American Pride and Optimism
Americans are proud to be Americans. Germans are not proud to be Germans. That’s too nationalistic in their eyes, and I think their biggest fear is to be compared to the Nazis. Germany’s past is still a huge weight on the shoulders of today’s generation. I used to carry that weight as well. Every time I traveled beyond German borders I had this apologetic look on my face, my shoulders were drooping and I moved very slowly, like a mourning man following a coffin to its final destination.
When I moved to the United States I was told at the airport that I couldn’t take that much baggage on the plane, so I decided to leave the weight of Germany’s past in Germany. It really helped. I feel so much better now! But I’m still not proud to be German and hopefully I never will be. That’s why I filed the papers for my Citizenship. I can’t wait to be an American!
Almost as heavy as the weight of Germany’s past is the weight of German pessimism. Unfortunately I wasn’t asked at the airport to leave it behind because it’s already calculated in the ticket price. Flying is expensive in Germany! Needless to say, I was broke when I arrived in America.
The day my boss hired me I asked him: “You do realize that I’m German, don’t you?”
“I sure do,” he replied, “I love that German perfectionism!”
“Ah, I see …” Back at home I first checked the dictionary and then my luggage.
My boss Terry is the best example for American optimism. If a customer requested a banner to be stretched across the mountain range west of Las Vegas, Terry wouldn’t even flinch and he’d promise the job to be completed by noon. I’d be pulling my hair out, pleading with him that it couldn’t possibly be done before 2017, but he’d only say: “Just make sure the banner is perfectly straight, German man!”
Yes, American optimism is a fascinating thing. I admire people who lose their job and, instead of complaining, they see a new chapter in their lives with new opportunities. If, on the other hand, a German teacher lost his job he would collect unemployment and hibernate till he was offered another job as a teacher. He’d also get a nice chunk of money to help pay his rent, which isn’t really necessary because it’s almost unachievable for a landlord to evict his tenants. The “upside” of German socialism!
German pessimism is an annoying thing, especially when you live in America. It’s like a built-in brake-system that will let your thoughts come to a screeching halt every time you dare to think something positive. You can’t even enjoy your own Birthday because it just reminds of how old you are getting. Americans are different. They think: “Hey, what if I won’t grow old? I better make the best of my life right now!”
I know I need to get rid of my German pessimism. But why bother? It would never work!
Americans do have pride, but they also put their pride on the line and do what is needed, when it is needed.
http://lonestartimes.com/2006/02/10/heroes-of-the-texas-national-guard/
Papa Ray
West Texas
USA
Comment by Papa Ray - February 10, 2006 @ 2:05 pm
“Americans are proud to be Americans. Germans are not proud to be Germans. That’s too nationalistic in their eyes, and I think their biggest fear is to be compared to the Nazis.” -cut-
- I take no stock in typical (blind) nationalism, pessimism and the infamous German baa baa gripe.
- However, I am _proud_ to be German. I am proud of German culture of the last few hundred years (do not take Nazis or Merkel as culture, by the way.)
- A healthy dose of realism isn’t that bad, as long as you can cope with it.
Now, how does that fit into your world view!?
It is always easy to judge others while actually talking about yourself. Accept where you come from, there’s really nothing to be worried or ashamed about as long as you are a responsible citizen. So whatever your citizenship, accept your roots if you want to be happy.
The guilt syndrome you can apply to almost any people: the US haven’t done less atrocities in their history. The dark side of US history just isn’t stressed as much in the public as that of Germany. I’ve met Americans in Dresden who experienced that guilt syndrome in full strength when they got to know about the Dresden bombings, where dozens of thousands of innocent people where killed, for nothing. It is good no know about history, I told them, but they should learn from it and get over it.
By the way, we Germans at least do not (yet) have to sign employment contracts that explicitly dictate us to smile obsessively at the workplace all day… (Well, apart from Deutsche Post staff.) That’s something to be proud of!
