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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
World
Philip Oltermann in Berlin

‘In no city have I felt as unsafe as Berlin’: opera singer sues metro over racism claims

Metro Station Warschauer Strasse in Berlin, Germany.
The station at Warschauer Strasse in Berlin. The network has no ticket barriers so a team of 170 roaming collectors carry out spot checks. Photograph: Markus Mainka/Alamy

A Berlin metro ticket controller squeezes through a throng of old-school punks, mariachi band members and burly men in leather chaps, all while jauntily humming Is’ mir egal, “It’s all the same to me”.

The 2015 viral ad, featuring Turkish-German Neukölln rapper Kazim Akboga, was a great marketing success for the German capital’s public transport company, BVG: if you ride on our metros, trams and buses, it said, you can be whoever you want to be – as long as you remember to buy a ticket.

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