There are many stereotypes in Germany about life in the United States. Here I will try to compare these stereotypes to the reality in the US as I perceive it. In this comparison, I will also portrait the situation in Germany so that Americans might learn something about my country and Germans have something to criticize.
I am constantly generalizing here; I'm talking about "the Americans" and about "the Germans" and I'm aware of the fact that, strictly speaking, these generalizations are wrong; I'm trying to capture a hypothetical average. And not even that: just the average of my personal acquaintances mixed with some information gathered from the media. The first observation is that, in most instances, the US show a much larger variation than Germany does, so that talking about the "average" is more dangerous when referring to the US than when referring to Germany.
Since I started this page several years ago, I repeatedly noticed that the differences between America and Germany are getting smaller, a result of Germany moving in America's direction.
Of course, this comparison is necessarily subjective - take it as just another data point.
The German system gives more power to the parties, since they can decide which candidates will be placed on the list from which the parliamentarians will later be drawn. Parties finance the election campaigns; the candidates themselves do not need to raise substantial amounts of money. In return, there is a very high party loyalty in the German parliament. Parliamentarians vote their conscience only on rare, very important questions; most of the time, they vote the party line. Parties are financed by the taxpayers according to the proportion of votes they received, by donations from big business, and by membership dues.
By contrast, Congress persons in the US are much more independent: they raise campaign money on their own (or use their own money) and the party cannot even decide who will be their candidate in a particular race: this is decided in so-called primaries, races between the various candidates where every voter who declares themselves a supporter of the party gets to vote. Once in Congress, the legislators can vote their conscience on virtually every question.
American politicians are almost constantly raising money for their next campaign. Since they are free to change their voting pattern on almost any topic, moneyed interests appear to have much more political influence than in Germany.
It is often believed that the position of president in the US is an extremely powerful one; this is wrong. Essentially all he can do is govern by changing administrative rules and veto or sign laws written by Congress. The vetos can even be overridden by a 2/3-supermajority in both houses. By contrast, the chancellor in Germany is elected by the parliament, the Bundestag, which means that a majority is behind him and most every law he wants to enact will pass, because of the above mentioned party discipline. Most laws do not have to be approved by the second chamber, the Bundesrat, which represents the German states.
The American parties are located to the right of their German counterparts. Former President Clinton for instance, a democrat, would have to be placed at the right wing of the German conservative party CDU. Some people at the right end of the American republican party are so radical that they would probably be under surveillance in Germany. There is no social democratic party in the US.
It is not very well known in Germany that most US states have systems of direct democracy, where citizens can bring up ballot measures if they raise enough signatures. There are no restrictions on the contents of those measures: tax reductions, criminal laws, and changes of (state) constitutions are all fair game. Local prosecutors, sheriffs, and judges are also often directly elected by the citizenry.
Despite of this, large segments of American society ignore the political process altogether. Even the big presidential elections see fewer than 50% of the eligible voters participating; other votes have much smaller participation. In Germany, the numbers for federal elections are around 80%.
I can see three possible reasons for the low voter participation in the US: votes always take place on regular working days making it difficult to participate (even though many businesses grant time off for voting), the majority system locks out supporters of smaller parties, and the system of voter registration (which requires every voter who moved since the last election to fill out a form several weeks before the vote) makes it unnecessarily difficult to vote.
By contrast, Germans like their security quite a bit and are uncomfortable with the dichotomy Freedom vs. Security. They want both. In fact, when told that in the US one can be fired when getting severely ill (or for no reason at all -- so-called "at will" employees), at which point the health insurance coverage is also lost, Germans ask puzzledly "But how can people live like that?" It is even more astounding to Germans, including me, that given this dire situation, US citizens are notorious for not saving any money, even living on credit instead. (Almost all Americans carry several credit cards; I never understood why anyone would bother to carry more than one until a fellow graduate student told me that she treats credit cards as a kind of unemployment insurance). Even in the presence of the huge German welfare systems which tries to make everyone feel as secure as possible, people routinely save money, just to be on the safe side. Personally, I found it very strange to learn that many Americans, even those with a good income, live on a "month-to-month" basis, always waiting for the next paycheck to arrive in order to be able to pay the bills. If they do save, then they usually use the money to speculate (they call it "invest") in the stock market, which is again much too insecure for the average German. On a similar note, Germans don't understand why people keep living in areas which regularly see earth quakes or hurricanes; natural disasters which kill people don't exist in Germany. Many of this may be explained by a generally much higher level of optimism and risk tolerance in America.
The following interchange took place on usenet between
someone from the Netherlands and an American; it beautifully sums up
the differing approaches towards the concept of freedom:
- "A welfare system increases individual freedom, because it lets people
experiment without the threat of catastrophic failure."
- "You are not really free if you are not free to fail."
It is rather surprising however that given this German emphasis on security, I cannot find a clear overall plus in freedom in the US. Sure enough, political freedoms and freedom of speech are stronger; racist Nazi propaganda for example is (with wide popular support) illegal in Germany while it is legal in the US, with the same wide popular support. The quote that fits here is: "I disagree with what you say, but I would fight for your right to say it." Most Germans are not able to take this noble position, probably because they fear the power of effective propaganda given the historical experiences.
