Those Crazy Germans

This was meant to be a short one, but it's not. It's about the things that make Germans different from Americans, and living in Germany different from living in the US. First, of course, Food and Drink. Item One: No Ice Cubes. They just aren't served with your drink here. If it's "Eiskaffee," it doesn't mean it's iced coffee - instead it's cooled coffee with a scoop or two of ice cream in it! Can't complain there! I don't think they do the same with tea, although they do offer cold, flavored tea in the summer. Naturally all soft-drinks and beer are served cool or cold, but to use up expensive electricity for something that melts, and additionally waters down your drink, is just a waste. Number Two: No Tap Water in restaurants. A glass of water does not automatically appear at the table when you sit down in the restaurant. If you're gonna drink it, you have to order it, but ordering just a glass of tap water anywhere but a coffee bar gets you strange looks. Nothing is free here, and they don't like to waste any resource. So the menu always has a couple of options for bottled water, with or without. With or without? "Kohlensaeure, Sprudel, Spritz, Gaz" are all names for carbon dioxide bubbles. And the bottles are always glass, the empties are collected in the crate they came in, and traded for a crate of full bottles the next time the distributor comes. Of course, the tap water is safe! It's just not profitable! Numbers One and Two add up to the fact that I haven't seen a glass of iced tap water since I've been here. The only places that serve iced drinks are Burger King and McDonald's. You want free tap water, go to France. Issue Three: The milk man doesn't come to your house here anymore either, but the Beer Man does! Every week a truck bearing the logo of the local beer brewery delivers crates of beer or soft-drink to the neighbors and picks up the crates of empties. You can leave your order taped to the crate of empties. Article D: No butter for the bread. When a restaurant serves a basket of rolls or bread, either before or with the meal, there are no accompanying tubs or packets of butter. Usually the bread tastes so good that you don't need anything on it. That said, the Germans do not shy away from slathering all sorts of toppings on their "Pausebrot" or "Abendbrot." (Bread eaten during a school recess or in the evening at home.) There are a bewildering array of bread spreads in the grocery store, including butter. There's Nutella, a gift from the Italians, and all kinds of jams and marmelades, but there's just as large a selection of savory spreads, from herbed butter to herbed cream cheese, to things made with pineapple and chicken, with red peppers, eggplant, and don't forget the meat spreads- there is also something called "Wurstsalat," literally, sausage salad. It consists of small strips of sausage (which is available in more varieties than can be named, and is more like lunch meat and not at all like the greasy breakfast sausage we get in the States), swimming in a creamy sauce, with pieces of spiced pickles. Now to language and customs: Learn a language, gain insight into a culture... Or just gain confusion. If you've ever learned another European language, you know that there is a formal way to address someone (i.e. with 'you'), and a familiar way. These pronouns are "Sie" (zee) and "Du" in German, respectively. Richard and I were taught the rules, and they are these: 1. The first time you meet someone, you address them with Sie, and Herr or Frau Schmidt. If they later ask you to say Du to them and tell you their first name, which is the perogative of the older person, then you can accept. However, you must use "Sie" with their spouse when you meet this person, until that person tells you that you can be on "Du" terms. 2. When two work colleagues, or people who feel that the other person is someone they'd like to have as a friend, decide that they want to be on "Du" terms, they complete a ritual which involves drinking a slug of beer with linked arms. They are thereafter officially on informal terms. 3. Children are always addressed with "Du". All fine. We believed we were equipped to avoid insulting someone. But the confusion comes when they don't follow the rules we were taught! Example: Richard addressed his group leader, Herr Seeberger, with "Sie" for a year, until one day, the group leader sent him an Email saying, "Richard, please answer Herr Soandso's question, attached below." Richard, somewhat surprised, wrote back "Gerd, I have answered Herr Soandso's question." And that was it. They were on "Du" terms - on a first name basis. I told Richard, "That was sneaky of him. You should at least have gotten a beer out of it!" So after this, Gerd invited us to his house, to have a drink and some snacks - he's a very friendly guy. He introduced his wife as "Elizabeth". Now I am totally confused. Do I say "Sie" to her, as I do to him? I think she addressed us as Sie for a while. But as we were leaving Gerd said "Wiedersehen, Kathy!" That was the cue that I could address him with "Du", and that in fact, I probably should have been all along. Because he and my husband are on a first-name basis. Oy! What's a poor American to do? They don't keep to their own rules! Richard now has his own system - whether he spends time with someone outside of work determines whether they are on first-name terms. Now he's often the oldest one in the crowds we hang out with, so he can set the rules. This is just one example of the confusion we face every time we're introduced to somebody new. When an older person introduces herself as "Hannah", and we address her male companion as "Herr Ackermann," what are we supposed to do? What form of address is appropriate? Is it insulting to someone who's given us her first name by distancing ourselves and saying "Sie," respectfully? Oh, the awkwardness! Sometimes I think they try to make it easy for us because we're Americans. Be careful about the "other" (andere). In Germany, when trying shoes on, don't ask to try on the "other" shoe; the sales person will think you mean a different style of shoe, but will ask "the second (zweite) shoe?" to be sure. "Yes, I meant the second shoe," resolves another close-call in terminology. And when you want another beer, be sure to ask for "Noch ein Bier" - one more - and not "ein andere Bier" - an other, i.e. a different one. "Nur" is not the only only. "Erst" is not always first. We learned that "nur" means only, and "erst" means first. In real-life German, however, a direct substitution is not always correct. If our nephew is "only" 19 years old, then he is "erst" (just) 19, not "nur" 19. Recipe directions don't say "'Zuerst', pour the packet into a large bowl" (At first, pour....), they say "'Zunächst', ....", which literally means "at next". Furthermore ... When invited to a party, don't ask the hostess "Can I bring something?", just to be polite. This is interpreted as if you have some (food) item that you would like to bring