German Joys

Respect their Bluntness

Tory broadsheet The Daily Telegraph shines a light on The Germans in their National Cultural Profile of Germany:

Negotiating characteristics: Germans will arrive at the meeting well-dressed and with a disciplined appearance. You must match this. They will observe hierarchical seating and order of speaking. They compartmentalise their arguments, each member speaking about his/her speciality. They expect your side to do the same. They do not interfere with a colleague’s remarks and generally show good team-work throughout.

Listening habits: Germans have a long attention span when absorbing information and especially like repetition and plenty of background information. Manners and taboos: The right to privacy, both at home and in one’s office, is paramount. Eccentricity, ostentation, unpunctuality and disobedience are frowned upon.

How to empathise with them: Be frank, truthful and as honest as possible. Respect their bluntness and accept criticism when it is directed towards you. Avoid irony, sarcasm and quick wit. The people of Germany do have a sense of humour, but they do not use it at work. What amuses a German will not get all other cultures laughing too.

All reasonably accurate, as far as thumbnail generalizations for use by business types go.  I love the long attention span, being the long-winded type myself.

The stuff about hierarchy is still achingly on-point, except in the most self-consciously leftie environments (and sometimes even then).  One of the most amusing spectator sports is to watch Germans mixing in an environment in which status indicators are unknown, like some big conference in which everyone from entry-level employees to CEOs to professors might congregate.  Lots of comically stiff, halting, impersonal conversations in which the participants desperately try to ascertain each others' status, so as to know whether they can use formal or informal address and what subjects are appropriate to talk about: Can I confess my love of Dieter Bohlen?  Or must I try to sound like I've read Martin Walser's latest novel?

It's like watching ants try to re-group after their invisible chemical trail has been interrupted.

Stuff White Germans Like

In comments to my posting of a few pictures from Berlin, the indefatigable Mr. Moehling (where were you Friday?), who surfs the web for Kulturkritik so we don't have to, points us to the Internet sensation that's taking white America by storm: Stuff White People Like. 

There's a list of Stuff White People Like, including coffee, Asian girls, dogs, non-profit organizations, having black friends, wine, marathons, Barack Obama, film festivals, organic food, threatening to move to Canada, having two last names, The Daily Show, marijuana, free healthcare, irony, not having a TV, religions your parents don't belong to, and Asian fusion food. 

This sort of thing is shooting fish in a barrel, and has been done before umpteen times.  Still, the site has its charms.  And let's face it, because fashions change so quickly, yesterday's yuppie-mocking dates quickly.  Of course, judging by SWPL's standards, I am intensely white.  White-hot, you could say.  How could I not be?  After all, I actually moved to the very source, the Pangaea, the ancestral homeland of whiteness -- Northern Europe.  I set foot here, and felt a stirring deep in my blood: "This is my Volk."  The free healthcare, the farmers' markets, the wine -- they're are all around you, everywhere you go.

And, unlike in the New World, they're pretty much taken for granted.  Europeans were designing "walkable urban spaces" before the New World was even a glimmer in Vespucci's eye.  Even if you do shoehorn what you thought was a sophisticated reference to wine in at a dinner party, you may be sitting next to someone who knows much, much more about wine than you do, because her family has owned a vineyard for 300 years.  Further, northern Europeans nurture topoi of ultra-whiteness that will always remain out-of-reach for New Worlders: avant-garde (or, increasingly, any) classical music, anomie, hereditary royalty, Roman law, the word topoi.

Aside from these areas of ueber-whiteness, though, white Americans and white Germans have much common ground.  As sociologists never tire of pointing out, elites from countries on opposite sides of the globe have more in common with each other than they do with poor people in their own country.  Yet there are some uniquely German rules of whiteness.  Here's my list:

1.   Furniture, in this exact order:

1. "Discovered" at flea market.  Bonus points if discovered abroad.
2. Purchased at dusty antique shop
3. MannMobilia
4. IKEA (cachet almost totally expended, but still dimly flickering)

2.  Friends with the following qualities (in order of desirability): Jewish, born in impoverished third-world nation, gay, born in non-EU country in Europe.

3.   Balkan disco music.

4.   Non-profit organizations.  Bonus points if it operates in third-world countries, rather than at home.  No points if it operates in Germany.

5.   Custom-designed bookshelves.  Bonus points if actually filled with books.  Extra bonus point for every complete edition, deductions for books that have colorful spines or embossed titles.  As in the U.S., Dan Brown is radioactive.  Europe's answer to Dan Brown is Paulo Coelho.  One Paulo Coelho book can cancel out an entire library of first editions.

6.   Playing an acoustic musical instrument normally found in an orchestra (piano, violin, recorder, clarinet).  Bonus points for playing it together with other white people.  Extra bonus points if playing music by obscure 18th-century court composer from the region you live in.  This is called musizieren, and people did it all the time in the 19th century.  Generally, anything people did all the time in the 19th century is something white Germans will like. 

7.   Writers who were born in non-EU countries.  Bonus points if they now write in German, and enjoy gently teasing Germans for being so stuffy/car-obsessed/socially awkward.

8.   Contemporary art/theater/dance.  Bonus points if your apartment features works of art.  Extra bonus points if the art features nudity or contains "social commentary."

9.   East German design.  Not the hairstyles, clothes, music, or politics.

10.  Socialist writers who died long ago enough to no longer be controversial: Liebknecht, Luxemburg, Marx, Lassalle.  Generally, if a leftist has had a public square named after him, it's OK -- and may be de rigueur -- to say you admire his principles.

11.   Paul Auster.

12.   The European Union.

13.   Arts subsidies.

14.   Berlin.

15.   (Being disappointed by) the Green party.

16.   Speaking good English, but maintaining a "critical distance" from "Anglo-Saxon culture" and loudly denouncing English business jargon.

17.   American roots music.

18.   Reading Latin.

19.   Max Goldt.

20.   Bildblog.

OK, that's all I've got for now.  If I've missed something, let me know in comments.

Know Your Patients, Know Your Readers

So I'm waiting in the doctors' office yesterday, having forgotten to bring something interesting to read (g).  I begin shuffling through the magazines lying around in the waiting room.  They all have the uniform blue outside cover of the Lesekreis (g) magazine-wholesale firm.  This means you can't see the cover of the magazine from the outside, only its title.  As I'm shuffling through the stack, I notice one called Praline.  'Mmmm,' I think to myself, 'delicious pralines.  What could be more soothing than reading about candy?'  So I pick up Praline, earning censorious looks from the old ladies in the waiting room.  Turns out Praline (g, nsfw), isn't about candy at all, or at least not in the literal sense.  Oh no.  It's got pictures of nekkid girls in it, although the really naughty bits are censored.

But what really got me was the reader advice columns.  In the Anglo-Saxon world, "advice" columns in glossy soft-core porn magazines are generally filled with reviews of autos you'll never be able to afford or Italian hand-painted silk ties that you'll never need to wear to your soul-killing job at the post office.  But Praline has no illusions about the kind of guy who reads Praline.  One unemployed reader wrote in saying he'd finally gotten a job offer, but it required relocating to Passau, Germany.  Neither his savings nor his mother's "widow's pension" would be enough to finance the move.  Could he ask for a special government benefit to cover moving expenses?  The answer, from Praline's columnist, was "almost certainly yes!" 