Comment by captainchaos - February 10, 2006 @ 2:36 pm
Believe it or not, captainchaos, people in America don’t have to sign a contract like that, either. They can choose to work somewhere else
Comment by Michael Meyn - February 10, 2006 @ 3:31 pm
“I’ve met Americans in Dresden who experienced that guilt syndrome in full strength when they got to know about the Dresden bombings, where dozens of thousands of innocent people where killed, for nothing.”
Gee, how dare we bomb Dresden ‘for nothing’. Sorry, but war is hell, so it’s best not to start one. Of course there are American’s who feel guilty because America caused the Holocaust then bombed Dresden for ‘for nothing’.
You can find Americans who believe nothing and everything (usually at the same time). We call them Idiots here. Europe loves them though and likes to nominate them for Nobel Peace Prizes (see. Carter, Jimmy).
Comment by rc - February 10, 2006 @ 5:03 pm
Americans are Americans and happy about it most of the time. The French are French and generally pleased. But Germans want to be Germans while living like Americans, and that’s their problem.
If they want to live in a happy, ordered, regulated society with Social Justice and Equality for All, then they have to live with the fact that their economy will not be as dynamic as in America.
Comment by ralphieboy - February 10, 2006 @ 11:47 pm
Michael Meyn: “Believe it or not, captainchaos, people in America don’t have to sign a contract like that, either. They can choose to work somewhere else”
- Oh yeah, the American Dream! What a bummer if “somewhere else” is exactly the same
Hmm, dunno how you see it, but isn’t signing a contract where you have to smile all day kinda humiliating if you not really have a choice? I’ve been to America and don’t want to see people smile at me obsessively when they actually think how much customers suck…
rc: “Gee, how dare we bomb Dresden ‘for nothing’. Sorry, but war is hell, so it’s best not to start one.”
- Definitely. But there’s a BIG difference in bombing military positions and bombing a whole city of civilians, don’t you think?
ralphieboy: “But Germans want to be Germans while living like Americans, and that’s their problem.”
That’s not correct. Lots of American “culture” is taken from old Europe. Apart from that, I don’t see where the problem is.
ralphieboy: “If they want to live in a happy, ordered, regulated society with Social Justice and Equality for All, then they have to live with the fact that their economy will not be as dynamic as in America.”
Since when does a dynamic economy have to exclude justice and equality?
Comment by captainchaos - February 11, 2006 @ 3:08 am
Since when does a dynamic economy have to exclude justice and equality?
You talk about equality?
Check the PISA Study and think again.
Compare the political participation of the biggest minorities in Germany (the turks) and the US (afroamericans) and think again.
A dynamic economy doesnt exclude equality in chances, au contraire. But it excludes socialistic “Gleichmacherei” as done in Germany.
Comment by Loc - February 11, 2006 @ 4:59 am
I just want to congratulate you for making the decision to become a citizen! And give you a hearty welcome - have at it and enjoy. America is a big place and you can keep your guilt or oust it at will. Making the decision to become and official citizen is huge and not to be taken lightly. The pride I feel in being an American is not because we haven’t done anything wrong over the years, but that we’re still a place where people such as yourself want to belong!
Comment by Terri - February 11, 2006 @ 6:53 am
Deutsch ist ein Gedanke. So wie Gedanken keine Sprache und kein Land benötigen.
Brecht, Heine, Mozart, Marx, Geothe, Engels. Beethoven, Luther, …, Kepler,…Scholl, Schiller, Mann, Kafka, … . Grimm, Einstein, Freud…Mendelssohn, Bach, Planck, Fontane…usw…
Patriotismus ist die Tugend der Boshaften (Zitat. Von wem wohl?)
Ich glaube du solltest mehr lesen, dann würde dein Bild über Deutsche anders sein.
A thought is German. Need as thoughts no language and no country. Brecht, Heine, Mozart, Marx, Geothe, Engels. Beethoven, Luther…, Kepler… Scholl, Schiller, Mann, Kafka…. Grimm, Einstein, Freud… Mendelssohn, brook, Planck, Fontane… etc….
