My dear friend, I write to you today in order to answer the question you posed at me some days ago: “Why do you hate your people?” But I am not just writing this letter to answer it for you, but for myself as well. Because the moment you uttered it, it became clear to me that I did not know the answer myself. All I had was a feeling, something hard to describe and hard to put in words. But I will try anyway for your and for my clarity.
I like to travel, a lot. Not necessarily as a tourist but as someone who tries to fit in, to see different cultures from the point of view of the people who live it, I like to be a local where others only venture for pleasure, in order to see truth in the absence of obfuscation through the comfort of tourism.
And every place I go, every country I visit, they are already there, the Germans. Others of my tribe. It is not hard to spot them as they are easily recognised by their germanness. People that stand out like a sore thumb. Extremely white and usually dressed like a tourist in bad weather gear and an overemphasis on over-preparedness. The difference between them and the local culture could not be more obvious. The moment a German spots another German, they will ask, in German of course, if they are from Germany as well. Because it is totally normal to travel half way around the world, to be in the most remote jungle or desert, to meet someone else that has the same cultural background and upbringing and speaks the same language.
I like to avoid them, which is not always easy. I feel intruded upon, be it that I have found a place I enjoy being at and try to blend in more, or I come to a place that is swarming with them. I did not travel so far just to have more of the same. To meet the same people. With others present there is this immediate need to fall back on our own culture, to speak in our common language and talk about things that touch us in equal parts because we are from the same country no matter how banal they are.
The effort I put into experiencing another culture by adapting to it, by being as unobtrusive as possible, to see them in a way an Anthropologist would, is diminished or even upended by the present of someone of my own clan. I put in the effort, I am willing to suffer and to work hard to understand what is in front of me. I want to see and experience the deeper meaning of other places. Which is just not possible with them around. I see the others, how they just come here without effort, without the willingness to integrate or to make sacrifices. Their presence makes me feel inferior and sick. They get something for nothing, no effort and no suffering.
I feel the air of arrogance surrounding them.
And my dear friend, I am aware that this also applies to me. I am not immune because being German means being arrogant. Being confident in ones ability to do something without actually having to proof ones ability. We Germans can do everything. We can speak every language. We can go to any place. We can take what we want, because we come from a land of privilege. Something no single person is responsible for, but we have enjoyed constant peace and stability for the past eighty years in which we turned our war torn country around, into one of the most prosperous and richest nations on the planet. Being so successful for so long can only lead to negligence, complacency and what is much worse in my eyes: arrogance.
We believe we cannot fail. That what we want is ours and that it is all for the taking. This can be seen in the fact that we Germans own one of the most powerful passports in the world that enables us to go to the majority of places on this globe. Why is that? Because we have so much international influence that we can make other countries do our bidding. It is economic pressure as we have never been a successful military power in recent history. We tend to go out and colonise places not by force but through necessity. Through investments and companies that supply essentials and they can be found in countries all over the world. All because our name “Germany” stands for something. I guess what I don’t like is the fact that at least military powers are clear about their intentions while our economic colonisation and power plays are hidden, the government does not talk about them because they are just a bunch of individuals doing their own thing. Things that are only possible through the might of the German empire. That benefits the overall agenda even though we play shy and innocent.
In fact we have become so complacent and arrogant that we have become lazy. We believe that we deserve something more because of our heritage, while people from other countries get denied the same opportunities. They might be harder working or better educated, but your passport and your country determine how you are treated. If I decide to go and live in another country, or start a business that will operate in another country it is simple while most other people from most other countries would be denied the same opportunities.
Collectively we are a country of people who sit around all day and follow rules, who consider the written law more important than the lived one. We don’t invent things anymore because change is scary and the enemy of stability. We have many problems at home that we complain about, but don’t set out to fix them. Our infrastructure needs a desperate overhaul, the grip of big industry on the government needs to be tamed to allow new ideas to prosper, our educational system might be okay in global comparison but only because others are doing way worse.
This should not be the measure of things why a country is powerful and prestigious. Always striving for more, always willing to upend the current system in order to replace it with something new, with something that all people can benefit from. This is what it once was, and this is what it isn’t anymore. We have grown accustom to our static failing system that prohibits change and prioritises the exploitations of other countries instead of using our minds to make the things that improve the global status. We have fallen a long way. Reality and perception have drifted so far apart that such a separation should be obvious and impossible to sustain. What we have left is our insatiable hunger for status and comfort, things the previous generations earned for us to enjoy, but nothing that we can inherit to the coming generations. We are left with en empty shell of what we once where and as long as no one starts poking around the facade will hold up.
This is what I see when I see other Germans outside of my country. Because in Germany we are all the same, we are discouraged and bored. Angry and confused. Because we know the way things are going is not sustainable. We have too much time to make up rules and organising things that don’t need organising all while the real problems are set aside for later. But, and this is a big BUT, as soon as we leave our forsaken motherland we represent what the country represents, at current and what it once was, to the outside world. The work of hundreds of millions of people from all over the world past and present. This work is displayed as confidence and arrogance, we can do it, we don’t have to adapt, we are Germans. We can do anything if we want to. And I believe so, we could do anything we set our minds to, but we don’t do it. Because our status is not born out of hard work and the willingness to suffer in discomfort, but from a place of privilege and entitlement. We don’t know the difference because we never had to experience it. Would we know it, our country would be vastly different.
We like to run away, to imprint more of our feelings on foreign cultures than they do on us.
Yes, yes my dear friend, I can see the irony because these are all things that I am guilty of myself and arrogance and privilege allow me to do these things in the first place. I don’t want to be hypocritical here, but I like not to dwell on it for too long. This is the reason every time I see another German outside of the country, I see myself and am reminded of the distaste for my own country. I like to run away because I don’t want to face the music. The same way that no person in my country is trained to be entitled and arrogant, the same way a collective conscience can make you behave in a certain way, the same way this can create contradictory forces that can be expressed as hate. Or, I believe hate is a strong word to use, but a dislike of what my country represents.
This probably has been more of a clarification for me than it has been to you, but I hope you accept this as an adequate answer to your question “Why do you hate your people?” I don’t, I just hate myself.
In highest regards, your friend, John