German Resistance Proves Tough against Smoking Ban

BERLIN — From French cafes to British pubs, smoking has been snuffed out of European public life little by little over the last four years.

But kicking the habit hasn't been so easy for Germany, where smoking has long been part of everyday life.

Scott Norvell/For Cox Newspapers (enlarge photo) A smoker exhales as he passes by a sidewalk cafe in Berlin. From French cafes to British pubs, smoking has been snuffed out of European public life little by little over the last four years. But kicking the habit hasn't been so easy in Germany, where smoking has long been part of everyday life.

"I've been smoking since I was 10," Loki Schmidt recently told the daily Bild am Sonntag newspaper. "I won't stop."

Even the former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt has been accused of flouting recent smoking bans by lighting up — along with his wife — at a swanky theater.

On Jan. 1, half of Germany's 16 states introduced bans on smoking in public places including restaurants and bars, joining three other states that had already implemented their own bans.

The rest of the country is due to implement smoking restrictions by the end of the year.

For the first time this year, the beer tents at Oktoberfest — the annual two-week celebration of the national brew — are supposed to be smoke-free.

But the measures largely have fallen short of the near-total bans in other parts of Europe, with most German states still allowing smokers to puff away in smaller enclosed smoking sections.

A new airline, Smintair, plans to "reinstate the liberty of smoking in all seats" beginning with an inaugural flight from Dusseldorf to Tokyo later this year.

In restaurants and bars, smokers have come up with novel ways to get around the new prohibitions.

For example, many establishments have transformed themselves into "smokers' clubs." Anyone who pays a small fee — sometimes as paltry as only one euro (about $1.47) — can enter and smoke as usual.

In a blow to the anti-smoking movement, a constitutional court in a southwestern German state announced in February a relaxation of the smoking ban for one-room, corner pubs, pointing out that 80 percent of some small pubs' clientele are smokers.

The move could prompt other courts around Germany to follow suit.

"Some one-room bar owners have started to file suits in court against the smoking laws and this is a real problem," said Martina Potschke-Langer, a doctor at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg. "Germany has changed a lot but the legislation is still not sufficient because we need to be completely smoke-free."

She said that Germans boast an anti-authoritarianism streak that tends to make the population more resistant to all-out prohibitions.

About 36 percent of men and 28 percent of women are smokers, numbers only slightly above the worldwide average of 30 percent.

An estimated 130,000 people die each year in Germany as a result of tobacco-related illnesses. But nearly 20 percent of German youth — ages 12 to 17 — continue to light up.

In France, where there also are ardent pockets of resistance to a smoking ban, only about a quarter of the general population smokes.

Even German politicians have found ways to get around the smoking ban. The German media recently reported that Hamburg's interior minister, Udo Nagel, an avid pipe smoker, has had his office declared an official "smoking room."

A Europe-wide anti-smoking movement began four years ago when Ireland banned smoking in public places. A similar movement already had taken off in the United States, where laws have grown increasingly stringent.

Friedrich Wiebel, president of the German Medical Action Group on Smoking and Health, an anti-smoking organization, agreed that Germany has been lagging behind on this issue for years. But he said he hopes this is finally starting to change.

Wiebel said resistance to smoking bans has mostly been organized by the tobacco industry as well as by those in the hospitality sector worried about the bans' economic impact.

"Legislation against passive smoking is now well accepted by the general population," he said.

Barbara Geier, a spokeswoman for the German National Tourism Board, said it's too early to tell whether the new smoking regulations will have any effect on German businesses.

"So far we haven't heard any negative reactions," she said.