By: Innervoice_chan
Posted: October 14, 2005Character
The Importance of Being ErnsthaftIn Germany, life is serious, and so is everything else. Outside Berlin, even humour is no laughing matter, and if you want to tell a joke you may want to submit a written application first.
The Germans strongly disapprove of the irrelevant, the flippant, the accidental. Serendipity is not a word in their language. The reason for this is that such things are not
Ernsthaft, serious. It is hardly conceivable (and certainly not desirable) that a good idea might arise by chance or come from somebody lacking the proper qualifications. On the whole Germans would prefer to forego a clever invention rather than admit that creativity is a random and chaotic process.
Because life is
Ernsthaft, the Germans go by the rules. Schiller wrote, “obedience is the first duty”, and no German has ever doubted it. This fits with their sense of order and duty. Germans hate breaking rules, which can make life difficult because, as a rule, everything not expressly permitted is prohibited. If you are allowed to smoke or walk on the grass, a sign will inform you of this.
In professional life, devotion to earnestness means that you cannot give up accountancy or computer engineering in mid-life and switch to butterfly farming or aromatherapy. Any such change of heart would cause you to be dismissed as lightweight and unreliable.
OrderThe Germans pride themselves on their efficiency, organization, discipline, cleanliness and punctuality. These are all manifestations of
Ordnung which doesn’t just mean tidiness, but correctness, properness, appropriateness and a host of other good things. No phrase warms the heart of a German like “
alles in Ordnung”, meaning everything is alright, everything is as it should be. The categorical imperative which no German escapes is “
Ordnung muss sein”, Order Must Be.
Germans like things that work. This is fundamental. A car or washing machine which breaks down six months after purchase is not a nuisance, it’s a breach of the social contract.They are mystified when they go abroad and see grimy buildings, littered streets, unwashed cars. On the platforms of the London underground they while away the hours between trains puzzling about why the crazy English put up with it and don’t organize things properly. Even the language is unreliable and full of tricks, with people called “Fanshaw” who spell their names Featherstonehaugh,
(irrelevant note: do you realize that Microsoft spellcheck actually recognizes "Featherstonehaugh" as a WORD? O_O) and towns called Slough (of which you cannot get enough when passing through).
In Germany, they manage these things better. Words may be long and guttural, but there are no tricks to pronunciation—what you see is what you get. The streets are clean, the houses newly painted, the litter in the bins.
Ordnung.
Getting it SortedIf you offer a German a piece of advice like “Leave well enough alone” or “If it aint broke, don’t fix it”, they will assume you are British, or in need of psychotherapeutic aid.
It is axiomatic in Germany that everything needs sorting before you can achieve anything: the good needs to be sifted from the bad; the necessary from the contingent. What is yours must be clearly separated from what is mine; the public must be demarcated to prevent it getting confused with the private, the true must at all costs be distinguished from the false. Reliable definitions must be drawn up regarding what is masculine and what feminine (not to mention the characteristic German complication of the neuter). It goes on and on.
Only when everything is comprehensively compartmentalised can anything be truly said to be
in Ordnung. This is the famous categorical imperative—ordered by Kant because he couldn’t stand the undifferentiated hotchpotch of the world.
Kant was determined, as no German had been before, to divide everything into distinct categories. He was notorious for driving his wife and friends round the bend with his obsessive splitting of everything into smaller and smaller groups. In his library each volume formed a unique class which had to be kept in isolation in case any of the others contaminated its taxanomic distinctness. He went so far as to conceive a monumental plan in which all his books would be cut up and rebound so that their constituent words could be sorted and brought together—volumes full of correctly arranged “the’s” and “and’s” and so forth. He only abandoned this masterpiece of
Ordnung when doing so was made a condition of his release back into the community.
The modern German does not go to such extremes, but only because such extremes have been sorted into a phenomonological phylum of “the loony”, a nomenclatural subdivision few wish to be associated with.
