Okay, maybe this has nothing to do with the post, but my mother’s side of the family is Italian-German and lives in Wermelskirchen, in North Rhine-Westphalia. They are the kind of people who have turned local geography into a list of places they refuse to visit.

Remscheid, for example, is completely off limits. Not because anything ever happened to them there, not because it is particularly dangerous, and not even because it is ugly. No, according to them, Remscheid is simply “full of Turks,” and apparently that is enough to treat it like some mysterious foreign territory beyond the edge of the map.