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Sturgeon's House

So, Germany is a weird place


Vanagandr

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I had been meaning to start posting here for a while, but I never got around to it. I recently got back from Germany, and some trivial and not so trivial cultural differences that I found fascinating from my position as an American, so I figured I would share them, roughly in order of when I observed them. Some of these things are probably representative of Europe more generally, but I unfortunately did not get a chance to visit outside of Germany. So here are some interesting things I observed in Germany, from the perspective of an American.

 

Germany has different light switches. Whereas the US has toggle switches, Germany has seesaw switches. The thought had never occurred to me that light switches might not be a universal constant throughout the world.

 

People are much more liberal with their use of car horns. This might be a thing in the US too, but I live in a smaller town where horns are reserved for near-accidents and assholes. 

 

I was told that you could ask for tap water in most places, and they would serve it to you, at a price, and with distaste, but there was only one place I found that would actually serve me tap water (which they offered at no charge). The restaurant was flanked on both sides by hostels, so I assume they were catering to tourists who were used to free water. It's not easier to find free water outside of restaurants either. I found only one public fountain in my whole stay, and it was installed by the work of an individual philanthropist rather than the state. I've heard the historical reason for Germans' distaste for tap water is because the original water lines in Germany were not safe to drink from and cultural momentum keeps people from drinking tap water. I ended up buying a couple of half liter bottles of water, which I refilled from bathroom taps, which I was assured are perfectly safe now, throughout the trip. This was probably the most jarring thing for me.

 

I don't drink soda, but I noticed that if people would order soda at a restaurant, the waiters would pop open a bottle of soda and pour that into a glass. Soda fountains are apparently not a thing in the rest of Europe either. 

 

This didn't come as a surprise to me, since I was already acquainted with German culture, but none of the war-related museums I went to glorified the Wehrmacht or the SS at all, and would go on to say that Germans in general were complicit with the crimes of Nazi Germany. Germany, as a whole, is very apologetic about WWII, and they do not make excuses for the actions of the Nazis. Wehraboos are so terrible at wanting to be German that they completely ignore Germany's actual stance on WWII. 

 

Graffiti is almost everywhere. As best as I can tell, people have an apathetic acceptance of it, and don't bother to clean it up. There was a lot of anti-fa graffiti on street lights and things, which I thought was pretty neat. The one slogan in particular that I liked was "the 8th of May; whoever doesn't celebrate it, lost."

 

Older buildings are not treated with as much reverence as in America. There were cafes in almost every historical building, which I couldn't see happening in America. I assume that because there are a lot of older buildings relative to America, their attitude towards older buildings is different.

 

German museums are also much less secured than American museums, apparently trusting to the people themselves to not ruin antiquities, or possibly having replicas on display. They had a lot of things behind glass still, but they had some historical artifacts sitting out, and the American in me was mentally screaming. If we wonder why people think Americans are paranoid, this might be a small reason why. German museums also tended to be more interactive than American museum, in my experience, especially where technology was concerned. In the German Museum in Munich (not really much to do with Germany specifically), which was a technology oriented museum, you could hop into the cockpit of a bunch of aircraft, turn the turbine of an ME-262 engine, mess with the collective of helicopter blades, watch steam engines work, among other things.

 

I spoke with a lot of non-Americans, and talking about gun control always amused me. People are accustomed to the knowledge that Americans own guns, and they voice distaste for it, but for some reason the concept of going to a range and shooting for fun is incomprehensible. They'll get this expression of horror, and ask pointed questions as if they assume you're planning something. I'll tell them an anecdote about how one of my friends went into a gun store and came out the same day with a "civilian-model" AK-47 (for lack of better terminology that I know), and they just get this comical horrified look, as if they have no idea how Americans haven't already shot each other to death. I could never argue though that they didn't have a point when they would bring up that mass shootings are much more common in the US though.

 

German cuisine is interesting too. I could not find many traditional German restaurants, but at any given time you were in spitting distance of at least two Italian restaurants. American fast food chains, specifically McDonald's, Burger King, Subway, KFC, and Pizza Hut, are also common in Germany, and generally taste better than their American equivalents (McDonald's is an exception), in my opinion at least. 

 

Any business that does not need to be open at all times (IE hotels, hostels, hospitals, and sometimes museums) is required to be closed on one day of the week. Most shopping centers and other business places are closed on Sundays, most restaurants choose either Monday or Tuesday to be closed. There's not many places that are open 24 hours of the day, and there's not really any places equivalent to American retail stores like Walmart or Target. I understand this isn't so uncommon in the rest of the world, but it was a little weird for me since I took it for granted that you could go a Walmart on any day that isn't Christmas and buy whatever you happen to need.

 

Air conditioning is only a thing in office buildings or department stores generally. Houses and smaller buildings have neat windows that can open either side to side or from the top to let in air, and it doesn't usually become hot enough that it feels uncomfortable without air conditioning. The last few days I was in Germany it got up to 25 Celsius and I thought I was going to die.

