Nothing works here, you know. Think airport, or any of the other construction sites around town that have been built to last forever. Or try getting something done at your local Bürgeramt (no, that’s a “citizen’s office,” not a hamburger joint). And Berliners can boast about having a whole army of brilliant city planners and administrators who are known to have made their counterparts in Venezuela green with envy. And broke? Berlin is so broke that even the debt here is in debt.

And yet, nobody seems to care. I don’t know if stoic is the right word, long-suffering is more like it, but Berliners just don’t care. Nothing really shakes them. So now we have the situation where even international terrorist types come up against a brick wall here (another Berlin Wall?). These ISIS or whatever-they-call-themselves-this-week guys are just going to have to come to grips with the fact that Berliners aren’t particularly terrorized by their terror. In fact, they remain “maximally unperturbed” by the attack here yesterday, as Spiegel Online put it. And that pretty much sums it up.

Sad, in a way. If it weren’t all so sad. That these guys are failures goes without saying but to fail in a failed state like Berlin takes a very special kind of loser. Talk about adding insult to injury. What Luschen (duds).

“Eure Stadt fühlt sich sehr ruhig an. Ist Berlin eigentlich immer so?”