Patriotismus is the virtue of the malicious ones (quotation of whom probably?)
I believe you should more read, then your picture over Germans different would be. (translates with Google)
Comment by monochromer - February 11, 2006 @ 7:10 am
America has never been ruled by an ideology that equates patriotism with brutal militarism or racism as Germany has. Thus, despite some questionable patches in the country’s history, most Americans have no trouble being patriotic about their country.
cc: while America has a more dynamic economy, it also has a lot more uninsured jobs and uninsured folks in total. Most jobs in Europe still have to be socially insured, which raises the threshhold of economy for a lot of low-end jobs.
Comment by ralphieboy - February 11, 2006 @ 7:40 am
@ Terri Thank you very much!
“The pride I feel in being an American is not because we haven’t done anything wrong over the years, but that we’re still a place where people such as yourself want to belong!”
I agree with you. I never used to understand the whole American pride thing. To me pride was an emotion that you could only feel over something that you had accomplished. Well, becoming an American is quite an accomplishment and I will be proud of it. But the pride goes so much deeper than just filling out forms and mailing them off. It’s realizing that you are officially part of something great. Sure, America has done some things in the past that many people aren’t too proud of. But what makes the USA so special is that they always do their best to fix problems, and not just their own!
And up to this day (after 10 years) I have never been made fun of or harrassed for my nationality. I couldn’t think of any country that would make me feel more at home than America.
Comment by Michael Meyn - February 11, 2006 @ 8:43 am
@ monochromer I know that Oscar Wilde said it, but only because I googled it
But I don’t understand why I have to read more to be able to understand Germans. Doesn’t living in Germany for over a quarter of a century qualify?
Comment by Michael Meyn - February 11, 2006 @ 8:46 am
@ Michael Meyn
“I know I need to get rid of my German pessimism.”
you seem to think still as German.
Comment by monochromer - February 11, 2006 @ 9:20 am
Well, you might have noticed that I like to exaggerate a bit. I’m not sure if that’s a German attribute as well, but I mainly use it for entertainment purposes. We don’t want to bore our readers, you know
However, I don’t think it’s possible to completely shed my German mentality and sometimes I don’t even think it’s necessary. But if it makes you feel better, I’m not as pessimistic as I stated in my post.
Comment by Michael Meyn - February 11, 2006 @ 9:43 am
I guess we can’t escape what I call ‘The Glucksmann Equation’:
Germany=Hitler=War=Evil
As a result of denazification many Germans can’t help associating each part of the equation with Hitler - with the fatal effect, that even wars of liberation or self-defense appear evil to them. And that’s of course exactly what the winners of WW2 wanted to achieve in the first post-war years.
In this light it doesn’t seem to be fair all the way when countries like the USA all of a sudden expect us to forget the lessons they gave us and enter the next best battlefield with hurray and song.
And, my friends: What, if we actually had done this? The world would have said: These are the Germans as we know them. They are still huns - but now they are our huns.
Seems it is our fate to be Misunderestimated Germans, Michael - but we are not responsible for the underlying perceptions in the USA.
My two cents.
Comment by Olaf Petersen - February 11, 2006 @ 10:47 am
captainchaos,
rc: “Gee, how dare we bomb Dresden ‘for nothing’. Sorry, but war is hell, so it’s best not to start one.
- Definitely. But there’s a BIG difference in bombing military positions and bombing a whole city of civilians, don’t you think?”
I do, but it’d be best to avoid wars altogether, don’t you think? No, I’m not suggesting that’s possible, but pretending that WWII happened only between non-combatants, until Dresden occured, is simply ignoring the reality of that war.
I’m not claiming a moral high point here, only pointing out that when Hitler (and the Germany public that made him a democratic reality) decided that Jews (who were all innocent civilians) and London (and it’s innocent civilian population) could be destroyed (regardless of their military status), then Hitler (and the German public that made him a democratic reality) had to accept the moral (and physical) responsibility for the consequences that followed. The bombing of Dresden didn’t occur in a vacuum. Hitler (and the German public that made him a democratic reality) started a war and engaged in it to a total degree which left very little room for a humanitarian response. It was a ‘Total War’ and once one side starts such a war, the other is absovled from guilt in pursuing it to it’s logical conclusion. Once it’s clear that your enemy will stop at absolutely NOTHING to destroy you, you are then absolved of all guilt in pursuit of that enemies destruction.
