Meet the Germans | Rory's Berlin Blog | Goethe-Institut

    Germans produce cars which are the envy of the world.  The country’s artists are celebrated in London, Paris and Hollywood.  Everywhere homemakers set their hearts on owning a Bosch or Miele appliance.  Germans excel at so many creative activities, with one glaring exception.  They don’t make enough babies.  



    The headlines have been melodramatic and sensational.  As ExBerliner Magazine reported, German women, who for the past 30 years have only squeezed out 1.4 kids each, are not producing enough offspring ‘to ensure the survival of the German race, culture and pension schemes’.  Every generation is replacing itself by only two thirds.  According to the latest federal statistics, Germany’s population will drop to 62 million by 2060, down from 82 million today.

    The reports are scary and pessimistic -- but not news.  What is new is the direction in which the finger is pointing.  

     Once German newspapers accused women with university degrees for causing the falling birth rate.  The allegation was that female academic ambition – which in Germany can take a student into their early thirties – put a kibosh on procreation.  Study Böll and forget Bonking.  But according to a recent survey by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, the accusation is a load of – well -- bollocks.  German women who pursue a degree only delay child-bearing until their late thirties.

    Today the fickle finger is directed at German males, laying responsibility for the paucity of children at their ... feet.  Why?  Because German men are unfeeling, ‘hard as rock’ and more interested in engineering than cuddles.

    At least that’s the view of ‘Moorekwesi’, one of the many dotty respondents to the ExBerliner article.  His view is supported by ‘LogicGuy’ who claims that German men aren’t nice to their countrywomen.  ‘This, and the overall disrespect for German women, is surely part of the reason why they don’t have babies.  German women simply don’t want to lie next to a man who does not treat them with kindness.’  Another correspondent named ‘Mixxim’ asks, ‘Beautiful German ladies, lots of Catholics, a German Pope – what’s gone wrong?  Perhaps the men fancy each other?’  A fourth writer suggests that the answer may lie in granting Sandra Bullock dual-citizenship.

 
    Last year I aired a survey which ranked the Germans as the worst lovers in the world (because they only think about their own pleasure in bed).  Evidently a disappointing – and disappointed -- 20 percent of German women and 41 percent of German men have never given their partner an orgasm.  (No surprise then that three percent of women admit to planning household chores while having sex.)  And when asked what would improve their love life, a depressing 12 percent of Germans said they didn’t have one.  As for the rest of the country, sex lasts here for an average of 17.6 minutes, if you want to set your watch.


   So do German men need to develop their sensitive side?  Should they put aside their engineering manuals and concentrate instead on being better listeners, treating their loved one to body lotion and flowers, preparing romantic meals at home, aiming for intimacy rather than dissemination, even attending courses on ayurvedic massage?

    Well, sure.  It can’t hurt.  But – as every foreign visitor knows – there is a much more obvious means of stimulating the birthrate (and it’s kinder to battered male egos).
    ‘In a recent visit to Berlin, a two-week apartment swap, we were amazed at the single beds pushed together with twin duvets,’ wrote the wise and insightful correspondent Fritzwiz in ExBerliner.  ‘There was an abyss in between which made snuggling your bedmate difficult. Our comment at the time was, “How does the German birth rate survive this?”  Two singles pushed together is not a double bed. A double bed with a single double duvet or top sheet and blanket promotes cuddling which is the first step for those inclined to have children.  Ach, Du liebe!’



    German men: seize the initative!  Toss out those narrow mattresses!  Burn every single duvet!  Buy a huge, real double bed!  Then warm up the ylang ylang massage oil.  The future of the nation is in your hands!

    Do aubergines have webbed feet?  Can a potato sprout antlers?  Over the last ten days vegetable fantasies such as these seemed possible, as ravenous Berliners pulled on their Wellington boots, grabbed a shopping bag and trekked off to the Grüne Woche.



    Since 1926 this remarkable international exhibition has brought the world’s food, agricultural and horticultural industries to the city.  This year over 50 countries created pavilions or stands to promote their produce: Norway marketed its salmon, sensational strawberry jam and ‘gomme’ boiled goat’s milk, France opened oyster and champagne bars, Serbia splashed out glasses of fiery Loza grape brandy, Belgium gave away complimentary chocolates, Australia flogged emu steaks and Britain’s village fair stall displayed Tetley tea bags (I do not jest).  Hungary, this year’s ‘partner country’, occupied a whole hall where enthusiastic young Magyars plied passers-by with glasses of Tokaj, sweet ‘palacsinta’ pancakes filled with nuts and chocolate sauce, Kuglóf coffee cake and sausages... sausages... more sausages.



