What would I do?

It’s a gray winter day; dusk is falling. Rain patters against the streetcar windows. Nicole Wegmann, a sales assistant in a drugstore, is on her way home after a long day at work. Hans Armbruster, a retiree who got on a few stops earlier, is reading a crime thriller. The doors are already closing when two teenagers drop into the seats in front of him at the last second. One sports a leather jacket and cap, and the other is holding a beer bottle. Kevin and Mike are horsing around and then start verbally abusing Armbruster. When the pair discover Meike and dark-skinned Isaac in the back of the streetcar, they leave Armbruster alone and move on. The retiree breathes a sigh of relief and goes back to his book. Even as Mike begins hurling vile insults at Isaac and shoving him. Other passengers murmur among themselves. “Come on, leave them alone, they’re just kids,” a man hisses at his companion as she makes a move to intervene. The provocation threatens to escalate and starts to get physical. And one question hangs over everything: Intervene or ignore? Step bravely in front of the aggressors and risk getting in harm’s way? Call the police? Or avoid trouble, just keep staring out the window and hope the whole thing blows over fast?

Witnesses to such attacks ask themselves questions like these every day. In Germany alone, countless cases of violence and vandalism occur on a daily basis, often for no apparent reason. In 2018, the police registered 1,131,088 street crimes nationwide. This represents a six percent decrease compared with 2017 (1,203,124 crimes). Yet people recall the cases of Dominik Brunner in Munich in 2009, or Tugçe, the college student beaten to death in Offenbach in 2014 when she stepped in to help another girl who was being harassed by two men. Fueled by incidents like these, public discussion heats up again and again over a term that is fraught with meaning: “civil courage,” or intervening when there is trouble.

“We make the basic distinction between self-defense – meaning how to behave if you yourself are attacked – and ‘civil courage’ as intervening in an incident that you witness between third parties,” Ohain says. Munich’s police force has been offering the general public special courses in intervention for several years. “The courses are very popular,” Ohain remarks. Her observation contradicts the frequent accusation that helping people who are in danger is considered less and less important in our increasingly egotistical society. “Crimes committed in public scare people, of course,” Ohain says. The reasons bystanders most often use to justify looking away are insecurity and ignorance. “So we try to give people the security they lack: We use role-plays to practice the correct behavior in various situations, give concrete tips and also raise their awareness of potential danger.” This is important because anyone can find themselves in a situation that calls for intervention – whether as victim or witness, alone on a dark street or in the presence of other people on public transportation. Which brings us back to Isaac.

In his case, the other passengers’ halfhearted attempts to help are too little too late. When the streetcar stops, there is blood everywhere. Retiree Hans Armbruster stares at the scene before him speechlessly, unable to grasp what has happened. Shattered glass. Sirens. Isaac is unconscious as EMTs storm into the streetcar to perform CPR on him. His girlfriend Meike kneels by his side, weeping quietly. Her desperate cries for help have faded away. Not until the two perpetrators were already brutally beating Isaac did fellow passenger Nicole Wegmann pull out her phone and call for help. Too late for Isaac.

This is the shocking end to a provocation that escalated out of control, as described in the SAT.1 movie “Ein ganz normaler Tag” (“A perfectly normal day”) in stark detail – a fictional story in this case, a bitter reality in many others. It is an uncomfortable subject that leaves the viewer asking the disturbing question, “What would I do?”