German Culture Thread

The standard story of how the American G.I. reacted to the foreign people he met during the course of WWII runs like this: He felt the Arabs were despicable, liars, thieves, dirty, awful, without a redeeming feature. The Italians were liars, thieves, dirty, wonderful, with many redeeming features, but never to be trusted. The rural French were sullen, slow, and ungrateful while the Parisians were rapacious, cunning, indifferent to whether they were cheating Germans or Americans. The British people were brave, resourceful, quaint, reserved, dull. The Dutch were, as noted [in a previous chapter], regarded as simply wonderful in every way (but the average G.I. never was in Holland, only the airborne.)

The story ends up thus: wonder of wonders, the average G.I. found that the people he liked best, identified most closely with, enjoyed being with, were the Germans. Clean, hard-working, disciplined, educated, middle-class in their tastes and lifestyles (many G.I.s noted that so far as they could tell the only people in the world who regarded a flush toilet and soft white toilet paper as a necessity were the Germans and the Americans), the Germans seemed to many American soldiers as "just like us."

I wonder how hard it is to get a good lye bun over there.

Russia and China are miles ahead of Europe when it comes to investing in social media campaigns and founding cultural institutes, a new study has found. Germany, in particular, has some catching up to do.

Moscow and Beijing are piling money into the foreign media operations and concentrating in particular on social media campaigns, according to a new German study. The study, which carries the title "German foreign cultural and educational policy in comparative perspective," was presented in Berlin on Tuesday by the Hertie School of Governance, who were commissioned by the German Foreign Ministry.

Researchers found that more countries around the world had followed a "strategic approach to their cultural policy to gain an advantageous position in international competition." Russia and China, in particular, are "investing massively in the development of their cultural institutes and foreign media," with Russia engaging in a more aggressive "power political instrumentalization."

Stepping up the "narrative wars"

Andreas Görgen, director of cultural policy at the German Foreign Ministry, initially played down the suggestion that Russia's strategy was more aggressive, and suggested the phrase "power political instrumentalization" did not necessarily have a "moral tone." But he added that all countries transport a "certain view of the world" beyond the "content" of what they offer abroad.

That world view is never "innocent," he added, but said that Germany and European countries generally have certain ideas about how "free discussions can work in society, and we want to at least present these possibilities to others," Görgen said. "It's our opinion that you have to make the distinction between government communication, which is directed by interests, and communication in the free media landscape."

This free media landscape, he added, included "basic conditions under which it functions - that includes protecting journalists, that includes financing models that allow free media to exist - and that's what we offer, and that's our attitude, and that's what I'm prepared to put to the competition," he said.

After that, Görgen added, it's up to the "market" to decide whether it prefers the "European model - of prosperity through dissent - or does it find another model more attractive, which is prosperity without dissent." DW is part of Germany's foreign cultural policy, with a yearly budget of 335 million euros ($382 million).The Russian strategy was, the authors added, "increasingly marked by a proactive policy of exerting influence, which was challenging the boundaries of foreign cultural and educational policy internationally."

Europe against the world

The report pointed out that Germany and other European countries are not only economically and politically in competition with other countries - but also culturally. And while European investment has remained roughly constant in the past few years, Russia has stepped up its investment in this fight to get its world view out into the world.

The origins of crises and wars, such as in Ukraine, are presented in different ways in different countries, and, according to Helmut Anheier, president of the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, Germany has "not yet realized that the soft factor of culture and media has become a hard currency."

The study - the first of its kind to compare and track foreign cultural policies, found that while the number of western cultural institutes, such as Germany's Goethe Institute, was "stagnating," the number of Russkij Mir Institutes and Chinese Confucius Institutes had "grown dynamically" in the past decade.

But it is social media, and Internet platforms like You Tube, where Russia is being particularly successful - especially in markets like the Arab world and Africa.

Russia's international state media outlet RT, for instance, has built up You Tube subscribers on its Arabic platform from just a couple of thousand in 2011, to well over 500,000 now. Deutsche Welle's equivalent Arabic You Tube channel has only around 200,000 subscribers.

"If Germany wants to keep its good position, it has to increase the means and expand its activities in the geopolitically 'contested' regions," the study concluded. "New paths can be tried. One possibility would be European cooperation."

German companies are famous for their precision and attention to detail. That thoroughness applies to what they look for on a resumé, too.

German job seekers typically include their photograph and date of birth on resumes, and some will also add their marital status, and number and ages of their children. Not that long ago, employers also expected to see the names and occupations of parents, particularly from young candidates. More like an academic curriculum vitae than a US resumé, these documents extend for several pages.

Katrin Voelkner taught a course in German for business students at Northwestern University, and had her American students prepare a resumé to German specifications as part of her class. “They were incredulous,” she says. “They couldn’t figure it out.”

Germany and the US are both big, powerful nations with sophisticated economies, but as their resumé practices show, they have very different approaches to money and work. Germans are notoriously debt adverse— they eschew credit cards, and have low rates of homeownership— and are fiercely protective of their digital privacy. Office culture can be formal, and often bound by protocol and hierarchies.

The exhaustively detailed resumé is partly a function of German’s strict labor laws, which makes it hard to fire workers, says Voelkner, who now teaches Americans in Berlin. That makes hiring the right workers critical, and puts a premium on knowing as much as possible about a candidate before making an offer. There’s also another, less benign reason for wanting photos, she notes: “You can discriminate more easily, too.”

German resumes aren’t just longer and more detailed. They’re also written differently. Americans resumés are flush with verbs—applicants tout their skills at leading, managing, creating—and Germans stress their nouns, with lots of names and titles, in capital letters, Voelkner says. While Americans stress how they performed, Germans emphasize the organizations, responsibilities, and knowledge the job seeker has accumulated.

The companies you’ve worked for, and the positions you’ve held, are testimony to your abilities, says Sebastian Choquette, a Canadian-American who has worked in Germany for 15 years. “It’s a culture that places a lot of emphasis on skill, on education, and experience,” says Choquette, who is an executive at Salomon, a ski-equipment company in Munich. “In Germany, the knowing is more important than the doing.”

At Germany’s big, international companies, expectations are changing, and a one-page, US-style resumés are becoming more common. Smaller companies, though, will still want a photo and online resumé writing guides recommend it.

German and US resumé practices differ in at least one other respect, as well: So much care goes into their preparation and packaging that hiring managers traditionally return them to the applicant if they don’t get the job.