    Alongside the foreigners, eight of Germany’s federal states – Brandenburg, Lower Saxony, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Schleswig-Holstein, Saxony-Anhalt, Bavaria, Saxony and Thuringia – also offered their tastiest and more intoxicating produce to voracious visitors, myself included.  Over the course of a single day I sampled more varieties of German pig (acorn-fed, Bio-organic, Holstein and Thuringian, without casing, with added veal, ginger and nutmeg) and tasted more varieties of beer than I had in the previous year.  According to the Messe Berlin marketing department, as many as 100,000 different culinary titbits are given away over the duration of the fair.

    Beyond the Fair Trade and Bio Markt sections were the agriculture and forestry halls where children climbed trees (safety harness provided), prize-winning cattle chewed the cud and rabbits slept off their nocturnal exertions.  Audiences watched indoor horse shows and the Berlin-Brandenburg Carriage Racing Championship.  Salesmen marketed rape-seed-powered cars, domestic solar panels, combine harvesters, livestock inseminators, worm compost and good hygiene.  Over 30,000 flowers bloomed in the flower hall, as did a similar number of hobby gardeners.

    Over the years the fair has welcomed 30,000,000 visitors and – on the last Sunday – most of them seemed to turned up once again.  At the end of Green Week, in its final hour, most exhibitors sell off their produce at bargain prices.  The Australian Food Council does not want to fly its remaining half-ton of kangaroo sausages back to Oz, so they’re flogged for a song.  Kilo wedges of Appenzellerat are all but given away by the Swiss delegation.  Austrian butchers stand in the aisles offering bulging €10 bags of pork.  Bargain-hunting Berliners arrive at the fair with shopping carts and rucksacks, scavenging the 26 exhibition halls for tasty deals.  Like many residents, my refrigerator is now full of the most peculiar products: Canadian bison steaks, jars of Japanese wasabi, fermented Korean cabbage and a stinking box of overripe French cheese.



    The Grüne Woche is one of Berlin’s busiest, tastiest, most enduring and exhausting events: book your flights now for the 2011 fair – especially if you like sausages.

    What to do with a dead dog?  When Mrs. Cat, Maus and I moved to Berlin, we bought with us from the UK our much-loved, aging Golden Retriever.  Tess was – and is -- a Dorset girl, used to long walks across muddy fields, fond of chasing tractors, happiest spending her winter evenings in front of an open fire at the village pub.  Of all the family she was the least pleased to abandon the countryside.  Urban ambles lacked the delight of running rabbits to ground.  Unlike the rest of us she began to lose her enthusiasm for life in Berlin.  Until she discovered our neighbourhood sausage stand.  Like all retrievers she’s a scavenging omnivore and now she gallops down there to snaffle cast-off bratwurst and spicy currywurst.  Dorset badger poo had never tasted this good.



    January’s blizzards which blanketed Berlin – and most of northern Europe – had same invigorating effect.  Tess may be more than twelve years old, suffer from rheumatism and hip problems, but as the snow covered the streets she reverted to puppydom.  These last weeks she’s bounced around the block and rooted in the snow banks like a boisterous three-year-old.

    But she is getting on, spending more and more of her days asleep beside my desk, and yesterday I realised that I don’t know what to do when she dies.  In the UK we'd simply bury her body in a neighbour’s woodland, a place which she loved.  But I doubt the Berlin authorities would approve of me digging her grave in the Tiergarten.

