On Thursday I was sitting in the staff lounge at the international school. I was working on the final paper for my online class, when the annoying IT guy entered the room and just started talking, to everyone and to no one in particular. After he got through his reflection on the week's German victories over Spanish soccer teams, he said "there aren't any Americans in here, are there?". My general annoyance won me over and I said, snippy and sarcastic, "No, not a one. Why would you want to hang out around them anyway?" Apparently me being in the room did not stop him from going on a ten minute rant about how Americans don't want to learn any foreign languages and he can't believe that they just expect to speak English everywhere they go. Once he'd finished his declaration, which I tried to ignore, he came up to me to reiterate his point, since maybe I hadn't head the first time. I explained to him that I speak fluent Spanish and increasingly conversational German even though I've been here less than two years, and that I see his point but does he understand how far you have to travel in the U.S. to get to a non-English speaking country??
Then Friday night, we met up with our Australian friend Andrew and his German-Dutch girlfriend Katja, who is a doctor. They were out with her doctor colleagues who all seemed to leave the bar right after we arrived, except for an older guy who we will call Klaus (I don't remember his name, but that seems good enough for the story). When Klaus found out that three of us in the group were American, he told us that he thinks the U.S. is a barbaric, materialistic, capitalistic place that he never wants to visit, and that Americans are too arrogant to learn anyone else's language. (Shortly afterward I had a conversation with Katja in German).
As Americans we are brought up to think that the U.S. is the best country in the world, and that everyone wants to come live there, and that they all want to have what we have. That's not true. It's also not true that we are all shallow, violent, and stupid. I don't consider myself patriotic and I think there are a lot of things that the U.S. does wrong. But it's hard not to get defensive when other people point out negative stereotypes about your country, which includes most of the people you love and all of the places that (until very recently) you've called home.
I can see why some Germans might not like us. We did lead the charge to blowing up most of their country in WWII and then occupying it for a few decades after that. The images they have of Americans come from TV and movies, where people get shot and do drugs and drive huge cars and run around in bikinis and get shot. But they are still watching those movies, eating at Subway, and spending way too much money on Chuck Taylor high tops.
Think of the images that Americans have of Germany - thick, bossy middle-aged women named Helga, mean, heavily-accented WWII soldiers, black turtleneck-wearing, techno-dancing effeminate men that we once saw on the Sprockets skit from Saturday Night Live, Heidi Klum and Arnold Schwarzenegger (he's Austrian but it's practically the same thing, right?). We are all allowed to make generalizations about other people. Brian and I do it about Germans all the time. We just need to know that they are not always true.
It's not like Brian and are constantly under fire for our nationality (see, I'm an American and I make a reference to gunfire). Most people are nice to us, and a lot of Germans have visited the U.S. and liked it. I will generalize, though, that few Europeans I've talked to understand why passing gun control laws is even an issue, why we don't have universal health coverage, and what we were thinking by electing George W. Bush.
If you want to read a German journalist's thoughts on this topic, check out this article from Der Spiegel .
And I happen to agree with our annoying IT guy, though I would never tell him that. There are not enough Americans speaking enough foreign languages. Though if they did they'd probably learn Spanish.
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