I decided Germans are either very sad or very emo.
So here I am in Germany now hoping to dispel this persistent myth of the German classroom back in the US. Which brings me to the conversation I had with one of the teachers last week. We had seen a movie together that initially had a happy ending with reunited lovers, but turned out only to be the creation of one of the characters. In reality both lovers were dead, never to be reunited. My colleague? Loved this ending. When I suggested that it was a bit much and that they could have been reunited, but with the temperance of previous suffering balancing the scales, he was absolutely against this and insisted this ending was far more artistic. Getting into a bit more, he also said that Americans have very different taste in films. Essentially, that we just love our happy-go-lucky saccharine sweet happy endings. It's funny to me, because the reason he doesn't like the classic happy ending is that it's predictable; meanwhile, I asked him does it make a difference that I find the tragic German ending terribly predictable? Apparently it doesn't. On an unrelated note, he also watched Schindler's List 4 times, the first being New Year's Eve. My thoughts? Only in Germany : ) So much for dispelling stereotypes.
So I'm finding that I've never felt more American than I do now that I've left the country. In the U.S. I was a hispanic, a student, a woman, a German major, any number of labels. Here? I'm The American. Whenever I speak English, the first things anyone notices is the American accent. I'm inextricably linked to McDonald's, George Bush, wasteful energy policies, credit card abuse, and Hollywood. I'm somehow a projection of all that America has made itself out to be through different media outlets and I'm constantly called upon to answer for it.
I mentioned in the previous entry that people don't really do small talk; instead, they debate. To me it seems a little aggressive, but I've seen a normal conversation like this between 2 Germans and in the end no one is in the least bit offended and seem to have considered it a good conversation. So, I supposed I shouldn't have been as surprised as I was when, during a Thanksgiving meal with 2 colleagues at a Mexican restaurant, one broke the silence by leaning forward and saying, "So, I hear American kids are going to school armed now." (It's more striking in German). A big issue here is guns; they (and other Europeans) absolutely do not understand why Americans should have a right to carry around guns. And I've never really been in favor of it myself, but I've gotten tired of the attitude I get when discussing this and have since taken to playing devil's advocate. The usually results in a half hour debate.
There are quite a few cultural differences, though mostly things you don't notice right away. Recently I've noticed a big difference in what is considered appropriate subject matter for high schoolers. For one English class that is focusing on the 60's, the teacher played an hour long tape with clips from Woodstock. There was plenty of extended nudity and drug use and no one batted an eye. Now they're reading a book in English that has the f-word on the very first page (followed by profanity throughout) with plenty of descriptions of drug use and sexual encounters as part of the story (the students are around 15). In another class, I was asked to lead a discussion about relationships. The passage he gave me to springboard the discussion was about a guy who accidentally got his girlfriend pregnant and was an in-depth discussion of whether or not abortion would be justified. Again, no one batted an eye. Even more surprising to me was that the students had the vocabulary to debate this question at length. Nothing seems to be off limits when it comes to discussions in school: politics, guns, sex, drugs, abortion, religion, ethics, alcohol. Even though it's clear these things are perfectly normal, I still tread very carefully around them out of habit of expecting an outraged parent to phone in one day and try to shut the school down because little Jimmy saw a naughty word in a book.
And I guess it just makes me think. Here we have kids aged 14 to 17 who are dealt this 'adult' information openly and without equivocation. And they are none the worse for it. If anything, each and every one of these particular students is their own success story (high IQ, multi-skilled, multi-lingual, impressive internships, etc). They can even drink beer at 16 and there are barely any alcohol related incidents. A reoccurring topic with some of the teachers is their amusement at all the censorship that goes on the U.S. Which reminds me of this cartoon I came across a few months ago:
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