Next to the column was a clipart picture of some guy waving a fistful of Euros, flashing a gleaming, pearly-white smile, as if to say "ZOMG!  I hit the government's wikkid-cool relocation-expenses jackpot!"  Kind of touching, really.

The World Hearts Germany

To lift something Elfmeter pointed out in comments to a previous post, page 11 of the BBC report on global attitudes:

Germany’s global image is the most positive of all countries evaluated in this survey. In 20 of the 22 tracking countries the most common view is that Germany’s influence in the world is “mainly positive,” while two countries view its influence as mainly negative. On average across all countries, a majority (56%) has a positive view of Germany’s influence in the world, while just 18 per cent have a negative view.

The most widespread positive views of Germany can be found among its European neighbours, including very large majorities in Italy (82%), Spain (77%), Portugal (76%), and France (74%). Significant numbers in Great Britain (62%) and Russia (61%) also have favourable views of Germany.

Impressive!  Here are a few stabs at explaining this.  First, a bounce from the 2006 World Cup.  Second, Germany is probably still getting props for actively opposing the invasion of Iraq -- a position shared by majority of the world's population.

A few longer-term factors come to mind, in no particular order.  First, Germany's deeply integrated into the EU and no longer presents any military threat to anyone.  Second, Germany gives a pretty significant amount of foreign aid (this explains a lot of Japan's popularity as well).  Third, the German diplomats I know personally tend to be smart, well-trained, and well-disciplined.  They are actually diplomatic.  They keep a low profile and talk about reconciliation, compromise, mutual interests, peaceful means, etc.  Fourth, German leaders are routinely seen on the international stage taking responsibility and sincerely apologizing for their country's past misdeeds.  Fifth, Germans are renowned for being the least nationalistic large nation there is.  Sixth, aside from the beer-swilling package tourists, Germans abroad generally leave a good impression.  Some of the phrases I've heard: "diligent", "polite", "speak good English", "diplomatic", "don't ask awkward questions", "seemed interested in our local culture", "ate the local food."

The Readers are Revolting

I just heard Jens Jessen, editor of the Feuilleton (arts & culture section) of the German weekly Die Zeit, being interviewed on Deutschlandradio Kultur (g).  He was talking about how the Internet is changing the news business, the subject of the lead piece in this week's Feuilleton (whose title -- is "237 Reasons to Have Sex", mocks Internet features that force reader to click single picture after single picture to generate more "page impressions," as they're called in Denglish). 

Contrary to some editors' expectations, Jessen said, online articles about difficult subjects often do get just as many clicks as news about Paris Hilton's latest derailment: "Of course, the public is stupid (blöd)," Jessen said, "but it's not as bad as some editors think."  (rough quote from memory). The interviewer jokingly warned Jessen that he was going to write that quote down, which made Jessen chuckle.

Here are two possible reactions to Jessen's remark:

Reaction #1.  (The typical American and English reaction). Horror at the snobbery and condescension. Does Jessen really think he and his friends are so bloody superior to everyone else?  This is the key flaw of the European press: its cliquishness and insularity.  If you think the majority of your fellow citizens are idiots, you're hardly going to listen to their complaints or suggestions.  You're going to pay attention exclusively to what's being said and thought in your tiny circle of well-educated haute bourgeois urbanite friends, and that will lead to navel-gazing and stagnation.  And it's not just journalism that suffers from this elitism.  Even Jeremy Rifkin -- that tireless American cheerleader for European social policies -- is horrified by the open snobbery he often encounters among EU officials.  One good reason average Europeans believe that the Brussels elite distrusts them and ignores many of the things they care about them is that the Brussels elite -- regardless of what they say at news conferences -- does distrust them and ignores many of the things they care about.  This can't be good for European society.

Reaction #2.  Jessen is the Feuilleton editor of Die Zeit, Germany's most highbrow mainstream newspaper. It's not his job to appeal to the masses or even enlighten them.  And the Feuilleton of Die Zeit does what it's supposed to do well, week in and week out.  It's ambitious but not too stuffy.  And at least Jessen is honest.  Americans pride themselves (often showily and self-aggrandizingly) on their 'democratic values' and lack of snobbery, but unpack this claim and you'll find plenty of denial.  As W. Somerset Maugham once said of America: "Of all the hokum with which this country is riddled the most odd is the common notion that it is free of class distinctions."  American definitely has a class system, and there's lots of horrid stuff being produced for those at the bottom of it.  The only difference between an educated American and German is that the German will say that it's garbage and that the people who consume it are idiots, while the American will only think this.  And what's more important: hurting the feelings of ordinary blue-collar citizens (who, anyway, aren't listening to public radio), or actually designing a society in which they have a chance at a dignified existence and social advancement?  Some of the most elitist Europeans also willingly pay social-welfare taxes that are astronomical by American standards.  And finally, the history of the 20th century doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the wisdom and purity of the common folk, does it?  Nor, for that matter does the 2004 American Presidential election, although with somewhat less disastrous consequences.  And have you looked at a tabloid lately?

I think that about captures it, without tipping my hand.  Any other possible reactions?  What's your reaction, esteemed readers? 

Helmut Schmidt: Soon A Prisoner of Conscience?

Note to foreign reporters looking for a German human-interest story: former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, now in his late 80s and a chain-smoker for years, has been swanning about Germany (g) smoking in public places and trains, in defiance of new smoking bans.

It seems to be some sort of Crusade of Principle against Germany's new anti-smoking regulations, although Schmidt's defense boils down to "I'm really old and was a fine Chancellor and I like to smoke, so fuck the law."  And speaking of European deference to bigwigs, I should note that others share his view.  The Director of the Hamburg Thalia theater, who personally decided to let Schmidt defy the smoking ban in the theater's cafe, justified himself as follows (g) (my translation):

Director Ludwig von Otting commented thus: "Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi", which he freely translated as follows: "What we let Helmut Schmidt do, we wouldn't let the cattle (jedem Rindvieh) do."

The Pentagon Papers and the U.S./World Attention Balance

In his fine recent book The American Civilizing Process, Stephen Mennell, a professor at University College Dublin, makes an interesting point about what I call the "attention balance" between the United States and the rest of the world:

A study of a Dutch refuge for battered women and of their violent partners is revealing.  These were marital relationships with a very unequal power balance, and the authors (Van Stouk and Wouters, 1987), found that the women took much more notice of their men than the men did of the women, and that the women were much more attuned to their men's wishes and needs than the men were to theirs.  When the women were asked to give a character sketch of their partner, they could do so with considerable precision, nuance, and insight, while the men could not describe their wife's except in terms of cliches applicable to women in general.  These men's self-esteem depended mainly on what other men thought of them, in other words on their ranking within the established group....   It appears to be a general characteristic of established-outsider relations that the outsiders 'understand' the established better than the established do the outsiders....

Much the same, I would argue, goes for the grandest-scale established-outsider relation of all, between the U.S. superpower and the rest of the world.  Billions of educated people outside the USA known an immense amount about America, its constitution, its politics, its manners and culture; all these are extremely visible to the rest of the world.  But it is as if they were looking through a one-way mirror.  America's huge power advantage seems to function something like a black hole in reverse: a mass of survey evidence suggests that Americans do not see out at all clearly, and tend to think about 'the outside world' if at all in stereotypical an indeed Manichaen terms. (As always, there are of course large numbers of Americans of whom this is not true: we are speaking of general tendencies and differences in averages between Americans and, in particular, Europeans). (pp. 311-12).

