Berlin, Germany

• as a long-term foreign (non-us) resident employed here, there are couple of things about this country that irritate many people, even germans. as might be obvious since iraq, there is a large pseudo-left wing, anti-capitalist (often, as the nazis claimed, that means other non-german capitalists) undercurrent in germany. a major activity of these unconsciously revisionist attitudes is identifying other countries/people who are "worse" than germans, in the service of 19933-45, "the past that won't pass", largely because germans don't know how to achieve this since they don't have the honesty, trust and ability to confront issues that societies with the first principles of fairness, fraternity and equality have and depressingly, even educated germans tend to think other nationalities have "characters" - so they must have one as well and guess what it is.. this belief is a bit suprising since this is a central tenet of nazism, eg the "jews" are like this, the "slavs" are like that. and, also related to ww2, germans often dislike and complain about many aspects of their country. basically, the atmosphere is that much is old-fashioned and needs reformimg, and to desribe someone's behaviour/attitude as "deutsch" is usually an insult or a joke. then there's the sometimes grotesque provincialism. a lot of young germans run away to berlin to escape their allegedly claustrophobic small towns - and then complain about "impersonal" berlin which, coming from a new world country is fairly laughable, particularly since the street crime rate is so low even though many germans are obviously frightened of their own shadows and confuse dirty streets with threats to their person (the great historical bourgeois values of tidiness and order, exaggeratedly aped by german peasant culture, which the nazis played this one up, see dirty eastern europeans etc). but in the "capital city" the major piece of provincialism is the "berliner", a chip on the shoulder, pseudo-working class (the real german working class - i hear "pride" and "identity" in their somewhere -are probably mostly in the rhineland), people without much possibility to live elsewhere in germany (=a defintition of provincial) who lived on massive cold-war berlin susbsidies, and who hate having their dog-walking, beer-drinking, tiny little lives disturbed. they are the famous jfk "berliner", who actually didn't want the wall to come down (on both sides of it). attitudes have improved, helped by less cradle-to-grave employment security (many germans abuse the state and institutions that supports its people more than say, the us state does. as a french minister put it about the french recently: people should work more and stop thinking about their holidays)so there are now less surly bus drivers, arrogant shop assistants, permantly insulted lazy bastard government office workers, or people whose first question is "where are you from?" and never "how are you doing buddy?" and then the east: but that's another story of provincial paranoia. these things, like many things german, are being reformed of course but frankly on some days it's easy to have a f***ing gutful of running a de-facto retraining service for 200 years of historical failures, hardly to mention family losses (soldiers) in two world wars. by the way, there is still a big debate in germany as to whether the country was "liberated" or "defeated" in ww2.

  Ted 10 Aug 2008, 07:16 - Report

germany sucks