Bielefeld: What a taxi driver experiences on Christmas Eve on the night shift

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Taxi driver Ioannis Demertzis: "The taxi has also made me a social advocate"

Photo: Florian Gontek / DER SPIEGEL

Ioannis Demertzis, 56, always starts his shift the same way: with an espresso.

A double, of course.

The place where he drinks his espresso is always the same: the Shell petrol station on Artur-Ladebeck-Straße in Bielefeld, Brackwede district.

Between ten and twelve trips per night

Demertzis starts every night from here. Between ten and twelve trips per shift. Except on Wednesdays, when he's off. He learned a lot of what he has learned about society on the eight and a half square meters of his VW Caddy, says Demertzis. He brush it two or three times a day. "That's my study," he says. It's a place where small-scale society comes together: young and old, rich and poor, friendly and outrageous. “The taxi also made me a social advocate,” says Demertzis. For 21 years, a good 60,000 kilometers every year.

He remembers well a lawyer who told him openly to his face that he thought he was something better. “I replied that he had no idea why I even drive a taxi. Maybe I'll use it to feed my family, or maybe I'll just do it because I don't know what to do with my time and want to get to know new people. He can't even know that. "He likes to discuss things with his guests," and in the end I usually sit on the longer lever, "he says and laughs. The stress that prevails in society today seldom leaves time for nuances, he says. Headphones and smartphones ruined a lot of interpersonal relationships. The line that Westernhagen sang in "Taximann" as early as 1975, it sounds truer than ever from the mouth of Demertzis 2021:

“Now I'm off, I want to go home, taxi man.

Drive a little faster and don't stop all the time.

Now drive off, I want to go home. "

The first trips on this Christmas Eve seem more comfortable.

An elderly couple wants to go home from the family celebration, about a 20-minute drive.

It was wonderful, says the lady when she comes into the car.

The first year in the children's new house, the Silesian gingerbread sauce with carp and meat, the children who would have been happy about the presents and the floor that was littered with paper, she says at the start.

Demertzis lets his window down for a moment to say goodbye, children and grandchildren wave: "Sorry," he calls out, "we have changed our destination: we're going to Paris."

Demertzis laughs, everyone laughs.

It’s not going to Paris, but to Hillegossen, East Bielefeld.

Ioannis Demertzis, a medium-sized man with a bald head, a pointy nose and a pink sweater, came to Bielefeld from Thessaloniki in 1988.

He was born in Ulm, then at the age of eight he went to Greece with his parents: "That's where I learned lathe work."

That it didn't stop there, says Ioannis Demertzis, was probably his greatest luck.

When things got worse and worse around the turn of the millennium for the insulation company, where he worked for years, he began to drive cabs on the weekends.

At first it was just the fluff of a colleague.

Today it is his dream job.

Do something else again?

"No way, and not anymore," laughs Demertzis.

"Let's be honest: is that work?"

Ioannis Demertzis

In the meantime, he has safely dropped the couple in front of a Hillegoss apartment block. The trip cost her almost 50 euros, and that evening he always gets a good tip. "People are often a little more generous at Christmas," says Demertzis. He has to know. Every year he drives for Christmas and every year he breaks his shift to have dinner in peace with his grown daughters, 27 and 28 years old, and his wife. "We had duck, my wife made it," says Demertzis. He smiles. You can feel in every minute that you accompany him during his shift how important his family is to him. He calls his wife at least every hour, just to ask if she is okay. Sometimes only for ten seconds. "It's just a matter of hearing them briefly," he says. Same with his daughters.“They would always come if I had a breakdown or needed it. At any time, without hesitation, ”he says. There is pride.

Eight percent of those in employment work on public holidays

And yet it is quite normal for Demertzis to get into a taxi for Christmas and not be with the family. The day is too strong for his employer, he says. According to the microcensus of the Federal Statistical Office, he is one of the eight percent of the 41,601,000 employed who also work on public holidays. In 2017 it was eleven percent, the number has been falling for years; slowly but steadily. 3.2 percent of those surveyed state that they work "constantly", 3.3 percent "occasionally". Data on how many workers explicitly go to work over Christmas is not collected in Germany. One thing is certain: our society would not function without people like Demertzis, without nurses, intensive care nurses and postmen who also do their jobs on public holidays. She would collapseright now in the pandemic.

