Ha! This time I really felt remembered to Pictures in the Head and the caricature. Almost the same situation occurred as how I proposed to interpret the caricature with two white people sitting shivering on a bench when a black man appears.



Last Tuesday I was at the “Ausländerbehörde” (Foreigners Department) to apply for a residence permit for S. It is the only day they have opened for longer (from 9 until 18) and some people were waiting there. The majority were blacks. But also a girl from China, who is working for an import-export company near Halle as she told us, wanted to renew her residence permit.

Two counters were opened that day, each in a different room. At the first time when I was in the foreigners department I was quite surprised how unfriendly the room with the counter is. After you passed the door you can only make one step into the room and then you reach a wooden counter which is as high as my chest and from there until the ceiling continues as glass window. There are no chairs in the “guest’s” room. The officer of course has much more space and lives a lot more convenient there. Although at that time I could imagine why it is how it is, I found it actually absurd.

On Tuesday then I understood quite better. At the same time S. and I were called in, there was in the neighbour room a client who let his emotions out. Already in the waiting room his desperation and excitement could be seen. But now he could be heard. -His voice as well as his hand beating on the glass window. The officer said dry to me what I thought in the same moment: “Now you know why we have those glass windows here.”

As we came out to the waiting room again, the noisemaker was still in there. The waiting people shook their heads and commented the sounds from inside with sighs. Probably nobody of them had wanted the loud guy from inside to sit next to them when he comes out. The same scene like on the caricature could have happened and everybody had shivered, no matter which skin colour the sitting people or the person approaching have.

I haven’t been blogging for some weeks now. To excuse myself, I was on a conference or a meeting about America and religion. And hence, among us German students and professors a few Americans of both types were present, too. Maybe the time of the conference was too short as that I could experience numerous cultural differences. But one thing was there which I want to record here though.

Although Americans have to suffer from numerous stereotypes (being “superficial” and always small-talking are only a few of them), I experienced them as very polite and friendly. A big difference to the German participants was visible during discussions and lectures. First of all, the way to present was dissimilar. The German lecturers were reading from their manuscripts while their American colleagues seemed to be extemporizing and reacted pretty open to questions from the audience. For example, I had not the feeling that the answering professors were trying to override different opinions from the audience.

Second, in contrast to the Germans, every American member of the audience who has a question would first thank the lecturer for the presentation and then ask his or her question. The American lecturer would then thank for the question and answer it.

This is different when Germans ask and answer questions. The German audience would go into the question directly and maybe introduce it with “you said that…”. The German lecturer would answer it (maybe briefly) without thanking for the question.

One of the organizers was the lady responsible for cultural affairs at the American embassy in Berlin. During the whole conference she was present too. One evening, having a glass of whine, we spoke about those observations. She told me that many American lecturers have problems with German audiences and that she sometimes even has to prepare them for the German way of “politeness”.

During the past Germans learnt a lot from Americans. If I started with examples now I wouldn’t know where to end. But at the moment, the trend is to be more critical with American “exports” (material things, moral values, politics and so on). On the other hand, there are some things which, in my eyes, the Americans at the conference proofed to have in advance: their way of academic politeness.