When I arrived in Germany ten years ago, I believed there was such a thing as Germanness, which explained everything remarkable about Germans, from returnable bottles to honest civil servants. Alas, I learned over time that what I thought were core German values either did not exist, or were the result of historical or environmental forces.
Culture is always a symptom, not a cause. Germanness is no exception.
Germans wait at pedestrian crossings
At most pedestrian crossings, Germans patiently wait until the little red man turns green. In many other countries, people would first look right and left to check if any car's coming, then cross, irrespective of the little man's color.
I thought this was a remnant of a Prussian love for law and order. But if this were true, cars would also respect the law and drive at or under the speed limit, which they rarely do. There's more to it than culture, I thought, so I started measuring.
German streets are wide. The Katzbachstraße is an insignificant side street on my block, yet it is 11 meter wide, has three car lanes and two bike lanes at pedestrian crossings, with traffic coming in both directions. This is equivalent to rue Etienne Marcel, a major thoroughfare in the center of Paris, which many Parisians cross only at designated places. Because of the available space and the number of lines, German drivers do not hesitate to speed over 50 kilometers per hour, making jaywalking quite dangerous. Not surprisingly, the recklessness of German drivers makes German cities the most dangerous in Europe for cyclists, and probably for pedestrians, too.
Conversely, Germans have no problem crossing anywhere in smaller, one-way streets where traffic remains under 30 kilometers per hour.
Germans love good work
Many Germans, starting with the federal political elite, are proud to be export champions. Many medium-sized German companies are market leaders in their niches, from Katz, which says it produces 70% of the world's beer coasters (that cardboard thing your put your beer glass on), to Sikora, world leader in measuring and control technology (whatever that is). The lazy, culturalist explanation would be to say that Germans are hard-working, industrious people. But anyone who's lived in Berlin knows how inplausible this is.
The reason Germans can export is that Germany has no black hole, like Paris, London or Madrid, sucking up all the forces of the country, leaving everyone with the choice of moving to the capital city or living a mediocre professional life. Katz is headquartered in Weisenbach, a small town of the Black Forest. Sikora is in Bremen, a mid-sized town in the North of the country. But both are within one hour of a major airport (Hamburg and Stuttgart), which doubtless helped both firms become world leaders. More importantly, no citizen of Weisenbach or Bremen feels second-class because they were born far away from the capital.
Germans don't like good cooking
Stop in a random family restaurant in Calabria, Burgundy or Andalusia and you'll be in for a treat. Stop in a family restaurant in Brandenburg and you'll be in for roasted potatoes, overcooked asparagus (if they're in season) and a bit of tasteless pork. Bad food is a hallmark of Germany, but it has nothing to do with Germanness.
First, it has to do with climate. Much of Germany is too marshy and too cloudy for good produce to grow (if you haven't tried eggplant from Brandenburg, don't).
Most importantly, it has to do with history. In most of Catholic Europe (including southern Germany, which has a much better cuisine than the north), land was divided between all children upon a farmer's death. In northern Germany, only the oldest son inherited. This led to the concentration of estates, where farmers could grow cash crops such as wheat in large fields, and did not grow vegetables or fruits. The industrial revolution of the late 19th century, when up to a third of all Germans migrated to different regions, helped destroy any culinary traditions that survived.
Finally, Germany never had decadent royal courts that could maintain inventive chefs (and force nobility around the country to imitate them). Austria, where the Habsburg dynasty rivaled the Bourbon in culinary prowesses, boasts a much better culinary environment than Germany, even 100 years after that dynasty's downfall.
It takes a lot of different things for great cuisines to appear, but culture is not one of them.
Germans love beer and sausages
Germans drink beer, but not more than the Czechs, the Irish or the Poles. They make and eat sausages, but which European country does not?
The only reason why Germans are associated with beer and sausages is that (see above) they have no other culinary feat to be proud of.
Germans are incorruptible
If you think Germans are incorruptible and want to do business in Germany, you probably won't get very far. Corruption in Germany is pervasive, from the local car inspection center to the city's building department. Berlin has been failing at building an airport since 2006 - one of the reasons for its failure is the rampant corruption among contractors and public officials.
The key difference with neighboring countries lies in the federal structure of the state. Federal business is scrutinized by local officials, making egregious embezzlement at the federal level difficult. There are no such checks at the local levels.
