Germany’s Smoking Ban Evokes The Health Nazis
“’NAZI’ claim as Germans rebel over smoking ban,” says the Observer.
“Outrage greets change to the law – and drinkers forced to cross the border.”
Smoking in enclosed paces is now verboten in Germany. So the German smokers are on the move, journeying not to France (where a smoking ban persists) but to Poland, historically an intrepid German’s first port of call on any freewheeling European adventure.
It is all too easy to hark back to those dark days, to mention the war. But this talk of Nazis is intoxicating for the Observer. How have Germans reacted to the tobacco ban?
In Berlin’s Vienna Bar, Gerhard Grünberg is showing off his bruises, a victim of “bar rage”. He shares his anecdote. A man is smoking. He asks the man to step outside and partake of the air warmed by heaters, the blankets and sofa. Says Grunberg: “’But the man said I was taking away his rights, and then he threw the punch.”
Violence in Germany. And as the papers notes: “Under the supervision of the Institute for Tobacco Hazards Research, the ban was imposed in every public building and public space, including air-raid shelters, with Hitler even personally intervening in 1944 to ensure it was extended to trains and buses in order to protect young female conductors.”
And: “It was even pointed out that Hitler, Mussolini and Franco were all non-smokers, while the ‘evil enemies’ – Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin – all enjoyed a tobacco fix.”
But it is the UK that bans smoking in all enclosed public places. In Germany, smokers can indulge their habit in establishments with separate rooms. The Observer say this is a “quirk”.
It’s not. It’s a fact. Modern Germany is more tolerant than the UK…
Posted: 20th, January 2008 | In: Broadsheets Comments (7) | TrackBack | Permalink