Everyday freedom of speech may very well be lower in the US however: it is severely restricted by the fact that one can be privately sued by anyone at any time for virtually anything, and being sued as a private individual is almost equivalent to bankruptcy, no matter whether the case is won or lost. (Unlike in Germany, in the US the loser of a lawsuit does normally not have to pay the winner's legal costs.) People who have spoken up against projects of certain corporations during town meetings have been sued by those same corporations, for the very act of speaking up. Expressing a negative opinion about an American company's products on a website will very likely result in a threatening letter from a lawyer. In addition, the fact that one can legally be fired without any reason severely limits freedom of speech at the workplace. (Sure enough, given Germans' love for security, Germans can be fired only given a valid reason, and there is a whole branch of the juridical system, the Arbeitsgerichte, which deals with deciding which reasons are to be considered "valid".) The right to freedom of speech also does not apply to the homeless: the US supreme court has recently ruled that local laws which prohibit asking people for money are constitutional. Ironically, the same supreme court ruled that giving money to politicians is covered by the freedom-of-speech clause and cannot be restricted.
It is an almost bizarre contradiction that US citizens are not granted the right to freely travel wherever they want. Cuba, a popular vacation spot for Europeans and Canadians, is off-limits to Americans. This is especially ironic since one major complaint against communist countries has traditionally been their refusal to allow their citizens to travel freely. I would expect that, were the German government to restrict the right to travel, major protests would ensue.
The fact that local communities, states and the federal government can enact concurrent criminal laws in the US together with extremely draconian punishments (combined with sporadic enforcement) also tend to limit personal freedoms. (In Germany, only the federal government enacts criminal laws.)
For example, prostitution, anal sex, and zoophily are not illegal in Germany but are illegal in virtually all US states. In Germany, murderers can be and often are paroled after 15 years in prison (except for terrorists and the psychologically abnormal) while in the US, they are lucky if they can get away with a life sentence without the possibility of parole (a sentence considered to be violating human dignity and therefore unconstitutional by the German Verfassungsgericht). Children as young as 12 can be tried as adults and sentenced to life imprisonment in adult facilities, and 16 year olds can and are sentenced to death. In Germany, children under 14 cannot be punished at all, and juveniles under 18 cannot be sentenced as adult.
Furthermore, the US legal system (denies but) practices double jeopardy: you can be tried and sentenced twice for the same crime, first by the state and then by the federal system. This is mostly used in drug cases and is rather rare however. Drug law is strange in that state laws are usually relatively lenient when it comes to drug possession, while federal laws are extremely harsh; people who are caught can only hope and pray that the federal prosecutor won't be interested in their case. In Germany, possession of small amounts of drugs for personal use is normally not prosecuted. In the US, the government may also take away all property which was used to commit a crime, for example a farm where some marijuana was grown or a house in which drugs were found. Even if acquitted in criminal court, the accused still has to fight in civil court for the return or their property.
In the US, so called crime stopper programs are common: they provide a toll-free phone number to anonymously accuse anyone of a crimes and they pay a reward if the call results in a conviction. Germans are generally appalled by this system since it reminds them of the Nazi scheme of having everybody spy on everybody else.
Several large US cities have enacted curfew rules, which prohibit teenagers from being on the streets at night if not accompanied by an adult. This is another example of an infringement on freedoms which I think would not be tolerated in Germany. In general, teenagers seem to live much freer lifes in Germany than in the US. For example, it is common that 15 or 16 year old Germans will take vacations in foreign countries with a couple of friends; in the US, it is rare to see anybody traveling under the age of 18 -- even though 16 year olds are already allowed to drive there, while in Germany the driving age is 18. It is much easier for German teenagers to drink and smoke, but other drugs are more readily available in the states. Many US high schools subject students who participate in extracurricular activities to random drug test, which also involve tests for alcohol and tobacco. Their freedom of expression is also limited: often they cannot criticize school officials or wear offensive or suggestive clothing. Some high schools forbid their students to hug or even to touch other students. More than twenty states still allow the striking of students in schools if the parents don't object. Young German teenagers often spend their weekend nights dancing in discos, while virtually all comparable clubs in the states are off limits most of the time to people under the age of 21, because they serve alcohol.
In the US, you cannot leave your children at home alone if they are under 12 (varies by state). No such rules exist in Germany. On the other hand, several regulations in Germany limit personal everyday freedoms:
I see one amusing parallel though: both countries hold dear one "freedom" which virtually no one else in the world recognizes as one: the right to drive as fast as possible on the Autobahnen and the right to keep and bear firearms. Both these "freedoms" survive because there are very effective and vocal lobby groups behind them, even though a slight majority of the general populations in both countries opposes them.
The situation in Germany, of course, is radically different. To love Germany is to love its history, its culture, its political and economical system, the government's institutions, the whole enchilada. Obviously, Germany's history cannot be loved, and so it is a pretty safe bet that someone wearing a shirt with a German flag on it is either a soldier or a foreigner or a neonazi. At best, it is considered to be in bad taste to claim that one is proud to be a German.
The jobless youth in big German cities and in the eastern part of the country however often present an aggressive nationalistic attitude, to the extent of harassing, beating and even killing foreigners with the wrong skin color. This kind of violence is unheard of in the US.
There is also a kind of snobbishness in Germany's educated classes about the myopia of Americans: "they don't care what's going on in the world, they don't travel abroad, they still don't understand why they are hated around the world, they think they are always right etc." While all of this may be partially true, it conveniently ignores the very noble and enlightened treatment Japan and West Germany received after the Second World War, and the fact that the US was the driving force behind creation of the UN and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Americans generally embrace new technologies enthusiastically; it's cool just because it's new. By contrast, Germans are much more reluctant and don't try out new stuff without given a very good reason to do so. Sometimes new technology is even made fun of: if a German sees someone with a cellular phone, they often assume that that person probably has a need to look important (this has changed in the last couple of years however). If a cellular phone or beeper goes off in a cinema, concert or restaurant, Germans can get pretty angry. While every kitchen, office and cafeteria in the US is now equipped with a microwave oven, people in Germany are still debating whether microwaved foods are good for you and whether microwaves may have detrimental effects on people with pacemakers. Almost everyone in the US has a computer at home; many Germans don't see the need. New (and not so new) technologies are usually a lot more expensive in Germany than in the US, average income in Germany is lower, and Germans tend to stick to their money more.