Mennell is not polemicizing about the U.S. as the 'world's wife-beater' (as tempting as that analogy might sometimes be).  He's talking about relations: the stronger party in a very unequal relationship will always want to gather and analyze evidence about the more-powerful party.  The converse generally isn't true, because the powerful party will get its will no matter without having to understand, much less please, the weaker party.

I've had many experiences at home and abroad that confirm Mennell's point, but I'll describe only the most recent one here.

Courtesy Among Communists

I've dipped into the German manners guide from 1982.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is a book for the ages.  On the inside of the dust cover, the publisher proudly asserts that the first edition ridiculed many fusty old traditions into impotence.  The second one sailed into the "taboo" area by suggesting ways for unmarried people to show attraction for one another. The third and fourth editions (the one I have) positively "affirm" this state of affairs.

There is nothing this book does not tell you how to do, except perhaps invade Poland [disgusting! cheap! -- ed.]  You'll learn how to use a fish-knife, smoke a cigar, help a lady sit at the table (hint: never shove the chair into the backs of her knees!), when to make an ironic comment to a conversation partner (never against those who are too dull to defend themselves in kind), how to drive, how to dance, how to begin and end your letters, how to watch television, how to travel, when to call people (never during the evening news!). The advice is generally damned good, and delivered with panache.

If you need proof of the authors' broad-mindedness, consider that they tell you not only how to greet a university president (Eueure Magnifizenz) or dean (Euere Spectabilitaet), but also a Communist:

For and Against the address "Comrade"

There is basically no objection to the address "comrade," when, for example, a former Social Democrat or Communist meets another former Social Democrat or Communist. After all, the Social Democrat or Communist intends to show the other a token of friendship: he wishes to refer to common interests or memories, and does so in the expectation that the other person will take pleasure in the reference to the things that connect them.

In the post-war era, there have been many discussions of the pros and cons of this address among Communists and Social Democrats. The exchange of opinions between old and young comrades has not quieted to this day.  This is understandable, since for many, the word "comrade" is tainted by associations with "Volks-comrade" or "party comrade," just as others entertain the suspicion (greatly overgeneralized, to be sure), that by using the address "comrade" outside of certain closed circles, one is possibly attempting to identify oneself with comrades of all nations, who are trying to spark a global revolution.

Umgangsformen Heute, pp. 117-18. The discussion continues for five more paragraphs. Complicated country, Germany.

Manners in 1982

I found this at a bookstall in Frankfurt this weekend: Manners Today: Recommendations of the Special Committee for Manners. The Special Committee of the German Dance Instructors' Association, that is. It was published in 1982, but its advice is timeless. Expect generous excerpts in the coming days! 

Zizek on German Toilets

Didn't know it was available as a video:

I've never understood what he was getting at, although I suppose I should read the entire lecture before judging. I've encountered what Zizek claims are "French" toilets in Germany, and vice-versa. The transatlantic comparison is perhaps a bit more reliable. I cannot imagine an American buying, or even voluntarily using, the sort of German toilet Zizek describes here...

Day-to-day Interaction in the U.S. and Germany

[Note: I'll be visiting friends this weekend, so blogging will be light/nonexistent.  But I'm leaving you with plenty to chew on!]

Germans and Americans interact with each other in very different ways. I doubt this observation will raise many eyebrows among my readers. Even in the Rhineland, where people are unusually friendly and accommodating, I notice these differences every day.

While doing some research on another subject, I came across an article by an American sociologist named Stephen Kalberg on the different patterns of social interaction among educated people in Germany and the United States. Kalberg is mainly known as a Max Weber expert and has done in-depth comparative research on the United States and Germany.  However, he realized that there was not much literature on day-to-day interactions. So he set about creating some, based on nine years of in-country observation an extensive interviews with both Germans and Americans.

The result, which was published originally in 1987, is one of the most thoughtful and thorough explorations of the topic I've ever come across. I'm not alone: the article -- both in German and English -- was featured on the website of the DAAD for years (it seems to have been lost in a recent reorganization). Professor Kalberg has kindly given me permission to post some excerpts on this blog, so here they are.

West German and American Interaction Forms: One Level of Structured Misunderstanding

Although instant communication networks and entire industries of popular and scholarly books have served to increase our knowledge of other cultures, very little of the information acquired through these channels informs us concretely regarding those aspects of daily life that the non-native resident confronts more directly: forms of interaction, including the common modes of forming acquaintances and friendships. More frequently the barrage of journalistic and even scientific reports focus on such subjects as exotic cuisines, new art forms, beautiful landscapes, fine wines, crime rates, class structure, unemployment, the organization of factory work, political decision making, and social security systems. (603)

Too often, the failure of visitors to become informed about cultural differences at this pragmatic level leads to confusion of such a degree that stereotypes and prejudices become confirmed and animosities exacerbated-rather than alleviated. Unfortunately, the literature that attempts to trace out systematically the manner in which persons from one culture will be confronted with a constellation of specific interaction forms in a particular second culture is rare indeed. (604)

This division [between insider and outsider status] is far more severe in the FR than in the US due to the fact that social circles in all walks of life tend to have more fixed boundaries and a more clearly delineated 'membership'. Indeed, whereas these boundaries are likely to be porous and changing in the US, a clear status is awarded not only to the insider in the FR, but also to the member of long standing as opposed to the new member. (606-07)

Because the porous character of groups in the US has often tended to preclude the attribution of status as a result of group membership alone, the American placed within the German context confronts immediately an unaccustomed situation. Moreover, the means the American typically employs in his or her own country to acquire in-group status generally conflicts with the accepted means in the FR: a demonstration of 'personality' tends to attract favourable attention in the US and to lead to recognition by the established group. The firmer boundaries to groups in the FR have, however, themselves placed a damper on this means of attaining in-group status and even, in some cases (especially if it takes an exaggerated form, such as clowning), stigmatized it as evidencing a lack of socialization into middle-class norms. Conformity to rules of politeness and a certain reserve is expected of the newcomer, at least until his or her status as a group member is secure.

Due to the more prescribed means for attaining full acceptance by the group and the more delineated character of its boundaries, a degree of 'pragmatic diplomacy' and caution, foreign to many Americans, is required. During this transition period, the American experiences a further, unaccustomed situation: whereas in the US (more so in the mid-West and West, less so on the East coast, particularly in New England) group members very often seek to facilitate the transition of the newcomer to full in-group status, acquisition of this status in the FR is more often viewed as the sole concern of the new or potential member. Just this aspect of the transition process is frequently interpreted by the American as a lack of hospitality and even conscious unfriendliness rather than the residual of a more severe insider/outsider division. (607)

The sharpness of the division between the public (the political, occupational, economic and educational spheres) and private spheres (family, intimate friends) in German society . . . and its reduction to a minimum in the US has given rise to a whole series of discrete differences, all of which retain the potential for introducing patterned misunderstandings at the level of interpersonal interaction. (608)

Are Germans' Views on Crime all that Distinctive?

