There were a lot of things we liked about Germany and living outside of the US; however, we had a lot of difficulty with certain points as well (and, from talking to other expats in Germany from both inside and outside of Europe, we were not the only ones). At one of the worst points we were even threatened with not being allowed to leave the country by a German lawyer! (I'll mention more about that later.) I told myself, to be fair, I would wait a year before posting more about Germany, to get some distance and perspective. One of my college roommates from Shanghai, China used to say a common Chinese maxim is, "a mountain is seen more clearly from a distance." The Chinese character for mountain is also one of the few parts of Chinese writing he taught me that I can remember to this day.
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| I am going into this tangent to help illustrate that we truly do live in a multicultural, international world today. |
Connected to this is the German idea of Ordnung, which does not translate into a single word in English so I will use the German word here. Ordnung encompasses ideas like order, organization, rules, discipline, code of conduct. For fun, I used to say to a German that worked for me "Übermaß Ordnung schaffen Chaos," as my contribution to bumper-sticker philosophy and as a way of telling her not to spend time on needless details. (I would try to talk to her in a little German each day to practice.) It translates to "excessive order creates chaos." Germany is seen as ordered, safe and civilized and the rest of the world (Ausland) is shamefully undisciplined and out of control. Sadly, a lot of commercially successful news agencies seek to reenforce our prior beliefs rather than challenge them (which leads to « news » sources tailoring to different markets, like Fox News and conservative christian republicans). During the Arab Spring for example, English language newspapers in Europe had headlines loosely along the lines of "Students in Tunesia protest and take to the streets for economic and social change," which can be seen as a positive cast. In contrast, German headlines were to the order of "Chaos in Tunesien!"
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| A symbol of chaos. |
As a side note, I thought it was telling that while M and I were waiting in line, among people from all kinds of different nationalities, to go up the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the only family we observed jumping a divider to get ahead were speaking German to each other. I also found out that Germans (and incidentally also the British) have a reputation in parts of Europe for not following local rules and laws. It is as if they think they are in a lawless land when outside of Germany. However, let me pause at this point and clearly say I am speaking in gross generalizations here about a group of people. This is something that is distasteful to me on many levels, but I am not sure how else to capture elements of a nations culture in words. (And yes, I am all too familiar with the concept of « the ugly American » , I am not saying Germany is the only country with international cultural issues, but it is Germany I am focusing on here.)
And this was not all negative. At times it was refreshing to have clear-cut rules for situations (once you finally sorted out what they were.) When I was driving in Germany I found some aspects crazy and complained about them at the time, but the other day I found myself saying to V (and us both laughing about it) that the way people drive in parking lots in the US "ist alles im chaos" ("is all in chaos, with German ~kows~ pronunciation for chaos) and that in Germany at least it made sense. I love that pedestrians can use crosswalks in Germany without fear of being run over. Even before stepping foot into the road, cars will stop and let you cross. In the US we had to caution the kids that things didn't work the same way and that you had to first make sure no cars were coming no matter what the crosswalk or lights said.
This works both ways, one of my first lasting impressions of Germany, the first time I visited ten years ago, was how pedestrians waited at crosswalks. I was walking along the sidewalk and, as I approached the intersection, looked down the road to see if any cars were coming. It was clear so I started to cross the street. However, the other people walking nearby me stopped all on cue, as if magically controlled or invisibly communicating with each other, and stared at me as I walked out into the road on my own. I jumped back to see if there was a car coming that I had missed, looked around; there was nothing coming⸮ Then suddenly everyone started walking at once! I came to realize that they were actually going by the crosswalk signals rather than the traffic conditions...