Some of this may be attributed to the generally higher level of optimism in America. If you present a new idea, people will usually respond with "Sounds great!", while the typical German reply is "This won't work because..."
This is not the full story however. I am constantly amazed about the poor quality and backwardedness of many technologies routinely employed in the US. Sometimes I think that while Germans tend to tolerate outrageous prices without complaint, Americans tolerate substandard quality. Here are some examples, I keep discovering more every day:
In Germany, the biggest TV stations are "Anstalten öffentlichen Rechts", which means that they cannot make profit, they are independent in the sense that politicians cannot directly influence their decisions, and the top managers are appointed by councils that represent the major groups in society: political parties, unions, churches, business etc. Laws prescribe their internal organization and their purpose. They are financed from a monthly fee that every owner of a radio or TV set has to pay and from advertising money. Advertising is restricted to certain times of the day and never interrupts movies or news shows. News coverage is usually very broad, internationally oriented and well-balanced with few freak coverage (then again, I believe that many more freak incidents happen in the US than in Germany, for some reason. Have you ever seen a living room being washed away by the rain or 50 houses burning down in Germany? Happens all the time here.)
Then there are also private TV stations in Germany, mostly on cable. They definitely move in the direction of US TV, not quite reaching it yet though.
Again, there's another side to the story, which is not well-known outside of the US, maybe not even inside. It is public TV and radio. Financed mostly by donations and partly by the government (few ads), it provides exceptionally high quality programming, much better than anything I've seen on German public TV. For example, I saw an 8 hour documentary about the war against the native Americans, stretching out over four days, and a similar one about the civil rights movement. (Documentaries in German TV are usually 60, at most 90 minutes long.) The news coverage on public TV and national public radio approaches the quality of German news, except for international coverage. Science coverage is clearly superior in US public media. I personally enjoy the public media in the US more than the ones in Germany, mostly because of the in-depth coverage of a vast variety of topics.
When filling out your tax form, you can always call a toll-free telephone number and friendly people will help you or send you easy-to-understand instructions. The tax forms are very easy to fill out, and at the end you know exactly how much taxes you owe. You can even file your whole taxes over the phone. Compare that to complicated Byzantine tax forms in Germany which are much longer than those in the US. The instructions for the German forms are nearly incomprehensible since they use their own lawyer speak. Once you have filled out everything, you send it in, someone checks it all and computes your actual tax load which you only learn much later. On the side: by German standards, taxes in the US, at least for medium incomes and above, are laughably low, which makes the constant American complaining about high taxes seem rather funny to me. (Caveat: stock market gains are taxed in the US and are not taxed in Germany.)
Other bureaucracies are also generally friendlier in the US than in Germany. German bureaucrats tend to see their customers as a nuisance and treat them accordingly, while US bureaucracies work more like customer serving businesses. This could however also simply be a consequence of the generally higher level of friendliness in the US which I'll talk more about in the Violence and Aggression section.
German bureaucracies never bend the rules and have opening hours that all but exclude working people.
Given my good old German bureaucratic mind-set, the boundless ineffectiveness of US bureaucracies bothers me a lot. For example, the US is not able to enforce child payments of divorced fathers. As a father, you just move away, preferably to a different state, and there's a very good chance that you'll never have to pay. The mother would have to hire private investigators and lawyers in order to track you down and make you pay, but of course she doesn't have the money for that. Since the bureaucracy is of no help, there actually exist private companies who promise to make the deadbeat father pay, for a heavy percentage. In Germany, child payments are simply taken out of the father's paycheck, end of story. If there are problems collecting, then the collecting bureaucracy loses money, not the mother, because she receives the money from that agency in either case.
Another example is the fact that the US has no effective way of forcing someone to pay an outstanding bill or to make a credit payment. In fact, I remember seeing a sign at the student loan office at my university which said "No defaulting allowed". This strikes Germans as very funny: the word `defaulting' does not even have a translation, because the concept is virtually non-existent in Germany; it is simply impossible to default - if you don't pay, you will be reminded a couple of times and then someone from the court will come and take away your belongings. If you don't own enough, they'll put a hold on part of your future earnings. By contrast, in the US there's a whole industry of private "collection agencies" who don't have any executive power and can't do much more than harass debtors without end. Even the payment of traffic tickets or other legal penalties is not enforced: In Santa Barbara, the city government takes out a page in the local newspaper every couple of months and lists everyone by name who failed to pay their ticket. Nothing else happens to them, unless they are stopped for another traffic violation. Amazing.
A more bothering instance of US inefficiency is the apparent inability to ensure full immunization of children. The immunization level in the US is now lower than that in some developing countries.
And one last example: in Germany, it is impossible to have a car with a valid license plate and not carry car insurance. If you apply for a license plate, you have to present proof of insurance; if you drop your insurance, your name is forwarded from the insurance company to the appropriate agency, which will invalidate your license plate. Non-valid license plates are easy to spot from far away. This simple system makes sure that everyone who drives carries car insurance. The US bureaucracies are apparently not able to create a similar system. Accidents with uninsured drivers are a major problem here.
