Anality and High Finance

There's been plenty of buzz surrounding Michael Lewis's recent article on Germany's role in the financial and Euro crises. Let me sum it up for you:

• Germans are obsessed by shit.
• By some obscure mechanism of causation, this led them to buy a lot of "shitty" subprime-backed loans.
• Also, they love rules, and their rule-based system for evaluating securities generated misleading results which they didn't question, because they love rules.
• Also, they were hopelessly naive and way out of their depth -- especially the ones who worked for quasi-public banks such as the Landesbanks. Long after everybody else in the world was running in the other direction, "idiots in Düsseldorf" were still buying crap from the US.
• Germans are less greedy and speculative than lots of other nations, and their financial people get paid way less than they do in the US.
• German civil servants are remarkably loyal to the state, and aren't all itching to leave government work for a giant bonanza in the private sector.
• One reason they got stuck holding so many worthless derivatives was, ahem, that they didn't have enough Jews around.

Lewis has a pretty good line in describing complex financial transactions in ways mortals can understand, but he doesn't use it here. Instead, he lets himself be guided by cultural stereotypes, which he manfully tries to wrench into some form of relevance for his thesis. I'll turn things over to Felix Salmon for the rest:

There’s precisely one thought-provoking paragraph in the entire 9,600-word article:

One view of the European debt crisis—the Greek street view—is that it is an elaborate attempt by the German government on behalf of its banks to get their money back without calling attention to what they are up to. The German government gives money to the European Union rescue fund so that it can give money to the Irish government so that the Irish government can give money to Irish banks so the Irish banks can repay their loans to the German banks. “They are playing billiards,” says Enderlein. “The easier way to do it would be to give German money to the German banks and let the Irish banks fail.” Why they don’t simply do this is a question worth trying to answer.

Sadly, Lewis doesn’t bother trying to answer that question. Instead, he returns to the running theme of the article, which might be evident if I excerpt a few words from here and there:

excrement – anality – Scheisse (shit), Dreck (dirt), Mist (manure), Arsch (ass) – The Money Shitter – crapping – rear end – toilets – “shit” – “my little shit bag” – laxative – “Purgation-Calendar” – anal – “As the fish lives in water, so does the shit stick to the asshole!” – scatological – “I am like ripe shit, and the world is a gigantic asshole” – sitting on the john – indulgence in fecal imagery – Scheisskerl (“shithead”) – feces – one of his favorite things to do with women was to have them poop on him – filth – coprophilia – The Call of Human Nature: The Role of Scatology in Modern German Literature - bowel movements – ring of filth – shit – Scheisse – splattered by their mud – a men’s bathroom – urinate – sat in the stall – “shit” – crap – crap – “Lick my ass” – “Lick my ass” – anally obsessed – stewing in their own filth – energetic anality – a blowout with prostitutes – anality – “Kackwurst is the term for feces” – ‘shit sausage’ – Bescheissen: “Someone shit on you.” Klugscheisser: “an intelligence shitter” – “you are said to shit money: Geldscheisser” – Die Kacke ist am Dampfen: the shit is steaming – a secret fascination with filth – “Scheisse glänzt nicht, wenn man sie poliert—Shit won’t shine, even if you polish it” – “Scheissegal: it just means I don’t give a shit.” – stick figures engaged in anal sex – simulating anal sex onstage

Which is not to say that there isn’t a sub-theme here. There is:

Nazi – Hitler’s favorite words – Hitler’s doctors – Hitler – the Nazis’ ambition – provincial Nazis – Hitler – Göring’s Air Ministry – Hermann Göring – the only advantage to the German financial system of having no Jews – the new Holocaust Memorial – Jewish Museum – spending decades denying they had ever mistreated Jews – Nazi-era expropriation of shares in the zoo owned by Jews – Hitler’s bunker – German guilt – “the Jews” – there are no Jews in Germany, or not many – “They never see Jews” -When they think of Jews – their victims – terrible crimes – a Jew whose family was driven out of Germany in the 1930s – Aryan – A Jew’s Life in Modern Germany - HOLOCAUST – Nazis – Hitler – A landscape once scarred by trenches and barbed wire and minefields – another Holocaust Memorial

Yes, the article’s about Germany. And, like Lewis’s previous articles on European countries, it’s an attempt to shine a light on the European financial crisis through the lens of national stereotypes. This is a dangerous exercise at the best of times, but in this case Lewis has gone way over the line. His article fails to say anything new or interesting about what happened in Germany during the crisis. And that’s fine, it has a lot of company in that respect. Everybody has an off day. But this essay is worse than that: it forces us to re-examine all of Lewis’s previous articles in the series as well.

Lewis’s articles on previous countries have all been criticized within those countries for precisely the kind of stereotyping which is so pointlessly offensive in this one. Not only has Lewis descended to an extended scatological riff which demonstrates absolutely nothing about the Germans’ propensity to buy subprime-backed bonds; he’s done so while violating Godwin’s Law. (Full disclosure: I’m half-German, so not entirely impartial in this case.)

Comments

[Raphael]

Andrew, could you provide a link to Felix Salmon's piece quoted by you?

[Adonis]

Doesn't Lewis actually say that if Germany had had more Jews in the financial business, they would have been stuck with even more worthless derivatives because the Jews would surely have bought from Madoff?

[Lutz]

@sebastian
You are right. The English language has a long list of shit terms too. But it’s noticeable that insults related to not accepted sexual practices were not very common in Germany (at least when I was young). Something that has changed over the times - wixxer has become very popular. Maybe insulting becomes more international, and national differences vanish?

A friend told me, that good old fashioned Dutch insults comprise nasty or deadly diseases.

[Sebastian]

@Lutz:
While it is certainly true that "Scheiße" is the german equivalent to "Fuck", I must call bullshit on the common "Germans are obsessed with shit"-interpretation.
In the English Language there are scores of feces-inspired idioms and swearwords: "shithead", "in deep shit", "the shit hits the fan" "taking the piss", "full of shit", "eat shit", "shit-faced", "get your shit together" - the list goes on and on.

All in all, it seems that anglophones are just as obsessed with shit as germans are, doesen't it?

[Lutz]

You can discuss if Germans are “obsessed”, but you cannot disclaim that Germany’s favourite four letter word is “Scheiß(e)”. “Arschloch” is frequently used as an insult. Frenchmen also tend to be anal, like “merde”.

Please compare: In the U.S. the #1 four letter word is “fuck”, and a favoured insult is “motherfucker”. What does that tell us about this nation? What does that mean according to Freud?

In Spain various insults deal with, let’s call it “improper religious practice”. In Arab countries you give serious offence by insulting a man’s forefathers. Does anybody know what they favour in China or Japan?

[LemmusLemmus]

Andrew,

you've missed the most basic idea in Lewis's article, which he never spells out. It is that *Germans are stuck in the anal phase* (Freud!). One consequence of this is that they love rules (which is typical of the anal personality, according to Freud). Another is that they're obsessed with shit (an assertion that, I believe, you have made yourself).

Just don't ask me how the Jews fit into this logic.