Driving a taxi can also reveal social abysses, always, but especially at Christmas: A Hamburg taxi driver who has been chauffeuring guests through the Hanseatic city for decades once told me that she would like to drive at Christmas, but could not stand Christmas Eve on To be service. She can't cope with children having their annoying parents brought to the lonely apartment on Christmas Eve before eight o'clock in the evening or if they drive their husband and wife home from dinner and then have to drive the husband to the brothel. “I just can't stand it. That's why I'm not doing it, ”the woman told me at the time.

Ioannis Demertzis also knows such guests, they were part of it, he says.

Sometimes he just drives people around because they need company.

Without a specific destination.

“I notice that quickly.

Right now that loneliness has increased in the pandemic.

For many people, I'm not the taxi driver, I'm Janni, a friend «.

The life story, but without a surname

You can see that on this evening too. 115 taxis are in use in Bielefeld on this Holy Night. Most of them in the city center. Demertzis stays away from the hustle and bustle whenever possible. 60 percent of his guests are regular customers, and he often travels to the outskirts. They are saved in his phone under "Freund Quelle" or "Beethovenstrasse". They just call or write a WhatsApp when they need a driver. »I talk to many of my guests about very personal things. Sometimes I don't even know her last name, ”says Demertzis.

Around 11 p.m. there is another pit stop. Espresso, Doppio of course. Not as is usually the case at the gas station, but with one of Demertzis' oldest customers. Every year at Christmas he drops in here for an espresso. It is an area that the average Bielefeld citizen only goes for a walk. The Johannistal. According to a report by the »Neue Westfälische«, Bielefeld was the city with the second most billionaires in Germany after Hamburg in 2017. Corporations like Dr. Oetker, Schüco or the Goldbeck construction company. Estimated annual sales of the three companies: 13 billion euros. Many of the decision-makers in this region live in the Johannistal, not far from the Sparrenburg, the town's landmark.

That night, too, you can tell that some of the city's money is quite loose.

After the espresso, Ioannis Demertzis not only drives the regular customer's parents home, he also drives the boss of one of the city's finest restaurants to his apartment and picks up people with a large fleet of vehicles from large properties.

All regular customers, of course.

"Everyone is different.

Sometimes you just listen, sometimes you actively ask questions.

I can feel that quickly. "

Ioannis Demertzis

In between, Demertzis drives a lady, not a regular customer.

She talks about her bowel cancer, the pride in her two sons, one of whom is a lawyer and the other senior teacher, and the loneliness without her recently deceased husband.

She talks about her long-time job at Karstadt and the brass on Thomas Middelhoff, the fallen star manager of the nineties, also with a Bielefeld past, who let Karstadt die.

"Do you know what I have learned in life is that it has to go on and on," she says when she leaves.

Demertzis brings the woman to her small apartment on the edge of a park in Mitte.

She pays him more than double the actual fare.

Metal, at night at 2

"Everyone is different.

Sometimes you just listen, sometimes you actively ask questions.

I can feel that quickly, «says Demertzis.

He gives the iPad to a young couple who are next in a taxi.

It is now after 2 o'clock, Demertzis takes out a little light, moves it like a lighter, and we hear hard metal, Eskimo Callboy.

When the couple got out of the taxi, Demertzis asks: "Let's be honest: is this work?"

He will make about 300 euros in sales that Christmas night.

It is now 3:30 a.m.

The last hour and a half of the shift.

I say goodbye.

It's tinkling again at Demertzis.

There's an espresso to say goodbye.

The eighth that night.

Editor's note: In an earlier version of the text, the number of people in employment in Germany was incorrectly stated.

We have corrected the passage.