If you will, Dresden was nothing different than the Blitz of London, but executed on a larger and more effective scale. It was Hitler (and those Germans who supported him or didn’t care enough to oppose him) who created the conditions for the destruction of Dresden and nobody else.
Hitler, and all those around him, absolutely and unequivically supported the notion of total war, and decided that the British (and Czech and Polish and Russian) non-combatants were legitimate targets. German people (and not all by a long shot, but enough) supported that policy.
It would be dishonest to say that the British and American governments didn’t rejoice at the idea of revenge. It’s a crass emotion, and to say ‘but they did it first’ is not a very moral and humanitarian thing to say. It is, however, a well recognized human response, and cannot be held against those who experienced the first violation, all the while hoping for peace.
Comment by rc - February 11, 2006 @ 6:05 pm
My last post may have been a bit ‘over-the-top’ in two respects: 1) I don’t think The Bombing of Dresden was a good idea because I we now know that Dresden was not a valuable military target. 2) I hope nobody (and I definitly don’t) holds any Germans (and of course not the very gracious hosts of this blog) responsible for anything that was done by ANYBODY during WWII.
I just think the author of the comment who rolled out Dresden in this post did so in bad faith and wanted to express my opinion why his comments don’t hold any water at all.
I hope, especially, that point 2
Comment by rc - February 11, 2006 @ 6:28 pm
Congratulations and Welcome aboard!
Comment by Steve_Mac - February 12, 2006 @ 4:54 am
@ Steve_Mac: Thank you very much!
@ rc: No worries. I think you got your point across very well!
Comment by Michael Meyn - February 12, 2006 @ 5:06 am
In 2002 Germany made it to the finals of the Soccer World Cup. They asked team captain Oliver Kahn if he thought that Germany would win, and his answer was a qualified, reserved and even pained, going something like “Well, if we all get out and give 110 percent, then I believe in my heart that we could perhaps win…
I wondered back then, where is the optimism, where is the “We’re all playing at the top of our form and I really think we can whoop these muthas clear back to Rio!!!”?
(btw, Brazil won)
Comment by ralphieboy - February 12, 2006 @ 5:16 am
@14 sure makes me feel better
Comment by monochromer - February 12, 2006 @ 6:54 am
The Bombing of Dresden
Two weeks ago, my cousin visited me, having recently returned from a long visit to Germany. He spends about six months in the U.S. and six months with his girlfriend in Germany. He is a little anti-American and has the Euro viewpoint of everything American is wrong. On this visit he berated the bombing of Dresden and said that his German friends were totally disgusted with the “murder” of German civilians by Americans in WWII.
The “murder” of civilians began during the Battle of Britain which occured between July 10, 1940 and October 31, 1940. Hitler had initiated a campaign to eliminate British airpower in order to begin an invasion of England. This was a very successful campaign and by the middle of August, 1940, most of the British Air Defense System was destroyed and most of the RAF airfields were useless. A few more weeks of German attacks would have finished off Britain’s air defense and allowed an invasion by the German army.
On the night of August 24, 1940, a Luftwaffe bomber lost it’s way and inadvertently bombed the center of London. In retaliation, Churchill ordered the bombing of Berlin on the following night of August 25. Very little damage occurred, and Churchill ordered two additional attacks for August 28 and August 30th. Some damage occurred during these attacks, and a few civilians were killed.
