The other day I had work to do in Flensburg, a northern German town of some 86,000 souls that is hard by the border with Denmark. When foreigners hear "Flensburg," they generally think of ...

... nothing.

The natives, on the other hand, tend to cringe, much as Americans do when they hear "IRS." The reason is that Flensburg is the home of Germany's Federal Bureau of Motor Vehicles (Kraftfahrt-Bundesamt), which keeps a register of drivers' traffic violations. Points are given for each violation; if the sum hits 18, it's auf Wiedersehen to the ol' driver's license.

Flensburg holds no fear for me, though, since motorized I'm not. To me the town is rather attractive -- it wasn't blown to bits by Allied bombers -- and interesting in many ways. Flensburg is the center of Germany's Danish minority (and headquarters of the European Centre for Minority Issues). It was the Nazis' last seat of government (led by Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz after the suicides of Hitler and Goebbels and the fall of Berlin). It was the site of the world's first sex shop, in 1962, and is the base for Europe's biggest erotica-products retailer, Beate Uhse AG.

Flensburg is also where Flensburger Pilsener, aka Flens, is brewed. The beer is best known for its bottle, which is sealed with a rubber-ringed ceramic cork attached to a flippable clamp. Corks were used to seal beer bottles before the bottle cap was invented. In May 2003 in Berlin, Germany's then foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, served Colin Powell, then U.S. secretary of state, Flensburger Pilsener in the bottle. (Powell is said to have fond memories of the quaintly corked beer from his military days in Germany.) Three months earlier, before the U.N. Security Council, Powell had presented allegations of Iraqi WMD.

Now THAT was a real corker.