Driving in Germany has made me much more aware of pedestrians and bikers. There are some problems with the way Germans drive (the concept of defensive driving doesn't exist, instead safety is assumed as long as rules are adhered to), but I wish driving behavior in the US was more rule oriented than opportunistic. (More about that later)
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| Road signs in Germany |
Anyway, this ordnung goes much deeper. Germans are controlled by small marks on the sidewalk and signs that foreigners miss, which control details like which parts people can walk on, in what manner, and in what direction... The rigidity of these rules sometimes seems pathological rather than cultural. (Yes, I am judging another culture based on my own cultural values; I was judged constantly as an American while in Germany, so now it is my turn; deal with it.) Again, back during my first visit ten years ago, I was walking on the sidewalk talking to someone from Spain that was living in Germany. A man that was walking faster than us came up right behind us and started making loud, weird throat noises. I thought he was mentally ill but my Spanish friend said that he wants to pass us because we are walking slow. It was a very wide sidewalk and we were off to the side only taking up half of it to walk side by side while talking. He could have easily passed and walked around us, but then the realization hit me. Half of the sidewalk had a different brick pattern and was designated as a bike lane. There were no bikes anywhere in sight--there was absolutely no danger of getting hit or blocking a bike--but the man would not step out into the bike lane to go around us. I made the mistake of stepping off to the side, into the bike lane, to let him by (instead of moving single file on the pedestrian side) and he felt compelled to point out the error of my ways.
This starts at an early age. There is no equivalent concept of a tattletale in Germany, where children are discouraged, by adults, from turning each other in for minor rule breaking. Children are encouraged to point out rule breaking behavior whenever they see it, even if it is adults who do it, and verbally correct the offender. One of the first times this happened to me, a little girl came over to the car I was driving and explained, indignantly pointing out a sign down the road, that the street was only for local cars, I was amazed. A moment later I told the German riding in the car with me, who was from the neighborhood, "wouldn't she rather play in her yard than monitor traffic?" then I found out that the girl didn't even live on that street and was just walking by‽ At another time, when we were firing some fireworks over a lake on New Years Eve, a boy walked up and told the kids and I (but spoke directly to me) that I needed to wait until sunset to shoot the fireworks. This ordnung is also used to redefine reality. A coworker of mine was riding his bike when the biking lane was interrupted briefly by access to a parking lot. According to the markings it was briefly entirely a pedestrian lane before going back to being split between a biking and pedestrian lane. As he rode across it an older man, that was walking on the pedestrian side, quickly moved sideways toward him. My coworker tried steering the bike out of the way around him, but the man blocked his way. So he had to stop the bike and get off. The man continued and pushed into the bike. He asked, in German, what was going on, why are you pushing me, and the man said no, that he had hit him with the bike instead because it was marked as a pedestrian lane‽ (This reminds me of another time when a man shoved me in a diner because I didn't understand his word for napkin when he asked me to pass him one...but that is a different story and is related to the remarkable impatience of Germans.) However, this doesn't always extend into directions we would expect coming from an American perspective on social rules. German ordnung is not simply taking American/British style rules and intensifying/extending them. For example, waiting in line and doing things in order of arrival is not as strict, in say a German bakery, as it would be in Britain or the US.
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| A famous German staring and pointing. |
Part of growing up is being taught behaviors specific to a culture. How to sit and eat at a table, speak politely, maintain personal distances, etc. So when someone from another culture exhibits behavior that is discouraged from an early age, it is unavoidable that they seem child-like (i.e. the behaviors generally only seen in small children before they are suppressed). In Germany people will stare (the avoidance of direct, prolonged stares at strangers is a part of American culture that I didn't even realize existed until I spent more time traveling and living out of the US) and point, openly, and discuss with each other aspects of your car parking abilities, windowsill flower arranging abilities, yard maintenance, sidewalk sweeping, whatever. To an American this seems like a group of adults acting like children, which is, as I pointed out above, an unfair impression because of cultural differences. Also, cultural differences dictate what is considered a disorder. A friend of ours from Canada that lived in Germany for many years observed that in Canada and the US if your house is too clean something is wrong with you (obsessive) but in Germany if your house is the least bit messy something is wrong with you. Also, I remember stories my aunt told me about my great-grandmother who's family was from an American German community, she said every object in her house "had its place."
