170 nationalities

Sub-title: or Hitler's ashes will be turning in their bunker.

It was one of the moments of the sporting weekend. One of the football ("soccer" to North American readers) moments that left an impact. The right back, Lukasz Piszczek, broke down the right, fed the ball to Jakub Blaszczykowski (known as "Kuba"), whose centre ("center" to North American readers) landed at the feet of Robert Lewandowski standing alone at the far post three metres out. A simple goal eventually. 2-0.

OK, all three are Polish internationals and it looks like that Poland have the basis of a good national team for this year's European Championship finals. The goal was not scored for Legia Warsaw or any leading Polish league team though. It was scored for the leaders of the German Bundesliga, Borussia Dortmund.

More than 50% of players in the Bundesliga now are not German. The major internal dispute in Dortmund's increasingly dominant team is coming from their Paraguayan international, Lucas Barrios, who lost his place in the starting line-up earlier this season due to injury, and he cannot force his way back into the team. Let's face it, how do you change a team that has won eight straight games and is leaving the opposition gasping for the proverbial air?

As for the Polish connection, it is something of a breath of fresh air to hear something positive about them. The Poles historically have a poor reputation in Germany. The stereotype (NB, most people should realise by now what I think of stereotypes ....) is a rather stupid, feckless individual, with a propensity for being lazy. Despite the strong Catholic faith for which the country is renowned, morality is not always seen as a strong Polish characteristic (a fact reinforced by the large number of Polish women working as prostitutes in Germany's legalised brothels).

So anything that shows them in a good light is to be welcomed.

In my seven years in Frankfurt I have never myself encountered any evidence of Polish residents or culture here, but there must be some somewhere. According to a statistic that I recently noted, there are people from 170 nationalities living here. That by any standards is astonishing. It is multiculture almost gone mad (the extreme nationalist parties like the NPD seethe permanently at the thought).

Interestingly also, it seems to work and I have never yet encountered any sense of the need to kick the foreigners out. One such isolated demonstration did take place place (organised by the NPD, surprise, surprise) a couple of years ago. My wife encountered a youth who screamed "Ausländer raus" at her at the main railway station - which might actually indicate that he had caught a train in and may well not have been a Frankfurter (in which case he could take the train back to the place from whence he came and leave our civilised, cosmopolitan city and its citizens to its own lifestyle, thank you).

At that demonstration a grand total of almost 50 people turned up. And something like 10 times that many ("antifas") turned up to oppose it!

Of course everything in the garden is not rosy. Across Germany as a whole, particularly in the former East, there are pockets where they hang Hitler's photo on the wall (ugly b*stard and hardly typical Aryan that he was) and some idiots celebrate Rudolf Hess's birthday.

But these people are a small minority, tolerated in a democratic society as one must occasionally do with complete imbeciles - as long as they do not cross the line and resort to violence in the name of their stupid beliefs (as with the members of the Zwickau Cell for example)!

It would be interesting to know though just what would happen to Frankfurt if the political philosophy of the 1930s ever did return. 170 nationalities - that sounds a lot of people to ethnically cleanse. Some recidivists like myself would no doubt be shipped to updated versions of Dachau (as must happen with the politically incorrect), some would be instantly flown out, and the rest?

What is to be recognised though is that Frankfurt would lose a lot of the character, taste and flavour that it (like many German cities) has developed over the last half-century, and it would be poorer for the departure of all these influences.