Another lifetime ago it seems, I was on the mother of all art courier trips, bringing a major photography exhibit from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg (its first ever photography exhibition), to the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg. The trip involved a truck drive through the Russian/Finnish border, an adventure in itself, an overnight stay in Helsinki, an overnight ferry across the North Sea to Lubeck, Germany, then back on the truck for the final leg of the journey to Hamburg.
That trip was just slightly less eventful than the first leg of the adventure when I originally brought the show to St. Petersburg from Chicago. I could write a book on that one. One of the greatest pleasures of the first trip was meeting Hessu, the Finnish truckdriver with whom I spent in addition to the time it took to drive from the Finnish capital to the magnificent city on the Neva, eight hours at the aforementioned border in the middle of the night in the middle of a Finnish winter, waiting in a several mile long line of other trucks trying to get into Russia.
We had lots of time together Hessu and I, obviously, and we became fast friends. I can't describe my joy when later that year, waiting for my ride while standing in the courtyard of what was once the Winter Palace of the Russian Tzars (until the Bolsheviks stormed it on October 26,1917), and learned that it would be none other than Hessu, driving my cargo and me from Russia to Germany,
Hessu's job took him far and wide. Like every Finn who expects to spend time outside of his country, he spoke a number of languages, although I don't recall him being able to speak Russian. There, what seems to have become the lingua-franca of much of the world, English had to suffice, which was really helpful for poor, pitiful, mono-lingual me.
Truly an international man, much of our conversations centered around his adventures hauling freight throughout the continent. He wasn't shy talking about the characteristics of people from the various countries he spent so much of his life in, including his own, where it seemed he spent the least of his time.
In our day and age, we tend to shun ethnic stereotypes. I'm not talking about cartoonish depictions of say the drunken Irishman, the penny-pinching Scot, or the Italian with mob ties, although those things do indeed exist. But the reality is, stereotypes don't come out of thin air, and people tend to in one degree or other reflect the values, customs and traditions of their cultural identity and the place they come from.
Why wouldn't they?
Perhaps because of their connection with the events surrounding the Second World War and the Holocaust, one group that no one seems to have problems stereotyping are the Germans.
Germans, the cartoonish stereotype goes, drink copious amounts of beer, the men wear lederhosen, the women dirndls and everyone socks with sandals, they are humorless, strictly efficient, punctual to the second, and above all, have an almost religious devotion to rules. The latter of these traits many believe, is a contributing factor to the rise and acceptance of Nazism and the Holocaust in the 30s and 40s. I don't necessarily buy that but it's a subject for another post.
Hessu's take on the Germans was their almost super-human efficiency. He pointed out the German expression that he felt defined the German people more than any other: "alles in ordnung." Literally it means "everything in order" but it is used in several contexts including asking someone if they're OK as in: "is everything in order?"
Well as they say, in a case of life imitating art, when we reached our destination in Hamburg and unloaded the nineteen crates containing the exhibition, we asked the person responsible for packing at the museum if we could help him place the crates in storage. He politely declined saying that he had a detailed plan on where the crates would go and it would take too much time for us to hang around to implement it. He then showed us his plan which was an intricate to-scale drawing, created by the hand of someone who was obviously a grand master champion of Tetris, with each crate tightly interwoven into its own place, leaving no room for error. Which meant that if one of the crates had been measured wrong, even by an inch, the whole plan would have to be scrapped. Unfortunately, the crate sizes provided to him were not complied by another German, so.... We didn't stick around to check how it all turned out, but hopefully for the best.
I have another little anecdote of an experience in Germany. My wife and I were visiting friends in Frankfurt. From there we were headed to Prague and our friends helped us find the trains that would get us there. In this particular itinerary, there was to be one stop where we would need to switch trains. I asked how much layover time there would be between trains, assuming it would be about an hour or so. It was four minutes. "Isn't that cutting it a little tight?" I asked my friend, "...what if our first train runs late?". "Don't worry" was his response.
Well, it turned out our first train was indeed running late, by about a minute and a half, which is why the efficiency of the trains is a constant source of frustration for most Germans. I was sweating bullets fearing that we wouldn't have enough time to de-board our train, then find the track of our next train to make the connection.
Turns out we had plenty of time.
As I mentioned in several previous posts, I've been studying German for the past year or so. I've discovered over the years a very useful resource for language learning is YouTube videos. In several of the German videos I've been watching are references to stereotypes about Germans and how in fact, a lot of them are founded in reality. According to them, and these videos are made by Germans mind you, most German people are indeed obsessed with punctuality, tidiness, order and rules. So just deal with it OK?