    Luckily I have a dog-loving friend, the bearded, cherry-checked owner of our local Tierfütter – animal feed – shop next to Sausage Central.  Herr Kunst is a gentle soul, and I was certain he’d help me in my dilemma.  This morning I popped down to see him and started to explain the situation.  Unfortunately matters quickly got out of hand.
    ‘Tess is sick?’ asked Herr Kunst, with tears in his eyes.
    ‘Not yet,’ I replied in my less-than-perfect German.  ‘But she will be one day.’
    ‘She will be?’ he said, suspicious now, his tears drying up.  ‘Why?  Are you mistreating the her?’
    ‘No, no,’ I insisted.  ‘She’s healthy.  She loves your food and next door’s sausages.  But one day she – like us all – will die.  And I don’t know what to do when she does.’
    ‘The correct response is to bury her,’ he stated, reaching for a brochure on pet cemeteries.  ‘It’s expensive but then you can visit her, sit with her, as often as you wish,’ he went on, the tears welling again.  ‘My God, it breaks my heart when a beloved companion dies.’
    I had not intended to tap Herr Kunst’s inner most emotions.  Now the poor man was so moved that I didn’t have the heart to tell him that Mrs. Cat and I had agreed on a simple cremation for Tess.  Then as he steadied himself on the counter, the shop door opened and in stepped our local postman.  Herr Kunst immediately said to him, ‘Tess is dying.’
    ‘That’s sad,’ said the postie, putting his hand on my shoulder.
    ‘Not...quickly,’ I added, stumbling to find the right words.
    ‘And that’s the worst,’ the postman went on.  ‘It was a blessing that my Lucky went fast -- booof! -- under the wheels of a bus.’
    ‘No!’ said Herr Kunst.
    ‘On Monday while I was doing my round,’ he revealed.  ‘Today is the first chance I’ve had to tell you…’
    Now Herr Kunst came out from behind the counter and took the other man’s hand.  They stood together in silence for a long moment.
    ‘What did you do with the body?’ I asked, unwilling to disturb their reverie but anxious for an answer my question.
    ‘Cremation,’ the postie said, not meeting my eyes.  ‘I took her to the vet and he arranged everything.  All I had to do was go to the town hall and pay the €15 fee.’
    ‘The town hall?’ I said.  ‘What’s it got to do with them?’
    ‘You have to pay them to cancel her license.’
    I took a deep breath.  Tess doesn’t have a license.  She’s insured and vaccinated.  She has her Kennel Club papers.  But she doesn’t have a German license.  
    ‘Why on earth does she need a license?  She doesn’t drive a car,’ I said to lighten the moment.
    Neither man laughed.
    ‘You have to have a license,’ Herr Kunst informed me in an icy tone.  ‘Or your dog cannot die.’

    Later I took Tess for her evening walk.  Nietzsche once wrote, ‘Foreigners stand astonished and attracted by the riddles revealed in the contradictions of the German soul.’  I never realised that the old philosopher had been a dog lover.  
    As Tess scoffed down another sausage at the corner stand, I whispered to her, ‘Hang in there, old girl…at least until we get your papers in order.’

    Last week German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle was in Turkey urging Ankara to press ahead with reforms to bring the country closer to the European Union. ‘Some people have asked me if the new German government wants to close the door to membership for Turkey,’ he said.  ‘I will tell you quite clearly: what the EU and Turkey have agreed stands.  And that applies to this German government too.  I am committed to that.’



    Turkish accession is a thorny issue in Europe.  The country may have been a member of the Council of Europe since 1949, it may have been an associate member of the European Union and its predecessors since 1963, it may contributed the second-largest army to NATO, it may play a key role in trouble spots like Iraq, Lebanon and Afghanistan, but more than 50% of Europeans question its commitment to Europe.

    As far back as 2002 the former French president Valery Giscard d'Estaing told Le Monde that if EU enlargement included Turkey ‘it would be the end of Europe’.  Five years later his successor Nicolas Sarkozy echoed those sentiments.  ‘I do not believe that Turkey belongs to Europe, and for a simple reason: because it is in Asia Minor.  What I wish to offer Turkey is a true partnership with Europe, but not integration into Europe’.

    For domestic political reasons, many politicians also play the Christian card.  They ask how can a majority Muslim country be admitted into Europe.  But the EU is not a community built on religion.  The Union was founded on common European values such as the respect for human dignity, the rule of law, tolerance and non-discrimination.  As a community of shared values, one of its strengths is to be united in diversity.   Europe has suffered through too many religious wars to allow religious faith to be a criterion for accession.

    Apart from the French, the Greeks and the Austrians (who still can’t forgive the Ottomans for laying siege to Vienna in 1529 and 1683), most European governments support Turkey’s bid to join the Union.  Queen Elizabeth underlined the British position by stating, ‘For us, Turkey is as important now as it has ever been…Turkey, with its strategic location straddling Europe and Asia, would be an asset for the European Union’.  She added, ‘Turkey is uniquely positioned as a bridge between East and West at a crucial time for the European Union and the world in general.’  Carl Bildt, the Swedish foreign minister, echoed her words, saying, ‘the accession of Turkey would give the EU a decisive role for stability in the eastern part of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, which is clearly in the strategic interest of Europe.’

    Germany is caught in the middle.  Like Sarkozy, Chancellor Merkel’s conservative Christian Union would prefer to see Turkey granted a ‘privileged partnership’.  But her coalition partner -- Foreign Minister Westerwelle’s pro-business Free Democrats – appears to be more supportive of Ankara's ambitions for full membership.  Both parties are well aware that there are about three million Turks and Turkish descendants living in Germany.

    There are of course outstanding problems with accession: Turkish treatment of its Kurdish minority, the rights of non-Muslim religious communities and the division of Cyprus, which Nicosia’s politicians continue to exploit.  But Turkey is addressing and solving most of these matters.