I'm doing research on Germans' views on criminal justice at the moment, and I thought I'd share a few interesting facts. You sometimes hear Germans say things like "we Germans" are against the death penalty or that "Germany" is against the death penalty. And, in fact about 50-55% of Germans currently say they are are opposed  to the death penalty when they are given the abstract question "Are you for or against the death penalty?"  About 25-35% state that they are in favor, according to most recent polls. 

However, as with all polling questions, the specific phrasing is critical, as are the "national mood" and press coverge just before the poll. An example: on page 9 of this paper, a criminologist from the University of Kiel relates a 1996 poll which featured the following three questions:

Are you basically for or against the death penalty?

Are you for the death penalty for someone who commits the sexual murder of a child, or are you against the death penalty in all cases?

Are you for the death penalty when someone abducts and murders another person, or are you against the death penalty in all cases?

The answers were:

For the death penalty in general: 37%

For the death penalty for sexual murders of children: 60%

For the death penalty for murder after abduction: 50%

This is not surprising; ncreased support for the death penalty when survey respondents are asked about a horrible kind of crime is always higher than support for the death penalty in the abstract. The late 1990s saw a large increase in punitive sentiment in German society (including a 13-point rise in support for capital punishment).  Support for capital punishemnt has gone down since then, but nevertheless, a 2007 survey reveals that 86% of Germans would like to see those convicted of molesting children locked up for life (G).

I suspect that ordinary Germans have ideas about criminal justice that are not that far removed from citizens in other countries.  There is a dramatic difference in support for the death penalty between Germany and some of its neighbors to the East.  However, that difference in support would probably be reduced if you asked questions about specific kinds of very serious crimes, as was done in the 1996 poll.  Put another way, 35% of Germans and 70% of Poles might say they favor the death penalty in the abstract, because the average German probably associates capital punishment with George W. Bush or China. But when you focus their attention on the latest Lustmord that dominated headlines in their neighborhood newspaper, average Germans and Poles will probably begin to think a bit more alike.

Oh, and one other interesting fact. According to the 1998-2002 Allensbacher Institute public-opinion research yearbook, (p.677), the political party whose members are most likely to support capital punishmment are...the post-Communist PDS (42%). Go figure.

Kiss Me, I'm an Accountant

The city of Düsseldorf holds a public celebration.  Free beer and sausages were handed out to 5000 partygoers.  The occasion?  The fact that it has paid off all its public debts. 

The New York Times Discovers Karl May

The article opens with a portrait of Jürgen "Lonely Man" Michaelis, a Karl May fan who lives near Dresden, and goes on from there:

A few months ago the director of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, Tex., told me in passing how his museum was frequently overrun by visiting Germans, so the curious German obsession with the Wild West — which newly arrived Americans repeatedly discover to predictable eye-rolling from Germans, for whom it’s hardly news — was not exactly unknown to me.

Still, the extent of it is a little astonishing. At powwows — there are dozens every year — thousands of Germans with an American Indian fetish drink firewater, wear turquoise jewelry and run around Baden-Württemberg or Schleswig-Holstein dressed as Comanches and Apaches. There are clubs, magazines, trading cards, school curriculums, stupendously popular German-made Wild West films and outdoor theaters, including one high in the sandstone cliffs above the tiny medieval fortress town of Rathen, in Saxony, where cowboys fight Indians on horseback. A fake Wild West village, Eldorado, recently shot up on the outskirts of Templin, the city where Angela Merkel, the chancellor, grew up.

Primal Force: Volk

The word Volk (people, national community) is famously hard to translate into English. So famously hard to translate that it probably no longer needs to be translated.

I just heard a Deutschland RadioKultur documentary Urkraft Volk (G) on the history of the concept in Germany. It all started with the Roman historian Tacitus' description of the Germanic peoples, in which he speculated that they must have been a native population, since their 'blue eyes, reddish hair, and large, capable bodies' seemed distinct from neighboring tribes. The notion of a unique, ancient Germanic habitus took on a life of its own in the 19th century. Hegel praised the "ardency" of the German Volk, Kleist called the German Volk purer than any other.

In the words of the moderator, the poets and thinkers gave their imprimatur to the discourse of "remote origins, purity, and superiority" that would be taken up by the white-knuckled ideologue of race and nation who began to flourish in the later 19th century. Here is where the notion of a Volkskörper ("people's body") comes into play; the analogy of the entire group of humans of "Germanic" or "Aryan" descent to one large body. Of course a body must defends itself and cast out impurities; the nationalist thinker Julius Langbein said in 1900: "Life is a defensive struggle. One's own blood wants to prevail against foreign blood; therefore Aryan blood wants to and will prevail against all other." It goes without saying that the "bloodstream" of the German Volkskörper must be purged of all elements "alien to the species," just as the Volksseele (national soul) must be purged of foreign philosophies and ideologies.

I think we all know where this led to. Let us, to paraphrase Gibbon, draw a veil before these unhallowed doings.

The documentary proposes that völkisch thinking is creeping back into the national discourse through four outlets. First, right-wing music, which is pretty open about the need to combat foreign and artfremde (alien to the species) people and ideas. This shouldn't come as much of a surprise; What else are they going to sing about -- butterflies? Second, fantasy novels and games. They're generally harmless, but sometimes contain searches for roots and ancient mystical origins that have something of the folkish about them. Third, esoteric religious movements such as the New Heathenism. If you're not convinced by the völkisch theory that Jesus wasn't Jewish, then you have little choice but to chuck Christianity and go back to the ancient Druidic/Wicca religion of your forefathers, which has the added advantage of a lot of wicked-cool accessories of varying authenticity (runes, witchcraft, robes, crystals, ancient healing secrets, etc). Fourth, the crusty old national-conservatives, whose press organ is the Junge Freiheit and think-tank the Institut fuer Staatspolitik.

I don't have much to add here; I just thought I'd link to this this thoughtful documentary.

Metaphysical Postcards

Germany's the land of poets and thinkers, baby, and they don't let you forget it. Take, for example, this seemingly-harmless greeting card, which you can find in any German post office:

For you non-German speakers, what's your guess as to the caption? "Determination Means 'Shaking Off' Defeat and Starting Again"? -- "You're All Wet, but I Love You Anyway"?  "Heaven is a Cool Pond on a Hot Day"?

All wrong.  The caption actually reads "Even Eternity is Just Composed of Moments." If you're asking what this little saying might have to do with a dog shaking water out of its fur, you obviously haven't given the matter enough thought.

The message of this postcard is vital, but it is neither simple nor reassuring. Bello here is completely wrapped up in the moment. He's grimacing with concentration, focused on nothing more than expelling as many water droplets from his fur as possible. His facial expression does not exclude the possibility that this activity may have an erotic component. We will leave that to one side for the moment.

But what happens after he's shaken the water off? Then comes another moment, just like the last one. Then another, then another, in a seemingly endless succession. Fortunately for Bello, he is a stupid animal without self-consciousness, so the fact that he spends his life in a completely pointless sequence of discrete activities does not weigh upon him.