 

Bottle deposit in Germany is between 15 to 25 cents. In any metropolitan area you're likely to see people picking through trash cans for yesterday's bottles. Bottlecaps, cigarette butts, and sometimes glass pave the streets of Germany.

 

I'll probably add to this later. Cultural phenomenon thread maybe?

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I've been to some places in the US where they have see-saw switches, but I think toggle switches are still the standard, at least in Iowa. The most jarring moment coming back to the US was when I saw a toggle switch, and for a moment I couldn't remember how to use it.

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All the light switches in my place are see-saw.

And if you grew up in a really old houselike I did, you had push-buttons or twist "snap" switches.

 

As to "mass shootings" I remind people that a lot of the perception they have about gun crime and firearms ownership, comes from the way the U.S. media reports on it.

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This didn't come as a surprise to me, since I was already acquainted with German culture, but none of the war-related museums I went to glorified the Wehrmacht or the SS at all, and would go on to say that Germans in general were complicit with the crimes of Nazi Germany. Germany, as a whole, is very apologetic about WWII, and they do not make excuses for the actions of the Nazis. Wehraboos are so terrible at wanting to be German that they completely ignore Germany's actual stance on WWII. 

 

 

I spoke with a lot of non-Americans, and talking about gun control always amused me. People are accustomed to the knowledge that Americans own guns, and they voice distaste for it, but for some reason the concept of going to a range and shooting for fun is incomprehensible. They'll get this expression of horror, and ask pointed questions as if they assume you're planning something. I'll tell them an anecdote about how one of my friends went into a gun store and came out the same day with a "civilian-model" AK-47 (for lack of better terminology that I know), and they just get this comical horrified look, as if they have no idea how Americans haven't already shot each other to death. I could never argue though that they didn't have a point when they would bring up that mass shootings are much more common in the US though.

 

 

 

 

I worked for a tech company for about 13 years, and for most of them, the Q/A (software testing) department got about two thirds of its staff from Germany as paid interns from various German colleges. The company put them up in apartments close to the office, paid them enough to live on and have some fun, and kept them in house for six months. I was in the support department, and we sat in the cube block right next to the QA section.  The company also had offices in Germany and France, and we often hosted our support counterparts from Germany and France. I worked with one French and one Germany guy for over ten years, seeing them about three times a year, but doing conference calls once a week. So for having never gone to Germany myself, I've met more than my fair share of young German dudes.

 

My cubicle was kind of an office land mark.  When I started the job, I was just ending my boo stage, but had not discovered how truly great the Sherman tank was. I even had a copy of Deathtraps in my cube, along with a bunch of 1/18 scale 21stCentury toys tanks and airplanes in my cube.  I had a Panther, Tiger, Sherman, and M48A3 for tanks, plus, a Corsair and P-38 and a bunch of other toys in there, so they would always come by and look the stuff over.

 

None had any interest in the German tanks or any nationalist feelings for Germany at all. None knew anything about the German Army, or Air force of WWII, and had nothing kind to say at all about Nazi Germany.

 

They all liked FPS Shooters though, and we would all get together once a week for a night of BF Vietnam or BF2.

Most of them were fascinated with guns, and between the Americans in the Q/A department, and a few of us in support we had pretty big range of guns. I had a lot of range time paid for by German interns, and put a lot of rounds through my guns letting them shoot. Some had served in the German military, but none had been really shot guns. A number of them liked it enough to go multiple times. Most went back with a changed view on American gun ownership.

 

Not a single boo in the crowd, it’s why Boos like HansZulu are so special, since he claims to be a genuine real life German, German, from Germany.

Edited by Jeeps_Guns_Tanks
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Pull cords are awful. My ceiling fan has a pull cord and three speed settings, and there is no way to find out which setting it's on, so turning it off is a matter of trial and error.

Sometimes you can hear the windings sing, and the common switch config is  "off/high/med/low/off".  If you're really slick you have a wall mounted chopper and you never touch the fan mounted switch.

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Sometimes you can hear the windings sing, and the common switch config is  "off/high/med/low/off".  If you're really slick you have a wall mounted chopper and you never touch the fan mounted switch.

 

Yeah it's a two-switch system, the wall switch controls the fan and the light and then there are two pull cords for the light and the fan. I usually just leave the fan on because fuck it.

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Germany sounds a lot like South Africa, only with more old buildings and much better museums.

As for gun kultuur, we have all sorts. Spree shootings, however, seem to be a genuinely western/developed world phenomenon - we had one attempted a few years back but that's it.

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Germany sounds a lot like South Africa, only with more old buildings and much better museums.

As for gun kultuur, we have all sorts. Spree shootings, however, seem to be a genuinely western/developed world phenomenon - we had one attempted a few years back but that's it.

