"You notice you're becoming more German when you go to England and things don't work. I was on the London Stansted Airport Express, which costs a bomb and is filthy. There was a Japanese passenger who sat down and his seat collapsed. Everyone laughed. I thought: Welcome to Britain. Collapsing chair, overpriced, laughing at foreigners, and all within 10 minutes of arriving."
So says London Times Berlin correspondent Roger Boyes (via Spiegel International, thanks to Anja for the tip), who has written a new book, My Dear Krauts, about his efforts to understand a country he describes (seemingly affectionately) as full of 'paranoid schizophrenics':
(So, you see, his frustrations are not only with the British...and what better to bring two nations together than their frustrations?)"One minute they're convinced they're total losers and start filling their pants. The next they're fervent patriots who think they know it all. It's completely confusing," says the veteran journalist, who began his career in Bonn in the 1970s and returned to Germany in 1993 after postings in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Italy.
The 2006 World Cup was a case in point, says Boyes, 54. "Weeks beforehand they were saying, 'Oh God we can't get anything right, ticket sales are going wrong, security is going wrong, no one's going to come.' Then the World Cup came and they went all patriotic and were suddenly saying no one does it better."
There's an excerpt from the book at the Spiegel site (in English), which is quite nice but which does...almost inevitably...mention the war.
Where Boyles, however, does seem to go wrong is in the assumption that Germans are not funny. They are, but it takes some time to get the hang of German humour.
Earlier this year, in the run-up to the World Cup (when, briefly, it seemed that at least some British people had an interest in Germany which for a change did not involve Where Eagles Dare style cliches), Stuart Lee examined the peculiarities of German humour. I'm not sure that he's entirely right, but he does say a few insightful things:
The geographical accident of Germany has denied Germans the fun we have with language, and it seemed to me that their sense of humour was built on blunt, seemingly serious statements, which became funny simply because of their context. I looked back over the time I had spent in Hannover and suddenly found situations that had seemed inexplicable, even offensive at the time, hilarious in retrospect. On my first night in Hannover I had gone out drinking with some young German actors. "You will notice there are no old buildings in Hannover," one of them said. "That is because you bombed them all." At the time I found this shocking and embarrassing. Now it seems like the funniest thing you could possibly say to a nervous English visitor.Lee also recounts the following brilliant joke, apparently known among 'comedy professionals' as 'The German Child':
An English couple have a child. After the birth, medical tests reveal that the child is normal, apart from the fact that it is German. This, however, should not be a problem. There is nothing to worry about. As the child grows older, it dresses in lederhosen and has a pudding bowl haircut, but all its basic functions develop normally. It can walk, eat, sleep, read and so on, but for some reason the German child never speaks. The concerned parents take it to the doctor, who reassures them that as the German child is perfectly developed in all other areas, there is nothing to worry about and that he is sure the speech faculty will eventually blossom. Years pass. The German child enters its teens, and still it is not speaking, though in all other respects it is fully functional. The German child's mother is especially distressed by this, but attempts to conceal her sadness. One day she makes the German child, who is now 17 years old and still silent, a bowl of tomato soup, and takes it through to him in the parlour where he is listening to a wind-up gramophone record player. Soon, the German child appears in the kitchen and suddenly declares, "Mother. This soup is a little tepid." The German child's mother is astonished. "All these years," she exclaims, "we assumed you could not speak. And yet all along it appears you could. Why? Why did you never say anything before?" "Because, mother," answers the German child, "up until now, everything has been satisfactory."Finally, anyone who says Germans are not funny has never heard of Erwin Pelzig. Of course, for most of you, the humour may pass right by, requiring, as it does, not only knowledge of German but also of the dialect spoken in Franconia, a region to which, for a variety of reasons, I feel inordinately - and quite fondly - attached. (To be honest, probably about 50% of his humour lies not in what he says but how he says it...)
Still, for some of you, perhaps worth a look...
2 comments:
I really like your blog, I just stumbled on it, right through the Spiegel article you quoted. For me as a German reader who has never been to the UK / US or anything these cultural insights contrasted with German reality are informative.
Your Hype-and-Glory post somehow worries me. I thought GB was more down-to-earth than the US, but it seems reality is correctly described in any of these English textbooks.
(You should compare textbooks for learning English and French. Awhile the English textbook makes up all those discussions about freedom, equality and tells you about your great future in Anglo-Saxon countries, the French textbooks offers a vast amount of loss-of-social-systems, disillusioned-youth or pickpocket stories saturated with pure negativity. Even the teachers seem to be a lot like their books.)
Thanks for your comments, which have maybe helped explain something to me. I used to teach English language and culture courses at a German university, and I found that German students were often either excessively positive or excessively negative about British and American society. There seemed to be little room in between for a more balanced view. Perhaps this is universal. Perhaps, as you suggest, it has to do with their textbooks.
There is, of course, another side to British culture, perhaps the more stereotypical one, which features politeness, a fine sense for irony and humour and a certain kind of self-effacing humility. You still find that...but the 'concern' I register in my original blog was that the things which are very pleasant about Britain - and there are those things - are becoming increasingly endangered.
But yes: when I compare the English teachers I've known with the French teachers I've known...I think you're on to something.
Thanks for reading and for writing.
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