Date: Wed, 24 Aug 94 18:16:10 -0400 Return-Path: To: berlin-prague-feedback@martigny.ai.mit.edu From: Peter Wittich Though I appreciate your going to all this effort to make this exhibit, I feel that a your depection of Germany and the germans falls into the same sort of stereotyping that you accuse the Germans of in your articles. Your inability to accept the concept of shopping only during limited business hours is a good example of this. While this may seem to be inconceivable to people who come from the consumer heaven that is america, you don't seem to even entertain the notion that other people might be content without being able to shop after six during the week and only until 1pm on saturday. This seems a bit closed-minded to me. As a frequent visitor to Germany and Berlin in particular, I have found that it is quite easy to adjust to this minor scheduling inconvenience. To claim that this is another instance of Germans trying to force people into a mould and use this as an example of the german rigidity seems rather naive to me and reduces everyone to nothing but a consumer. While I too have found that there are many germans who harbor stereo- typical images of the US, this is by no means the case of all Germans. Your account leaves me with a feeling that all germans are hostile towards america dislike it for no apparent reasons. Alot of the stereotypes of America that germans have are based in fact: the US has a distribution of wealth that is unheard of in the Germany, for instance, and criminality, though on the rise in Germany and all of Europe, is byno means comparable to that what we accept on a day-to-day basis in this country. You only need to spend some time abroad, or try to look at the evening news with through the eyes of a foreigner, to get the feeling taht the US is completely out of control in terms of violence and crime. I won't bore you with more complaints or comments, since I doubt that you will agree with me. However, I would like to ask you to re-examine your views of Germany and consider the possiblity that the way you view the Germans is exclusively through the eyes of an American, not as someone who is trying to see a different culture in its own light. ------------------- Return-Path: Date: Sun, 4 Dec 1994 22:51:36 -0500 (EST) From: "David W. Fenton" To: berlin-prague-feedback@martigny.ai.mit.edu I've finished reading only your Berlin narrative, but as an American who lived in Germany for a year (1992-93), I feel compelled to write. I agree wholeheartedly with many of your comments about the Germans, but I do believe you misrepresent some things. As a tourist, things are very different. One easily adjusts to the store hours, but I never stopped resenting it (as a New Yorker, I'm accustomed to having a 24-hr. deli in the block that I live in). The prices are really not that out of line for food, etc. - I know how it is for tourists because my family visited me while I was there and we did the tourist routine (I had to re-adjust to speaking English, and having to translate all the time). My brother-in-law observed about the cost of Coca-Cola vs. beer (beer is cheaper there, of course), that it showed the results of sin taxes. That was an astute observa- tion for a Southern Baptist - Germans certainly don't have our concept of sin. Many things are, in fact, quite cheap - wine, for instance, and Italian fruit, as well as candies (our $1.59 chocolate bars are 79 pfennigs over there, about a quarter the price). I also cannot praise the public transit systems enough - I have often observed that in Germany public transit is on the honor system, but but they have turnstiles in the supermarkets (and DM1,-- deposits to get shopping carts), whereas here, it's the other way around. I'm not sure if this is a matter of our entrepreneurial spirit or what, but it does seem that our societies are organized rather differently. I did not like the Germans (I lived in Munich for 10 months), but then, they didn't seem to like me that much either. I spent quite a lot of time in Vienna (which I thought would be unfriendly), and found the people there to be far kinder. I had always attributed part of my problem to my faulty German, but that didn't seem to bother the Viennese. My epiphany came when I realized that German society is organized around rules and authority, whereas ours is based on a recognition of individual rights - we are trained that we all have rights, but the flip side of that is that we learn to be careful about infringing upon others. Germans are taught to enforce the "rules" regardless of the consequences. Thus I have seen a little gray-haired lady acost a mother with a baby holding a yellow balloon while she prayed in the Peterskirche in Munich - the old German lady came running across the back of the church and in very loudly whispering "Dass ist verboten - raus!" The problem, of course, was the balloon, which was on the prohibited list as you entered the church. But, of course, she disturbed the church far more than the balloon would have, had it been let loose. My reaction was "who died and left you in charge?" An American (I think) would have gone over to the woman and whispered to her, rather than making a public spectacle. The Germans also have a tendency to ignore others in public places, cutting in front of them in lines, stopping to chat at the bottom of U-Bahn escalators, etc. Americans don't do that, but it is not because there are rules to that effect. It is because we are trained in a principle of consideration for others. Now, I know I'm open to criticism on a number of grounds, but every American who has lived in Germany with whom I have discussed this has agreed with me on it. Again, I must praise your powers of observation. A great deal of what you said is right on the money. But you were there for only a few days. Then, again, I was there for only a year. Tchuess!! -------------------