There is also an idea that for everything there is a correct way to do it and one must be taught the correct way; once you learn this everything will work out in life (this was told to me by a German). The other half of this statement is that if it is not done the official/correct way than it is incorrect. It is a very black and white mentality, in general the idea that there is a range of ways to achieve the same goal or that sometimes people doing the same thing are in fact trying to achieve different goals does not come easily in German cultural mentality. For example, often in computer programming there are an amazing number of ways to achieve the same result. (Imagine how many different possible routes there are between two points in a city. If the driving time is practically instantaneous and the driver never tires and follows the route exactly, it really doesn't matter which particular route you take.) I taught some programming to Germans and they were very preoccupied with which variation was the right one. I told them that any method that gives the right result, and that they understand why it works, is fine. Unless it is CPU or memory intensive, it is much more important to write comments into your code to help you understand it later than worrying about this or that particular method of doing things. (In fact, one of the PERL programming language mottoes is "There's more than one way to do it.") I believe this kind of thinking was more common in the US among my grandparents generation, that there is a single "truth" and everything else that deviates from it is "wrong." Although the US has a long history of more Thoreauvian ideas such as marching to the beat of a different drummer, and plural, valid possibilities such as Frost's "The Road Not Taken."
This « one correct » platonic archetypical view where all alternatives are degenerate simulacrums carries over into languages. There was an effort to teach some English in German schools, which in itself, teaching multiple languages, is a laudable goal. However, my native English speaking children were marked wrong and « corrected » by German teachers because they did not use British English. The teachers could have used our kids as a resource to help teach English to the rest of the class, but then this is not how authority works. The majority, 57%, of native English speakers are in the US, another 5% are in Canada, making American English, either broadly or narrowly defined, the predominant form of modern English. Only 16% of native English speakers are in the UK. Historically, American English has diverged from British English just as long as British English has diverged from American, i.e. neither group of dialects remain in an unchanged ancestral form. Also, by the way, Germany is not in the UK and not part of the British Commonwealth. So why were my children counted wrong in school if they did not use the particular dialect and spelling of an island in the North Atlantic rather than the predominant form of modern English⸮ It is because, for whatever reason, British English is seen as the « correct » form of English in Germany. (Also, when I wrote something about Scotland for my job in Germany our editor « corrected » it to England!) Note however, that I am not advocating stamping out British dialects completely. It is entertaining to have different dialects around and it helps give the British a regional identity. However, eradicating something different is exactly what Germany is trying to do with Plattdeutsch. Plattdeutch is still spoken in northern Germany, but its use is discouraged. Children from Platt speaking families are growing up speaking only German. Platt is closer related to English and Frisian than to German and is much easier for English speakers to pronounce. (Some of the words even sound eerily close to English. If you ever get the chance, ask someone how to say "a little" in Platt.) However, I have had Germans insist to me that Platt is not a language, it is only a dialect of German. I always wonder where the parity resolution comes from in these kinds of statements. If that is true then is German not a true language but only a dialect of Platt⸮ Also, if Platt is closer related to English, does this also mean that English is not a language⸮ Anyway, Platt is made fun of and marginalized, much like Appalachian English in the US, and it seems that it will die out except in the occasional use of cute, toy phrases. This satisfies the German ideal of uniformity, mentioned below, via authoritarian correctness. (Once, when V told a German teacher that I was learning Platt, the teacher almost fell out of her chair in shock and surprise--I'm not kidding. Platt is seen as a novelty and slightly embarrassing part of the past that foreigners should not learn about.)
