Dear Americans

Dear Americans,

in 1949 you brought Germany the first real democracy in our country. After the failed attempt during the Weimar Republic, which led to the election of Adolf Hitler and through him to the Third Reich and World War II, you brought us one of the most stable and efficient democracies in the world. We are very grateful for that (apart from a few right-wingers and a few hopeless people who live in the past).

With your 2016 election, you have, however proven that you are in dire need of a true democracy yourself.

You have been holding on to an old institution called the ‘Electoral College’ for too long, for one thing. An American friend I spoke to recently thinks it serves to make sure stupid people (or uninformed people, as it is put officially) don’t take too much influence on the election of your president. Well, that either means you’re wrong or it means even intelligent people voted for Donald Trump. I choose to believe the first one, because I can’t imagine any person who is intelligent would vote for a con-man who has no plans and will destroy everything his predecessor, one of the best presidents you’ve had, has built up in eight years in office. The bottleneck of the Electoral College means that a lot of votes go unnoticed every time. It doesn’t matter whether a party wins a voting district by a few votes or by several hundreds. If it wins, the other votes cast don’t matter for the rest of the electoral process. It also validates the technique known as Gerrymandering - a way to make sure as many voting districts as possible will go to the party the person doing the Gerrymandering favours. Get rid of the Electoral College and just count out all the votes. Overall, you might get different results.

You make the electoral process look like a huge party. You make it extremely focused on entertainment. And you make it extremely important that the candidates (and their parties) raise a lot of money. It’s no wonder the candidates in the end were both extremely wealthy. But how much do people with millions in the bank know about the struggle of the common citizen? Not much, usually. Yes, candidates should speak about their plans for the presidency. They should take a stand on political and social topics so the voters know where they stand and what to expect from them. They should not make a show out of it. The showman is close to the con-man (not all showmen are con-men, but all con-men are showmen) and will rarely keep his promises after the votes have been cast. Cap the amount of money candidates can invest. Like this, money isn’t that important for becoming a candidate.

Make sure the polling places are controlled. Not to avoid voter fraud as a such, but to make sure people are not bullied (for example by armed people standing outside and threatening those they think will vote for the other candidate) or are turned away, even though they have the right to vote. Having a system which gives every citizen the automatic right to vote might help. Make sure everyone has the chance to get a photo ID (meaning making sure everyone can afford one) and make the photo ID mandatory for voting. To get a photo ID, you need to be a citizen - which means a person with a photo ID is eligible to vote.

Many years ago, you brought a country you had just defeated in war the wonderful gift of democracy. Please do not allow things to go badly enough this country needs to be part of a UN mandate during the next elections to make sure America stays a democracy.

Easier than getting a law passed

Okay, I had decided after my burnout that I didn’t want to get annoyed about things again that easily, but after quite some recent stuff about people denying services of various kinds to others based on their race/gender/sexual orientation, I have something to say about the topic myself.

If you have a problem with serving a person in your job because said person is, according to your eyes or to that personal belief system of yours, the wrong race/gender/sexual orientation or whatever, there is a much easier solution than passing laws: Don’t work in a service job. Yes, it is that easy.

If you take a job in service, no matter whether as a cashier, a pharmacist, a doctor (technically, doctors and nurses also work in service, since they provide health service), a pizza baker, or something else, you will have to be ready to serve everyone - as long as they are ready to uphold their part of the deal and hand you money for it. It doesn’t matter what your religious book or your preacher or your conscience has to say about it. If your conscience tells you to absolutely not do it again, then get another job, one where you don’t have to do that again.

And if you consider yourself a Christian, you might want to read all of your holy book one of these days, not just the part that justifies your prejudices. It’s going to take a while, especially if you read all of it, Old and New Testament. You might be shocked by the content especially of the New Testament. You see, this guy called Jesus whom you believe in, he had a strange way of seeing things. In essence, he only wanted people to do one thing: be nice to others. He sided with the poorest, with the outcasts of society. And he said there was only one rule to follow: love others like you love yourself (or, in some cases of extreme self-loathing, perhaps a little more than yourself).

