Cultural Markers

This post genuinely took me quite some time to think about and properly get started. Nonetheless, here we go.

Since I have lived in a few places across the world, I do not count myself to one specific culture or culture group. Considering my background, I will stick with the German culture and all its associations. I have never found a culture to be important to me. All that ever really mattered to me was the ability to communicate with the people in my surrounding.

Germany is accompanied by a few “stereotypes”, which both have positive and negative associations. To start off, I shall lift the mood by talking about the positive ones.

According to many rumours around the internet, we are supposed to be extremely punctual. From personal experience, this - sadly - is not always the case. During the time that I have lived in Germany, I have met some very punctual people, however, I have also met a bunch who prefer arriving thirty to sixty minutes late. Along with this, efficiency is a trait the rest of the world uses to describe us. I am not too familiar with this to be honest. To an extent, I know that german firms and our government has always been efficient in getting a job done. That is about where my knowledge ends on this topic. 

Now to the part of this post I am honestly not looking forward to too much. Starting of with a milder assumption: we do not have a sense of humour. True. We are not allowed to laugh. Incredibly funny joke aside, from experience, no day exists without fun. This is probably the least correct of all.

Last on the list, and I almost feel bad for having to include this, is our link to national socialism or nazis. I am not going to lie and say that I have been called a nazi and been told to go to my hitler shrine. This keeps me speechless. I cannot physically express how this makes me feel. It kills me to say this, but links to national socialism do exist in Germany, more than necessary. Especially now with the influx of refugees, the number of “Neonazis” keeps growing. Even though german lessons exist for the refugees, the refusal to communicate with them makes everything a lot more difficult than it needs to be. If all the right-wing citizens open up to communicating with the refugees, we would know more about their background and why they fled in the first place.

Hence I believe in order to communicate in peace, it is important to understand ones cultural background. How do you feel about this? Any suggestions or additions? Leave them in the comments below!