The high cost associated with the extensive social system is often cited as a reason for the relative stagnancy and high unemployment rate in German society and as an argument for the US free market model. There is some truth to that; however, the tremendous costs of the American "social system" are often overlooked: the money spent on housing a gigantic prison population consisting of jobless, hopeless or mentally ill inmates.
The US defined itself over a long time by being Marxism's big enemy; in everyday political (usenet) discussions, it is still common to be accused of Marxism if one favors proposals such as tax increases or public health insurance. This accusation is very effective, because no defense is possible. The term "social democrat" does not exist in the US public debate, so everything slightly critical of limitless capitalism is defined as socialism, and this term in turn is used synonymously with communism and Marxism.
It is interesting to note that in Germany only people critical of capitalism use the term "capitalism", while in the US only people critical of socialism use the term "socialism".
Then there was Senator McCarthy who, together with his Congress committee in the fifties, saw communists everywhere and came up with elaborate blacklists and other means to get rid of them. At that time, being accused of communism could amount to a personal catastrophe.
It is not very well known however that Germany saw a much more vigilant communism hunt at about the same time. While in the US only about a dozen people ever went to prison for being Communists, that same number runs in the thousands in Germany. The communist party was forbidden by the German supreme court and all the leaders were arrested and sent to prison.
By contrast, American unions in most fields are weak and splintered (with some notable exceptions: police, construction, airline pilots, automobile industry, teachers). Often, different unions fight against each other. The historic alliance between unions and the mob is the most likely cause for the low moral authority attributed to US unions. This allows American employers to openly state their goal of keeping unions out of their business. A statement like that would create a huge outcry in German public debate, and it would not go unpunished. US unions are often hostile towards strike breakers and force all employees of a unionized company to join the union. This is not the case in Germany: if you don't want to join, you don't; you will still get the benefits of the negotiated contract. German unions often see themselves (and are sometimes seen) as working for the public good, for example when they try to come up with programs against joblessness; American unions are much more focused on their member's narrow interests. Here is an appalling example of this: the union of Californian prison guards actively lobbies for longer prison sentences. Another instance of this is that American police unions usually come out on the side of the officer in police-abuse cases, while the German police union typically sides with the abused party.
The whole bargaining process appears much more civilized in Germany. When the contract runs out, the parties meet, they can't agree at first, there's a strike which usually is only symbolical, and then a new contract is written up. Everybody pretty much agrees that this is a good process. In the US, individualism is so deeply rooted in the public mind that many people outright deny the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively (no one denies the right of capitalists to organize in huge corporations though...). Labor fights are often ugly and war-like and go on for a long time: employers hire replacement workers right away, they try to fire union organizers and other strikers (which is legal in the US, illegal in Germany), strikers try to keep the replacement workers out etc. To a German, it looks a lot like the Manchester capitalism that seemed to have been overcome a long time ago.
The management of US corporations is generally seen to be responsible only to shareholders. In Germany, management is seen to be responsible to shareholders and employees alike, even though this seems to be changing slowly in the American direction.
In the US, it is also quite common that people who are not paid by the hour work much longer than the 40 hours per week that they are obliged to. In spite of the fact that many large and successful employers freely lay off workers to increase profits and appease Wall Street, employees in the US exhibit a rather strange loyalty to their employers. They often own stock of the very company they work for and really want "their" company to succeed, almost like a team sport. In Germany, where it is taboo for a successful company to lay off any workers, many workers are still not very loyal to their employer: basically, the employer is the enemy who forces you to come to work every day.
Even in their time off, Americans often volunteer for charities or at schools, join their children at sports games, or work out at a gym. In Germany, it seems to be much more common to relax by spending time in a pub or going for a walk. Americans watch a lot more TV though while Germans like to join various sports and hobby clubs, so maybe the time off is a tie.
While Americans definitely work more, they are very much focused on making money. By contrast, in Germany you have a work ethic where many people take pride in producing quality, which I think is sometimes absent in the US. However, I received a message from an American project manager who has lived in Germany for 9 years and he claims that the pride in workmanship and the quality of work is decreasing rapidly.
In every day life in the US, you often encounter shocking incompetence. This is a consequence of the fact that most jobs require only minimal training:
Customer service is far better in the US in virtually every respect. Some examples:
Only a very small percentage of cases reach a jury trial in the US: most cases are resolved during "plea bargaining" between defense and prosecution, where the defendant basically offers to plead guilty for a lesser crime in return for a smaller sentence. The outcomes of jury trials are considered to be volatile and are avoided by both parties if possible. Often, as a condition of these bargains, the defendant has to give testimony and aid in the conviction of other criminals. In Germany, there is some resistance against deals of this sort ("Kronzeugenregelung"), and after having been used for several years in cases of organized crime, they were abandoned. The general feeling is that punishment should follow culpability and should not depend on the outcome of "dirty deals": defendants with important information should not be unjustly rewarded. Americans are typically very pragmatic: "Why not give him a break if it helps in catching another bad guy?"
In Germany, both the prosecution and the defense may appeal an unfavorable outcome; in the US only the defense can appeal.
Police in the US commonly use lie detector tests to check the statements of suspects; the results of these tests are however not admissible in court unless all sides agree. In Germany, lie detectors are considered to be unreliable and are not used at all.
The system of laws in the US is much more Byzantine and complicated than that in Germany. The German criminal code is a little booklet which one can easily read and understand in one afternoon, while the criminal section of the U.S. code comprises several thick volumes. And this is only the federal level; the states and even the local jurisdictions in the US pile on their own layers of criminal codes. On top of all that there's the "common law" which is a rather ill defined body of rules that isn't written down anywhere and that is the result of prior court decisions sometimes going back to England several hundred years ago. Common law is mostly used in civil cases and its importance has been decreasing in recent years. In Germany, only the federal government issues a criminal and civil code and there is no common law layer.