Hermann Goring had assured Hitler and the German people that no one would ever be able to bomb Germany, and these attacks had shocked the Berliners. Berlin had never been bombed before and the Spanish and Polish campaigns had convinced Germans that their military was indestructible. In a furious speech on September 4, 1940, Hitler shouted that he would raze Britian’s cities to the ground. On September 7, 1940 and for fifty-seven consecutive days, the Luftwaffe bombed London. The appalling death and destruction had a single golden advantage, it gave the Royal Air Force time to repair it’s air defences and repair it’s airfields. Fighter Command was back in business and went on to destroy the German air attacks. The invasion of England was called off, and Germany went on to invade Russia, leading to it’s ultimate loss of the war.
The bombing of Dresden was the culimation of mass bombing of most of Britain’s and Germany’s cities. 713 British Avro Lancasters bombed Dresden on the evening of February 13,1945 followed in the next two days by 311 B17s of the USAAF. Dresden had only been attacked once before in a minor raid in October, 1944.
In Germany today, most young Germans still deny Germany’s role in creating the largest conflict the world has ever seen and the holocaust that killed millions. They deeply resent the U.S. and the British for fighting back.
The world now faces another enemy very similar to Hitler. Radical Islam has similar goals of killing innocents simply because they are “different”. We must unite to face this threat.
Comment by Ray - February 12, 2006 @ 8:08 am
Michael Meyn, It’s commonly known that Germans make the best Americans and even better Texans. The USA is an admixture of disipline and anarchy, puritinism and bacchanalia and Vegas has that in spades. The Mormans are dealin’ the cards. Ya gotta love it and roll with the punches.
Comment by Del Hoeft - February 12, 2006 @ 8:53 am
rc,
I just wanted to point out that military defense is not the same as military revenge, it seems you got it. And killing off a whole city where not only “the German people who accepted Hitler” lived, but also innocent _children_ is NOT a “well recognized human response”, it’s merely an atrocity not better than Hitler’s act of war.
Comment by captainchaos - February 12, 2006 @ 9:08 am
Dresden was a major hub for the rail system in Germany. Those rail lines transported men and supplies to the eastern front. There were also factories that produced aircraft components, anti aircraft guns, as well as optical and electronic equipment. To say that there was no military reason to bomb Dresden is inaccurate.
Comment by jlwb - February 19, 2006 @ 9:55 pm
I loved this post. I’ve linked.
And welcome to America!
Comment by Kathryn Judson - March 3, 2006 @ 11:06 am
Thanks, Kathryn! For the warm welcome and the link
Comment by Michael Meyn - March 4, 2006 @ 8:58 am
Michael, welcome to America. Americans are more fasinated with the Germans than you think. As an American history teacher, whenever the word “German” comes up, you have the kids undivided attention. They are very curious of the German people/culture.
Personally, I drive a BMW, watch Bundesliga fussball weekly, drink German bier, and am working very hard to learn how to speak the language.
As for WWII, This is going to sound weird but; I wouldn’t be too ashamed. The Bible prohetised more than 2,000 years ago that the Jews would have their nation (Israel) and language (Hebrew) back in a pure form. How else could that of happened without the Holocaust of the Jewish people…they were given back their land and language in 1948. I personally think Germany was simply a part of a plan. Which might also explain why you guys were screwed by the Treaty of Versailles.
Na ja, auf wiederhören!
Comment by Jerry - November 23, 2006 @ 11:53 pm
Until the First World War, there were large areas in America where German was still spoken by a large part of the population, especially in Pennsylvania and Texas. But they dropped their language and cultural identity out of a sense of patriotism.
But now that Americans no longer feel compelled to play down their ethnic origins, active interest in Germany and the German language has stared to make a comeback.
I don’t share Jerry’s sense of Germany’s history as part of a “plan”, but even as a kid, I was fascinated by the German language, history and culture.
And even though we certainly knew that the Germans were the bad guys, they were such awesomely cool bad guys, with the neatest taks and most stylish uniforms. And when we played soldiers, I always let the Germans beat the British before the American soldiers arrived to save the day.
Still, I find it paradoxical that the one period in Germany history that the Americans are most familiar with is the one that the Germans themselves know the least about.
Comment by ralphieboy - November 24, 2006 @ 4:40 am