An American in Germany, Part Zwei

Well, I had a very long to-do list this morning. However, the mere fact of taking a shower proved an exercise in balance, flexibility, and strength as I attempted to keep from applying any pressure whatsoever to my left ankle. Even so, after turning off the water with an accomplished sigh, I pivoted around on my right heel only to come face to face with the ledge separating the shower from the bathroom floor, looming up as aggressive and challenging as Hadrian's wall. How does a person hop on one foot over three inches of obstruction, when the surface being sprung out of is soapily slippery, and the only things to cling to are two flimsy shower doors that would probably come down at the application of the slightest bit of weight? Solution: bend slowly down onto your hands and knees, left foot still held carefully out of the way, and crawl out of said shower. At this rate, doing laundry and dishes, much less grocery shopping, seem quite out of the question! So instead, I think I'll just continue a bit in the blog. :)

So anyway! Now that I've sort of touched on the American's perspective, let's talk a bit about:

How Germans deal with said American.

Looking back, it's interesting to note the various ways people here react to my nationality when they discover it. The typical reaction in the States to foreigners seems to be either, "Cool accent, where are you from? Aren't you just loving our fabulous country?" or "You aren't one of them ter-or-ists, is ya?" (This is assuming the hapless foreigner in question isn't Hispanic. In that case, the usual reaction would probably be, "Hey you, speak American!")

But strangely enough, despite the almost overwhelming friendliness of people here in general, I find myself hesitant to own up to my American citizenship. I'm sure a lot of this has to do with simple shame at our current leadership; unfortunately, that seems to be the only prevailing impression of America abroad, is that we have a xenophobic cowboy at the helm of a nation whose people's general attitude is one of ignorant, nationalistic arrogance. I gotta tell you, it's tough work trying to emphasize to my students the true multifaceted, multicolored, multireligioned, often-conflicted nature of the 300 million people who call themselves Americans, and the impossibility of trying to characterize all of them under a single descriptive umbrella. Here's a brief survey of various reactions I get when people find out where I'm from:

- Girl in the video store: "Oh my god. That's so awesome. I've always wanted to go to America." She giggled at me as if I were a movie star.

- My younger students: "Have you been to New York? Have you been to Hollywood? Do you know any stars?"

- My older students: "Is it true you have to be 21 in order to drink??"

- Guy at restaurant who came over and talked to us because he knew the Hamanns: "You don't look like an American."
Me: "Really? How am I supposed to look?"
Him: "You're not fat, for one thing. And where are your sports shoes?"

- Bert's dad: "We don't meet many Americans around here. It's nice to find out that they're not all raving Bush fans."

- Bert's aunt: "Isn't Thanksgiving a Christmas celebration of some sort?"

And various other little telling encounters, among which are:

- Bert himself, looking at a picture book of the States that Mom gave him for Christmas. He was vastly absorbed in the spreading photographs of canyons, praries, tundra, Rocky Mountains, everglades, and desert. "Huh," he observed. "It really does look like there are a lot of various and interesting things to see. No wonder people travel there -- there's more to the place than just Hollywood and President Bush." Not having realized that that had been his image of my country beforehand, I was enormously gratified to hear this. :)

- Some not-so-positive encounters, like the guy at the repair shop the other day. Shauna and I walked in and the first thing the older man behind the counter did was to use the informal address of "du" (instead of "Sie"). As customers at a shop, this is considered quite rude and patronizing, and tipped us off that we weren't dealing with a gentleman, here. After talking with us for a few minutes, he asked where I was from, and I hesitated a little before saying. He just seemed like the xenophobic type who didn't take well to foreigners, particularly American ones; and sure enough, his response was, "No, you're no American."

I was suprised. "I'm not?"

"No, you're not."

Since he didn't offer any further explanation, I couldn't help pressing a little further. "Um... is that a good or a bad thing?"

He smirked through his enormous waxed moustache. "It's a good thing."

Of course, this was a guy who was going out of his way to insult us, especially by continuing with the remark that "women and technology don't go together." (My sister, a brilliant computer programmer, didn't say a word. We exchanged knowing smiles and chalked the tasteless comment up to the idiosyncrasies of an older generation.) We left the shop without buying any services; but the one thing that stuck in my head was the man's lack of any sort of hesitation to tell me that "not being an American" was a good thing.

- Some of my coworkers don't really seem to know what to make of me. Not all of them, to be sure; many are supremely cool and interesting. However, perhaps some of the others haven't ever traveled to another country -- or at least outside of Europe -- themselves, and consequently don't have much of a concept of exactly how different the two countries are or are not. I speak relatively decent German, and would imagine that that would be a tip-off that I have some experience with the country. However, I have gotten some well-meaning but flabbergasting questions such as, "Have you ever had a baguette before? It's bread from France," or "We should take you out sometime to experience typical German food. Have you tried a Bratwurst yet?" Again, these inquiries are sweet and well-intentioned, and there's no way for them to know otherwise; it would be ungrateful and classless indeed of me to ruffle my feathers about it. After all, if I were talking to a Vietnamese girl fresh off the plane, I'd probably ask if she'd had good old fashioned American barbecue, yet. It's not the innocently ignorant questions that bother me. But maybe this does have something to do with why I find myself less and less inclined to hang out socially with many of the other teachers at the school: kind as they are, whenever these deliberate and careful invitations are extended to do something social, it is under the overt pretext of showing the lost and helpless foreigner around. Even if it is partly impelled by actual personal interest on their part, the whole interaction is still permeated with the view of me as the Outsider -- after all, my status as the Outsider was the whole reason for the invitation to begin with. (And believe me, I'm not falsely imbuing the situation with my own paranoid impressions. It is quite literally a matter of, "Have you been to a Christmas market before? You should taste some Gluehwein. Why don't you come with so-and-so and me this Friday and we'll introduce you to this tradition?") Again, I feel enormously ill-mannered to be complaining about such kindness. I'm sure that, had I fallen off the boat from China and found myself suddenly in a totally alien setting, I would be enormously grateful for such overtures. But as it is, I smile politely and accept, and don't mention that I know a Gluehwein recipe that's probably better than the weak stuff at the local Christmas market.