They are not common here, either.

 The hype created around them is what makes them seem more common than they are.

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Indeed, but they're still more common in the US than SA. If we had your rates we'd see at least one or two incidents a year. Still not much of a contributing factor to the murder rate, but definitely a phenom of some sort.

How many do you think the U.S. "commonly" sees a year?

 

(ETA a fun link for your edification )~  http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jun/22/barack-obama/barack-obama-correct-mass-killings-dont-happen-oth/

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How many do you think the U.S. "commonly" sees a year?

 

(ETA a fun link for your edification )~  http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jun/22/barack-obama/barack-obama-correct-mass-killings-dont-happen-oth/

 

I feel uncomfortable about discussing good metrics for mass shootings, but the only data in that link lists victims per capita as a representation of the frequency of mass shootings, which is unequivocally wrong. It does not address events per year or per capita, which could be actual metrics for frequency. If you take the mass shootings divided by the population, using numbers pulled from that chart, America comes out with .417 mass shootings per million people, which is much higher than any other country on the list, with Finland coming out to .4 per million people. It still doesn't address the number of events per year, instead saying that the events are all from the same time period (for all we know it's counting shootings from the early 1900s). The data is either terribly organized, or designed to mislead. America definitively does have more mass shootings, more frequently, than other nations. I probably wouldn't make so big of a deal about it, but just 11 days ago my younger brother was at a Target store where a gunman opened fire, so passions flare.

 

In any case, this is a kind of morbid subject, when we could instead be talking about culture shock and anecdotes from abroad.

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I feel uncomfortable about discussing good metrics for mass shootings, but the only data in that link lists victims per capita as a representation of the frequency of mass shootings, which is unequivocally wrong. It does not address events per year or per capita, which could be actual metrics for frequency. If you take the mass shootings divided by the population, using numbers pulled from that chart, America comes out with .417 mass shootings per million people, which is much higher than any other country on the list, with Finland coming out to .4 per million people. It still doesn't address the number of events per year, instead saying that the events are all from the same time period (for all we know it's counting shootings from the early 1900s). The data is either terribly organized, or designed to mislead. America definitively does have more mass shootings, more frequently, than other nations. I probably wouldn't make so big of a deal about it, but just 11 days ago my younger brother was at a Target store where a gunman opened fire, so passions flare.

 

In any case, this is a kind of morbid subject, when we could instead be talking about culture shock and anecdotes from abroad.

That link has more to do with illustrating how politicians and the media will "work" figures, than what you're seeing.

All in all, the data one finds on this subject is always subject to bias, no one source has (nor is willing) to give an honest picture as it'd raise all kinds of political (and funding related) issues.

 

An example of this is the more than fuzzy definition of "mass shooting".. It will change depending on who you talk to.

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You realise that this is like saying that all arguments are wrong, then pointing to the ramblings of the town drunk as your example?

 

You are correct that "mass shooting" is a fuzzy term. So define your own terms and we'll go from there.

 

Personally, the metric I'd use for a "spree killing" is this: a small number of perpetrators (one to three maximum), with no material support from outside organisations, the perpetrators displaying premeditation and preparation before killing (or attempting to kill) a number of people in order to make some sort of point (political, philosophical or whatever). If this definition looks a lot like terrorism, that's because it is. Spree killers and the like are simply the atomised, disconnected expression of terrorism that atomised, disconnected developed countries seem to favour. In any case, the remarkable thing about this form of killing is that, whichever definition you use, the US is still the most prolific producer.

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I was stationed in Germany for 3 years and have traveled back and forth often over the years. Other than the obvious cultural differences (the do and don't kind of things)  and different electrical outlets, it wasn't much different than  living in a large city over here in the US. Most of the Germans I knew/know had something to do with the military, so their attitudes on firearms differed from that of the general public.

 

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I think I only heard one song in German the entire time I was there actually. Most of it was American pop, rap, or rock, but the only exposure I got to what Germans listen to was whatever happened to be playing in bars or hostel lobbies, so that might not be an accurate representation. Anecdote time though, a Brazilian, a Mexican, a Canadian, and myself, whom we collectively dubbed "the four Americans", went on a pub crawl, hooked up with a German dude from our hostel, and found ourselves in a "secret bar", in what I think either used to be an underground parking garage or a bomb shelter or something (no emergency exits that I could see because fun is number one in Germany). It was sort of punk themed in that they had tons of stickers for whatever bands the patrons played in stuck on walls, and plastered on urinals, they played vaguely punk music like RatM and Rise Against, and everyone was dressed punkishly. At some point though, Linkin Park came on, and people started cheering, and this one guy I remember raised his beer with his index finger outstretched and head bowed, as if to say "this is my jam". I feel like German culture is American culture from ten years ago.

 

Also there, is a "Lebowski Bar" in Dresden, in which they have the Big Lebowski playing at all times on multiple different screens.

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