    The real problem is one of vested power.  If  Turkey joined the EU, its 71 million inhabitants would grant it more MEPs than France.  By 2020, if demographic projections are correct, Turkey would grow to have the largest number of seats in the European Parliament.  Cozy ‘old’ European alliances, party cliques and Common Agricultural Policy would be shaken to the core.

    And a good thing too, I say.  A younger, more diverse and ambitious European Parliament would enliven the continent’s politics, enabling it to stand taller on a world stage, extending its liberal and democratic principles far beyond its geographical borders.  It would also promote tolerance, acknowledging the understanding that no people can lay claim to superiority.



    Europe needs a stable, democratic and more prosperous Turkey which adopts its values, rule of law, and common policies. The accession process has already driven forward bold and significant reforms.  When the rule of law and human rights are guaranteed throughout the country, Turkey can join the EU and thus become an even stronger bridge between civilizations as it is already today.

    Will German schooling leave our seven-year-old son Maus with a warped spine?  I’m not worried because he’s constantly bent over his desk, toiling away at his multiplication tables.  Nor because his enthusiastic Aikido instructor is teaching him how to fall (trip-twist-thump!).  And not because the playground climbing frame is at least two stories high.  But rather because of the monstrous dimensions of his school backpack.



    In Germany school backpacks are big, both in size and price.  Every morning, up and down the land, little tikes set off to school lugging kaleidoscopic filing cabinets on their backs.  And their poor parents – cue the sound of paternal weeping – have to pay for the colossal things.  Last week in our local department store I couldn’t find any school bag for under €120!  Oh woe.

    As far as I can recall, I went to primary school with a neat leather satchel slung over my shoulder and clutching a small brown lunch bag in my hand.  Even in the depths of the Canadian winter, there was no need for any child to lug around a rucksack as heavy and as expensive as an antique oak bedside table.  Yet today the hallways of German primary school resemble multi-coloured furniture showrooms, with unnumbered, unwieldy Scout bags blocking the classroom doors.

    This cultural peculiarity intrigues me so, curiosity whetted, I set off to investigate.  Why do German children – who are at present much less brand-sensitive than their British and American counterparts – need these flashy and whopping travel trunks?  Do German educators secretly require children to carry half their body weight for at least two kilometres every day?   Or has German industry unleashed a dastardly behaviour-altering programme, bent on turning millions of innocent toddlers into muscle-bound consumers?

    In the course of my investigation I learnt first that mega-backpacks are not a recent phenomena.  As far back as the 1980s, Scout – the country’s leading supplier -- offered an exhaustive and seductive range.  Boys didn’t make the grade unless they owned a black Panther or red Dolphin.  Girls’ Scout bags were available in brash pink.  Amigo Kids was seen as a wannabe brand, at once showy and inferior.  Scout owners regularly kicked Amigo bags down the school steps (they would never subject a fellow Scout pack to such an insult).  Other brands were simply beneath contempt.

    Next I discovered that – with the introduction of printed designs -- thematic bags became more popular here than franchised television spin-offs.  Rather than say Batman or High School Musical backpacks, German kids chose generic dinosaur, racing car, unicorn or fairytale princess themes.  To this day branding remains surprisingly uncommon, with only Lego and Sponge Bob Squarepants bags bucking the trend.

    Finally I learnt that these shockingly overpriced and colourful backpacks are de rigeur only in primary schools.  Once a child turns 11 years old, and moves into secondary school, kiddie bags are dropped like overweight Cabbage Patch dolls (‘dude, they are SO yesterday’).  At the Gymnasium and Hauptschule, teenagers go for understated Eastpack or JanSport bags in black, granite or grunge…anything that isn’t bright or pretty.

    I can reveal that the reasons for this phenomena are quite prosaic.  German youngsters need big backpacks because most schools don’t have lockers, hence kids have no where to dump their text books, and because the school day tends to end at lunchtime.  Children are expected to spend the afternoon doing homework, so they need to carry all their books between classrooms, school and home.



    How then to protect my son’s back, and my pocketbook?  Well, padded and sturdy, no-name, double shoulder rucksacks are available (for a third of the price of similar Scout models) through ebay and from Woolworths (yes, dear Brits, Woolies does still exist here).  

    My decision not to surrender to the Scout-trend may deny Maus automatic entry to the classroom elite, but hopefully it will teach him the value of independence.  That’s my view anyway.  At least I don’t go as far as one foreign resident of Munich who, when confronting this very problem, suggested that parents should ‘…get a rectangular cardboard box that is approximately 57% the size of your child, attach a couple of straps, and spray paint random ***** all over it, using the most garish colour schemes you can possibly think of … that hopefully make your eyes almost bleed when you look at it.’  He then added, ‘I’m pretty sure that is what most parents do here.’