When I was 20, I lived in Germany for a year as part of an exchange program. One of my favorite things to do was go to a particular dance club in town on the nights aimed at university students, which tended to be particularly packed. On one such night in April, which happened to be very hot, I was dressed in clothes appropriate for the warm weather when a man came up to me and told me, in German, “You can’t dance here.”

This club, which used to be a movie theatre and therefore was set up with multiple levels, included a stage level, where I was currently dancing. Because I couldn’t tell if the man worked there or not, I simply moved away from him and continued dancing with my friends. He came up to me a second time. This time he grabbed me (hard) by the elbow. This is the conversation that ensued:



Him: I told you you can’t dance here.

Me: Do you work here?

Him: No.

Me: Then I can dance wherever the fuck I want. Get your hands off me.

Him: No, you can’t dance here. You’re fat. Me and my friends don’t want to look at you.

Me: Fuck off.

I continued to dance, at which point he grabbed me by the arm again and pushed me against the railing which separated the high stage section of the club from the lower level. He was very strong and I was having a hard time getting my wrist away from him. The female friend I was with, as well as another girl who seemed to be part of my group, were screaming at him to leave me alone, but his male friends just looked on and laughed. He then proceeded to scream various insults at me in German. While my German was only alright at the time and I was a bit drunk, I only understand part of what he said, but most of it was either to call me a “fat bitch” or “disgusting cow” and various variations thereof.

Sensing that I was going to be hurt in any event and that he was pushing me ever closer to the railing, I reached around him to pour a drink on his back, in the hopes that his reaction time would allow me a chance to slip away. Unfortunately, he saw the reach, and used the opportunity to “haybale” punch me in my left eye.

The force of his punch was so hard that it broke my thick rimmed plastic glasses at the temple (rather than at the hinge). When I recovered my broken glasses, a huge chunk of my eyelashes had ripped out and were located on the lens. I remember that the impact was so hard my knees did not bend before I hit the floor. Had a girl not noticed me falling and caught my head before it hit the ground, I very likely could have been far more seriously injured.

The rest of the night, I blacked in and out, but I do remember two bodyguards picking me up and carrying me to another room. As injured as I was, I remember being upset that I was being carried, because I didn’t want the bouncers to be worried about how heavy I was. Thinking about how THIS was my concern in that moment, even 6 years after the fact, makes me really sad.

I ended up having to get a series of stitches. My eye was swollen shut for a week. I needed assistance to wash my hair. My clothes were covered in blood and ruined and I got to spend the last two months of my exchange year in fear of leaving my house because my mere physical appearance was deemed a cause for violence.

Of course, I don’t consider this experience representative of the German people, and I had many friends who supported me after this event. But I also know that even after I left Germany, the lawyer who defended my case in my absence had to contend with the fact that this man was trying to claim he hit me out of self defense…that I had caused the fight by spilling his drink on him and that my size was the primary reason he had hit me…because it caused him to fear for HIS safety.

My lawyer won my case, but it took a long time, seemingly because this defense was considered somewhat plausible. This man, by the way, was a member of the German air force, and had been trained in combat. He knew where to hit me, and how hard, to truly hurt me. The doctors said that had my thick glasses not absorbed some of the shock when they broke, and he had hit my temple directly, I could have suffered brain damage or worse.

Any world in which the mere existence of a fat person in a room is cause for violence is not a world I want to live in. And every day, I get to see the scar on my eyebrow that reminds me that I do live in that world.

Fuck. That. Shit.