No reason to protest

I am not often greeted by the police when I leave a restaurant on a Friday evening. And I mean hundreds of them — all wearing helmets and all brandishing truncheons.

And not just policemen and (many) policewomen, either. I was also greeted by screaming police cars and enormous green tanks with water cannons on the top.

As I said, this is not my normal Friday night out. But then I don't usually spend Friday evening in Hamburg — and this was the first of May in the city's alternative quarter, the Schanzenviertel.

To an outsider like myself, it looked like a fairly serious riot. To the people of Hamburg, enjoying their food or watching the events from the pavements of the main street, Schulterblatt, this was apparently a normal night out at this time of year.

Let me be honest: I was both shocked and fascinated. Shocked by the seeming normality of the riot and the cost to the taxpayers of the police operation. Fascinated by this very same normality and by the possible cause.

After talking to residents and reading the papers, I understood that these riots had little to do with the sort of social unrest that some commentators think might increase in Germany as the recession gets worse.

Yes, there were lots of anti-capitalism posters in the area, but this was a Hamburg ritual, a kind of Dinner-for-One, same-procedure-as-every-year game of cat and mouse between anarchist protestors (bored youth) and the police. It was, as a journalist wrote in the Hamburger Morgenpost, an "Action-Event".

Few were hurt, and 20 or so rioters were arrested, most of whom — surprise, surprise — were drunk. The events were of a different quality than the much more serious riots in Berlin.

The day after the Hamburg riots, all was quiet in the Schanzenviertel. I sat in the park that had been at the centre of the protests and read The Financial Times and its Saturday luxury supplement How to Spend It.

Nobody batted an eyelid.