TALKING WITH THE TEUTONS
Here's a conversation I had with a Swiss border guard yesterday:
Guard: "Guten Tag. Longgermanword, bitte schön".
Palinode: "Bitte nochmal?"
Guard: "Longgermanword and Evenlongerone, bitte".
Palinode: "Sprechen Sie Englisch?"
Guard: (without missing a beat)"Sprechen Sie Deutsch?"
(A pause in which you can feel the international tensions build. A long line of cars stretches out behind our rented Saab into the Schwarzwald mist. Ahead, the steel and concrete public works of Switzerland wait patiently for my long-dead bureaucratic German to sit up at its desk and produce the correct terms.)
Palinode: "Paßkarte?"
Guard: "Bitte schön".
(Then my German sits up straight and starts pulling the right files. I explain who we are, where we're going and why, discovering in the process that the phrase 'Direkttransit' transcends languages and produces the desired 'please proceed' gesture, that lazy twirling finger indicating the Autobahn and the whole of Austria. We drive off, having satisfied the Swiss customs people that we can be trusted to drive through their country and into Austria without causing any trouble or poisoning the Bodensee or anything like that. On our way through St. Gallen we stop briefly to poison the Bodensee.)
ON BEING FOREIGN
Since I began travelling for a living I've been to a number of places around the world, but Germany and Austria are the only places in which I've felt like a foreigner. People stare at us with curiosity and sometimes hostility, dogs single us out for barking, shopkeepers refuse to understand my German. At first I thought that my Deutsch was far worse than I'd imagined, but after a few halting and friendly conversations with various folks, I realized that some people here aren't interested in understanding me. It's as simple as that. They hear the foreign tones in my voice (or the Turkish cast of my skin?) and their faces shut down.
Worse than that is the low-grade paranoia that these places engender. In Holland we were treated with courtesy, in France with apathy, but in Germany we were watched. No kidding. One Sunday morning we went out filming in a neighbourhood of Ludwigshafen (right across the Rhein from Mannheim) and a middle-aged man in a leather jacket kept an eye on us, affecting a casual air that failed to convince after ninety minutes. Yes, for an entire Sunday morning this anonymous German citizen had nothing better to do than stand on street corners and pretend that he wasn't following us around. There must be a German word for this. "The pleasure derived from pretending to be a secret policeman around foreign film crews". Stupid self-appointed self-policing freaks. I took pictures of him whenever he glanced at us.
Maybe he was a secret policeman. On sleepy Sunday duty.
4 comments:
people always have stereotypes. i am an asian who can pass as a latino. i have been to parts of japan and the rule of thumb over there is im ignored (at least they pretend not to see me) in the trains for example. then in the states. im regarded like an equal in big cities (where there are many other foreigners like us) and mistrust if it was a small city .. especially in white communities. im also guilty of this because im personally afraid of walking down on black communities where ive heard stories .. c'est la vie .. je devine
In my six hours spent in Frankfurt I noticed that most shop keepers and resteraunteirs would quickly switch to English to prevent having to hear me clumsily massacre their mother tongue with my Canadian-prep-school-German. They weren't terribly polite and they were all damn tall.
In the Czech Republic, though, I had the confusing experience of being assumed to be a German in a restaurant. The guy gave me the specials in German and took my order in German. He talked to my dinner companion in English. To this day, I have no idea why. I must have looked particularly Uberfrau-isch that day...
-Skatch
He probably just wanted to be in your film. Germans can be rather shy about these things. Hey, sorry I missed your call on Sunday. We tried to answer the phone a few times but it had conveniently (for who, I'm not sure) gone dead each time. Did you find our postal code or what? I'll send it in an email if not. I still want a postcard, mit thick slabs of sheiza.
This is a bit late, but better late than never. I find it ironic that rmacapobre writes plainly that, "people always have their stereotypes" and yet fails to acknowledge your stereotype of people within the deutschsprachige Raum (Austria, Switzerland, and Germany). I use that term with full irony because, well, they don't really speak German there, even in Baden-Würtenburg.
I know, you had your experiences. I can't take that away from you, but come up further north next time. Try Koeln or Berlin ... the people are a lot friendlier and, if you come up to Hannover, they actually speak German.
Germans are rather shy, but it is a sort of German 'el macho' to project this shyness as hostilely as possible.
Daniel ... an American living in Trier Germany since 2004.
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