But for the human who receives the card and reads the caption, the message is different. The message is (cue condescending German accent): "Your life, whether you are brave enough to admit it or not, is also composed entirely of isolated 'moments' within a pointless, howling, 'eternity' of time. Like him, you permit yourself to be completely wrapped up in daily distractions, oblivious to the deeper meaning of existence. The only difference between you and this animal -- which spends a great deal of its waking time licking its excretory organs -- is that you have been cruelly outfitted with self-consciousness. Which means, once in a very great while, when all your distractions and petty concerns recede, you will come face to face with the terrifying fact that your life, within the limitless ocean of time we call eternity, is but an infinitesimally small pinprick. After it is extinguished, the universe will continue implacably, completely oblivious to your existence."

It's that message which makes this card perfect for a child's birthday.

Americans as Unwilling Diplomats

Der Spiegel has a story on American exchange students (G) in Germany who've had the same experience I have: being forced into ultra-tedious conversations about U.S. foreign policy everybloodywhere they go.  The story of one lad, Edward Janssen (my translation):

Edward Janssen describes the typical conversation with a German classmate. First question: What's your name? Second question: Where do you come from? Third question: Did you vote for Bush? And then he's right in the middle of a discussion of the Iraq war, the death penalty, gun laws, and environmental protection.

A German professor of American studies argues that the discussion culture is different in Germany, politics are the stuff of everday conversations, and direct questions about political views should not be seen as attacks.  An American college student who goes to schools to talk about the U.S. as part of a 'Rent-an-American' program has a slightly different take.  Noting the smug self-righteousness of the students she meets, she describes younger Germans as opinionated and knowing 'exactly what's right and wrong.'

I've got my own strategies for avoiding yet another conversation about politics (yawn) with a finger-wagging German, and I'll share them when I get back into regular blogging rhythm (late July). In the meantime, have fun with the article.

Stories about Schultueten Wanted!

This post is about the following object:

In the interest of general enlightenment, I'd like to ask people to contribute stories about Schultueten, those crazy cone-shaped goodie bags kids get on their first day of school. A U.S. journalist wrote me with the following story/request:

I lived in a house in Germany long ago. The youngest child went to her first day of school (first grade) with a giant ice cream cone shaped of thin cardboard and covered with fabric. Half of the cone was stuffed with tissue paper and the rest was filled with candy. I recall it had a long name, ending in Tute. (or similiar) Is it possible that you can tell me more about this custom, with the proper full name? Or maybe you might ask readers of the blog to submit some of their stories about the first day of school for them or their children. Of course I am referring not to "first day" for all children, but only those going for the first time.

So, if you can provide any background information about Schultueten or have stories about them that might be interesting to Californians, please let the world know.

Oh, and keep it heartwarming and family-friendly, folks. No stories about "Schultueten" from Beate Uhse.

So I Guess You'd Prefer Anarchy?

From an email forum for expats in Germany, a cry for help from a non-German (guess which nationality) married to a German:

Last night my husband informed me offhand he needed to pay his bi-yearly car tax again. Since he recently joined a new firm which provides their employees a company car I inquired which car he meant... He said no, he was paying the taxes on a car he hasn't owned for the past nine and a half years. !!!

After my initial shock I inquired further and the story unfolded as follows. In mid 1998 (before I joined him) he owned a used Volkswagen Polo. He was a career Army guy back then and while on the way to work one day the car began to smoke, got too hot apparently, and the motor locked up on him on the autobahn. After having it inspected he learned that to fix the car would take more than what it was worth, so he contacted a junkyard in Bonn and arranged to have it towed away and junked. No money changed hands so there was no receipt.

...My husband informed me there are (at least) two sets of papers required to own a vehicle. One set are for ownership and the other are something to do with the allowance to drive it on the public roads. I'll have to take his word for that. When the junking company showed up he was required to give them the ownership papers and the other papers he kept.

No money changed hands so there was no receipt to show any transaction had taken place. The company simply showed up with a wrecker, hauled the car away and that was that. He was supposed to receive some kind of documentation per mail (transferral of ownership?) regarding the car but very shortly after this happened he...was out of the country for approximately a year.

When he returned he found out he was still being billed for the taxes on the car. When he went to the tax office to straighten things out he was told he needed proof of the transferral of ownership in order to stop being taxed. He went to the junkyard and requested a copy of the paperwork they had, only to be told they didn't have a clue what he was talking about, didn't know which car he meant, and couldn't help him.

He went back to the tax office and they told him without those papers he has to pay the tax or they will prosecute him. He yo-yo'ed back and forth between the two offices for a while longer with no result before he gave up and paid the tax. After a few years of paying the tax and it being a hardship he decided to try again to resolve the problem, only to find the junkyard had gone out of business.

Now it seems we're stuck paying this tax (approximately 400,-Euros per year) forever on a vehicle that hasn't been in our possession for going on nine and a half years. I am highly frustrated about this and the fact he's been simply paying it year after year without getting it taken care of, but he says he's exhausted the known possibilities and it's at an end.

ROTFLMAO (G).

German Happiness = (α1 log yit+1 + α0 log yit...

Via Kevin Drum, I learn that a recent study of Germans conducted jointly by scholars at the Harvard Business School, DIW Berlin, and Imperial College, London, says this is how you achieve happiness:

Happiness[it] = ( α1 log yit+1 + α0 log yit + α-1 log yit-1 + α-2 log yit-2 + α-3 log yit-3 + .. α-T log yit-T) + ( β1 log Sit+1 + β0 log Sit + β-1 log Sit-1 + β-2 log Sit-2 + β-3 log Sit-3 + .. β-T log Sit-T) + δ Xit + fi + ηt + eit

Those Anglo-Saxons think everything can be reduced to a number, some German readers are now chuckling.

OK, enough snark. I am not one to pooh-pooh happiness research. I've read a few of the better books on the subject and come away impressed. Yes, you can measure happiness pretty reliably, and you can identify factors which are strongly associated with it (a good social network, being married, having some sort of religious belief, and feeling and expressing thankfulness). 

Money and status are somewhat associated with happiness, but not as strongly as most people think.  More money can create a "hedonic treadmill effect," in which rising levels of income ratchet up your desire for yet more comsumer goods, and your frustration at not being able to afford the next-most expensive high-definition television (U.S.) or next-most-prestigious contemporary sculpture (Germany). And what about status? Here is the basic conclusion of the study's authors:

In this paper, we ... estimat[e] a happiness equation with a distributed lag structure for income and status on individual panel data on 7,812 people living in Germany between 1984 and 2000.  We find strong adaptation to changes in income but not to changes in status. The adaptation effects to income are large in size. Once the long-run effects are estimated (by summing up the current and lagged income coefficients) we cannot reject the null hypothesis that people adapt totally to income within four years. By comparison, significant effects of status are found to remain after this time.

In this context, adaptation means "it wears off."  That is, 10% raise increases your level of contentment for a short time, but then you revert to being as happy as your were before the raise.  A raise in status, however, seems to permanently increase your level of contentment.  Most interesting of all is the results along political lines.  The authors designated sub-groups of people who had distinct left-wing and right-wing views and found: "that those on the right (left) of the political spectrum adapt to status (income) but not to income (status)." In other words, right-wing Germans tend to be made lastingly happier by increases in their income (but not by status increases), while left-wing Germans tend to be made lastingly happier by increases in their status, but not by income increases.