Germans are on time
When invited at a party in a big German city, showing up at the precise time will make you look very provincial, just as it would in Paris or London. Conversely, being 10 minutes late for a business meeting will be frowned upon.
While German time-keeping has evolved in line with global norms, there are signs that they never were any more punctual than other European nations. The concept of academic quarter (akademische Viertelstunde, a tongue-in-cheek way of saying that an even will not start on time) exists at least since the late 19th century.
Germans have a word for everything (it's called das Einwortfüralleshaben)
The German language makes it easy to collate words together to form new ones, to verb or to substantivate (to noun a verb and vice-versa), like in English. However, until the mid-20th century, German from Germany sounded much more normal to English ears. Radio was Radio and a dentist was ein Dentist, not Rundfunk and Zahnarzt like today.
What happened was Entwelschung or "de-welshification" of the German language (Welschland meant France and Italy in Middle-Age German), an understatement that meant "removing Latin words from everyday use". With help from a few nationalist governments, what started like a crusade from a few loonies became official policies and textbooks were dutifully cured of their foreign words. To the point where no one remembers that these strange German composite words are the result of political action, not a linguistic trait.
Germans have no sense of humor
During my first years in Germany, I thought Germans couldn't understand irony and double-entendre. I was wrong. My German was just too poor for me to understand their irony.
I guess I wasn't the only one to speak too little German to understand the richness of their humor. While German philosophy and drama is widely translated, German comedians rarely, if ever, are. Thomas Brussig, for instance, a best-selling satirist, has just one translated book (Heroes like Us). The hilarious movies of Leander Haußmann (Sonnenallee, Herr Lehmann) were never even released internationally. On the other hand, every second-rate French or American comedy is shown in German theaters.
Germans are environment-friendly
In our courtyard, there are 7 trash bins. A green one for green glass, a brown one for brown glass, another brown one for compost, a blue one for paper, a yellow one for small packaging, an orange one for valuable trash (no one knows if there is a difference with the previous one) and a black one for the rest. And we have to bring returnable glass bottles back to the store.
I wish this recycling frenzy would translate in a special care of the environment (it's not rare to hear that Germanness is closely linked to the countries' forests, hence the Germans' appetite for all things environmentally-friendly). Unfortunately, the Germans who hold power love destroying forests much more than they love preserving them. Germany burns more coal than Poland, the Czech Republic and France combined. German per capita CO2 emissions are among the highest in Europe.
Most local authorities have done close to nothing to shift from car-centric to human-centric cities and regional and federal governments still favor the car industry over other interests, including their citizens' health and future.
Germans have a protestant work ethic
Germany has been split evenly between Catholic and Protestants since 1945 (and Catholics outnumber Protestants since the mid-1990s). If you hear anyone linking Protestantism with today's Germany or Germanness, show them this graph.
Germans tell others what to do
You're chilling in a park, ready to start your barbecue on the grass, until a random passer-by gets off his bike, walks straight to your spot and tells you, in a passive-aggressive tone, that your barbecue does not meet the minimum height requirement ; before walking back to his bike and moving on. Not a few Germans seem to love to take from their own time to tell you what should be the proper way to behave (according to them, that is).
While you're unlikely to see this in other European big cities, it's quite common to hear elders voicing their criticism of you or anybody in smaller towns or villages, in any country. This rules out the cultural explanation. Large cities in Germany are different from the rest of Europe in that people trust each other much more than anywhere else (bar Scandinavia). This trust, in turn, probably comes from the better institutional setup of Germany, which can be summarized by the fact that, when you meet a German police officer, she or he is more likely to help you than to tear-gas you.
The German police, like other federal and local institutions, is fast evolving towards less inclusiveness and more violence, undermining trust all around. This, I predict, will make Germans less willing to tell you what you're doing wrong when you're just minding your business in the street. They will, like many other Europeans living in big cities, be too afraid of strangers to do so.
Germans watch Dinner for One on New Year's Eve
Every year since the 1980s, millions of Germans, both East and West, watch a 10-minute sketch, Dinner for One (Youtube link, available to non-German IP addresses only, because GEMA).
I couldn't find an explanation for this. Must be the genes.
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