Parliamentarians in the U.S. are also called "lawmakers", and that's exactly what they are. The only way to distinguish yourself in parliament is to make a law and get it passed. One frequently gets the impression that laws are only introduced in order to make a public statement and to get news coverage. These laws are often written by the parliamentarians themselves (without much legal knowledge, because they usually don't have a law degree). The result is an amazing zoo of laws that don't fit together (and are often struck down by the courts). I have seen a specific medical procedure being outlawed in California by putting the ban into the state constitution in order to make the prohibition more difficult to change. Overall, the US legal situation is not very aesthetic: no overriding principles, just a huge collection of random prohibitions. Many regulations that are handled by German bureaucracies much more flexibly are written into law in the US because the lawmakers traditionally don't trust the administration.
The civil and criminal codes are much more transparent in Germany; however, the rules and regulations that apply to businesses are issued and enforced by various different bureaucracies and are a lot harder to navigate than the American ones.
In Germany, it is rare that individual parliamentarians introduce a new law. The common procedure is that larger groups of parliamentarians (from one party or being interested in one topic) work together, or that a minister's staff works out a law.
The American system of bail, which forces everyone arrested for a crime to pay money or go to jail, is considered to be blatantly partial to the rich by Germans. In Germany, bail is rarely used; defendants awaiting trial have to stay in prison if and only if they are considered dangerous or likely to flee.
Generally, police and prosecutors have more power in the US than in Germany. For instance, police are allowed to and regularly perform undercover operations in many areas, including posting officers in adult cinemas or saunas to watch out for "indecent conduct". Officers can also act as "agent provocateurs", for instance they can offer to sell drugs, pose as prostitutes, or pretend to be teens looking for sex in internet chat rooms. Undercover policemen are also routinely used in large demonstrations. In Germany, undercover operations are only used in severe cases of organized crime.
So do I, and it is absolutely frightening to me how privacy rights are constantly violated in the US. Credit card companies keep databases about your purchases and sell the information; supermarkets issue frequent-buyer cards in order to track your preferences; if you buy a TV set in an electronics store, they ask for your name and address; the post office sells information about who moved where; the Internet set-top box WebTV dials up Microsoft every night to upload information about your web surfing habits, automatic face recognition cameras are used in sports arenas and casinos etc. etc.
The US has very strong access-to-information laws. If the government collected it, and it does not affect vital national interests, then you can file a request to see it. Emails of the president, phone bills of the governor, lists of all issued driver's licenses: everything is fair game. These laws enjoy wide public support.
Interestingly, neither is privacy a big issue in the US nor is access to information a topic in Germany. Clearly, the two issues are opposite ends of a spectrum - you can't have both at the same time. Maybe this difference between the countries is a symptom of the fact that Germans tend to distrust big business, while Americans tend to distrust big government. Quite predictably, the consequence is that corporations are more powerful and government is less powerful in the US than in Germany. When Americans need a quick example of government gone bad, German history serves well; when Germans need a quick example of corporate excesses, American businesses are often used.
First of all, Americans move around a lot more than Germans. It seems that most people don't stay longer than two or three years at the same place, at least until they buy a house.
More importantly, Americans change jobs much more often than Germans. It's not at all unusual to meet someone who had been a soldier, then after retirement became a teacher, and then moved on to become a truck driver. Careers like that simply don't exist in Germany. One reason is probably that virtually every job in Germany requires at least a three year low paid apprenticeship; nobody wants to go through this twice if they don't have to. Generally, the German economy offers a lot less low-paid no-training "McJobs" than the American economy does; this is due to much higher labor costs. No supermarket could afford to hire someone simply to stuff customer's plastic bags.
Then there is a lot of mobility between classes. If your parents are workers, than you are much more likely to become a worker yourself in Germany than in the US. (One probably has to exclude the American inner city slums here, which don't allow for much class mobility -- the only realistic perspective for boys seems to be drug dealing and for girls bearing children.) Of course, mobility is not only upward: middleaged engineers who end up as supermarket clerks after being laid off are not unheard off; sometimes people slide right through into homelessness after loosing their job. Generally speaking, the classes in Germany are much more static.
In one sense of the word though, Germany shows more mobility: traveling. Wherever you go in the world, you'll find Germans. They are obsessed with traveling. Many people take two major vacations per year. Clearly, this is facilitated by the fact that Germans get about 6 weeks paid vacation per year plus some 11 (or more if you're in a Catholic state) paid holidays, compared to an average of 3 weeks plus 6 days in the US. There are other obstacles to traveling as well: when I once asked a graduate student I knew in Santa Barbara why his wife and his new-born child never came to visit from San Francisco, he told me that they were afraid to travel because their health insurance would only cover illnesses of the child when treated in San Francisco clinics.
Only about 50% of the members of the US House of Representatives have ever left the country. For a German, this is hard to fathom. But then again, Germany is only about the size of Montana.
This is only half of the story though. If you walk down a street or take a bus in a big German city today, you'll hear about as many languages as if you did the same in New York City. It's probably still true that Germans are more alike than Americans, but there's more than just Germans in Germany these days!
By contrast, the rich are not particularly well-liked in Germany. In politics, being extremely rich would certainly be an obstacle. In the back of the German's mind there's still the assumption that someone who owns that much must have exploited others to get it.
