And what a night it was. Pankaj came over to meet me at Pariser Platz. He was in town to see his old friend Hal Hartley who had just left Berlin because he took up a teaching job which he was forced to take up because nobody will produce his movies it seems. Pankaj came anyway, it was the day of the election, and he was curious why there was so little going on, actually there was nothing going on at all in the middle of the most important city of the most important country of Europe. In India, he said, there would be crowds. In Berlin there were only tourists. The calm was irrational. We are in the middle of a fucking storm, and this city feels like somebody just shut all the windows. Well, it was her, the lady in charge, with her hands clasped together. Frau Merkel. We walked past the gigantic poster that was put up next to Hauptbahnhof, a poster of her hands. This is politics 2013. Pankaj remarked how much he liked the train station, I did not say anything because I was surprised that he said it and did not want to disagree for the sole reason that I had the feeling that he had a point, looking from the outside in, a point that eluded me. Pankaj is a great writer, he was wearing a khaki jacket and khaki pants and had a very old-fashioned looking camera around his shoulder which he used form time to time. Maybe it even still works with film. We walked to the place where the CDU candidate had his election party, his name is Philipp Lengsfeld and he is the son of former GDR opposition figure Vera Lengsfeld. The place was called Neumann*s, it is a very typical restaurant for Berlin, dark wood, old street signs as a nostalgic nod towards the past which is always good in a place like this. The guests, all members of the CDU, had greying hair and a certain kind of tan that you acquire on the tennis court. Across the street was the old prison of Moabit where Fritz Teufel and Andreas Baader and Martin Niemöller were incarcerated but also Erich Honecker and Erich Mielke. The mood was good, Angela Merkel had a historic evening, Philipp Lengsfeld, a very nice guy, seemingly yet unspoiled by the political machinery, was very confident. Pankaj talked to the owner of the Neumann*s who was Indian. I talked to a girl from Iraq who came to Germany when she was two years old. Today she is 19, she joined the CDU two months ago because she wanted to join a party that included god in its consideration. She is not a believer herself, she said, not yet. The reason the CDU won are people like her. Not because of god, this might be a mistake. But because the party today is open and accessible to all kinds of people, aspiring, ambitious, wary. Pankaj and I had a beer and then we moved on to the SPD.