I find this fact fascinating. It also helps explain something I've always found a bit amusing: German professors with known left-wing views who still insist on being referred to by all of their titles: "Prof. Dr. Dr. hc.," etc. I would be willing to bet there's a strong cultural factor at work here; i.e. that you would get somewhat different results in other countries.   Deriving satisfaction from being rich is still a little declasse in Germany, where you encounter traces of something like the English disdain for "trade money." You also find very evident traces of admiration for those who act from "noble" or non-monetary motivations. Here, for example, Reinhard Mohr argues (G) that condemnation of the "Black Bloc" rioters in the German press during the G8 summit was muted because of the German cultural trait of forgiving those who operate from "pure" motivations. There might be something "wrong" with having money, from this perspective, but there's nothing wrong with having status (degrees, awards, impressive job titles etc.). Especially if you got those status designations for doing something unselfish, such as writing or heading up an NGO.

Anyone agree/disagree?

Stork #17 has laid Egg #O-DE-3344554

Sometimes, a chain of mysterious conjunctions happens in your life, leading you to a deeper truth. For me, that deeper truth is that every discrete object found in nature in Germany has a number. 

Item No.1: A few weeks ago, we found out that every tree in Berlin has a number. 

Item No. 2: A few days ago, I found out that we know exactly how many storks there are in Germany.  I was doing some post-Ascension errands, and listening to the children's program Kakadu on Deutschland Radio Kultur.  Children were calling in from all over Germany to talk about storks. Many were extremely excited by one of the various live Internet webcams that show families of storks in Germany (The link is to a Stork Cam in Vetschau, Germany, which promises: " With the brood process, there will be categorically no interference!")

The guest was a woman from the German Nabu, or Nature Protection League (G). Each kid was asked what German state he or she lived in. Most of them didn't know, which I found cute. After they asked mom or dad which state they lived in, the woman from Nabu told them exactly how many stork breeding pairs were in that state. There are 275 in Saxony (if memory serves), and 128 in Bavaria, although the woman said "The number might not be accurate, because some of them haven't been reported yet."

At one point, the following exchange occurred, which I found even cuter:

Moderator: And what did you see when you saw the storks at the zoo?

Child: I saw them being fed!

Moderator: Ooh, so you saw the mother stork regurgitate food for the stork babies?

Child: No, a person did it!

Item No. 3: This weekend, I buy eggs at my local organic food store, Kraut & Rueben, at Brunnenstr. 9. They are, of course, organic. And each individual egg has been stamped with a special three-part code. Take a look:

The code tells you that this egg came from the Hof Alpermuehle farm, in Germany, it was produced under completely organic conditions, and it came from stall number 01-12121.

It was delicious.

Mr./Ms. Smoky Says "Stop Smoking!"

According to the FAZ, smoking will be banned (G) on all Deutsche Bahn trains as of September 1, 2007. I don't have anything particular to say about this, except 'sounds like a good idea to me', but I loved this photo, which accompanied the story. It's a cigarette -- smoking a cigarette! Which would seem to be a kind of cannibalism, which perhaps explains why he looks so grouchy:

My question is: is this a boy cigarette or a girl cigarette? Going by the fingernails, I'd say it might be a girl. But I'm not really sure how to tell the gender of cigarettes. Can anyone help?

Short, Interesting Post about Long, Boring Meetings

One thing I absolutely cannot bloody stand about Germany, is the agonizingly long, soul-crushingly boring public gatherings. They're like Academy Awards ceremonies, only without music, stars, or cleavage.

I evade them whenever possible, and I'm not alone. From a recent analysis of the EU's 50th anniversary meeting by Peter Zeihan:

The European Union celebrated the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Rome on March 25. To mark the event, 27 heads of government gathered in Berlin, ostensibly to sign a declaration reaffirming the union's values and outlining future goals. Disputes over the document's text, however, proved so divisive that in order to avoid embarrassing refusals the leaders were not even asked to sign it. Meanwhile, the ceremonies were so dull that many officials wandered off into the streets of Berlin well before they concluded.

Happy Easter, everybody. Back on Tuesday. Ed Philp is, as always, invited to take up the slack, but he'd better not outshine me like last time...

Confessions of a Karnevalsmuffel

Today is Altweiberfastnacht in my part of Germany. I'm not exactly sure what this word means, but literally translated, it's "Old Woman Fasting Night." It's part of the Rhineland's Carnival season, which culminates Ash Wednesday. Today, women march into government buildings and take them over, and roam through the city kissing men. Oh, and they're also supposed to cut the mens' ties in half, for some reason. According to the local newspaper, which today features a huge photo of a bare-breasted woman on its front page, on Altweiberfastnacht "Everyone's thinking about Sex!" (Really? Even the 1-year olds? Even the monks? Why do German newspapers constantly tell me what "we" or "Germans" or "Berliners" are thinking?).

I admit, I'm not such a big fan. I go to the occasional Karneval party, and watch the occasional parade, and try always to catch the Tuntenlauf, but that's about it. There are several reasons for this. First, the music is horrid. Thumping, unsyncopated, mass-chanting anthems that all sound alike. Second, the sense of forced, frog-marching 'fun'. I'm with Roger Boyes on this one. Instead of behaving like paper-souled middle managers 359 days out of the year and then going apeshit on the remaining 6, shouldn't people try to integrate a little fun, a little subversion in to every day?

Non-Entrepreneurial Europeans

Edmund S. Phelps, 2006 Nobel Prize Laureate in economics, takes a stab at explaining Europe's lagging economic performance in this editorial in the Wall Street Journal.

He has some interesting things to say, albeit in bone-dry prose. He doesn't blame European social transfer payments for the lackluster performance (let us leave to one side, for the moment, how this performance is measured, and whether it's really all that lackluster). Rather, it's the mentality:

The values that might impact dynamism are of special interest here. Relatively few in the Big Three [France, Germany, Italy] report that they want jobs offering opportunities for achievement (42% in France and 54% in Italy, versus an average of 73% in Canada and the U.S.); chances for initiative in the job (38% in France and 47% in Italy, as against an average of 53% in Canada and the U.S.), and even interesting work (59% in France and Italy, versus an average of 71.5% in Canada and the U.K). Relatively few are keen on taking responsibility, or freedom (57% in Germany and 58% in France as against 61% in the U.S. and 65% in Canada), and relatively few are happy about taking orders (Italy 1.03, of a possible 3.0, and Germany 1.13, as against 1.34 in Canada and 1.47 in the U.S.).

***

The weakness of these values on the Continent is not the only impediment to a revival of dynamism there. There is the solidarist aim of protecting the "social partners"--communities and regions, business owners, organized labor and the professions--from disruptive market forces. There is also the consensualist aim of blocking business initiatives that lack the consent of the "stakeholders"--those, such as employees, customers and rival companies, thought to have a stake besides the owners. There is an intellectual current elevating community and society over individual engagement and personal growth, which springs from antimaterialist and egalitarian strains in Western culture. There is also the "scientism" that holds that state-directed research is the key to higher productivity. Equally, there is the tradition of hierarchical organization in Continental countries. Lastly, there a strain of anti-commercialism. "A German would rather say he had inherited his fortune than say he made it himself," the economist Hans-Werner Sinn once remarked to me.