The next piece of the German cultural puzzle to add here is the ideal of uniformity. Socially Germans tend to operate in groups, not individually, by consensus derived from authority. (There is a tremendous respect of authority in German culture, which gives rise to titles like "Prof. Dr. Dr. Schmidt"--this is actually referring to one person. German physicians do not expect to be asked questions by patients and explain what is going on, rather they expect to have their instructions unquestioningly followed. Also in Germany someone can't simply set up a business; you have to be officially trained first in order to do the prefession « correctly ». Etc.) The American ideal of the lone, independent character breaking the rules to do the right thing is a literary curiosity for Germans, both from the lack of consensus and especially because rules define what is right and people have to be made to understand why that is so. Also, to go into a tangent here, in Germany you either go with the flow or get lost. Germans tend to do things in groups, not as individuals. They seem to be blind to individual needs (they don't simply ignore individual differences, individual needs are something that is completely off the radar and don't even raise to a recognition threshold). For example, we experienced this first hand with our children not being native German speakers in the school system, which ended up in them generally being ignored in the corner of the classroom. Also, things like the islands in the local park were off limits to individuals, but could be visited by groups...Germany is set up for participating in clubs or groups of people, not following hobbies individually. However, to steer back to uniformity, when I painted M's room I painted the ceiling and two of the walls in pink and the remaining two opposing walls were white to which we added a pattern of pink handprints. When I told a German coworker about the weekend painting they asked when was I going to finish painting it. I told them it was finished and they didn't seem to understand that we were not planning to paint all the walls completely the same color. (This is not just a German ideal. When I showed a maple leaf that had started changing colors in the fall to my Chinese roommate, I said it was pretty because it had green and red and yellow on it. He said in China it would be pretty if the leaf was all the same color and not « mixed up ».) German's also have an ideal of getting outdoors and « closer to nature » but their idea of what is and is not nature is strictly prescribed (which is not that different from the US). However, the German nature is manicured parks and highly managed forests. There was a tree, in a row of trees, that had a limb broken out of it during a storm. I thought it looked nice in a rugged sort of way. But in the next few days the tree was cut down, the stump ground up, and it looked as if it had never been there. To use another poem from Robert Frost, I doubt "The Tuft of Flowers" would have the same kind of appeal to the general German way of thinking as it does to Americans.
The Tuft of Flowers
by Robert Frost
I went to turn the grass once after one
Who mowed it in the dew before the sun.
The dew was gone that made his blade so keen
Before I came to view the levelled scene.
I looked for him behind an isle of trees;
I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.
But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,
And I must be, as he had been,—alone,
As all must be,' I said within my heart,
Whether they work together or apart.'
But as I said it, swift there passed me by
On noiseless wing a 'wildered butterfly,
Seeking with memories grown dim o'er night
Some resting flower of yesterday's delight.
And once I marked his flight go round and round,
As where some flower lay withering on the ground.
And then he flew as far as eye could see,
And then on tremulous wing came back to me.
I thought of questions that have no reply,
And would have turned to toss the grass to dry;
But he turned first, and led my eye to look
At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook,
A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared
Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.
I left my place to know them by their name,
Finding them butterfly weed when I came.
The mower in the dew had loved them thus,
By leaving them to flourish, not for us,
Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him.
But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.
The butterfly and I had lit upon,
Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,
That made me hear the wakening birds around,
And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,
And feel a spirit kindred to my own;
So that henceforth I worked no more alone;
But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,
And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;
And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech
With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.
Men work together,' I told him from the heart,
Whether they work together or apart.'
I suspect the German ideal of uniformity is related to their xenophobia. We had to put up with things like children throwing rocks at me, T being followed by children throwing trash at him, and members of our family publicly humiliated for no other reason, that we could tell, than we were different.
However, let me also say that some stereotypes Americans have about Germany did not pan out in our experiences. German trains definitely do not always arrive on time. Germany does not seem to have any more bureaucracy and paperwork than we have in the US, although Germans themselves say that Germany has much more regulations and paperwork than anywhere else. Also, there didn't seem to be much schadenfreude (pleasure in the misfortune of others, the complete opposite of envy), at least not more than in the US for example, as far as I could tell. I have also traveled in Africa, a place that has cultures much different from Germany, where there is a lot of emphasis on relationships and how your actions affect people, and I saw as much schadenfreude in Africa as in Germany (people laughing when someone dropped something or was threatened).
