> an awful lot of stuff about “national character” that is… questionable.

Yes! I recently read this book and was pretty shocked by how much was chalked up to the German character.

I came away feeling neither comfort nor increased panic relating to the current US situation. I read the book because I was hand-wringing about how complicit I am just by getting on with my privileged and comfortable life right now. I didn’t really come away with any resolution to that question or clear ideas about how I should change my behavior.

▲ simpaticoder 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Anecdotally, having lived in Germany for a couple of years recently, there is a perceptible national character. The best way to understand it is to ponder the difference between a drag race and a rally race - in one, success means going as fast as possible; in the other success means getting to navigation points within a window of error. Or, with beer: in America success is discovering a new beer with a different flavor profile. In Germany, success is figuring out a way to even more precisely and consistently conforming to a centuries-old brewing standard. This, along with a kind of blunt speech that presupposes the listener to have little in the way of vanity or ego (or challenges them to not express it), is the "German character" as far as I can tell.

I suspect in part this was because they were burned very, very badly by the outward striving into the unknown that Hitler represented, and still having creativity and effort to apply turned inward to asymptotically approach perfect execution of the known.

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MrJohz 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Eh, I think that's a bit overblown. In theory, Germans are famously methodical and precise, in practice the rail network is falling apart, a major bridge in my city recently collapsed due to lack of proper maintenance, and "made in Germany" is mainly an encouragement to buy local, rather than buying for quality.

My experience of Germans, having lived among them for almost a decade, and having married one of them, is that you can usually find a counterexample to any supposed German characteristic just by looking around the room. If there is any overarching theme to the German psyche, it might be a tendency to conservatism (in the sense of preferring to do things as they've always been done), but at the same time you've also got radical groups on the left and the right that are a fundamental part of the democratic fabric of Germany.

I think there are some cultural touchstones that are very German, and those have an influence on how Germans think and act, but I think this can be very contradictory and it's difficult to draw a single picture here. For example, people are very conscious of antisemitism here because of how much it's talked about in schools and the media, and that informs national foreign policy. But at the same time, Germans, like most Western Europeans, have grown up in a time of peace and see war and aggression as a cardinal sin. Both of these inform the German response to something like the situation in Gaza, but the result averages out to a policy that's broadly in line with many other liberal European states.

All in all, I think you'll get more insight from phrenology than from trying to figure out the German character in too much depth.

	▲	moomin 8 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Funnily enough, the book goes into the anti-war thing a bit. The idea put forward in the book is that straight after the war there wasn’t a great deal of anti-war sentiment, just anti-losing sentiment. But after the Cold War started, and the major powers wanted Germany militarised again, to be on the front line of a battle against checks notes other Germans on the other side’s front lines, they developed an anti-war culture pretty quickly.
	▲	6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
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▲ computerthings 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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▲ noobermin 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

While reading about history can always be enlightening, I sure hope you aren't looking to a book to inform you on what is right or wrong and what your behaviour should be.

	▲	jrmg 11 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Who or what should we be discussing or consulting ethics with? Is the line drawn at the written word? It’s easy to read your comment as meaning ‘never let others influence your opinions on right or wrong’ which is (I hope!) obviously ludicrous.
	▲	jebarker 10 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Yes, I do read books to give me different perspectives on life that help me form my beliefs about what is right, wrong and ethical. The suggestion that’s a bad idea is pretty incredible to me. Where do you think I should go for such things?
	▲	schiffern 11 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		`>I sure hope you aren't looking to a book to inform you on what is right or wrong` While it's not my cup of tea, from what I've heard there are a few major world religions that might disagree on that point.
	▲	ProllyInfamous 9 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The entire purpose / point of this book is that the overly-oppressed majority is easily susceptible to becoming "NAZIS," and why National Socialist mentality ought to be actively DISCOURAGED. But you're just going to see the swastika on the cover (which is used appropriately as the symbol of hate it represents) and you'll not even attempt discussions at preventing future Nazi-creating societies. Good work /s If you search my username, I have provided the couple-dozen quotes from this book that alarmed me most, in regards to society in 2020 (when I first read the book). I am not a supremicist in any capacity — I am a blue collar union electrician (so: I hate everybody equally smile_face.GIF). But I've heard it all on jobsites, and not all hate is "misdirected"...