AngstPredictably, in this immaculate garden lurks a serpent of doubt. As a nation the Germans are wracked with doubt and fight constantly to keep chaos at bay. Being German, they cannot brush their doubts aside or put off worrying in favor of a pint and a laugh.
Not for them the touching British faith that “it will be alright on the night”, that it “all comes out in the wash”. For a German, doubt and anxiety expand and ramify the more you ponder them. They are astonished that things haven’t gone to pot already, and are pretty certain that they soon will. (In other words, blitheness ≠ German)Germany is, after all, the Land of
Angst.
It is said that this pervasive anxiety leads to a reluctance to undertake anything; that, when action is necessary, the Germans struggle with the difficulties. (Now, that certainly DOESN'T sound like Klaus to me...)Angst is responsible for their desire that everything be regulated, controlled, checked, checked again, supervised, insured, examined, documented.
Secretly, they believe it takes a superior intelligence to realize just how dangerous life really is.
They see their anxiety as proportional to their intellectual capabilities. (Hee hee! ^_^)Life’s a BeachThe German craving for security is nowhere more evident than during holidays at the seaside. Here they have earned for themselves global notoriety for their ruthless efficiency in appropriating the best spots on the world’s beaches.
No matter how early you struggle to get to the beach, the Germans will be there before you. Quite how they manage it is a mystery, given that they can be seen carousing in the bars and tavernas until the small hours with the rest of us.
Having gained their beachheads, the Germans will immediately start digging in, constructing fortifications. You can always tell the beaches under German occupation: huge sandcastles cover the area, one per family, each several feet high, elaborately decorated with seashells and decaying starfish, crowned by flags.
Unlike everyone else, the Germans prefer to be inside their sandcastles, which then serve to mark out their territory—define their particular space. Often these structures are so tightly packed together there is no room left to walk between them. In extreme cases non-Germans may find themselves sitting on bare rock, the Germans having excavated every grain of available sand for their Fortress Beachtowel.
(That entire section made me imagine the Alphabets on a beach, industriously building a giant sandcastle under the Major's watchful eye...^_^)Dream InspiredThe Germans enjoy escaping into fantasies whenever reality becomes too unpleasant. Failures and defeats require a metaphysical back-up system; they love to dream. The German equivalent of John Bull and Uncle Sam is sleepy-headed Michel, a name derived from Germany’s patron saint, St. Michael.
The poet Heinrich Heine summed up this propensity:
“The Frenchmen and Russians possess the land,
The British possess the sea,
But we have over the airy realm of dreams
Command indisputably.”
(Oh boy. I can see the steam coming out of Klaus' ears if he heard that one...)On occasion, the German fondness for escapism—their need for a spiritual essence, can make them seem otherworldly and impractical. Goethe noted wistfully,
“While we Germans torment ourselves with solving philosophical questions, the English with their practical intelligence laugh at us and conquer the world.” (Hmm, I think our pair got it backwards...XD)The Ideal“Nobody is perfect, but we are working on it”, said Baron von Richthofen optimistically. Perfectionism is a prime German characteristic which benefits their auto industry, but can be a real trial at parties. Compromise and settling for what is good enough is not good enough. Strictly speaking, only the ideal will do.
There is no doubt in the German mind that the ideal, or rather, the Ideal, exists and is out there somewhere in the ether. Naturally, here on earth, we can never achieve the Ideal, only a pale imitation of it. Plato may have been a Greek, but he thought like a German.
So it is not surprising that many Germans relate to ideas more than to people. As Goethe put it, “The Experience is always a parody of the Idea”.
Ideas are beautiful and don’t let you down; people are unpredictable and do. Clashes between ideas and reality are inevitable, and Germans are quite resigned to this. It is part of what makes life tragic.
This is reflected in German literature and legend. Many German heroes fall because they measure their ideals against the imperfection of their nature and that of the world. Lamenting this sad state of affairs is a German preoccupation. Making the best of a bad lot and taking the rough with the smooth are more or less alien concepts to the German mind.
book by Stefan Zeidenitz and Ben Barkow. Ravette Publishing: Horsham, 1997.
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