Culture Wise Germany
Pamela Wilson
Travellers often underestimate the depth of cultural isolation they can face abroad, particularly in a country with a different language. To many people, Germany may seem a relatively easy option, with its long history of welcoming ‘guest’ workers, widely-spoken English and hundreds of thousands of visitors. However, sooner or later, most newcomers find certain aspects of German life alien – not least its bureaucracy, food and social customs – and some come unstuck as a result. Culture Wise Germany will help you understand Germany and its people, and adapt to the German way of life. Most importantly, it will enable you to quickly feel at home.
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Extracts from the book…
Driving
Germany has one of the highest rates of car ownership in Europe, with a total of over 46m registered cars. Germany also manufactures some of the world’s most impressive high-performance cars (e.g. Audi, BMW, Mercedes and Porsche) and has a superb free motorway (Autobahn) network with no speed limits, which encourages the German propensity for high-speed driving. Irrespective of your motoring experience, you may find driving in Germany a taxing, and at times nail-biting, experience (unless you’re Italian, Portuguese or Spanish ...).
Drivers
If someone on the road annoys you, don’t ‘give them the finger’ or you could be fined over €1,000. If you insult a police officer or other uniformed traffic official, the fine is €1,500. Until recently, the German police had an official list of offensive phrases and corresponding fines – presumably derived from long experience of being insulted.
Like most things in Germany, driving is taken very seriously and you must undergo a stringent testing process to earn a driving licence. This ensures that motorists have a fairly high level of competence, and Germans generally follow the rules of the road (both written and unwritten – see below) and expect you to do the same.
Most serious crashes occur on ‘ordinary’ roads, outside built-up areas, rather than on the motorways (as one might think), and are caused by speeding or impatience. Many drivers are extremely aggressive: tailgating, honking their horns the second a light turns green, constantly changing lanes and often cutting in with no more than a few metres to spare. Some tell you to get out of ‘their’ lane by flashing their headlights at you, which is illegal. Not all aggressive drivers on the Autobahn are Germans, however: foreigners often come whizzing by at impossible speeds in Ferraris and Aston Martins, taking advantage of the almost unique German speed-limit-free roads.
There’s a ‘car hierarchy’, which dictates that a VW will yield to an Audi, which will yield to a Mercedes, which will yield to a BMW, while the kings of the motorway are Porsches. Drivers of foreign vehicles are mere paupers.
Queuing
Perhaps the most exasperating part of life in Germany is waiting to be served, when the rule of thumb seems to be whoever is pushiest gets served first. ‘Queuing’ brings out the same sort of aggression in Germans as driving, everyone feeling that they should have priority.
If there’s the slightest hesitation on your part in joining a queue or closing the gap between yourself and the person in front, you’re considered fair game by queue jumpers. The answer is to be assertive – smiling and being polite will definitely lose you your place – and say ‘Ich bin der Nächste’ while moving smartly forward.
In banks and post offices where there are several windows or counters (or machines), there’s no such thing as the snaking ‘one-queue-fits-all’ system that commonly operates in the UK (which would spoil all the ‘fun’). You simply choose one machine and wait in front of it, hoping not to find yourself behind the person who has lost his pension book or card. When you reach the head of the queue, you may think it polite to keep a discreet distance from the person being served, but such discretion is likely to cost you your place. For this reason, you shouldn’t be surprised if the person behind you encroaches on your ‘personal space’ when you’re performing a transaction.
Small supermarkets often have only one cash register open at a time, therefore waiting can be interminable – and the impatience levels stratospheric. Don’t be surprised if the person behind you plays bumper cars with his trolley if you don’t keep close up to the person in front, even though this makes not the slightest difference to his waiting time. Placing a separating bar behind your purchases is also a must, as is bagging them at lightning speed before the next customer pushes you out into the car park.
When it comes to public transport, there’s no semblance of order. Those waiting to get on often don’t even let people off first. If you’re slow – whether elderly, disabled or encumbered by bags or a pushchair – the unwritten rule is that you let everyone else go first, though it isn’t unknown for people to be run over by pushchairs or hit with a cane.
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PRICE: £10.95
PUBLICATION: May 2009
EDITION: 1st
PAGES: 232
BINDING: paperback
SIZE: 200 x 130mm
COLOUR PHOTOS: over 100