The obvious fact that the rich in the US have much better access to health care and legal representation than the poor is generally not seen as an injustice. To Germans, this notion is deeply offensive. When I discussed the O. J. Simpson case with Americans, I would usually point out that he got away with murder because he was rich enough to hire the very best lawyers; many people I spoke to didn't even notice the implied criticism: they replied "Sure, the rich can buy better lawyers. They can also buy better cars. That's what wealth is."
This is even more tragical in Canada's case since Canada is the biggest trade partner of the US but still completely and utterly ignored in the US public debate.
The abstract, big German environmental issues, such as the greenhouse effect, the ozone hole, energy saving, overconsumption, and garbage reduction, are almost non-existent in American public debate. Every once in a while, an article appears whose author wonders whether the greenhouse effect really exists (a question that has been considered settled for several years now in Germany). Energy saving is a complete non-topic, and accordingly, energy is wasted at amazing levels. The only fear that appears every once in a while is that the US could become dependent on foreign oil; the concept that fossil fuels are finite and that we will run out soon is very un-American: of course science will come up with wonderful fusion technology just in time. Garbage reduction is almost unheard of. In every supermarket, your purchases are immediately stuffed into paper or plastic bags (sure enough, you get to choose which type of bag: it's the land of the free after all).
In the US, fuel is cheap, cities are spread out, mass transit is poor, many people commute 50 miles a day to work, large cars are considered to be cool. All this contributes to an immense energy consumption.
Environmentalism in the US is often very down-to-earth: getting industry to clean up a certain toxic waste site, protecting a particular endangered species, or preventing a particular piece of land from being developed.
Air pollution standards are much more stringent in the US than in Germany: catalytic converters had been required 20 years earlier and Diesel engines are virtually regulated out of existence.
While all German parties have embraced the notion that environmentalism is not detrimental to economic progress and in fact can spur technological innovation and export opportunities, most American politicians still see environmental regulations as a direct threat to jobs and to the competitiveness of US businesses.
I see two reasons for these different approaches to charity: first, Americans distrust big organizations and third world governments; they fear that money they donate for global causes will trickle away in bureaucracies somewhere. Second, Germans intuitively don't feel a need to help local organizations or schools: "that's the government's job, that's what taxes are for."
The first thing every visitor to the US notices is the immense number of astoundingly obese people. There is a huge obsession with fat-free foods, to the extent that people happily eat sweet desserts as long as they are fat-free. Americans seem to be eating constantly: in the car, at the movie theater, at work, while watching TV; more often than not, it is fast food or snacks. In many poorer neighborhoods, the only nearby store is a neighborhood convenience store which typically sells potato chips, coke, bread and peanut butter but little to no vegetables, fruit, milk or other fresh foods. In Germany, the schedule of three meals a day is still more strictly followed and groceries are much more common than convenience stores.
Many Americans take food supplements and vitamin pills daily, something that Germans sometimes find mildly amusing: "Just eat your vegetables!"
Americans smoke a lot less than Germans and virtually all public spaces except bars are smoke free. People generally look down on smokers. Americans also exercise more, typically in fitness centers, which again many Germans find slightly suspect because of the closeness to body-building, which is generally considered to be utterly ridiculous.
High tech and critical medical care is more advanced in the US than in Germany. Hospital equipment is generally more up to date and new and experimental treatments are adopted earlier. If you suffer from cancer or need a heart bypass, the US is definitely the place to be. The constant threat of catastrophic malpractice lawsuits keeps the quality of care high. Still, statistically the US fares worse than Germany: infant mortality is about 40% higher (mainly because of the high teenage pregnancy rate and because many poor people with high-risk pregnancies never receive any prenatal care), life expectancy is roughly the same while per capita health care spendings are about 60% higher in the US than in Germany.
The treatment of chronic and mental diseases and rehabilitative care is much more advanced in Germany. This is also the area where the lack in health insurance of a large proportion of the US population has the most severe effects; if you had a heart attack, you can easily get a free triple bypass, even if you are a Mexican without health coverage, but American health insurance policies contain only minimal coverage for mental diseases. There are virtually no treatment options for uninsured people with long-term mental health problems short of Social Security disability benefits.
When I arrived in the United States, I believed that all universities there were private, that professors could be fired if they didn't work hard enough, and that in any case only the rich or the exceptionally smart could go to college due to the high tuitions. Wrong on all counts.
Many states maintain public universities supported by taxpayer's money, and these are characterized by lower tuition. In addition, virtually all universities, public and private, are heavily subsidized by grants from the federal government. All private universities are not-for-profit institutions and scholarships are given freely. Professors earn tenure after having been employed and shown a good record for a couple of years. Their jobs are then virtually guaranteed just as in the German system. The tenure system exists at public and at private universities alike. (In Germany, all but one universities are public.)
In general, the German system places much more emphasis on big examinations while degrees in the US are automatically granted if the student has passed a sufficient number of classes. This is true both for the high school diploma, which doesn't involve any exam in the US and consists of several big written and oral exams in Germany, as well as for college degrees, which in Germany require passing several oral exams and producing a thesis.
It turns out that professors in the US are a lot freer than their German colleagues: for about three and a half months of the year, they can do what they want, without any obligations of presence whatsoever. In Germany when the semester is over, professors still have to report to work every day (except for regular vacation time). On the other hand, German professors usually have personal secretaries and academic assistants, which US professors lack. Professors in Germany are very highly regarded in the public opinion and accordingly full of themselves.
If you go to a college town in the US, you will see students studying in libraries, coffee shops, book stores etc. In Germany, you rarely observe students studying in public.
