Up until now, it has been difficult to deal with Birkenstock wearers: too self-confidently, they radiated the arrogance of the better off, the at the same time completely grounded, who stood with bare feet on corky sandal soles and seemed more natural than their dull stockinged fellow human beings, those sad moderns with their stinky tennis socks or scratchy knee-highs, stepping from one platform shoe to the next and looking enviously at the natural way in which Birkenstöckler's foot and shoe came together.

Now it is over.

Anyone who wears Birkenstock is not only an unaesthete, but also a tree killer.

As the "Nordkurier" reports, an avenue of linden trees and chestnut trees near Pasewalk has to give way because the access road to a planned production plant of the shoe manufacturer is to be widened.

39 young, healthy trees will be felled by the end of this week to make room for the trucks that are expected when an industrial park in the Vorpommern-Greifswald district takes shape.

So far, there has only been talk of a possible building application, but the trees apparently have to go anyway to show political will.

At the same time, climate activists in Berlin are blocking access to the city autobahn and, supported by the Federal Minister for the Environment,

on an emergency and the Greenpeace boss is made government representative by the Foreign Office, silent climate rescuers are eliminated, unmolested by cameras.

CO2 guzzlers who could have continued to live and work for up to nine hundred years if the sale of organic brands wasn't ultimately more important than preserving the biotope.

This is now the linden leaf falling on the back of the Birkenstock empire: that it is partly responsible for the murder of these trees.

According to the regional newspaper, the local forest service provider is using heavy equipment to remove crowns and trunks piece by piece.

It's no consolation that he does his job carefully so as not to endanger sleepy bats.

Just as little as the promise of the local mayor that three new trees would be planted for every avenue tree that was felled.

From then on, a dark shadow fell on the clean sandals, which in the 1980s became a symbol of alternatives and were later integrated into bourgeois revolutionary households as house and leisure shoes.

The revolution doesn't always eat its children right away, it sometimes even takes off their shoes first.