Asternweg

Last Saturday night, VOX (one of our commercial networks in Germany).....ran a rather odd documentary around 8:15PM.  "Asternweg: A Street Corner".

Normally, at best....VOX might collect around five to six percent of the German audience for this time slot.  For Asternweg, they got around eight percent....a hefty jump.

Asternweg is a documentary covering a suburb of Kaiserslautern.  The best description you could use?  It's a four-star ghetto....where you attach yourself and never leave.  It's where the drunks and marginal life folks in Kaiserslautern live.  It's where their kids grow up and continue to live in the same neighborhood.  It's not fiction.....it's real life.

I sat and watched a clip of the show last night.  In the beginning....you feel sorry for these folks, but you reach a point where you realize that anyone could pack up and leave.....yet they just don't seem to have any interest in doing so.

A four-hour documentary piece.....which apparently interested a large segment of German society.

For twelve-odd years I lived in K-town.....I knew of the neighborhood and had driven by on a couple of occasions.  It reminds an American of marginal home projects in urban America....folks sitting on the street and guys openly drinking beer throughout the afternoon and evening.  People in this stage of life live off welfare and don't have any expectations anymore.

A one-time documentary?  It would appear so.  But oddly, people are curious about this kind of stuff.