A dingy line of red tile runs across the otherwise brown floor of
the men’s changing room at the public swimming pool in my Berlin
neighborhood. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire It tells you where to take your shoes off and, in the
meantime, a fair amount about German thinking.
As their eyes alight on the small sign that goes with it, which
reads “barefoot zone” in German, grown men freeze as though they have
hit a force field, or had an electric shock administered for being
foolish |