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| Taming the Donkey (E. Zamacois 1868) Used as an example of schadenfreude. |
Protestant and Catholic religion are integrated with the German government, which is something that is unnerving to someone from the US with our higher degree of separation of church and state. Religion is taught in public schools, which children are required to attend. Our own children were assigned to the protestant class without the school even asking us. Taxes are taken out of your income, unless you initially opt out, to go to the church. When you arrive in a town there is a sign, made and put up by the local government, that gives the time of mass and service in that town. Given the German ideals of uniformity and correctness I am amazed that Germany has dual christian sects established today, but of course that was not without its wars, fighting and deaths. However, Germans have a deep seated phobia of religious minorities. Home schooling is illegal in Germany, part of this is to have more government control over shaping children's views, and a not unrelated part of this is to suppress minority religions. There was a US court case that dealt with homeschooling a few years ago and a German family seeking asylum in the US (link and link). The US media focused on the illegality of homeschooling in Germany, while the German media focused on the families fundamentalist evangelical religion. (Much like the bias in US media in the Israel/Palestine conflict: Israeli "demonstrators" conflict with Palestinian "militants," not the other way around.) There is also Germany's battle against Scientology (link and link). There have been attempts to ban Scientology in Germany and filming of a movie Tom Cruise (a Scientologist) was in was disrupted by Germany.
On a personal experience level, a coworker of mine in Germany was a German and a Jehovah's Witness. I was warned that he might try to talk to me about his religion and told that if he did to report him to the administration and that they would then reprimand him and put a note of it in his work record. In response I asked what if someone at work talked to me about Catholicism or « Lutheranism » and was told that this was OK and not a problem. A Catholic at work actually had discussed the Catholic church with me a few days before and another person had times of song performances at his protestant church posted in the hallway. This piqued my interest and I asked some more about why Jehovah's witnesses were singled out (they are not, other religious minorities are also under this sort of pressure in Germany). However, first let me say something about distancing ourselves from negative history and rewriting history in general.
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| "The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth" (1914) By Jennie A. Brownscombe |
The Mayflower arrived in 1620 in what is today Massachusetts, carrying the Pilgrims who established a colony where they could enforce their Puritan rules. In popular culture this is seen as the beginning of the English speaking colonies in America (and spun as a tradition of religious freedom, which I find questionable) and the nucleus that eventually becomes the United States. In general this is accepted by people and all the facts are visible for everyone to see, which makes it so odd... Jamestown, in what would become Virginia was founded in 1607, 13 years before the Pilgrims voyage, and it followed upon the failed settlement of Roanoke in 1585. The first official American English Colony Thanksgiving was held in Charles City Co., Virginia in 1619, before the Pilgrims had even left Europe. The Pilgrims themselves were trying to travel to Virginia but didn't make it and had to anchor in Massachusetts instead. Why then is Virginia not seen as the origin of the English colonies that were to become the United States? (I am also avoiding the much older Spanish Colonies that became parts of the US and the even older American Indian cultures that are part of the US.) I suspect the answer lies in the Civil War. The South lost the Civil War and the North had a chance to reinvent itself and promote the North as the true origin of the United States, thus the story of Pilgrims, the Mayflower, and their Thanksgiving was promoted in schools and the media until everyone believed it. This just goes to show the power and persistence of ideas, even if they are false. When most people believe them, they are almost impossible to revise.
Back to Germany. Germany obviously has had a recent negative history, the Nazis, and it is perfectly understandable that modern Germans, right or wrong, want to distance themselves from this history. But what I heard next was very troubling when this negative history is used to support modern issues. In the US we talk about World War II and fighting the Germans, but in Germany it is phrased more along the lines of the allies defeat of the Nazis, instead of Germans--so far this is fine. (Although it wasn't just the Nazis in the German military fighting; and it is called the « American » invasion of Iraq, not the Republican, or Bush administration, invasion.) But then I heard statements along the lines of the breakdown of democracy in Germany allowing the Nazis to take over...? Actually, as I understand it, the Nazis used democracy as part of their toolkit to gain power. (E.g., Nazis had won the greatest share of the popular vote in the two general elections of 1932, which contributed to their rise to power.) In Germany I was blamed, as an American, for Bush's unilateral war in Iraq for no clear reason (despite my personal opposition for reasons), then why do Germans--by their own rules--get to collectively shirk some share of the responsibility for the rise of the Nazis? (I took responsibility for Bush and voted against him and spoke out against him at every opportunity.) Anyway, in response to Jehovah's Witnesses (who by the way were persecuted by the Nazis and sent to concentration camps during WWII) I was told that Germans don't like people that try to convince you of their ideas, because the Nazis used this kind of brainwashing to take over and we don't want a repeat of that. ... I must say I was truly shocked. That the modern persecution of minorities is justified, in a round about way, by the past persecution of minorities by the Nazis; but, and this is key to the acceptance of the approach, it is phrased in terms of preventing the rise of organizations like Nazis (who, in contrast, enjoyed widespread support).
