withdraw from the world

I continue with my German beer to go with German movies.  I picked this one up in a shop I don't often visit, since it's a little out of my way.  Augustiner is about as identifiably German beery as you can get, being from Munich and all.

It has a bitter-sour sort of smell, at least that's what I get through my fog of virus, but it's typical of standard beer.  The color is extremely light compared to what I've been used to recently, and clear.  It's a little like a fizzy lemonade.  It's more strongly bitter than I expected, although it was hinted at in the smell.  It's a good, clean flavor.  While noticeable before being swallowed, it doesn't hang around.  It's about as German a beer as you can think of, being a teaser for food.  I've even just had lunch and now I just want something to munch on to go with my Augustiner.

I think this lemonade needs more powder...

Supplier: La Tienda de la Cerveza
Price: €2.40

Now for the second movie.  The relationship to the beer is not very direct.  One might argue that it's a traditional German beer and traditional German values are talked about in the movie, but I can't be sure that those really are traditional values.  Many people have serious difficulty defining "traditional" anyway.  The movie was actually produced for television, but it was fine on the big screen.  It's titled Das Ende der Geduld/The End of Patience.  Like many movies shown in the festival, it concerns the problems with assimilation of immigrants, in this case being based on the true story of a judge in juvenile court system who wanted to streamline hearings by applying existing laws more rigidly.  She is primarily concerned with encouraging young Muslims in the Berlin district of Neukölln to get educated and avoid becoming street thugs, earning a lot of resentment as well as admiration from authorities and citizens alike.  She comes off as having some fairly right-wing ideas, such as placing more requirements on the awarding of subsidies to immigrants, like making sure their children are regularly in school and learning German.  This judge appears to be a major proponent of assimilation by immersion, at one point remarking with approval on a program that forcibly removed people from ethnic ghettos to remove influence from their home cultures.  She also sometimes shows the typical right-wing/conservative lack of understanding of the struggle of the disadvantaged (although this problem is certainly not limited to those on the right), telling a Muslim mother who has just told her about her family's economic problems that she doesn't need money, she needs German classes.  By the end of the movie, there seems to be general support among the German public and authorities for her program of change, called the "Neuköllner Modell", and she is given a book deal.  As soon as she finishers her manuscript and sends it off to the publisher, she decides to kill herself, which she does after seeing Germany win the World Cup by hanging herself in a large, wooded park.  The movie highlights the struggle that both immigrants and host countries face: the immigrants want to succeed, but not lose their identities, and they can easily feel that the only way to survive is to band together and game the system they find not only strange but unwelcoming; the hosts wanted labor, and wanted it cheap, and now have to deal with the consequences of a population left behind, not to mention the desire to appear evolved and tolerant to other societies.