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.