Lena Gamper is a 19-year-old college student from Stuttgart, Germany, who is spending part of her summer in Eugene visiting family. This is the first of a five-part series examining the cultural differences between Germany and Eugene (and America as a whole).
Guten Tag!
“Well, Germans? They probably drink beer all day, wear Lederhosen all year, hang out at this awesome event called Oktoberfest all the time, eat sauerkraut and sausages constantly, and they all must be crazy about soccer and cars anyway.”
Without a doubt, there are a lot of things that inevitably would come into the minds of most Americans when they find out that I’m from Germany. And certainly, Germans would do the same thing: “Americans? Aren’t they really patriotic, super-excited when it comes to sports, even weird ones like that baseball-thing … and don’t they have the biggest cars and people over there?”
It is natural.
It is almost like an instinct of ours that evolves when meeting someone with a different nationality: Double-checking one’s memory on these widespread assumptions regarding the behaviors and habits of a certain people of a country to compare these stereotypical notions with whichever one is facing in that moment.
It is almost like a hypothesis, which we have in storage in the very last corner of our memory, and which is pounding on the walls of our brain, screaming: “Prove me right, prove me right!”
It is what media has fed us and how society has trained us to react towards something new or strange that appears in our lives.
A lot of times these assumptions might be an exact fit, and this German guy from next door really does prefer to have his beer served warm. In that case, the irritating brain-hammering would immediately be satisfied.
A lot of times though, they aren’t. And thus, this American waitress actually does know where to find Afghanistan on the map; in fact she might be a political science major trying to solve conflicts over there in her future career. You just never know.
Yet I don’t write this with the intention to point out how awful it is to label people or judge places before actually experiencing them. I think — or I should rather put, I hope — that we all already know this as a fact and that we are aware of the importance of this principle.
History and common sense should have taught us, many times too often, the devastating effects that intolerance and discrimination can cause. Therefore, it obviously is not a question of a lack of knowledge but a question of one’s willpower and determination to be open-minded.
Then again, I don’t want to send out one of these perpetual messages to the readership, which yearn to make the world a better place, save the environment and put an end to world hunger at the same time. No, I could never even dare to entitle myself for these kinds of speeches at this point. Not yet at least.
If truth be told, I wouldn’t be able to do so, even if I really wanted to convey these pieces of wisdom. Why? Because I make use of stereotypes myself. And I don’t blame myself for doing it. In fact, I think they are fun. Yes, you’ve just read the word “fun.”
And yes, this is still about stereotypes. I never understood why the universal understanding of this word has always been this negative. To be honest, I am of the opinion that there is nothing wrong about having them. Not if one (and this is the crucial detail) is willing to adjust any previous thoughts and ideas in case they turn out to have been exaggerated or simply wrong. By allowing the person or the place to affect and change prior beliefs and presumptions, one shows true interest and open-mindedness. There is a German saying: “Whoever says A, has to say B as well.” A wise man once rewrote it: “Whoever says A, doesn’t have to say B. He or she can realize that A had been wrong as well.”
Therefore, even if you have to proof the initial hypothesis wrong, make the irritating pounding in your head shut up!