They're building a mosque in our neighborhood.

I learned of this the Saturday before last when I stepped out to run a few errands and ran into hundreds of police in riot gear. They had set up roadblocks and were armed with water cannon, not to mention the smaller stuff.

It turned out that neo-Nazis were holding a demonstration to protest construction of the mosque, in the center of Bergedorf, a normally tranquil district on the southeastern edge of Hamburg. Young leftists had gathered in protest of the neo-Nazis, and the police were there to prevent clashes.

Wow. I ought to get out more often.

You had to feel sorry for the neo-Nazis. Almost. The police had tried to ban their demonstration for "incitement to public disorder" but were overruled by the courts. So district leaders organized a concurrent "Anti-Rightist Festival." Complete with music groups on two stages and an ecumenical church service, it brought together people from all of the "democratic" political parties as well as trade unions, local businesses, the Turkish community, and others. "Religious Freedom For All" read a big banner.

Weak and riven by infighting, the Ewiggestrigen (loosely: "forever yesterniks"), as the neo-Nazis are often called, managed to mobilize a measly 40-odd demonstrators. They marched down the street and chanted their slogans, e.g. "Bergedorf isn't the Orient," with the help of old loudspeakers mounted on a rickety delivery van.

The leftist Antifas (anti-fascists), about 1,100 of whom showed up, largely drowned them out. Most were dressed in black, the group's usual fashion statement. An inscription on the back of one said: "Keine Macht für Niemand" (No Power for Nobody). Some lefties bombarded the righties with snowballs, stones and bottles. They also pelted the police, who numbered about 1,200. The police responded by firing their water cannon (the weather was freezing, by the way). They also briefly arrested 16 people.

And that was that.

Mosques have existed in Germany for decades; there are about 150 already. But building new ones now, given the troubled state of relations between Muslims and the West, is often controversial. This is especially true in Hamburg, where three of the 9/11 hijackers, including the head of the terror cell that led the attacks, lived, studied, and attended the al-Quds mosque, in the city's central St. Georg district. Since that fateful day in 2001, two mosques proposed in Hamburg have been turned down.

In Bergedorf, however, every party in the district assembly gave thumbs up. "We all know the people in the Turkish community, and they're all upstanding Bergedorf residents," the chairman of the assembly's conservatives was quoted as saying. At the moment the Turks' place of worship is a nondescript back-lot building.

There are 3.2 million Muslims in Germany, population 82 million. About two-thirds are Turks, by far the largest group of foreign nationals in the country. Many are the children and grandchildren of Turkish "guest workers" recruited between 1955 and the economic crisis of 1973. Turkish döner kebap has become Germany's favorite snack. Turkish grocery stores are a blessing. It's hard to imagine Germany today without Turks, who leaven, in my humble opinion, what would otherwise be an insufferably stiff society.

That's not to say that life is always carefree with the descendants of the Ottomans, who slashed their way to Vienna's gates in the 16th and 17th centuries. Take my Turkish barber, for instance. Not long ago, after kindly offering me a cup of Turkish tea, he suggested singeing the hairs off my ears (I'm a man of a certain age). I was horrified.

"And what if my ears catch fire?" I asked, just half in jest.

Mehmet, or Mustafa, or whatever his name is, sought to reassure me. "No problem," he said good-naturedly. "We've got a fire extinguisher."