But why shouldn’t I be beastly? You killed my grandma, you teutonic bastards!
Ah, but when I say ‘you’ who do I actually mean? The generation that blitzed Britain, invaded most of Europe and exterminated nearly all of European Jewry is almost gone bar a few aged relicts gumming their Iron Crosses in very clean senior facilities, and the Germans of today bear no responsibility for past horrors.
Rational people realise this. Nevertheless, negative feelings towards Germany and stereotypes about Germans persist, both in the US and in Britain:
Not that there isn’t a kernel of truth in some of the stereotyping; this video is one of a series from German broadcaster Deutsche Welle‘s YouTube channel called The Truth About Germany and explains the concept of speißigheit:
spießig
smug {adj}
suburban {adj}
bourgeois {adj}
philistine {adj}
narrow-minded {adj}
petty bourgeois {adj}
white-bread {adj} [coll.]
square {adj} [coll.: boringly traditional]
The whole series is well worth watching.
As if being labelled petty bourgeois, obsessive and dull weren’t enough, one of the most persistent stereotypes of Germans is that they have no sense of humour.
Oh ja? Is dat zo? German comedian Henning Vehn has made it his mission to turn that particular stereotype inside out and give it a good shake:
Here he is trying to entice visitors with his guide to (West) Germany;
…and boggling at the British tabloids’ obsession with the Nazis and WWII:
Yes, our papers are a bit obsessed, aren’t they ? You’d think the German armed forces were some kind of mechanical death whirlwind rather than fallible human beings:
Less mechanical death whirlwind, more Windy Miller.
So what have we learned from this brief foray into German culture and humour? Bugger-all really, other than the Germans are just like us really, and stereotypes (whilst sometimes having at their core a teensy-weensy little seed of truth) are just mental constructs that serve to distance us from our common humanity. It’s much easier to kill a humourless kraut than it is to kill a fellow human being who’s quite nice really. Let’s not be beastly to the Germans – we’re going to need them soon anyway, when the economy goes to shit.