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| Jehovah's Witnesses at a concentration camp. They were forced to wear a downward pointing purple triangle for identification. |
OK, this is probably the most negative thing I will say about Germany, this aspect is not a feel-good statement about Germany, but I think it is worth being said. The German ideals of Ordnung, Uniformity, Unitary Correctness, Authority and Xenophobia are all strong and present today, and frankly this is scary given the German past. Counter-intuitively, rule breaking, iconoclast German punks are the future saviors of the German people and authoritarian German school teachers, that all children in Germany are forced to obey, are the antipathetic nemesis. Is it religious minorities like Jehovah's Witnesses and Scientologists we should be afraid of or the culture of the majority that acts on perceived fears of them⸮ Germans do take the persecution of the Jews during the Holocaust seriously and seek to make amends and not deny (in fact it is illegal to deny) this part of their history. But this needs to be broadened to include other ethnic and religious minorities within Germany today. It was painful to hear from my children how people in Africa were described at school, as people who have no self discipline and get fat whenever food is available... To return to Scientology a moment, in addition to declaring Scientology not a church and efforts to ban Scientology alltogether in Germany, individuals have also been targeted. Reading the section about "sect filters" here, used by the German government to identify Scientologists, forcing them to declare themselves, screening them from certain jobs, identifying businesses that employ Scientologists and publicly identifying individuals is truly frightening given Germany's past attempts at battling minorities. Currently a lot of the official rhetoric is also aimed at recent migrants to Germany such as the Turks, in terms of failed multiculturalism in Germany. Rather, I urge Germany to not fail to learn from its past in the broadest sense. (Yes, just as the US learns from its past with racism, minority discrimination and the horrible history with American Indians.)
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| Three bellpeppers (Capsicum annuum) from three different cultivars. Luc Viatour / www.Lucnix.be |
I do not like bell peppers. They smell very strong to me and ruins the flavor of foods like salad and pizza when they are included. As we both know, most Americans have no problem with bell peppers and include them in all kinds of food. However, there was another American coworker in Germany and she did not like bell peppers either, for the same reason. Because we were the two Americans at my job in Germany and we shared a random trait, it was widely known at work that in general Americans did not like bell peppers. Of course this is not true but our German coworkers impressions were shaped by the Americans they happened to be exposed to. In the same way, my impressions of German culture is shaped by the Germans I happened to interact with. Other people may well have completely different impressions of German culture and the issues involved. And I may well have misunderstood certain points. As adults, we learn to use shortcuts in verbal communication. A lot of what is said is expected and conversations tend to fall along predetermined themes. However, this is specific to a culture. When we communicate between cultures misunderstandings can easily arise because what we intend to say is not expected and not necessarily made explicit by the words we use. For example, there is not the equivalent of self depreciating humor in Germany. V made comments to German friends that "we will laugh about this later" and instead of smiling the response was "why?" This also extends to visual clues. Both my American coworker and I had trouble simply walking down the sidewalk in cities in Germany. People kept moving in front of us in odd ways. We were not giving off and were not interpreting the subtle cues people use to navigate by each other. One time a German colleague walked with us and was laughing at how people kept almost running into us.
OK, summing up the important aspects of a different nations culture from years of observation is a tall order. I've tried to do some of that here focusing on certain issues--perhaps the most important issue in the current political climate. Later I will talk more about Germany, including positive aspects, and our impressions of the US upon returning.
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