student protest - Blogabond

I happened across a student protest tonight. I was with K.J. and Meg. and we had been working late in the center. We decided to go across the River for dinner at a German place, but the whole place was full. So we decided to go to our crazy Italian place instead. If we hadn't made this detour, though, we wouldn't have gone through Bertoldsbrunnen.

As we were approaching Bertoldsbrunnen (which is a main plaza in the center of town, with a statue so old I'm only halfway sure its' a guy on a horse), in a cold, misty, night, when we heard chanting. Loud chanting. Our thought process, or at least my thought process, went along the lines of:

Well, there's no soccer game tonight...

Protest?

We hustled up to Bertoldsbrunnen and sure enough, about a hundred people our age were marching in a circle around the statue, holding signs that had the logo for Die Linke in the corner (Die Linke is the political party that formed out of the government of the DDR upon reunification - it literally translates to The Left). But I couldn't understand the chanting and we didn't have a good enough view of any of the signs to read them, so we stood there a few minutes trying to figure it out.

Finally a guy broke away from the crowd with some fliers and handed Meg. one, then asked, in German, if we knew what was going on. He explained that there was a tuition raise which, in Germany where there's a huge emphasis on public education being affordable and accessible for all, is kind of a big deal.

Then he asked if we students on the university. I explained, still in German, that we were Americans studying with a program that was tied to the university, but not directly on the university itself.

He got this shocked look, then in English said, "Americans? Well, you pay much more than us anyway... it wouldn't be a big deal for you."

Turns out they're protesting a raise from 50 Euro to 500 Euro. Which I think is still a big raise, all things considered. But we had to convince him that, despite the fact that without scholarship money we'd all be starving to be educated, we supported his cause. It might have been Meg. who literally said "we don't want you in Germany to go down the same path we in America have."

I was giddy all night.

written by

lost_red_balloon on October 30, 2008 from Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany

from the travel blog: The European Union

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