I should point out that this is not the majority attitude among the teachers. Many of them I like very much, and I don't get the feeling that they only want to hang out with me out of duty to the Token Foreigner. But on the whole, I personally enjoy socializing much more with (whom I've come to call) the Ludwigshafen crowd. There, I'm just another member of the group, and I can blend in and be "me" without sitting through the formal, interview-like setting of, "So, what brings an American to Germany? Have you had cappuccino before? We should go out for one." And even if you want to talk in terms of being truly being The Foreigner -- which of course I still am, technically -- one learns much more as a fly on the wall, and by being acknowledged and taken in as a member of the group, than by being formally presented with traditions and customs like so many attractions on a tour. All the experiences I've had by now with sitting around at a Gasthaus, drinking local beer and pounding a fist on the table to emphasize a point in a political argument, have not come about as a result of being formally shown around by a well-meaning colleague.

- At the doctor's office with Anna was another interesting culture clash. I had gone to a particular "women's doctor" (Frauenarzt -- haha, German is such a wonderfully practical language!) for my annual female brouhaha, and found him kindly, competent, and easy to be around. So when Anna needed to see someone about her mysterious stomach problems, I therefore made an appointment with the doctor's wife, who was a general practitioner in the same office where he had his. She was... intelligent and approachable, but much less easygoing. And definitely had no idea what she sounded like when making the following statements:

Anna started to explain that she'd had some mysterious digestive complaints off and on for the last three months, involving puzzingly conflicting symptoms, and not seeming to respond to experiments like avoiding dairy products or gluten. The doctor seemed to listen to this, but her first suggestion was, "Well, you're American, right? The Americans aren't known to eat a particularly nourishing diet. Perhaps that's the problem." I can't even begin to express the absurdity -- not to mention ignorance and basis in uninformed stereotype -- of this statement. First of all, the trouble began after Anna came to Germany; and even if it hadn't, and if we pretend that her assumption regarding the typical American diet is correct, then why aren't all Americans experiencing this problem? Secondly, how on earth does she even know how we eat at all? She admitted that she'd never been to the States herself. And even if that were the general stereotype, she didn't even ask what Anna herself ate. Many Americans, myself included, are actually verifiable health-food nuts. Even more ridiculous is the fact that German cuisine is not necessarily based on wheatgrass and bran, either. I would hardly call pig stomach stuffed with greasy and questionable pork parts, covered with heavy cream sauce, served with salted cabbage -- all vitamins having been leached out in the pickling process -- and washed down with unfiltered beer a balanced diet. Anna and I just kind of stared at the doctor and said, no, that wasn't it.

Minutes later, the doctor had Anna remove her sweater and lie down on her back so that she could palpitate her stomach. She did so, and the doctor exclaimed in surprise at Anna's slender torso: "Why, you're so trim!" As if she shouldn't be...? But no matter, Anna does indeed have a most impressive six-pack; perhaps the doctor was simply admiring the apparent health of a good human specimen. The likelihood of this, however, seemed to diminish when the doctor later called a colleague to whom she referred us: "I have a young American woman here to whom I'm referring you. But don't worry, she's quite slender and easy to examine."

It didn't stop there. I took the opportunity to also ask the doctor for a refill of the prescription I had obtained every summer from the UA Health Center (I get a natural mottling on the skin of my back when it gets humid, and a simple tablet taken every six months takes care of it quite well). She had a look at my back, also expressing surprise at my apparent lack of obesity, and offered me a lotion. I explained that I'd tried the lotion before; unfortunately, it was only a temporary solution, and the internal medication worked much more effectively. "You Americans!" she snapped irritably, "Popping pills for everything!" ...Huh? What was her problem? Did she think I was trying to tell her how to do her job, and so responded with annoyance? How is one type of pharmaceutical administration different from another, except in degrees of effectiveness? What did she know about the American medical community, anyway? Anna and I should have said something, but we were taken so off guard, and weren't immediately sure that we really could be hearing such ignorance and prejudice from an relatively young, educated professional, that we simply took the reference and our prescriptions and left. It was later that it all sort of sunk in, and I had to laugh at the sheer ridiculousness of the whole interaction.

Happily, there have been many more positive encounters than negative ones. But perhaps it is the latter which stick in your head, as they give more cause for retrospection, while the former are simply enjoyed as lovely bits of hospitality from a people for whom the majority are naturally friendly and curious. I can't tell you how often I've asked a stranger on the street for directions, and have been practically personally walked to said location; how many waiters have brought us extra slices of pie because they hear we're exploring the city as tourists and are interested in the local cuisine; or the lady behind the counter at the winery, who slipped two bottles of sparkling red wine gratis into our bag, because she had overheard me tell Shauna that she should try Dornfelder Sekt in addition to the usual array of sparkling whites.

Okay, well, like the last one, this post is way too long. Maybe my ankle feels up to tackling the dishes again... I'll ask it and see what it says.