The same, by the way, goes for the religious organisations operating public places over here in Germany, like kindergartens, schools, or hospitals. Stop looking down on people who you think have done the wrong thing. Stop choosing your employees merely by their religious belief and their marital status (nobody who got divorced and remarried is allowed to work in a Roman-Catholic kindergarten, school, or hospital). You want to serve society? You want to actually get people to listen to what you say? You want your slice of the cake? Then act like a responsible part of society and accept its reality. Divorce is reality, religious freedom is reality. Deal with it!

You don’t need to make laws to allow people to discriminate against others based on their personal belief. What you need, is to make laws to forbid people to discriminate against others for whatever reason (religious belief, race, gender, sexual orientation, whatever).

German School System Strikes Again

In Germany, students of the highest form of secondary school, called Gymnasium over here (and yes, I know it means something different in English), have to learn two foreign language. The first foreign language is English, the second can be either French, Latin or Russian. The latter, though, is only taught in the eastern counties of Germany (former GDR).

Now, I’ve been through the process of choosing my second language myself, when I was in school. I chose French (and maybe, in hindsight, Latin wouldn’t have been all that more difficult a choice, French is a complicated language). Latin wasn’t exactly popular and so we had two and a half classes of students learning French and half a class learning Latin in school. My school coped with that problem.

Schools in some areas of eastern Germany, though, don’t seem to see it like that. There are schools in those areas where they force some students (chosen merely by a lottery) to take the language they don’t want to take (usually Russian). The simple argument? There’s not enough students willing to learn the language to fill a whole class. Instead of saying ‘one half learns Russian, the other half French’, as my school did, they put all the names of the students of that year in a hat, basically, and draw as many names out of it as they need students to fill a class (Germany has a class-based system, students are separated into a number of classes and all students of a class have all courses together).

This is highly unjust in more than one way. First of all, students have the right to decide about what they learn. If a child (more likely a child and its parents) decides to take French, you can’t just say ‘you have to take Russian instead’. Even if there’s no law explicitly giving students this right, the basic rights of all people in Germany definitely encompass that, in my book. If that child has to move west during the course of its school career (something rather likely to happen, parents having to switch jobs a lot more often than in the past), that child will have to leave the school type, simply because Russian is not a second foreign language taught in other areas of Germany. This means that the child will have to find other means of obtaining the necessary certificate to be allowed to attend university. In addition, Russian might prove even more difficult than French or Latin – they have their own script as well, after all, putting them up with languages like Chinese or Japanese (or Ancient Greek, maybe) instead.

There is a discussion going on as well to turn our three-type school system into a two-type school system in the future, fusing the two ‘lower’ branches (Hauptschule and Realschule) into one and leaving the highest branch (the Gymnasium I already mentioned … still aware it means something else in English) as it is. While this might change the fact that the certificates from the ‘lowest’ branch of school are worth little to nothing, it won’t really make things better in the long run, probably. Even today, almost all parents want their children to go to the highest branch of secondary school. Maybe a complete and far more extreme makeover of the Germany School System is necessary: what about only one type of secondary school and an additional thing like the college between school and university? What about giving kids a choice in the matter of some subjects at school, letting some do more practical stuff, others more arts, others more maths or science? It would make three school types unnecessary and prepare kids better for the future in the ‘real world’.

I’m probably not going to see the school system in Germany really modified and modernized. But it would be nice, if politicians would one day work it out.

White Christmas

Usually, around here where I live, we can sing the song about dreaming of a white Christmas, but we rarely get one.

This morning, there was hardly a trace of snow left. The street and walkway were the usual dark grey of a slightly rainy morning, the evergreens in front of my home were, well, evergreen. The ground was dark brown (no grass) and the fence was light grey. During the morning, towards noon, snow started to fall. When I went over to my parents for Christmas Eve (which is an important day in Germany), there was a thin layer of snow on the ground. When I came back, about six hours later, there were ten centimetres of snow on the ground. The street and walkway are covered by thick, white icing. So are the evergreens and the fir trees from across the street, the ground and the fences. And snow is still falling.

For me, the snow is a minor problem, but for a lot of people in Germany, the snow is a major nuisance, because they don’t get where they’re supposed to be, whether it’s in some hotel where they wanted to spent Christmas or at home with their loved ones.

German Suburbs

Yesterday I took my car to a mechanic for an inspection. While it was done – about one hour –, I walked around the neighbourhood. This made me think about the strange thing called a German suburb.