But I stumbled across another video, this one in English and made by an ex-pat Brit living in Germany named Benjamin Antoine. That could be the reason that his YouTube channel is called "Brit in Germany". The aim of his channel as you can imagine is to describe the cultural differences between Germany and especially the UK, but also other cultures, that expats living in Germany might experience.
The title to this particular video is Freedom Isn't the Point Here and in it, he points out that there is a much deeper meaning to all the perceived rigidity found amongst the Germans.
I won't go into details because I highly recommend you watch the video, but the point of his thesis can be summed up in the following "money quote":
Germany isn't structured around individual freedom, it's structured around shared responsibility.
In other words, all the rules, regulations, personal habits and the rest, do not exist out of some irrational compulsion, but out of a sincere desire, to make society work for everyone.
Here's more from the video's notes:
There is a core difference to how German society is structure as opposed to American or British society. It all comes down to the individual vs. the collective. In Britain and the US, the self comes first. In Germany, the structure and the system come first.Now of course I am generalising here but American values and to a lesser extent British values prize autonomy. German values prize reliability. And neither is right or wrong. But they produce very different lives.
As an example, Antoine points out in the video something I was already well aware of, that the Germans are diligent about recycling. Unlike Americans at least here in Chicago where if we do bother to recycle, we just throw all our recyclable material into one bin where someone in a recycling center allegedly sorts it all, the general public in Germany is expected to sort out their own recyclable material by type and if plastic, by color, then thoroughly clean it before depositing it into the appropriate container. I'm not sure if there is a law that regulates this, but one can rest assured that if you mess up, a neighbor will be more than happy to point out the error of your ways.
Contrast that to a family outdoor family gathering held in the backyard of my cousin's house a few years ago. When it came time to clean up after the meal, I asked her where she deposited her recyclable material. Her response which I'll never forget was: "I am very proud to say that in this household, we do NOT recycle." It was almost as if I had asked her where her altar for animal sacrifices was.
Another unfortunately typical American attitude was highlighted by the uproar during the COVID pandemic, where tens of millions of Americans were aghast by the requirement for everyone to wear masks in public, Claiming it was a violation of their rights, people expressed the idea that it was their God given right to get sick if they so chose to do so. Of course what they failed to take into account was the real reason to wear masks, avoiding spreading the infection to others. That plea largely fell upon deaf ears, at least among the anti-maskers. Small wonder that the COVID mortality rate in the U.S. was higher than any other nation in the world.
Another more mundane German obsession is punctuality. When you think about it in the terms brought up in Antoine's video, being punctual is really more about showing consideration to others, than a rigid mandate, although it's that too. The same with laws against making excessive noise after 10PM and on Sundays, and a whole slew of other regulations designed to make life a little more livable for the Gesellschaft, society.
In my studies of the German language, I've noticed that German can be very specific when it comes to describing things. For example, German can have many words to describe something where English might only have one. But these German words are not interchangeable, they each have their own slight variation or nuance that English simply does not bother with.
But there is an example in reverse, where German has one word that describes something English recognizes as two entirely different concepts.
That word is rücksichtlos, and it can be translated into English as either ruthless or reckless.
Here's a brief English definition of ruthless:
having or showing no pity or compassion for others.
without thinking or caring about the consequences of an action.
It's when you get to the literal meaning of rücksichtlos, that you begin to see the connection between the two and with that, start to gain an insight into the German mind.
Rücksichtlos literally means without regard. German, at least here, does not distinguish between regard of oneself or regard of others, just like all the things in Antoine's video, what matters most is the regard itself.
In that vein I differ a little from Antoine's assessment of Germans not valuing individual rights. As I see it, Germans do value individual rights, as long as they don't interfere with the rights of others.
In one of my last posts, I mentioned creating flash cards to help learn words. Instead of writing down the English translations of the words I'm trying to learn, I often substitute pictures. As rücksichtlos describes two English words, I had to make two cards. The picture I chose to represent ruthless was easy, you more than likely know it. It's the picture of four of the most ruthless people I can imagine, Jeffery Epstein, his partner Ghislaine Maxwell, the current president of the United States and his current wife.
It was harder to come up with a picture to represent reckless, so I just googled the word "reckless" and looked for accompanying images. The first image to come up (which I used), was a picture of a chimpanzee driving a car.
I think the Germans are on to something. *
*My apologies to chimpanzees for that crude comparison.
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