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Getting on the train this morning I ran into dozens, if not hundred policepeople at the railway station. The number plates on their vans suggested they’re coming from Oldenburg, which usually means there’s some demonstration going on which the state feels it needs protection against (quite frequently this leads to the absurd situation of a dozen harmless protestors facing hundreds of heavily protected police, suggesting not the best value for taxpayer money…). But in the station it seemed that these policepeople may just have been the guard of/against a train full of football fans travelling from Frankfurt to Hannover to attend their team’s game.
On the one hand kudos to those fans. The seemed to be travelling on slow trains which means they must have been on their way for some hours already at 11 o’clock. On the other hand they used the same train I had to get on, so I was less than delighted - the train being full and noisy and all. While not exactly quiet and surprisingly dedicated to drinking beer in the morning, I have to admit that they weren’t overly misbehaved in my coach, so it’s hard to understand what the whole police fuss is about. (On the other hand, the train ended up arriving twenty minutes late, and judging from the unfriendly announcements of the conductor on the ride, people blocking the doors may have played a role in causing that… not a problem for me with my glorious 55 minute connection wait, but perhaps a problem in the big scheme of things.)
Arriving in Hannover the station was full of highly protected police as well. It feels strange to get off a train in such an environment. It seems they channelled all the football people down one staircase, letting the other one free for the rest of the people. Apart from some fireworks that went off and some anti-Hannover chants that happened on their staircase that didn’t seem particularly problematic either.
While the people I saw in my coach were well-behaved an looked peaceful, I did note a whole lot of shirts with Fraktur logos and slogans on them. That æsthetic is frequently associated to right wing / neo-nazi tendencies (however incorrect that association may be in terms of typographic history) as is ‘Lonsdale’ branded clothing, so one wonders what besides football is driving those people.