Got to hand it to the Germans, they know how to seal off an area. Specifically, a wide area surrounding a hotel in the southern Bavarian alps where the G7 economic summit will be hosted in early June.
The luxury hotel, spiffed up with some taxpayer money just to make sure it is really comfy has a cottage right on the hotel grounds next to a busy pedestrian path between two buildings.
And this cottage has been the home of 83 year old Mr. Haase for the past 50 years. His late wife and he both worked at the hotel for decades and were given lifelong residency rights to the cottage.
Now that the most powerful politicians of the Western world are due to move in for a short time, Mr. Haase has to move temporarily into an old folks home, a fact that worries him a little.
A minor inconvenience you say?
If so, you don't know much about the legal situation of the elderly in Germany. Around here, social services and doctors have quite the power to get old folks placed into a care home. They do have to justify it to a court, but judges really defer to the professionals. And if you live at home and have someone look after you several times a week, as is the case with Mr. Haase, it does not need much for those professionals to claim you need full time care in a home.
German social services (hospitals, old folks homes, rehab clinics) run a battery of tests on elderly patients to determine if they are able to live on they own. Only recently, a 90 year old neighbor underwent this after breaking a leg at home. They let her return to her house, but then she can beat some 50 year olds at memory and coordination tests. Fail, and you stay.
That's why Mr. Haase's worries are not as unfounded as you might think.
As said above, the hotel is a luxury hotel, so its everyday clients are already a cut above the rest of us. How does the old man handle the proximity to the upper crust when the spotlight of the world is not on him?
I keep to myself, he says in the article in Sueddeutsche Zeitung. I don't engage with the hotel customers, but many of them will approach me and chat, they seem to enjoy talking to normal folks.
To us, from a few miles away, it seems that the old man would enjoy sitting on his front porch watching the to and fro, weather permitting, and maybe be happy if the U.S. president or Ms. Merkel took a minute to pop over and say hi.
But that's not how the next few weeks will turn out for him.
Let's hope, the carers at the old folks home don't see a need to keep him there.
And by the way, according to the article no official wanted to explain who and exactly why Mr. Haase had to move.
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