Kultur 11 Jack Fuller

Timeline

I’m not sure what sort of cultural analysis I’m supposed to adopt here, but I will say that—as a history major—I find this timeline to be rather misleading.  The events depicted are true, their descriptions are accurate, and many are very important; it seems, however, that little attention was paid to the linkage of thematic concepts and certain events in German history. For instance, why would the “nude sparks scandal” appear after “the birth of the German democratic republic”?

Breaking Down the Wall in the Head.

This article implies that there is a shocking rift between the cultures of East and West Germany. 12-25% of Germans apparently wish to be separated from their neighbors. Should we be surprised by this? I don’t think so. I would be willing to bet that you could find a higher percentage of people in the upper echelons of American society who feel that programs like welfare and social security are just handouts to a whining lower class. Conversely, I’m guessing that you could find a much higher percentage of welfare recipients that feel like they’re being taken advantage of by the more well-to-do Americans. While societal discrepancies may not be as geographically distinguishable in America as they are in Germany, they certainly were after the last war that took place on American soil.

Ostalgie

“The term Ostalgie (along with the phrase Soviet chic) is also occasionally used to refer to nostalgia for life under the socialist system in other former communist countries of Eastern Europe, most notably Poland and the Soviet Union.”

Life must be rough in a capitalist democracy. Don’t let the American press get a hold of this.

Germanys real divide

I can’t help but laugh at this seemingly identical parallel to geographically influenced stereotypes in North America; this cultural divide in Germany should come as no surprise to us. I’m sure that, in Germany, the perception of, “the cool, practical, intellectual, industrialized, liberal north” and the “hick farmers in the south” comes from a relative pattern of diverging economic programs, confounded by environmental factors. I don’t need to look up Germanys climate to assume that the southern portion of the country is much more hospitable to farming and that the north experienced an industrial boom during between the two world wars. Naturally, like in America, the stereotype of the northern factory worker and the southern farmer emerges naturally out of this situation.

            Not only are the respective occupations of the north and south different, but apparently so are the cultural attitudes. The article purports that the southerners think that northerners are lazy, and that northerners think that southerners are racist. Could this be, perhaps, a product of the north being exposed to more ethnically diverse populations and the south rising at dawn to tend to their fields while the north will wake up at 7 to go to work? I’m also willing to bet that the southerners also think that the northerners “talk funny”.

In terms of religious differences and hostilities, this requires little analysis. Have Protestants and Catholics EVER liked each other? Didn’t Protestantism emerge as a rejection of/alternative to Catholicism? The geographical discrepancy should also be of little surprise.