German Culture Thread

In my case, one side of the family is directly from China, while the other has been native to Taiwan long enough to have lived through the island's time as a Japanese colony; so theoretically I can claim to also have Japanese ancestry.

From all of my personal observations, personal interest in European cultures is actually less popular in Taiwan than in China. Due to being a former Japanese colony with visible traces of that period everywhere if you look hard enough, and as well as the Kuomintang being allied with the US, most Taiwanese are more allured by Japanese and American culture. As mentioned before, the political incorrectness of admiring those two in China has led to people there looking towards European cultures as substitutes for a Western culture to romanticize.

Specifically to German culture, East Asians typically hold a much more positive stereotype of Germans largely due to geographic distance from the world wars in Europe and the fact that the cross-cultural role of an evil imperial other has already been reserved for the Japanese. It helps immensely that during the 20th century, Japan and China modeled their industrialization and modernization efforts in Germany's image; the US and UK had democratic traditions which the Japanese and Chinese emperors saw as threatening to their rule.

edited 26th Dec '16 10:20:20 PM by FluffyMcChicken

I think the main reason my dad still isn't interested in moving to Germany despite his appreciation for the culture is because he thinks the Euro is too unstable.

edited 26th Dec '16 10:32:37 PM by M84

Is he or you familiar with the language at least?

Me, the only real experience with German that I have is four years of a high-school course, a lifelong interest in military history, and a current level 13 on Duolingo.

My dad apparently took German in college. I'm not the least bit fluent.

edited 26th Dec '16 10:46:40 PM by M84

We have a saying in Germany: Deutsche Sprache, schwere Sprache (which means as much as German is sometimes a difficult language, even for those who grow up with it).

I think that Christmas in Germany is in a way more a cultural than a religious celebration. After all, the celebration in itself is older than the religion, the church just took a Germanic tradition and folded it into its belief system. Christmas markets, Christmas trees and Advent, those are inherently Germany concepts in a lot of ways.

The "Christmas pickle" is btw NOT a German thing, some American made this one up....

Maybe I've watched way too many World War II films, but German can be surprisingly easy to grasp once you become familiar with the grammar structure that maybe seem awkward to an English speaker. Due to the fact that modern English is an amalgam of German and French, many words and phrases in German sound strikingly similar to their English counterparts.

And now that I think of it, a major reason of why German culture is popular to be interested in China has to do with the massive footprint of German aid towards the Kuomintang during the Second Sino Japanese War. As an effort to establish themselves as a force for anti-communism, the Nazis gave military aid to Chiang Kai-Shek's government against Mao Tse-Tung. When war broke out with Japan, the Kuomintang's best troops composed of several infantry divisions trained by German World War I veterans. Henceforth, imagery of Chinese Nationalist troops typically features Stahlhelm helmets, Mauser rifles, stick grenades, C96 pistols, mountain caps, and other German World War I surplus; this is the German newsreel unavailable in the blog post. Hell, Chiang Kai-Shek himself wore an iconic German mountain cap◊.

The Second Sino Japanese War, despite occurring in East Asia, marked a turning point in European history as well. The conflict demonstrated the Kuomintang's inability to be an effective overseas ally of Nazi Germany, which saw Japan's successes in invading China as proving its ability to defend itself in a large scale war - and thus a much more viable ally in the event of a war against the US. When the war broke out, the Germans scrambled to lay out a coherent relationship with the Japanese, and withdrew their support to the Kuomintang when everything was in place.

Likewise, Chiang saw the breakdown coming, and recalled his adopted son from Germany in the nick of the invasion of Poland, where he had been training as an officer cadet in the Wehrmacht's Munich Kriegsschule.

Here are two excellent blogs about the Second Sino Japanese War, both run by a British historian who wrote a book about the 1937 Battle of Shanghai, which saw a Stalingrad-like clash between the Japanese and the Kuomintang's German-trained divisions.

The two blogs both feature fascinating articles about Germany's role in one of East Asia's most pivotal armed conflicts and periods in recent history.

edited 28th Dec '16 12:30:05 AM by FluffyMcChicken

It is easy to run into a trap, though, because a lot of those similar sounding words are actually "false friends" meaning they sound similar but mean something different. The most famous one for Germans is "become" though I guess English speakers would have more trouble with words like "Winken"...no, it doesn't mean "to wink", that would be "blinzeln", it means "to wave goodbye".

Then there are the three different genders, the huge number of irregular verbs which exists even though there already are three different rules for bending verbs in the first place, the different ways we use time oh, and the option to restructure sentences nearly freely instead of being forced to keep it to the SPO structure.

The upside is that it is a more poetic language than English in a sense that Germans have a lot of more freedom in playing around with words and structure.

