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Festive lights and steaming mugs: It's Christmas. Yet, some people must stay outside all year round. A stroll across Stuttgart’s Christmas market shows that Glühwein can have a bitter aftertaste. By Alon Shani

Wandering between the stands of the beautiful Christmas market in Stuttgart makes you wonder if it is the magical spirit, the holiday tradition or simply the social interaction that makes hundreds of people stand in the freezing cold and drink Glühwein.

Indeed, for a foreigner used to 15° C in an average December, it seems somewhat amazing. Yet, drinking the dark, warm and sweetish wine, you understand. It is one of those few moments that you feel you belong, not in a religious sense, not in a national sense, but just as a citizen of the world sense: enjoying what life has to offer and falling into conversation with others doing the same.

However, the shimmering lights of the stands and the warming aura of wine and conversation easily make us forget that reality for many people in Stuttgart and in southern Germany is less cosy than it appears in a first glance.

“The people who are left entirely alone”

At a press conference last week, the Voluntary Welfare League of Baden-Württemberg announced a renewed peak in the numbers of homeless women and men in the country. While in the last decade population growth was 2%, the numbers of the lowest poverty group increased by 36%. Many people behind these statistics are youngsters under 25 and women who lost their homes because of high rents. That day I tried finding one of these women who just recently lost her home. Going from one shelter to the other, though, I was unsuccessful. I met old men who were drinking their cups of tea and playing some cards, escaping into the warmth, but not someone who fits the profile described by the league.

“But they are there, these are not blown up numbers,” claims Beatrice Gerst from the trott-war street newspaper organization, which distributes as many as 30,000 copies a month in the region of Stuttgart. “I am not surprised with the numbers reported. Our country failed to build the right social security network that can help people with difficulties. We sometimes find it hard to accept people who suffer from mental illnesses or went though a tragedy in their personal life until everything collapsed around them. These are the people who are left entirely alone,” she adds.

During my visit in trott-war I met John, a fifty-something year-old vendor, who now lives on his own in a house, after several years of moving from shelter to shelter: “I’ve been unemployed for few years now. At my age, it’s not easy finding a job. In our August edition, I wrote an article about cultural places people can visit without paying. Otherwise, I feel that many of the locals here don’t care much about the vendors”.

A Christmas market’s appearance can be misleading

Societies, be it German or Israeli, I learned, wake up and remember the poor and the underprivileged especially during the holiday season. How wrong can we be, people think to themselves, donating money for charity? The media act as if what they announce was new when statistics such as these are published and they cover the issue of homelessness mainly before charity events. At least in the case of Germany and other western countries, the public can decide whether they want to know about routine everyday life from the perspective of a homeless person. In that case they buy an issue of a street newspaper, donate 1.70 euro, half of it to the vendor. It strikes me as odd that no such thing takes place in Israel.

Wandering again last night in the empty streets of Stuttgart, watching the market, all quiet and still, I thought about John and the others in their red trott-war outfits, hoping that they, too, will have a merry Christmas.

A Christmas market’s appearance can be a bit misleading. The taste of the Glühwein has some bitterness in it, perhaps like life itself, and like lives of others that we usually push aside so easily.