The Anti-German Crowd

For a week, there's been an effort by the German news media (mostly public TV) and the intellectual crowd to talk about the Interior Minister's (de Maiziere) little essay piece, of what I'd call the ten points on German cultural awareness.

This was given out not as a government official, but as one private citizen writing a simplified essay on why German culture matters, and that Germans are an open society with particular history, charm, and personal drive installed in their behavior.

This chit chat or forum chatter from the intellectuals?  Well....to be honest, they'd like to say that de Maiziere is wrong, and that they are anything but the type that Le Maiziere describe.  In essence....the Germans are the anti-Germans or the anything-but-German crowd.

Yes, one can be amused by this intellectual discussion and suggestion of the anti-German existence.  It's kinda like arguing that John Wayne was not the typical western cowboy pretender, or that Mark Twain was a great enthusiast of racism, or that Hillary Clinton held many tendencies of conservatives in her character.

The problem I see is that after you've invited twenty-odd people onto these forum chat shows and allowed them to pepper the conversation with the anything-but-German talk, the audience sitting at home is mostly amused and wondering if the moderators for ARD or ZDF are smoking any 'weed', or that it's a sign of summer having arrived with no real topics left to discuss except the stupid stuff.

The curious thing you notice after just one of these shows....the moderators don't invite some farmer from Bitburg, or a bakery manager from Kirtorf, or a retired plumber from Ringgau.  You get some prospective strictly from either politicians or intellectuals.  My humble guess is that if you surveyed most Germans, they flipped the channel to some soccer game, or Tatort murder mystery rerun.  This is the crowd who really don't need some dimwit telling what is, and what is not German.

 The sad thing is that a lot of these intellectuals are the ones who support the opera and musical business, ask for money for artistic statues that thrill you for no real reason, and press political parties to dedicate millions of Euro to something that only 10,000 people in some region can appreciate.  Their argument against Le Maiziere's ten points is fairly weak, but they just can't stand the fact that it's out in the public now that Germany has a culture existing.

One can hope that soccer fever or the election hype soon takes over because this is probably one of the most marginal topics of discussion that one might engage upon.