Filed under: amerika, das vaterland, empathy and responsibility | Tags: bike, i need to stop reading the NYT, urban planning
. . . and kind of great. I think articles about (sub)urban planning and/or Germany is my new black.
Who knew that most zoning laws in the United States still require two parking spaces per residential unit?
Filed under: amerika, das vaterland, empathy and responsibility | Tags: the Dutch, NYT Mag, Trina, Captain America, collectives, cowboys
Picture me, if you will, as I settle at my desk to begin a Golden Girls episode, and feel free to use the introductory paragraph from this New York Times Magazine article as your template. I mean, I have.
Shorto’s (henceforth known as Shawty) article on the Dutch welfare state jived with the conclusions I’ve drawn while leeching off a Northern European society for eight months. Just add an extra e and s to Dutch and, ta-da, you’ve got a fine piece on Germany society and collectivist culture. Pros: history, bikes, community, bakeries, social safety net. Cons: lack of go-get-’em-ness, “individuality” (I know it’s nit-picky but the scare quotes stay), 24-hour businesses, sun.
But ultimately Shawty prefers the Dutch social system to America’s, concluding that true freedom is security: knowing that becoming a redundancy won’t inspire cardiac arrest which would send you off in an ambulance and, guess what, you don’t have health insurance and now what’s going to happen to your family and the many mouths to feed? Basically, Shawty say the nation that she was with ain’t shit.
Which is a conclusion to which, after a whole winter of thought, I can’t cotton. It’s possible here that Dutch isn’t synonymous with Deutsch, and collectivist Netherlands truly is the promised land. But Germany isn’t. It seems to me that, since the German government in many ways babies you — it sets up your play dates (here, we’ve decided where to place your playground and, here, your community), hands you your allowance, and provides a cheap yet unshameful low-income crib — you can grow up lacking a certain initiative that need or a sense of individual responsibility inspires. A Dutch dude in Shawty’s article agrees: charity, for example, is handled by the governement; individual citizens don’t and wouldn’t give to the poor, because the government already taxes their income to give to the poor. Choice and action is out-sourced to the state.
More discouraging is the pressure to conform in German society (huh, who knew!). Even Shawty comments on the Dutch’s “tendency to become slaves to conformity” and the dwindling ranks of risk-takers. Trust me: this is true. Now this isn’t a cool thing to say, but I do admire (aspects of!) America, and here’s sort of why: those inspiring nut jobs, going out on a limb because that’s where they need to go. Germany’s got no dude in the desert building Salvation Mountain, no man rushing the stage at the Britney concert, no Leona Helmsly and her trust fund dog. The singular nexus of creativity seems to be Berlin, which is like half American at this point. Dull, right? Keep America weird!
Seriously, I think that’s why Europeans are so hung up on Obama: he’s emblematic of a certain type of sea change — a breathtaking turn in national identity — that is obsolete in modern-day Europe. Every element of German society is so durchdacht: well thought out, but maybe to a fault. Like Tyra says, hyper-analysis limits the possibility of movement and creativity. Time will tell if this U.S. fickleness, this malleability, is good or bad — seems to go both ways.
Still, I can’t 100% discredit the European collectivist culture: when you visit LA for a week and see how utterly alone you can be, how utterly alone everyone is in their bars, in their cars, arriving home to a drippy faucet, you return to a collectivist country viewing it as a end-of-the-rainbow sort of land. Do we want a collectivist community or a country of lonely inventors, these solipsistic cowboys of the American West?
Filed under: amerika, das vaterland, empathy and responsibility | Tags: amerika, das vaterland, empathy and responsibility
I just read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road from front to back in one harrowing train ride through the Rhein region. I mean, the ride itself wasn’t harrowing; it was timely and businesslike and whatever. But the book’s ashen skies and scent of human remains! The dubious, hesitant hope in a world without horizons! You finish the book and look out at the stubble on German fields, and it hits you again: Germany is a very real haunted house. Its past bleeds up and spooks me from time to time, like when reading about this Aribert “Dr. Death” Heim at the Mauthausen concentration camp, injecting gasoline into his victims’ hearts.
Which isn’t to say that American history (present day?) doesn’t have its atrocities and injustices. This is actually my point: that although Germany has this stomach-churning, unimaginable past, it has a national history of directly addressing the events, of public and professed responsibility. You don’t see the blind, ironic waving of country flags here as in the U.S. They know to where that kind of desperate national pride leads.
Which is why this New York Times article about Germany’s lingering relationship with events of seventy years ago alarmed me. Basically, everyone here is sick of its past. A German teacher this weekend explained that many people — especially the youth — basically feel that enough is enough. As Nicholas Kulish explains, Germany used to be “a country so ready not only to embrace its guilt for long-ago crimes, but to discuss it, research it and commemorate it with unusual diligence.” Lately, however, he has “noticed a shift. When the Nazi era comes up in interviews, people plead to me with their eyes to let it drop. There are fewer discussions and more awkward silences.” These latter situations are the ones I’ve experienced in the few instances when conversation veers toward World War II.
The World Cup two years ago was one of the first events in recent memory when Germans rallied under a national flag, felt a semblace of pride that could perhaps stand unquestioned. And why shouldn’t they feel national pride? The French are allowed to, the Brits and the Americans. Hey, I’m proud of Germany — for openly bearing responsibility for its actions, historical and environmental. It’s like the horrific, unforgivable catastrophe launched an accountable and wiser nation (though perhaps still one short on empathy…). It’s an admirable shift that America should graciously learn from — and an aspect of Germany I’d hate to see it lose.
Germans might move on, but they should under no circumstances forget. And if they must wave their flag in pride, it should be for a recent tradition of humility and responsibility. I’ll be curious to see where the country is in twenty years, when the last of the Holocaust reparations are doled out. A sigh of relief and a hasty washing of hands, or a contination of clear-eyed understanding?
Filed under: amerika, das vaterland, empathy and responsibility | Tags: amerika, das vaterland, empathy and responsibility
What with being feverish and shivery around the echte New Year’s Day, I’ve spent the last three weeks thrashing around, trying to rationalize a revisit to those resolutions squandered in the first ten minutes of the new year. And hey, look! A new president! Time for a fresh start, and a fresh round of resolutions! This presidency’s rsltns will include grudging blog maintainance: loving care and graceful pruning. As long as the roots are not severed, all is well. And all will be well in the garden. (In other words, I just saw wonderful Peter Sellers in wonderful Being There, and you should go see it now.)
First thing’s first: a word 17-year-old Germans consistently stumble over…inauguration. A NYT piece nicely condensed the Germans’ take on Aretha Franklin’s hat:
“Matthias Weyland, 29, who works for an environmental organization, said he felt a bit overwhelmed…. ‘We Germans are not used to things being quite so emotional,’ Mr. Weyland said.”
I looooovvvee stereotypical national responses! Almost as much as i looovvvee how CNN turned the “middle-aged African-American woman with tear-stained cheeks” into the go-to camera shot during Obama’s speech. Those woman need to sit the Matthaises of Deutschland down with some Kleenex and work on rehabilitating the feeling function in our civilization.
I know that the inauguration is old news, so just one more thought about the day — in time for this summer’s new Star Trek movie! Captian Picard’s response to Rick Warren’s invocation:
In the meantime, I’ll be vacillating between cautious optimism and measured pessimism — actually, between the bullet-pointed and energy-efficient Teutonic stability and the thoughtless, starry-eyed and apocalyptic American planned obsolescence. By the end of this grant period — and by the end of 2012 — which will have won out?