And German is less strict regarding the rules for the use of past tense.

& Danke. I appreciate the input.

Some more Sino-German history worth sharing - and yet another reason of why the Chinese can't get enough about Germany.

One of World War I's greatest ironies lies in the fact that Japan allied itself with the US and UK against imperial Germany. Prior to the rise of anti-Western fascism in the prelude to World War II, Japan maintained extremely close relations with Great Britain, which provided critical aid in the establishment of the blue-water navy that would come to crush the Russian Baltic Fleet in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War. When the UK entered the war in 1914, it requested aid from Japan in neutralizing the German port colony of Tsingtao in China. In the defining battle of the Pacific Theatre of World War I, the Anglo-Japanese coalition seized Germany's chief imperial holding in East Asia, and the city would remain under Japanese rule until being largely returned to the Kuomintang government in 1922. During the siege, the Japanese navy employed the very first usage of carrier-based aviation to bombard German targets. The Germans responded by sending up their own aircraft, resulting in some of the very first dogfights in history.

The Japanese seized Tsingtao a second time during the Second Sino Japanese War in 1938, until being surrendered back to the Kuomintang in 1945.

Note: Exercise discretion when reading non-academic online sources such as this one which shows up as the first Google result for "tsingtao german colony". Many of the websites run by Chinese authors will have visible nationalist sentiments to them.

German Historical Museum: Tsingtao - A chapter of German colonial history in China. 1897 - 1914

Photo Gallery: In China, Traces of German History

Deutsche Welle: Tsingtao - German beer tradition in China

Millions gather for Chinese 'Oktoberfest'

PDF: Qingdao as a colony: From Apartheid to Civilizational Exchange

edited 28th Dec '16 11:08:03 PM by FluffyMcChicken

For a few years there has been an increasing number of Chinese visitors to Freiburg who want to see the Freiburg military archive. Because there the documents from the German colonies in China, including many pictures, are preserved. Apparantly the Chinese local government wants to rebuild the historical ancient town centres of those cities, and for that, those pictures are helpful.

The Chinese government, and speaking from personal experience, large numbers - I dare say the majority - of its citizens tend to have an amusing if not frustrating contradictory attitude towards their histories. The foreign colonization of various Chinese cities is labeled as a central component of a "century of humiliation" in popular memory, yet citizens of Shanghai, Qindao, Macau, Hong Kong, and the like look to their cities' colonial pasts as a source of pride and heritage all the while.

" Germany is never mentioned when it comes to the most culinary places, it is always France or Italy. But I guess this is partly because the German cuisine isn't quite as distinctive"

for what I get, german cuisine is famous for having big portions, but not much in artistic cusine, your the european equivalent of texas in that regard.

That's because what foreigners get to see of German cuisine is usually Bavarian which is more or less the Texas of Germany. For example, Bavaria likes to use those giant Stein for beer, but the rest of Germany...doesn't.

Though I admit German cuisine in general is more practical than artistic.

Germans can be very creative when ot comes to preparing dishes with potatoes though.

Have you tried making proper dumplings, Baumkuche, Schichttorte (the pain, the pain!), handmade Schnitzel or good, old, disputed Strudel?

That's not just art, that's a load of hard graft! Even proper dumplings made to time honoured local recipes get insanely tricky and time consuming!

Or Rote Grütze....it takes ages to prepare the fruits.

(Serve with a Greuyers meringue or two and the traditional "seriously, that's not double cream — that's at least a quadruple heart bypass!" for true evil — needless to say, those meringues are tricky to get right.)

Like any question that fits into "Why is German X underrated unlike Y?" The answers are pretty much always ww1-ww2 anglosphere (includes the US) propeganda.

According to Hollywood Germany only has 3 flavors: Prussian, Nazi and Bavarian.

Yeah, it boils down pretty much to the way Germany is portrayed in the media. Interestingly Germany got huge surge in popularity after the World Cup of 2006...the only thing needed was enough people actually visiting Germany and seeing for themselves how it looks nowadays. And it certainly helped that not all the games happened in Bavaria.....

and Communist as well.

10 words that reveal Germany's Christmas culture

Stunning...all those words and they forget "Advent"...."Advent" means "Erwartung" (meaning something between "expectations" and "waiting") and starts the four Sundays before Christmas. That is the day to decorate the house and light the first candle on the "Adventskranz" (a wreath with four candles).

Seriously, what is with people setting off fireworks already? Is this just a Berlin thing? It is intensely annoying.

edited 29th Dec '16 2:04:03 PM by TerminusEst

Usually it's just children who use the opportunity that firework is freely available for a few days.

Not just children, teenagers and drunk idiots (with overlaps) as well.