***

It may be that the Continentals finding, over the 19th and early 20th century, that there was little opportunity or reward to exercise freedom and responsibility, learned not to care much about those values. Similarly, it may be that Americans, having assimilated large doses of freedom and initiative for generations, take those things for granted. That appears to be what Tocqueville thought: "The greater involvement of Americans in governing themselves, their relatively broad education and their wider equality of opportunity all encourage the emergence of the 'man of action' with the 'skill' to 'grasp the chance of the moment.'"

I don't know where Phelps is coming from ideologically, but -- as you can see by his prose -- he is an academic economist, not a polemicist. Therefore, I wouldn't call this Europe-bashing, despite the categorization.

I am Germany!

Sometimes people ask me: what gives you the right to say anything about Germany?

Now I have the answer: Because I could become German anytime I want. Really, just like I could quit drinking. The proof? I went on over to the Sueddeutsche Zeitung and took their "Are You Germany?" quiz. This is an online version of a questionnaire the German state of Hessen introduced to test how much foreigners know about Germany before giving them German citizenship.

The Sueddeutsche editors transormed it into an online multiple-choice quiz which you can take here (of course, it's in German):

My results (translated into English):

You have 16 points.

You're already almost Germany! Almost everything right, you just missed the little cherry on top to become a Top German. In any case, it's enough to become a German citizen in Hessen.

I missed questions about what the German scientist Otto Hahn did in 1938, the exact year the Bundewehr was founded, the name of the EU's policy-making body, and the names of the committees that handle citizen complaints in Germany. In the interest of full disclosure, the full results (in German) are below the fold.

I must say, this is pretty reassuring. If worse comes to worse and George W. Bush orders up a Volkssturm of all Americans who can somehow carry a weapon, I might have to become a German citizen. Although I'm pretty partial to the U.S. Constitution, I can think of far worse Constitutions to swear loyalty to than Germany's...

Satan-Worshipping Customs Officials

A few months ago my family kindly shipped some books to me from the United States. Instead of the books, I got a gray form telling me that I have to go to the Zollamt-Nord (Customs Office North) to explain what's in the boxes.

I, of course, live in South of the city, but nobody thought to send the boxes to the Customs Office South, even though they obviously know where I live. The reason? There is no Customs Office South. There's only Customs Office North, which raises the question why they would call it the Customs Office North when there's only one of them in the whole city.

I'm sure everyone who lives in the West, East, and South of the city whips open their phone book upon receiving a notice from Customs Office North to try to find out whether they can persuade the customs goons to transfer the package to Customs Office West, East, or South. Only to be cruelly disappointed. Meanwhile, people who live in the North of the city get the notice and think: Kick-ass! Those friendly, efficient bureaucrats brought the package to the customs office just around the corner! Of course, they are deluding themselves, but really, aren't we all?

But I digress. After a 1-hour streetcar ride I finally arrive at the Only Goddamn Customs Office in the Entire City to pick up my package. The young guy behind the counter didn't look like what you might expect a customs official to look like. For one thing, he has a ponytail. For another thing, he wore a black hooded sweatshirt that says "In Satan We Trust -- Do What Has to be Done" and was covered with these totally Goth, wikkid-cool occult symbols (see left).

Right next to the counter was a postcard taped to the wall that featured a strange-looking man eating an ugly sandwich on a linoleum table in front of some horribly outdated lemon-motif wallpaper. The motto was "Yes, I admit it, perhaps I look a bit outdated." Just to the right, a customs official had added: "But if love toward our clients is outdated, so be it!"

I'm happy to say that the Satan-worshipping customs official allowed me to take away my boxes of books without charging me anything. Let's just say he did what has to be done.

German Joys Review: Die Neuen Spiesser

The 'New Squares', Christian Rickens calls them in his new book, Die Neuen Spiesser: Von der Fatalen Sehnsucht nach einer überholten Gesellschaft ("The New Squares: On the Fatal Yearning for an Outdated Society"). It's a provocative title, Spiesser (roughly, "square") is a mildly pejorative term.

The New Squares range from the Federal Constitutional Court Judge Udo di Fabio, whose recent book Kultur der Freiheit ("Culture of Freedom") warns us that the collapse of common sense puts the "west in danger"; to Paul Nolte (G), historian at the Freie Universität Berlin, who denounces a new permanent underclass of alienated, tattoed Gameboy addicts cut loose from stabilizing bourgeois values; to Eva Herman, a peppy TV celebrity whose new book Das Eva-Prinzip: Fuer eine neue Weiblichkeit ("The Eva Principle: For a New Femininity" (G)) calls on German women to admit that the attempt to combine children and career cannot succeed, and return to the comforts of hearth and home. This is a pretty European brand of conservatism; fond of talk about ancient customs and traditional values, and skeptical of the free market. You could call the New Squares throne-and-altar conservatives adrift in a throneless cosmopolis.

Now comes Christian Rickens, an editor at Manager Magazine (G), to give them the back of his hand in this crisply-written, entertaining polemic. The tone throughout is lightly ironic, although not flippant. Rickens doesn't intend to confront right-wing doom-mongering with its left-wing Doppelgaenger. In fact, he mocks doom-mongering. Issue by issue, he sets out the New Squares' claims and demonstrates, by a bit of research and clear thinking, that the problems they describe are nowhere near as grim as they'd have us believe, and that their proposed solutions are generally unworkable.

Rickens acknowledges differences in temperament and intellectual caliber among the New Squares -- some are university professors, others tabloid columnists. However, Rickens identifies two typical thought-mistakes (Denkfehler) common to them all. The first is a weakness for spongy pseudo-scientific phrase-mongering: stuff like "the erosion of our cultural substance," or the "declining sense of togetherness and being bound together by fate" (Schicksalsgemeinschaft). The New Squares, he comments, seem to be reading "too much Nietzsche and too little Popper." Many of their arguments are, therefore, unfalsifiable -- dinner-table banter wrapped up in pretty rhetorical ribbons. How are we supposed to tell whether a nation's "cultural substance" is disappearing?

The second error is the conservative tic of confusing social change with collapse or decay. What Fritz Stern wrote of an earlier crop of German cultural conservatives still holds true: "[O]ften they mistook change for decline, and, consistent with their conception of history, attributed the decline to a moral failing." German society is changing, argues Rickens, but many of the problems bemoaned by the New Squares are much more manageable than they let on, and some of them aren't problems at all.

German Federal Express Likey Chinaman Velly Much

Here's a current banner on the German homepage of Federal Express:    

["Federal Express -- The Art of Simple Shipping to Asia"]. Isn't Ching-Chang (or Wing-Wong, or Ting-Tang) adorable, with his little conical hat, slit eyes, and traditional robe?

There's nothing unusual about racial caricatures at an ordinary hotel in Essen. But on the front page of the main portal of an multinational corporation? On a webpage that could be seen by thousands of Asian potential customers? That's new. Ancient Chinese philosopher once say: he who put ethnic stereotype on advertising risk losing market segment!

The New Squares Challenged

First we had the Germans who wanted a return to the happy, comfortable values of the 1950s. They wanted a Neue Buergerlichkeit (roughly: "new bourgeois sensibility"). People like Udo di Fabio, a judge on the Federal Constitutional Court, who wrote a book praising patriotism and good old family values called the Culture of Freedom (subtitle: "The West is in Danger Because a False Idea of Freedom is Destroying Everyday Common Sense"); Eva Herman, some sort of TV hostess who told German women to "shut up once in a while," and return to cooking and decorating; and TV star and Bild columnist Peter Hahne, who wrote a book called "Forget about Funny: The End of the Fun-Society." He apparently wants Germans to end their addiction to fun and laughter, and return to tried-and-true notions of duty, honor, country, and family. Or something like that. (I haven't read these books).

