Emergency call to the Passau police, a man calls, his shoe is gone. The crime scene of the story is an apartment building, only one of two sports shoes is still there. In the police report you can read how it went on: “A 66-year-old neighbor was suspected,” it says, she finally admitted to having “the missing shoe in her possession”. And: “Only after a request from the police” did she return the shoe.
Unfortunately, nothing is known about the background, one would like to know more precisely what the police mean by the “previous neighborhood dispute” with which they justify the “scandal” described above. But “neighborhood dispute” is already something in this country that seems to be completely sufficient as a reason for a neighborhood dispute. The cultivated curious neighborhood escapade just belongs to the country like the schnitzel and the Lauterbach. And now the pandemic and working from home may have exacerbated tensions.
Can you say publicly that a cheese shop stinks?
Taking someone else’s shoe away, that’s still a big deal, of course. Whether the latter causes an odor nuisance is a completely different question, which can be easily debated. In any case, a few years ago, a Kasladen owner from Bad Heilbrunn, Bavaria, did not want to put up with the accusation that it stinks, but a court ruled in the interests of freedom of expression: The neighbor may continue to say that she, quote the court, “as smelly” feel.
Things aren’t always that sensitive, and in most cases such nagging is of course no fun for those involved. It is likely that even more people die from neighborhood disputes than from shark attacks. But how much time courts have to spend with minor complaints about noisy cowbells, clucking chickens, flying balls and tinkling pianos – one would rather not know. In any case, one thing is clear, as the SZ reported back in 1998: “A garden gnome standing in the front yard with his trousers down and sticking his bare buttocks in the direction of the neighboring property cannot be prosecuted.”
Always a reason for quarrels between neighbors: more or less tasteless garden gnomes.
(Photo: Joseffson/imago/Westend61)
It’s also the exception, thank God, that the belligerent neighbor builds a machine in the course of warfare, which – equipped with a timer and electric motor – operates a hammer on a wooden construction and thus causes such a loud click at previously set intervals that the neighbor can hear it throughout the house, as once happened in Geretsried in Bavaria.
Yes, some may already recognize a terrorist in their own neighbor. But if it really is one, it doesn’t have to degenerate like in the Hollywood film “Arlington Road” between the characters played by Jeff Bridges and Tim Robbins. Not every terrorist builds a bomb right away. Or a tapping machine.
In fact, there would also be the neighborly option of peaceful coexistence, you just have to find a healthy balance between closeness and distance. Because it’s true what Schiller had his Wilhelm Tell say: “The most pious can’t stay in peace / If the bad neighbor doesn’t like it.”