American suburbs are well-known in most countries of this world (in all where American TV series are shown), the strange thing called a German suburb, on the other hand, is not even known very well inside Germany. While soap-operas and TV series set in the suburbs (such as “Desperate Housewives” or even “The Simpsons”) portrait the live of the supposedly ‘average’ American family, the main characters of German soap-operas (yes, they exist) usually live in big cities, downtown in apartment blocks or at least in a flat. It’s more modern and definitely more hip than the German suburb.

The most distinct thing in the German suburb are the houses, small terrace houses (at least that’s the word my dictionary gives me for the German word “Reihenhaus”) set in rows of five to ten, along a footpath leading from the street (where the garages are placed) to the last house. Each of those houses has a small garden (as broad as the house, but not very deep, because of the closeness of the rows), a garage along the street and each is constructed from the same blueprint.

Historically, most of those houses have been build in the Fifties and Sixties and then from the Eighties onwards. During the Seventies, the dream of a wife, two kids, a dog and ‘our own house’ was suspended for a while, but it came back. The terrace house was ‘our own house’, but far cheaper than an individually build one. Germans tend to rent flats or apartments while moving from job to job and town to town, they only build or buy a house once in their lives – once they’re ready to settle down. This house once in their lives for a lot of people was and still is a terrace house.

I have been inside various of those houses in my life and can give you a basic description of their design. The entrance is usually reached by climbing two, three or four steps, because the first floor is elevated slightly (about one meter) from the ground. This way, the basements can be fitted with windows more easily. And why, you might ask now, do German houses need big windows in their basements? Well, because the terrace house doesn’t offer all that much space, for one thing. The first floor usually offers a small bathroom (toilet, sink, maybe a shower – depending on when the house was build) and a huge area that combines kitchen, dining room and living room. Sometimes the living area is lowered a bit, one or two steps, to set it apart from the rest. The kitchen (and quite often the bathroom window, too), face the front of the house, the living area faces the back, where a terrace is leading to the small garden. The second floor and the attic (which more often than not is at least partially converted into living space) hold more bedrooms and at least one more bathroom (two, if the attic is completely converted). Usually, there’s only space for two bedrooms on the second floor, so once the kids are old enough to want a room each (two kinds still are quite common in the German suburb, although statistically it’s 1.3 children per family), either the attic or the basement have to be converted into living space – partially or even full, depending on the number of children and the size of the house. Usually, it’s the attic. But what about the basement and the big windows then? Suburbs in Germany are very social places – and places with strict social rules. You need to throw a party every now and then and the average German (living in the suburb with his 1.3 kids) keeps a room in the basement (quite often with an exit to the garden for summer parties) for this. The party room has places to sit, maybe a pool table or soccer table in it. There’s a stereo and other party equipment around. Quite often the room also sports a small bar where the head of the house can show his prowess at making drinks. The whole room, basically, is a huge status symbol for the happy German suburbinan. The rest of the basement usually consists of storage space (no attic and the garage is used for the car) and the heating system.

As you can guess from this basic description of the houses and of the suburbs, it’s a place for conformists, not for individualists. But deep in our hearts, all of us Germans are individualists. While those of us living in the suburbs know we need to conform to the social rules there, we still tend to bring in as much individualism in as the rules allow. If you walk along a row of houses in the suburbs, you will see that while they all follow the same blueprint, not two of them will have exactly the same door. They all will sport different details around the door (small figures, a name sign – mostly it depends on whether or not the family living there has kids already and how old they are). There’s not much of a lawn in front of the houses (lawns take up space and terrace houses don’t have any space to waste), so quite often the walkway leading from the path to the house will be different for every house. But they’ll all have the same colour-scheme, even after forty or fifty years and at least one new coat of paint. They’ll all have the same paintjob for the garages (which, in huge suburb areas might make up a small plaza of their own – where kids play during the day while the fathers, usually, are away for work).

Some people, especially the more bohemian ones (artists, freelancers without families) and the more success-oriented ones (yuppies, dinks), abhor the German suburb with its conservative principle (wife, kids, dog, house) and strict social rules. Other people love it, because deep in the heart the German suburb never changes.