On German Stereotypes

There is a brilliant sketch by Loriot (1923–2011), arguably Germany’s greatest comedian, in which the lead character sits a practical exam in dinner etiquette. Loriot’s character has to complete a posh dining event, accompanied by two actresses provided by the school (one playing his wife, the other playing a guest). They all have a script to follow and have to complete the following tasks: greeting and light conversation before the meal, dinner etiquette, conversation during the meal, providing complements, and, most ominously, drinking and commenting on wine. Loriot’s character makes a series of mistakes and is thus asked to repeat the performance over and over until he gets it right. The problem, of course, is that he gets progressively more drunk. Loriot was a perfectionist, each word is timed perfectly and nothing is out of place, but if I could draw out one line it would be the following (delivered during the main course): Loiriot must turn to his guest and say, ‘wenn meine Gattin Klöße zubereitet, sind sie leicht und bekömmlich’ [when my wife prepares dumplings, they are light and digestable). He delivers this successfully a few times, until the time when he has consumed too much wine and, having already referred to his guest as a ‘fette Schnecke’ [fat snail], he becomes confused about the line. He mistakenly delivers it thus: ‘wenn meine Gattin Klöße zubereitet’, slurring now, and spilling wine everywhere, he jabs his finger at his guest, ‘Sind Sie leicht and bekömmlich’ [when my wife prepares dumplings, you are light and digestible’].
Loathe as one is to explain a joke, this is pertinent to the point I will make below. As Loriot’s character is not well acquainted with his guest, he refers to her using the polite Sie form. Written with a lower case, sie, as many of you will know, can also be both ‘she’ and ‘they’ depending on the verb and context (and orthography). So the phrase sie sind is ‘they are’ (referring in this case to the dumplings), while Sie sind is the polite form for ‘you are’. The joke depends entirely on the intricacies and subtleties of the German language. Loriot’s humour, like much German humour, German philosophy and, of course, German literature depends on these same intricacies: the German language is at times intractable but always beautiful, rewarding, and surprising.
The relationship between the stereotype that Germans have a poor sense of humour and the intricacies of their language was explored in an interesting article published by BBC Culture. Travel writer Amy McPherson, calling on her experience and the expertise of Nicola McLelland at Nottingham University, makes an excellent and eloquent defence of the language and its potential for humour. Although I would stress my disagreement that the nature of German grammar makes punning more difficult, McPherson deftly shows that differences in languages often shift comedy onto different idioms, different parts of speech.
For all the discernment of McPherson’s piece in taking apart the lazy stereotype that a nation of 80 million people has ‘no sense of humour’, however, the BBC’s recent question ‘Charlottesville violence: What Germans think seeing a US far-right rally’ speaks to a far more disturbing stereotype. Filmed in my own city, Heidelberg, the BBC asked students how they responded to seeing the footage of Neo-Nazis (and others) on a far-right march in the United States: what was it like, being German, and seeing other people holding Nazi symbols? That seems to have been the gist of the question, and at its root lies a formula that can cause quite a bit of psychological damage.
For those of us who live in Germany, study it, or have some experience with the country and its history, one of the most irritating responses to Farage, Le Pen, or Trump has been their constant comparison to Angela Merkel. A typical response is often a tweet of the following: ‘it’s 2017 and the far-right march on the streets of America while the chancellor of Germany is the leader of the free world’. I am a huge admirer of the German chancellor and hope that she is re-elected convincingly at the end of next month, but this grates. First, it puts too much pressure on her and her nation, and, second, there is an underlying assumption that identifies Nazism with modern Germany. One expects such crass analogies from the likes of the former UKIP leader and his followers, but not necessarily from liberal journalists or conservative tabloid editors. The comparison only works because of the immediate assumption that were there to be Nazis, they would surely be in their natural home, Germany.
One understands, of course, the historical impulse behind this assumption; what one does not understand is the weird historical essentialism that lies behind it. Comments of this kind, and they abound this year, have a silent preface: ‘isn’t it weird that in 2017 the Nazis are not in Germany (where we would expect to find them) but in Not-Germany, where we wouldn’t’. The most idiotic variants on this theme, of course, channel their inner Alanis Morisettes by pointing out the ‘irony’ of this situation.
But in reality there is nothing ironic about this. It makes perfect sense why a country in which people developed, implemented, committed unspeakable atrocities in the name of, and lived in the long historical shadow cast by this ideology have an aversion to it. That Germany has strict laws against Nazism and all displays related to it is an entirely logical result, and that its political system and principles should be defined against it to a degree stronger than anywhere else is also perfectly logical. The resulting effect is to make Germans ashamed of their past, and have sober views of their own grandparents. There has been a great effort to understand Nazi ghosts and contain them, rather than exorcise them. It is not remotely ironic that the current chancellor of Germany takes the strongest possible stance against the far-right.
Nazism will, because of its historical links, always be associated with Germany — but it is essential that Nazism is associated with Germany’s past, not its present. When ostensibly liberal journalists attempt to tweet their approval of Germany by drawing a fundamental link between the far-right and Germany, they link it to the present; when the BBC’s first instinct is to seek out German students and see what they think about the far-right in another country, they are repeating this grave error, and making unfair demands on its people. Our modern view of history seems somehow to have mixed Whiggish delusions with a kind of historicist essentialism: we all seem to have developed a secular version of the Biblical dictum that the sins of the fathers should be visited upon the sons.
To return to stereotyping, we may ask what role it plays in our understanding of other cultures. Does it not work like a kind of meta-language that allows us to speak about foreign lands and peoples without having any real knowledge about them? It is a shorthand: a Wikipedia approach to culture. A stereotype is really a kind of essence we assume that the members of a culture have solely by virtue of being a member of that culture. As these essences are laid out before us from a very young age, they allow us to carry out a certain level of analysis of another culture without really knowing anything about it. Germans are serious, the French are nonchalant, the British are witty, the Italians are charming, the Russians are tough, and so on. When an event happens abroad, we inevitably relate it to that inherited stereotype until we learn more about the event, its actors, its causes, and, most importantly, something about the culture in which it took place. What happens in this case is a dark stereotype, that the far-right and Germans are the same thing, as if they naturally belong together, and so when the far-right appear somewhere, there is an impulse to see what Germany is up to. This is as insulting to modern Germany as it is unedifying in the commentator: it demonstrates their ignorance.
We exist in an age where everyone is demanded to have an opinion on everything. It is inevitable that people giving an opinion from a position of relative inexperience will rely on stereotypes and assumed knowledge. It is even more essential that these stereotypes are exposed for the crass delusions they really are. I will not hold my breath for sound international coverage of the upcoming German election, however.
