Men cry too: Treptow Trashmetal

Deep in Adlershof, where the November sun is measured and social-educational care is provided by technical and scientific courses at the Humboldt University in Berlin and the Treptow-Köpenick youth welfare office, there is parking between white conference cubes and autumn-colored building land meadows, between Asian snack bars for lunch breaks and live love-laugh cafes for social workers who smoke and pee between two appointments must, a sleek black Audi.

Trash metal oozes out, muffled by the beetle-shiny bodywork. The chassis shakes to the blast beat and some kind of voice or something like that screams like a thousand cthulhuide fan belts. In this hyperbaric chamber of cosmic horror, in the middle of the functional part of the city, sits a young man in an impeccable suit, fingering his tie and crying uncontrollably. He notices that we are looking at him and looks away, but it shakes him so much that he cannot disguise himself.

He puts his head on the steering wheel, pityingly: We should act as if nothing is happening. We fulfill his wish, but as we move on we wonder what's going on. Did a research proposal not go through, did your friend accept the postdoc position in faraway India? Did the clerk decide to withdraw custody or was it not a good fit with the foster child? Just because someone is wearing a suit doesn't necessarily mean that a building deal has fallen through on one of the windy meadows. We won't find out. Treptow-Köpenick is big.

They scream it out on the record, the neighbors hear it in the suburbs of Cologne and here it is delegated in the car to cultural workers who gurgle from the depths of self-exploitation. Metal is so culturally enhanced today that it's for people who now think of the kindness of strangers.