germans to come to Jesus. As I said, they didn't seem very moved.

This tepid attitude toward religion is also part of Germany's general lack of comfort with the Turkish immigrants in the country, I think. One of my American friends who's also a TA works in a grade school in Kreuzburg, where the overwhelming majority of the kids are second-generation immigrants who have names like Jihad. When my friend was telling one class about different holiday traditions in the U.S., including Hanukkah, a rumor got started that she was a Jew. For the next week, she had these little kids asking her anxiously if she were Jewish, which they saw as a dirty word. It's sad enough that you have these little kids being brought up to see Jews as the enemy, but it's even more complicated in Germany, where most people shy away automatically from anything that smells vaguely of anti-Semitism. I think most Germans would say that their history pretty much shuts them out from getting really enthusiastic within a context of group loyalty, and makes them suspicious of people who do. The Jesus guy will probably lose his voice before he gets a whole lot of recruits.