with you, and brings the response "Like what?". The proper question is, "Can I help you by bringing something?" or "Do you need anything, that I could bring for you?" But the German host or hostess usually has everything under control and would have told you to bring a specific item at the same time that you are invited. Sometimes our American politesse is seen as superfluous, and maybe a little strange. Germans also do not write thank-you notes, but one must bring a small gift of flowers, wine or chocolate when invited to a non-birthday dinner or event! Politics... It's election season here in Bavaria. The Left, The middle left, the Greens, the Ecological Democratic Party, the moderates, the conservatives, and the "I can't believe these nasty people are still around" parties crowd streetlight poles with their placards. Among the last named crowd are the Republicans and the National Democratic Party of Germany, the NPD. Political correctness is not necessarily de rigueur for these groups. The Republicans: "Minaret Verbot" - do I need to translate this one? ; "Our Land for our Children"; "We leave the church in the village and the Mosque in Istanbul"; "For love of the homeland, vote blue" (adorned with blond woman in a traditional dirndl). Then there's the NPD, the post-Nazi Nazis: "Us instead of too many foreigners," succinctly put in German as "Wir statt Ueberfremdung." I've only seen one of their posters. These posters, from the Republicans especially, are present our part of the city, where some Turkish immigrants live in the apartment blocks, as well as on the main shopping street. Erlangen is a city full of immigrants from all over, as well foreigners (Fremde, Ausländer) staying as guests. Siemens and the University draw an international population. I don't know what sympathy they intend to gather by offending all these people. It makes me mad to see these signs of intolerance so arrogantly displayed. I nurture the desire to take my can of spray paint and scrawl "Nazis raus!" (Nazis, get out!) on their posters, which is a common graffiti here, by the way. I would be foiled though, because most of these posters are fixed above head level on the poles. The other parties, on the other hand, advertise things such as "A good education for all children," and "Bavaria for all," as if to provide a direct contradiction to these voices of intolerance. I will never get used to the racism and intolerance present among this small percentage of the population, and the fact that they openly express it. I had the illusion that the Neo-Nazis were only harassing people in the Eastern part of the country. Fact is, they are insinuating themselves into mainstream public life everywhere, but not without drawing the notice of the government, courts, and rational part of the population, who contemplate how to legally outlaw this party as the original NSDAP party has been. What's behind the "Minaret Verbot," by the way, might be that in Cologne the building of a traditional mosque has been proposed, with four minarets and central dome. There has been a fuss as to whether the minarets would be taller than the spires of the Cologne Cathedral, followed by several representations of the two buildings silhouetted side by side to prove that the proposed minarets do not challenge the height advantage of one of the tallest cathedrals in Europe, and symbolically, the primacy of Christianity in this country where only about 15% of the population actually goes to church on a regular basis. The mosque here in Erlangen, by the way, is in an inconspicuous building somewhere south of the center of town. Far as I know, the Muslims in Erlangen have not attempted to build their own mosque. Other Germans really are friendlier than the Franks! We've been told this often, but we don't get out of Bavaria often enough to prove it. But in Quedlinburg in Saxony, we were standing on the Market Square staring at the town hall before going to the Tourist Information office to join the city tour, when an older woman with her bicycle asked, "Do you need some information?" and proceeded to regale us with numerous facts about the city and its history, mentioning that she was once a city tour guide. She parked her bike and lead us around for more than an hour, just ahead of or behind the "official" tour guides and their groups. She cracked a couple of jokes along the way, showed us the significant details of the half-timbered houses, told about the history of the Ottonian emperors who had held court in the city (900-1100 AD), and at the end, when she left us to go cook lunch for her family, would not accept anything but our profuse thanks that she had taken so much time out of her day to share her pride in her city. That was only one of several instances where people were so friendly and outgoing. At one of the oldest churches in the town, St. Wiperti, there is a crypt dating to around 1000 AD. We saw an older gentleman explaining the particular features of the church to a German couple. When we asked him a question, he gladly replied. Then, realizing we spoke English, he broke out his very good English to answer more of our questions. There was, of course, a graveyard outside the church, but at the top of the hill were some family tombs dug into the side of the hill. This couple from Stuttgart who had been in the church invited us to look at these unusual tombs with them. They said these were very unusual for Germany. We chatted with them as we walked along the rows of heavy wooden doors, peering into the small grated windows, discovering some tombs that were from the 1700's, and some that were newly occupied. Keeping up friendships In September and October Richard and the 3 "ladies" from the B. family have their birthdays. (Richard often tells Peter to send his greetings to the "Damen", or ladies.) Birthdays may simply not be neglected in Germany. They don't understand why Americans are so casual about it. In our years of friendship with the B. family, Peter, Ulla, and their two daughters, if we weren't together to celebrate our respective birthdays, we were assured that they were toasting our health for the coming year. I believe they really were. A couple years before we moved here, we happened to be visiting them in June on my birthday. At the stroke of midnight, not before, Ulla came to our room with a Nutella, cream and Vodka cocktail so that we could toast my birthday! When Richard and Ulla celebrated their common birthday the first year we were living here, Richard thought he had arranged with Ulla before hand that they wouldn't exchange gifts. Wrong! Ulla and Peter met us for dinner at a Chinese restaurant in town with a basket of goodies and a cook book for Richard. We had only a card for Ulla. We have since learned our lesson and try to be prepared in advance for this birthday season. We are always invited to the girls' birthday celebrations with other family members. It's very nice to be included, because we are sometimes the only people there who aren't related.