GERMANY:Following his acquittal by a German court over an 'Aids bite' on a neo-Nazi thug, Dennis Milholland tells Derek Scallyabout his extraordinary life
Dennis Milholland's bark is worse than his bite. But his provocative personality and disrespect for authority have a habit of getting him into - and out of - trouble.
The 57-year-old author and translator, from an Irish-Algerian Jewish family, appeared in a German court last week after being attacked by a neo-Nazi thug nearly two years ago.
The thug ran off after Milholland bit him. Because Milholland is HIV positive - and told his attacker as much - he was put on trial as perpetrator not victim.
"My Irish father told me never to be a victim," says the bearded Milholland in his Berlin apartment. "But there's a history of turning victims into perpetrators in this country. I couldn't help thinking of the Nazi newspaper headline: 'Jew bites German Shepherd dog'."
On May night in 2005, Milholland and two friends were accosted by three men as they walked through Potsdam to catch a train back to Berlin. One of the men, Oliver Kleinow (26), followed them into their train carriage, shouted obscenities and punched one of Milholland's friends.
Milholland lunged for the younger man and a short scuffle ended when he bit down hard on the tip of the finger Kleinow had stuck in his mouth.
"Are you blind?" shouted Kleinow, clutching his bleeding finger.
"Yes I am," replied Milholland who, following an Aids-related illness, is fully blind in one eye and 70 per cent blind in the other. "And I have Aids and now you do too," he added.
Kleinow ran off and returned with police officers.
The chances of HIV transmission through a bite are considered negligible and Kleinow has not contracted the virus. "They took him off for medical treatment and us to the police station," says Milholland. "Meanwhile, I sat on a bench for two hours holding tissues to my bleeding ear."
The case is another unlikely episode in an extraordinary family history. Milholland's father was born in Dublin but left in 1919 after finding the doors of Irish universities closed to Jews.
He moved to Weimar Berlin where he met a Jewish woman from Algeria, or, as Milholland puts it, "a communist revolutionary bellydancer".
The couple married and in 1938 fled the country with their children to the US, where Milholland was born. His older brother Fred stayed behind in Paris as a student, but was murdered in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
In the US, Milholland says his physicist father worked on the "Manhattan" project to develop the atom bomb. However, his mother's communist background attracted unwelcome attention during the McCarthy era and eventually the family emigrated to France.
In 1961 Milholland moved to Germany to study and in 1972 was drafted for the Vietnam War. Although he didn't hold US citizenship, he says his Kansas city birthplace was good enough for the drafters.
In Vietnam he was shot, captured by the North Vietnamese army and ended up in a POW camp in Hanoi.
Later returning to Germany, he worked in the US embassy in east Berlin until a love affair with a Soviet military attaché was uncovered and he was sacked.
Milholland moved to Ireland in 1991 and discovered he was HIV positive after a 1987 blood transfusion. Despite developing full-blown Aids, he survived thanks to pioneering drug therapy and worked for Gay Community News. His journalism and fiction work, mocking the Orange Order, Irish politics and the Catholic Church, resulted in several death threats and, he says, a discreet suggestion to leave the country.
Meeting him, it's clear how, with ease, he can and does infuriate figures of authority.
Asked by the judge in court why he bit Kleinow, Milholland replied: "It was self defence. I'm almost a pensioner, I don't slither around the alleyways of Potsdam biting children's fingers."
The case was acquitted, to cheers from his transvestite supporters in the public gallery.
A day later, in his Berlin apartment, he was more reflective. "It was obvious there was homophobia and a couple of other phobias at play," he says. "It only came to court because nobody could stop the legal wheels turning. Those wheels have been turning all of my life."