It is very interesting to compare the accessibility of academia in the two countries. On the face of it, Germany wins hands down. Attending a university is free and (except for overrun fields such as medicine or psychology) prospective students don't have to apply anywhere: they simply sign up at their school of choice and start studying, provided they have the Abitur. On top of that, the German government pays a fellowship to every student without affluent parents. Only one half of this grant is paid out as a loan and has to be paid back later.
It is not very well known that a much larger proportion of the population goes to college in the US than in Germany. Almost one half of all Americans acquire a college degree during their lifetime, compared to only one third of Germans. (University degrees in Germany are worth more than US college degrees however; a B.S. is roughly equivalent to a German Vordiplom while a German Diplom, which takes 5-7 years to get, corresponds to a Master's degree. Much of the material of German Gymnasiums is taught in the first two years of American colleges.) Families in the US start saving money early on in order to be able to afford the college education of their kids later; many students work during their college years and most take out educational loans. In American colleges, you constantly meet people between the ages of thirty and forty who decided to go back to college in order to get a better education; this is exceedingly rare in Germany. Germans can in principle earn the Abitur later in night school, but few do. Once you've got your job, you've got your job, and that's that.
There can be no doubt that the American system is much more friendly, open and accessible to immigrants with insufficient preparation.
When looking at the higher levels of education in the US (graduate school and research universities), one notices an extremely high proportion of foreigners, to an extent where the system would almost stop to function if the foreigners were to leave. In Germany, foreign professors are very rare, probably because of the language barrier and because of more restrictive immigration laws, combined with a lower overall attractiveness of the country to foreigners. Furthermore, the old fashioned German universities require a "Habilitation" before someone can teach; this is an additional thesis and exam after the doctorate.
Generally speaking, the average American Ph.D. is less broadly educated and capable than the average German Dr.rer.nat. Specialization occurs earlier in the US, the time is shorter and many more people of only medium talent pursue a doctorate.
The US university system is very prestige oriented; whenever you state your degree, you immediately give also the name of the school where you got it from. The better universities can afford to maintain high entry requirements, while schools lower on the list have to take what they can get. By contrast, the German university system is largely homogeneous and degrees are perceived to be equivalent.
Once one enters the country, a couple of items can be added to this list: the news coverage focuses a lot on violence, the violent horror movies in the video stores are openly visible to kids (they are not placed in the adult section together with porn movies as in Germany), extremely harsh punishing even of non-violent criminals (including the recently revived chain gangs in some states), and violent TV cartoons for small kids on Saturday mornings. Generally, Americans have a much higher tolerance for violence in the media (and a much lower tolerance for sex) than Germans. To me, this is perplexing, since America's violence problems seem to be much more severe than Germany's sex problems :-)
A peculiar type of violence, school kids shooting around in schools, is not that uncommon in the US and is very interesting mainly because it seems so puzzling to Americans. Every outside observer immediately concludes that media and video games glorifying violence together with easy availability of guns and adolescent's common psychological problems provide a satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon. Americans cannot reach this conclusion however because the right to bear arms and the right to free speech are considered sacred. So all they are left with is "these are bad kids", and you actually hear people say that.
Somewhat paradoxically, everyday life is a lot less aggressive in the US than it is in Germany. People are generally more polite and friendly. Phrases like "please", "thank you", "excuse me" and "you are welcome" are a lot more common in the US. It happens all the time that a nice girl that you have never met before smiles at you for no apparent reason. (In Germany, they do it only if they have a very good reason, which means that you're in business.) If you wait in line in an American supermarket, you don't have to constantly watch out for people who try to slip in in front of you.
Traffic is much more relaxed in the states, very unlike the all-out war going on on German streets and highways, with tail gating and drivers cutting you off. People in the US actually drive slowly and cautiously, even though virtually everyone can get a driver's license at age 16 after taking a trivial test. Germany requires months of expensive training and a difficult test, but people still don't understand the concept of defensive driving.
The higher friendliness in the US is often noticed by German travelers, who will typically then add "but people are terribly superficial". There may be some truth to that, but a lot of it is just a consequence of faulty translations. Words describing emotional states are generally used much more liberally in the US than in Germany and common dictionary translations are often wrong. People will call you a "friend" if you have had a nice 15 minute talk with them; the German "Freund" is only used for someone that you have known for a long time and are emotionally close to. Similar for words like "hate" or "love".
The American friendliness is mixed with a strange moralistic streak: if somebody does something wrong, the normal sympathy and empathy is immediately and utterly withdrawn and exchanged for heart-felt condemnation.
Even though the overall crime rate is much higher in the US than in Germany, low-level "nuisance crimes" such as pick-pocketing, car vandalism and bicycle theft are much rarer. People are generally trusting and it is quite common that they leave their house entrance doors unlocked during the day, something Germans never do. Germans like their front doors to be massive, while American doors normally can be opened with modest force.
Like most things, crime is more evenly distributed in Germany than it is in the US. The higher American crime rate is mainly due to inner city pockets of gang violence; outside these pockets, life is just as safe as in Germany.
In Germany, there are violent clashes between opposing soccer fans and police almost every weekend. This does not happen in the US.
Maybe a more descriptive term than "impolite" for the typical German is "anal-retentive". If you're short a couple of pennies when paying at a supermarket checkout, they will make you search, with the line waiting behind you. Little "give a penny/ take a penny" baskets don't exist there, and the concept goes against everything a German believes in. Everything has to go by the book, and Germans like to be right. No doubt, Americans are more relaxed.
