In my first two years in Germany, I was corrected for walking my dogs on
the left side of a sidewalk instead of the right side. A woman scolded me
in a grocery store for dropping a glove and not realizing I had done so
until she LOUDLY pointed it out for the entire store to hear. A neighbor
in a different apartment building said I shouldn't come out the front door
of the apartment building with my dogs. I was corrected both for having my
dogs on a leash (I was told mine was inhumane or that I was being unfair
to have my dogs on a leash) and for not having my dogs on a leash
(even though they were right by my side, not bothering anyone). One museum
in Bonn made me wear my small fanny pack around my waist rather than
carrying it as a shoulder bag, even though it was much smaller than the
massive handbags women all around me were carrying. Another museum
wouldn't let me carry my winter coat, because they said I could hit
something with it (in this museum, *everything* is behind thick,
protective glass); I had to wear my winter coat, in a museum with a
temperature easily over 90 degrees and with no coat check, but parents
were, ofcourse, free to carry their flailing kids. The Beethoven museum
threw me and Erica out because she took a photo of their back garden. In
fact, the staff of the museums of Bonn are so awful their behavior is
cited in Lonely
Planet Germany
I could fill a book with so many German correction episodes. And the corrections weren't ever Germans being helpful; they were always Germans wanting to humiliate. I felt defenseless when I was mocked/corrected, because of my lack of German language skills -- which I was also berated for on more than one occasion. So I would just stand there and fight back tears and try to inch away. The turning point came because a man would stop his car and scream at me when I road my bike to work through Bonn-Plittersdorf. I understood that he was yelling at me for riding the "wrong way" down a one way street, but there were at least TWO signs within a block that said it's okay for bikes to go the "wrong" way on said street. I came into work in tears one day, just worn down from this latest barrage from angry driver dude. A German co-worker told me to say whatever I wanted to say to him or anyone else, in English, and it would be understood, and the correction would immediately stop, both because Germans hate confrontation and because they would realize I wasn't going to accept any more verbal barrages. Not two days after that, angry German driver stopped to lay into me, and I let him have it -- I said everything to him that needed to be said, in English. He never yelled at me again. I applied this tactic again and again, and it almost always worked. One of my favorite replies became, "How rude! Another rude German telling me what to do! No wonder people don't like to come here on vacation!" And I would laugh and walk away.
Something that helped me know I wasn't alone in being driven crazy by
this behavior is the tiny book, "The
Xenophobe's Guide to the Germans (Xenophobe's Guides)
Apparently, Erfurt is similar to Bad Godesberg: an American friend's stories of how she's been treated since arriving in August have been heart-breaking, and brought back a lot of my own first experiences here. It reached a peak when she was on the light rail with her dog, something she'd done dozen of times, and the conductor stopped the tram, walked back through the passengers to her, and yelled at her because her dog didn't have a muzzle, even mocking her for not being a native German speaker. I was convinced she was going to pack up and leave. So I gave her advice. Lots and lots of advice. And very quickly, her emails started to change:
My neighbor below me continues to pull me aside and show me how to sort my trash almost weekly...with tampon in hand no less. She put up a SCHEDULE in the hallway outside her door showing when I am supposed to sweep the stairs. She has her name on it, but very lightly, and my name is in BOLD, every two weeks of course. Oh my god......please help me... I've just become much more blunt and mildly aggressive. I just don't put up with it. When I get one of their "Thuringian scans" (the head to toe and then stare....), and they finally look at my face, I've started saying..."BOO!" They need to realize how ridiculous that is!But with all that said: I love how I don't have to tell anyone in a movie theater to shut up, because half a dozen Germans do it before I can open my mouth. I love that I can count on German quiet hours in the afternoon, 1 and 3 p.m. German obsession with order isn't always a bad thing.
Of course I learned that all Germans were NOT this way, and most German cities are a pleasure to visit and live in. I really hope my blogs, collectively, reflect this.
I wonder how Stefan will be treated when we live in the USA...
More later . . .
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