Public-run ZDF (one of the two major German networks)....ran 37-Degrees last night. It's a weekly show that generally is a fairly serious documentary piece on people. You'd basically say from a weekly prospective....it's the trials and woes of regular people, with all the ups and downs in full view. Real people.....real situations.
Last night was this fifty-minute piece on Diana....a missing 26-year old gal.
The best I can say after watching it......here is some gal that grew up always in confrontational status....had a kid around age eighteen....then discovered herself just spinning her wheels and going nowhere. She felt she had art and writing talent, but was told no one wanted her drawings or her manuscript.
Her anger and frustration have now reached maximum capacity.
Two years ago.....she decided to take a two-week hike. Germans do this on occasion....usually to clear their mind and dump some stress. This episode went in a slightly different manner. She wanted no cellphone for the trip, and took 300 Euro. If you camped and ate cheaply.....the 300 Euro would have lasted maybe five weeks at best. She disappeared off the face of the Earth. For two years, nothing....no contact with the family and everyone assuming the worse.
What the private detective has run down is her last day or two....in some village over in the eastern side of Germany. A small town in the middle of nowhere. After that? Nothing.
After watching the whole show.....I came to this opinion that she basically was going to commit suicide, and this was a long-planned episode. Without the cellphone, there's no tracking going on and you can quietly find some thick woods to disappear into.
The German cops will tell you of the eighty million population....they have roughly 200 Germans per day reported "lost". The majority end up being found within a day or two (they got drunk, stayed at some friends house, or just ran away from home to live under the bridge). You can estimate from the rest that around a thousand Germans a year.....never come back or show up. Murder? Suicide? Or just living under some bridge? You just don't know.
The bridge-people, as I refer to them, aren't counted in census operations, and the cops don't really care who they are or why they chose that life. In the Wiesbaden area.....just walking around and taking a humble guess.....I'd say around four hundred folks in the city exist as bridge-people. Some are teenagers who just walked out the door and won't go back. Some are hardcore drunks. Some are crazy.
The social office will take anyone who walks through the door, and help to put them into some organized effort. You can't slam the German system.....they will take on anyone, and at least ensure they have three meals a day and a roof over their head.
This Diana? You'd like to settle the story and at least the parents (and her son).....would know the precise end. Even if you found her body in some woods....it'd leave everyone with a set feeling. You could accept something like that. In this case? You just don't know. She might be one of the bridge-people and intend to live the next thirty years quietly.
The shows title? 37-Degrees? Well....that's Celsius, and that's where life exists.....at 98 degree F.
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