veronica

• If you are going to classes at a goethe-institute that is the sort of behaviour you can expect from teachers. I learnt at a foreign goethe-institute for a while and had the same experience of paranoia in relation to the non-german host culture. Some of it is becasue language teachers in general are not very bright or educated, but also germans are selling their culture when they teach german much more than english teachers are selling theirs. I think some germans realise they don't have much to sell after a while other than that they are not guilty for the war, which is a basic premise of german culture at the moment. The usual way for many germans to express that is to find as many bad things as possible about other countries. In particular, their great role model that they have a subordinate love-hate relationsnhip woth - america - only has a negative influence on the world (I think surveys regularly show about 3/4 of germans think that). Who knows what germans would be like if they could drag themselves out of their guilty hole, I have met some. But mostly germans think life is about either winning or losing, and they think everyone else does as well.

  the laughing foreigner 26 Mar 2009, 07:12 - Denuncia

germany sucks