Now comes the backlash, in the form of Christian Rickens' "The New Squares: On the Fatal Yearning for an Outdated Society" (He actually uses the word Spiesser, which I've translated as "Squares." More on this word here).

Courtesy of Themenblog (G), the book blurb (my translation):

Family, Faith, Fatherland: the advocates of the 'new bourgeois consciousness' tirelessly trumpet their views throughout the country -- and nobody challenged them. Until now. A long-overdue debt.

The new squares are on the attack. They want us to believe that the Zeitgeist of our times is conservative, and a return to bourgeois values and virtues is absolutely necessary -- otherwise, Germany's collapse cannot be stopped. But is there really anything to these ideas of the 'new bourgeoisie'? How much of it is provocation, how much of it irrational doom-mongering? Where are Schirrmacher, Hahne, and the others wrong? With analytical precision and clear-headedness, Christian Rickens, for the first time, looks behind the ideas and positions of the prophets of the new bourgeoisie and points out their prejudices, myths, and mistakes. His thesis: the New Squares are attempting the impossible: solving the problems of today with the recipes from yesteryear.

Natascha Adamowsky on Computer Games

Everyone's talking about computer games! Regulating or outlawing them, that is. American politicians are falling over themselves to criticize the games; Illinois even passed a law (the Safe Games Illinois Act) calling for mandatory labeling of computer games. German politicians have also stepped into the fray, after some violent incidents in Germay linked to young men who played violent video games. Conservative politician and Bavarian Interior Minister Guenther Beckstein has even proposed (G) sentencing makers of games that "glorify violence" to a year in prison.

Die Welt recently interviewed (G) Natascha Adamowsky, an academic in Berlin who studies the history of culture and of games. Violence has always been closely linked to games, she says. Video games are a step forward compared to past centuries, where competition produced piles of real, not just virtual, corpses. She's not averse to regulating the content of the nastiest specimens, but also believes that some of the criticism of violent computer games is driven by general Luddism and computerphobic intellectuals' inherent fear of new technologies. A few excerpts of her interview, translated by yours truly:

WELT.de: How do you react to the word “Killer Games”?

Natascha Adamowsky: It’s an understandable moral reaction to say that there should be no killing in games. We live in a culture in which we reject killing other people even in games. However, history provides many examples of games in which one or the other player does not survive. A game is not a morality play.

WELT.de: For example, the Colosseum in Rome?

Adamowsky: Or among the Eskimos in Greenland, who had plenty of fun twisting each others’ ears off. Or medieval football games, where villages played against each other and beat each other to a pulp. Or during the classical age in Central America, in which ritual demanded that the losing team be killed after the game.  There are also completely modern deadly games, such as when young people bet on how long they can drive on the wrong side of the road. The American ethnologist Clifford Geertz called this “deep play” – a game in which your own life is at stake. But the classic children’s game, where children “shoot” each other with sticks and yell “Bang! Boom! [in German: „Peng! Puff!“] you’re dead!“ can be seen on every playground.

Germany Copies America, Restricts Indoor Smoking

As a non-smoker for going on four months now, I'm pleased to see that the Grand Coalition running Germany has agreed on a smoking ban for almost all public places:

Smoking in smoking in theatres, cinemas, hospitals and schools will be banned in a drive to toughen some of the most lax smoking rules in western Europe. It will also be banned in all forms of public transport.

...

Health Minister Ulla Schmidt called the compromise a step in the right direction. "This is an enormous advance for the protection of non-smokers and for health protection in Germany," she said, adding that she hoped the coalition parties' broader parliamentary groups would accept the deal.

Nearly a third of all German adults smoke regularly and close to 140,000 die every year from tobacco-related illnesses -- far more than from traffic accidents, alcohol, drugs and AIDS combined.

The ban doesn't apply to bars and pubs, and apparently restaurants will be allowed to maintain separate smoking areas. I don't have a problem with somebody smoking in my presence, so long as there's a little air circulation. But ay, there's the rub: in Germany, "a little air circulation" is called a "draft," and, to quote Spiegel English: "A lot of Germans don't like drafts. Some even seem to have an irrational fear of moving air, believing it can cause pneumonia, flu, colds, clogged arteries and just about every malady imaginable." Thus, go into an average bar here during the winter and you'll see visible, choking clouds of second-hand smoke that have been resting in the motionless air for hours (if not years). Sometimes I have to wash my clothes twice to get the stinging, acrid tang of used tobacco out of them.

So, as far as this goes, it's probably a good idea, and I congratulate the Grosse Koalition.

But now, if you don't mind, I'd like to rant at German journalists for a few short moments. One of the most tiresome stereotypes around is of those "puritanical" Americans who passed laws banning smoking in public places. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s -- that is, before European governments began to ban indoor smoking themselves -- lazy German journalists, on slow news days, ridiculed America every time some city or state in the U.S. moved to restrict smoking. As this Tagesspiegel article put it (G) two years ago, "for years, Europans mocked the American example. But now, the old continent is following the New World...in ever-faster steps." Now, of course, these journalists sometimes quoted the odd German doctor saying: "Hey, this is actually not such a bad idea." But that was rare; the snide putdowns, if placed end-to-end, would reach to Saturn and back.

Suddenly, it turns out that banning smoking in enclosed public spaces was not some ludicrous paroxysm of American puritanism, but rather a sensible policy that has saved thousands of lives and millions of dollars in medical expenses. Something Europe, perhaps, should have started doing decades ago. All this time, snide journalists did a disservice to their readers by treating the smoking ban as nothing more than an occasion to mock America, rather than explore potentially sound public-policy idea. (Especially for a country like Germany, which has to reform its health system every few years to keep it financially viable.)

Therefore, to every European journalist who trotted out this lazy cliché all these years: you condescending snobs are hereby invited to come to Düsseldorf and kiss my big fat American ass.

There, I'm glad I got that out of my system. Now it's back to thoughtful commentary.

Brussels vs. the Tophats

So I'm waiting for a doctor's appointment this morning paging through Spiegel and see this article (G) about chimney sweeps in Germany. Germany still has Schornsteinfeger, those quaint figures in black tophats (good-luck symbols!) who make sure your coal-burning stoves and tile-ovens are in order and clean your chimneys of all the dust, dead pigeons, urchin residue, and unexploded bombs.

But wait, nobody has basement boilers or coal-burning stoves anymore; and the number of apartments with actual working chimneys is pretty tiny. So the chimney sweep must be a thing of the past, right? Wrong! There are most definitely still chimney sweeps in Germany. They not only offer their services to you, they force their services upon you. When they come by to inspect your building, you must let them in (they can even call the police and force entry), and you must pay them a fee determined by the local board.

The article profiles Joachim Datko, a 55-year-old engineer from Regensburg who tried to reject the chimney-sweeper's services, pointing out that he had installed an ultra-modern gas heating system that didn't produce a single particle of dust or smoke. He lost, and the chimney sweeper was permitted to barge h