It seems that there is a lot of tension and aggression buried in the average German, maybe as a result of the much higher population density. The level of friendliness, relaxedness and unaggressiveness seems to be higher on the West coast of the states and lowest in the big "quasi-European" cities of the East.
Comparing the political debates in the two countries is rather illuminating. The speeches of German politicians are generally less controversial, more inclusive and often hint at compromises. (They are also more substantial.) By contrast, politicians in the US have no problem talking about an outright "cultural war" (between the left and the right) and regularly accuse their opponents of everything from stupidity to adultery. But when it comes to physical political violence, Germany is far ahead. If a leading politician gives a speech in the open, he can expect having foul eggs thrown at him. People will shout and whistle in order to disrupt the speech. None of that ever happens in the US. The president can actually give a speech at a university and everyone will be polite and listen -- a very strange concept for German students. This is even more astounding if one takes into account that the difference in viewpoints between the Left and the Right in Germany is much smaller than that between the Left and the Right in the US.
Political demonstrations, smaller and rarer in the US than in Germany, are also a lot less violent. Politically motivated riots, which happen regularly in Germany, are rare in America. This is probably because young people tend to be more political in Germany, and kicking the butt of a policeman is still the easiest way to fight the system.
The logical next step is then political terrorism, which in Germany exists both on the left and on the right but is (at least in its organized form) almost unheard of in the US. It fits the picture that the terrorism that the US sees either comes from foreign countries or is the deed of fringe individualists.
All this has surprisingly little effect though; the Christian churches have far less influence on public life in Germany than in the US and are rapidly losing members. Only Catholicism in Bavaria is a hold out. The main reason is that the overall degree of religiosity in the population is much lower. In the US, people actually go to church every Sunday, something mostly reserved for lonely elderly women in Germany. The proportion of people believing in God is higher in the US than in any other industrialized country. In Germany, people will laugh at you if you tell them that you literally believe the fairy tales of the Bible; only some sort of "abstract religiosity" is acceptable. In the US, there are many people who believe what the Bible says word for word, and they are not ashamed to say so. This may be an instance of a more general fact: Germans are a lot more skeptical and critical than Americans. Four little examples:
In Germany, the Catholic Church is generally considered to be more conservative than the protestant churches in social and political issues; the situation in the US is opposite. People on the "religious right", a large and influential movement populated mostly by white protestants, are vehemently opposed to abortion (several abortion doctors have been killed by people on the fringes), believe in the literal truth of the Bible to the extend of opposing Darwinism (these people are called "creationists", a word that doesn't even exist in German nor would it be needed), oppose premarital sex, and call homosexuality a sinful choice. These same people also enthusiastically embrace the death penalty, private ownership of guns, military spending and lower taxes, without even noticing a contradiction to the Christian message of "Don't judge, live poor, love your enemies".
The bigot Christian influence can be felt throughout American life: no swearing on radio or TV is allowed (it is rather ironic to hear a beep whenever someone tried to say "fuck", especially in a country which prides itself in strong opposition to censorship), no nudity whatsoever on TV either, and no substantial sex education in the schools (resulting in the highest teen pregnancy rate of the developed world). The media discuss the whole topic of sex only in the context of crime or disease: there is a huge obsession with child molestation, rape, sexual harassment, AIDS etc.; Hollywood rarely shows sex in love movies but almost exclusively in "erotic thrillers", films which intimately link sex to some crime. Crimes involving sex generally carry higher penalties than non-sexual crimes. The advertised cure for AIDS is abstinence; ads favoring condom use cannot be shown on national broadcast TV and a broad condom promotion campaign by the government as in Germany is unthinkable. Some southern states in the US even prohibit the sale of vibrators. It is also rather difficult to buy condoms in the US; they are not available in public restrooms as in Germany. Public nudity at nudist beaches or co-ed saunas is extremely rare. Life sex acts cannot be shown in sex theaters. Anal or oral sex, even between married adults, are illegal in several US states; these laws are rarely enforced, but no lawmaker would dare to try to change them. Topics like legalization of prostitution are utterly unmentionable.
The word "rape" is used in a much broader sense than the common German dictionary translation "Vergewaltigung". The latter means "using force to achieve intercourse", while "rape" is nowadays often used in America in the sense "an unpleasant sexual experience that was later regretted by one party".
Still, the matter is not completely black-and-white; the American puritanism often only covers the surface. While it is legal in the US to display hard core pornography on internet web sites, this is not allowed in Germany. Similarly, the sex magazines that can be bought at regular newsstands are harder in the US than in Germany; in the US, satellite hard core porn channels can be ordered and this is not possible in Germany. There are certainly more strip clubs in the US than in Germany (a consequence of the higher taboo surrounding public nudity). The US porn industry feeds the whole world and is bigger than Hollywood. Abortion regulations are more liberal in the US than in Germany. Most of these freedoms come courtesy of the Supreme Court, which is very powerful and quite liberal on some topics. Indeed, throughout history, very many progressive changes in US legislation can be traced back to Supreme Court decisions; legislatures are often too scared for bold moves.
Another strange contradiction given the strong religious base is the enthusiastic embrace of exotic reproduction techniques and genetic modification in the US. Research on human embryos and human cloning is legal in the US (but not funded by the federal government) and illegal in Germany, as are rent-a-womb arrangements where a woman carries the fetus of another couple. Sperm banks which sell sperm based on the donor's features also don't exist in Germany.
It is also my impression that the atmosphere at US colleges is more sexually charged (clothing, flirting, partying etc.) than that at German universities. This however could have something to do with the fact that American students are on average a couple of years younger than German ones.
