The Citizens’ Hotline

Yesterday, I showed up to my weekly sing-along, held in a friend’s apartment, to find that her kitchen looked more like a war room than a piano bar. Apparently, the downstairs neighbor had threatened to go to the landlord to complain about the music, and the group was up in arms over the injustice. A discussion over renters’ rights and revenge tactics had erupted, when one woman calmly said: “Let’s call the citizens’ hotline.”

Nobody knew what she was talking about, but it turns out there’s a hotline in Berlin that you can call with any question that doesn’t require immediate police presence. The line is manned by police who can provide official answers to pesky questions such as what to do with a bat on your balcony or our own quandary: how long and how loud you can play music in your apartment.

I had just returned from a month in the States, and was struck by the cool-headed logic and casual efficiency of a citizens’ hotline. This was not rural Virginia, where a friend at the artist’s colony, out for a stroll, had been stopped by a squad car for walking along the highway in leather boots. (As the female cop had put it, in a heavy Southern drawl: “There’s only two reasons for walking: to get some exercise or because you’re up to no good. And if you were walking for exercise, you’d be wearing sneakers, not boots.”)

As the woman made the call, the rest of us debated the pros and cons of showing up at the neighbor’s door, en masse, and attacking her with fierce argument and/or Christmas carols. After a good twenty minutes, the call to the hotline ended and the woman returned. The news was not good: it turned out that you can sand floors late into the night without fear of legal repercussion, but that singing was a gray area requiring further mediation and assessment by the landlord and possibly the police.

We all slumped. Then a friend of mine said: “Let’s ask her what she prefers: all-night vacuuming or our singing!”

“I’ll just go talk to her,” said my other friend, to whom the apartment belongs. Half an hour later, just as we had begun to worry that things had turned violent below, my friend returned, triumphant. It turned out her neighbor was suffering from an illness that prevented her from leaving the house, and that once my friend had expressed concern, and offered to help her with grocery shopping, the woman had cheered up and revoked all of her complaints. We celebrated by singing Handel’s “Rejoice Greatly,” which might have made the woman change her mind, especially on the “Shout, Oh Daughter of Jerusalem” line, but it was too late. And if she wanted to complain further, there was always the citizens’ hotline, since what it sounded like she needed, more than anything, was someone to talk to, even if that person was a bored policeman on his sixth donut.