German public transport is a wonder: not because it is so efficient, but because it is based on the honour system. There are no turnstiles in the train stations, and you can walk past the driver on to a bus without buying or showing a ticket.
This, of course, makes life easy for fare-dodgers, called Schwarzfahrer in German, literally translated as black driver.
A recent poster campaign to crack down on fare-dodging in the city of Heidelberg, however, took the term rather too literally.
Posters showed a shifty-looking black man travelling without paying, as a white passenger bought the correct ticket.
The poster was the last straw for Mr Osman Sankho, a Sierra Leone-born epidemiologist living in Heidelberg.
Mr Sankho has lived in Germany for almost a decade but encounters regular abuse on the streets and on public transport.
He bought a car to avoid having to mingle with Germans on the train and see the offensive poster every day, but the abuse didn't stop there.
One day, while parking his car, an old man walking nearby shouted at him: "I pay my taxes. The state uses the money to take care of refugees. They take the money and buy cars".
The old man spat at Mr Sankho's car and continued down the street, shouting: "All foreigners out of here."
Mr Sankho is planning to move back to Sierra Leone as soon as possible because he is tired of the groups of skinheads on street corners and of the clandestine racists in Germany.
The opposition Christian Democratic Union (CDU) were accused of clandestine racism last year after the government launched a green card programme to attract IT specialists to Germany.
The CDU coined the slogan "Kinder statt Inder" (Children instead of Indians), implying that the government should educate German children to fill the country's high-tech jobs rather than bring in foreigners.
The party went further last autumn when the CDU parliamentary leader, Mr Friedrich Merz, suggested immigrants in Germany should place their own culture second and adopt the German Leitkultur or "defining culture".
He was attacked for reviving what sounded like Nazi ideas of cultural supremacy, with all its associated racist trappings.
The party quietly dropped the term, but it was revived in a Council of Europe report on racism published last month.
The report's authors said Mr Merz's comments strengthened negative cliches about other cultures already predominant in Germany. The report criticised Turkey, Cyprus and Croatia, but singled out a culture of intolerance in Germany, where open and latent racism and antiSemitism exist more generally.
Despite the uncompromising criticism of Germany, the report received scant coverage in the German press.
Indeed, the authors of the report said the media was part of the problem.
The media's reporting of racially-motivated crimes is regrettably simplified to problems of juvenile delinquency or frustration in the former East Germany.
A recently published book, Just One More Death: Daily Racism in Germany, catalogues the dozens of race-motivated attacks in the last decade.
Its author, Alexandra Klei, revisited the small towns in eastern Germany familiar to most Germans only because of racist attacks that took place there.
Many of these towns are located in national liberated zones, neo-Nazi strongholds where police say they cannot guarantee the safety of foreigners, homosexuals or the handicapped.
Witnesses to racist attacks in these towns always say the perpetrators are normal young people, because for them normal young people have shaved heads and bomber jackets and spend their nights shouting "Foreigners Out", says Ms Klei.
The town of Guben on the Polish border entered the hall of shame in February 1999 when a 28-year-old Algerian man, Mr Farid Guendol, was chased through the town by far-right youths.
He ran through a plate-glass door and bled to death in three minutes.
A memorial to Mr Guendol, visited recently by the Chancellor, Mr Gerhard Schroder, has been daubed with swastikas and graffiti several times by neo-Nazis in the town, including one of his killers.
New government measures to counteract race-motivated violence include an exit programme that provides financial support and even new identities for those who want to leave the neo-Nazi scene.
But the Council of Europe is sceptical of the long-term success of such policies because of cultural norms in Germany, where discriminatory policies and practices reinforce racism and anti-Semitism.
Central to the problem in Germany is the law of "blood right" that, until it was recently abolished, allowed only those born of German parents to hold German citizenship.
The report says this has bred a racist culture with a narrow definition of German identity.
Intolerance is endemic in German society, according to the Council of Europe, and a concerted effort is needed to root the problem out, beginning in schools.
Only then will the gangs of skinheads on street corners disappear and only then will the Schwarzfahrer poster campaign in Heidelberg be unacceptable to the Germans.
On Monday, Patrick Smyth and Elaine Lafferty write about racism in the US.
