#that my actions have essentially zero consequences in university so if I don't go i will not get in trouble lol

[tardis--dreams]

I hate small classes. I feel like i should let my lecturer know i won't come to class today just because we're already very few people

[tricktster]

Bruh don't leave us hangin' on the happenstances that took place in the frat house, fill us the fuck in.

Oh sorry I put this part in another post but we got there and were brought into the frat house’s private bar, where we talked with the guys who had invited us and a few of their frat brothers for maybe 20 minutes and drank a beer or two. This is a weird sense memory, but I clearly remember that they had an 80s style boombox on a long banquet table, and they were using it to play a David Hasselhoff cassette tape. I don’t remember what we talked about, other than them all being excited for a barbecue the next day.

I also don’t remember what happened to trigger this, but eventually there was some cue that caused all of the frat brothers in the room to exit through the (only) door, which led back to the main frat house. This left me and Y on our own in this elaborate, wildly well appointed bar. Keep in mind that German frats are, in many cases, better understood as sort of private, wealthy clubs/semi-secret societies that are entirely unaffiliated with the university. This one was sitting on a piece of real estate worth a few million euro, easily, and unlike American frats, this place was NICE. Framed photos on the wall, lacquered bar tables, hardwood floors, restaurant grade keg system... and there’s just me and Y in this space, all by ourselves, kind of bemused as to how we ended up there.

Y spotted it first, the only thing in the bar that immediately leapt out as janky and weird besides the boombox/Hasselhoff situation. “Is that Bert?” She said, pointing to a small tabletop ornament in the corner of the room opposite us. It was. I know this is the goofiest part of the story, but it was a 1.5 foot tall Bert from Sesame Street, and Bert, we simultaneously realized, was dressed in an SS uniform, a tiny mustache, and had been made to pose like he was heiling.

So, like, it’s 2019 now and you can’t throw a stone in America without hitting some edgy asshole white boy who thinks it’s funny to appropriate Nazi imagery. But this was 2008, it was Germany, this was pre-populism/white nationalism gaining a foothold in europe again, and we had enough of a sense of the culture at large to know that nobody, no matter how edgy, joked about Nazis - at least to us, and at least not so casually as dressing Bert up like fucking Hitler. It was an actual taboo, and seeing it openly broken like that was genuinely shocking.

We were taken aback for a long moment, and then I, filled with equal parts beer, buttweed, and genuine apprehension, began poking around more seriously, like a character in a goddamn horror movie. The photos? Alumni of the 500+ year old frat, many in their own SS uniforms. Nationalist banners, fucking swatstkas, all fully represented on the walls of this bar with one exit, in a private club’s mansion surrounded by a ten foot wrought iron spiked fence.

We didn’t know at the time that these frats had a reputation for viewing the Nazi party in a pretty sympathetic light. Y had just wanted to see what the inside of one of those swanky, multimillion dollar houses looked like. I’d only wanted to distract myself from the fact that I’d just smoked marijuana that had been smuggled into the country inside an Egyptian bouncer’s butt. And now we were out of our element, in enemy territory, and the only non-frat members in that house were me and Y.

It stands mentioning again that, while I am a relatively tall, relatively strong, admittedly aryan-passing white woman, the person the frat brothers had been intending to bring back to the house until I got yanked along for the ride was Y, and Y was (and remains) a four foot tall, dark skinned, obviously latina woman, and in the context of being in this Nazi fucking beer hall, that scared the shit out of me. Again, these guys were openly flouting the biggest cultural taboo we knew of, in a house located less than 1000 feet from the empty space memorializing where the town’s synagogue had once stood, which meant that we had ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA what their intentions had been (or still were) towards Y, but had plenty of reason to suspect that they were NOT GREAT.

So I’m there, trying to figure out an exit strategy and simultaneously trying to figure out how many Nazi sympathizers I can reasonably hold off to give Y time to make a break for it if anything broke bad (realistically, even being in the best shape of my life and by that point absolutely swamped with adrenaline, zero), and Y’s just kind of staring down at her beer, glassy-eyes and muttering “holy fuck, okay, fuck,” and about ten of the brothers suddenly file back into the bar.

“We have decided,” one of the original two guys we’d met downtown said, very formally. “To invite you to our barbecue tomorrow.”

“Since you both live in [relatively distant suburb] and the busses have stopped running, it really isn’t safe for you to go home.” Another guy said. “And besides, the barbecue starts at 10:00 am tomorrow. You should just spend the night here.”

Now, in retrospect, these were almost certainly just profoundly shitty wealthy dudes that wanted to sleep with us. There was almost certainly nothing more sinister intended in that invitation than like, the threat of having to discover what a bunch of Nazi sympathizers trying to seduce us would look like. But that’s the fucking thing; when you’re dealing with people willing to openly break one essential social taboo so openly and without any apparent fear of consequence for doing so, you really can’t predict what their intentions or actions will look like.

And so, at that point, all Y and I cared about was getting the fuck out of there. I can’t remember what excuses we came up with for needing to abruptly split. I know we definitely promised to return the next day for the barbecue (no fucking way), I know I gave a Nazi my (fake) phone number, and I know that I had never felt such relief as I did at the moment that we were safely on the other side of the 10 foot iron fence and all we had to contend with was navigating the five miles back to our student apartments in the dark.

On the way home, we grabbed some falafel from the doner place right before it closed at 3 am, and that falafel, my dudes, was the only good decision we made that night.