Years ago, one early morning in Frankfurt, just after 6 a.m., I was walking along Kaiserstrasse toward the central station. Only a few steps away from my guesthouse, I heard the faint sound of a bicycle behind me. The bicycle slowed, and a young man began to chat me up. He spoke in a language other than German and appeared to be barely out of his teens.
Even after I asked him to leave me alone, he persisted. His words were intrusive and suggestive. He continued following me all the way to the central station. When I finally reached the station plaza, about 30 people were scattered across the square. Only then did I raise my voice and call for help. As the eyes of those in the plaza turned toward us, he suddenly spat in my face, startled by the unexpected public attention.
Stunned by something I had never imagined could happen, I began striking his back with my bag. He shouted an insult at me, then mounted his bicycle and rode away. I felt anger, and, above all, a bitter resentment. But what disturbed me more than the assault itself was the fact that a few steps away, people stood by and ignored my cries for help. The man who had harassed me was not physically imposing. He carried no gun, no knife, no visible weapon of any kind.
As I stood in the square, still in shock, three young German men nearby approached me. “Are you okay?” one of them asked. But when I asked them to call the police, they shook their heads and shrugged in resignation. “The police can’t really do anything. People like him are always like this.”
I could hardly believe what I had just heard. It seemed out of step with the Germany I knew through years of living and traveling there. In difficult situations, I had often found people ready to help.
Yet at least at that moment, to me, the men seemed gripped by a sense of helplessness. I am no longer certain, however, that helplessness alone can fully explain their reaction. Their reluctance to intervene might also have reflected realities that were invisible to me at the time. I knew, of course, that this was only a small and deeply personal experience, far too limited to support any sweeping judgement.
Even so, the memory dug its claws into me and lingered far longer than I expected. Over time, what surprised me most was how easily I could mistake a deeply personal experience for a sufficient basis to judge broader realities. Confronted with events that seemed difficult to explain through reason alone, I found myself drawn to narratives that reinforced the conclusions I was inclined to draw.
Looking back, what I felt was not simply anger. It was a conviction that such incidents should never be allowed to happen again, and that society had a responsibility to address the conditions that made them possible. Of course, the man who harassed me and spat in my face committed an act of violence, and there is no question that such behaviour should be met with condemnation, as well as appropriate legal and social consequences.
Unfortunately, however, that sense of moral urgency made it easier for me to associate one person's actions with a broader group, clumsily dividing the world into "us" and "them." Only later did I begin to recognize what had slipped out of view. The object of my anger had been a violent act, not an identity. The issue I wanted to see addressed was not the existence of a particular group, but the violent behavior itself. Somewhere along the way, I had begun to lose sight of that distinction.
No matter how understandable my feelings may have been, othering can do little to address the problem itself and may even contribute to another form of violence. When fear, insecurity and violence begin to erode trust, the real challenge for a society is where its members choose to direct their attention. The answers we find are often shaped by the questions we decide to ask. In that sense, a better society might begin with better questions.
Therefore, the more clearly we want to understand a problem, the more carefully we must examine the lens through which we see it.
George Orwell once warned against the comforting belief that prejudice exists only in other people. By assuming that we are immune to irrational attitudes, we may fail to examine the biases hidden within our own minds. I still sometimes wonder whether I am entirely immune to it myself.
- - -
Bae Su-kyeong
Bae Su-kyeong is a freelance journalist. The views expressed here are the writer’s own. — Ed.
khnews@heraldcorp.com
![[Exclusive] Ateez to return in November](https://wimg.heraldcorp.com/news/cms/2026/09/02/news-p.v1.20260902.76162fb0ba55493aad1c076f240d0750_R.jpg?type=h&h=120)