Oz-Rita found the following video at Politically Incorrect. It’s a collage created by a member of the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland, Alternative for Germany) celebrating German history and culture, but without forgetting the stain of 1933-1945.
Rita has translated the video and subtitled it:
Rita notes that the creator of “I am Germany,” Martin Renner MP of the AfD faction in the German parliament, writes:
…We made a collage about us: About Germany.
This collage wants to show you what is being destroyed more and more. Destroyed by the internationalist, socialist and globalist policies of all established parties — here in our home country, but also in the EU.
This collage “Ich bin Deutschland” wants to make clear to you what needs to be preserved. What must not be destroyed — by the pseudo-elites of politics and their predatory community comrades in business, culture, the media, churches, trade unions and NGOs…
The little film is cute. But it is noticeable how cleanliness and industriousness and thoroughness are praised. These have their mental price.
The price is that the rules of German behaviour and effort which lead to the legendary talent for (pre-hijra, non-ummah) organisation and punctuality and reliability must be observed at all times without fail by all persons. Ironically, Turks raised in Germany fail to re-integrate in Turkey because of this: they try to behave in Turkey as if they were still in Germany.
The flip side of the pride in good workmanship, the Meister tradition, is that the customer for a product or service may ask sceptical questions about it at his peril only if he does not seem to be challenging the certified and State-recognised training of the seller ; the customer entering a shop in city or country is not only not King, he should feel grateful that he has been permitted to consider buying at all.
So the film does not mention or show the quality of interpersonal relations between ethnic Germans themselves in everyday life, in city or country, which give an outside observer the impression of severity between people and a regular unspoken demand that the other person defer to one’s presumed personal authority. For example, watch and listen how a Swiss ski resort male ticket seller winces when a German woman ski tourist addresses him as if he were a suspect undergoing interrogation.
Or witness rural police behaviour towards citizens at the scene of a small-town railway accident: the eagerness to show the arrogance and contempt of the State towards harmless “voters” is noticeable.
It is striking how often legal rulings are quoted in newspapers.
All of the above is relevant because I suspect it is the disappointment, hurt and dismay which more sensitive ethnic Germans feel about the national everyday warlike culture that leads to the (also legendary) uncritical worship of the Foreigner among some. This in turn, like a wound called Tolerance in the bark of a German oak leading to rot, has led liberals or Greens and not a few “conservatives” to a refusal to defend the culture, the famous German self-hate.
To illustrate: the father of the current AfD man, Nicolaus Fest, was Joachim Fest, the journalist and publisher of what used to be the leading right-wing daily, FAZ. He, as a conservative, said once that Germans believed that the definition of truth-telling was not to take any account of anybody’s feelings and to hurt them. (Die Deutschen glauben nur das wahr ist, was keine Rücksicht auf Gefühle nimmt und verletzt)
So I hope that some milk of mutual human kindness and trust can flow at least among AfD members, if not between ethnic Germans at large: they will need it at Poitiers and Lepanto ahead.
Goodness me ,I think the Swiss I have met are far more brusque than the Germans I have encountered.
Did you get turned down by some pretty fraulein at some stage and has that coloured your opinion ?
I join in with Anonymous.
Been living here for 71 years and travel to ski resorts ( and elsewhere)for 52 years now, but never witnessed a situation like depicted by Reconquista. His/Her points are not totally off track, but refer to ancient clichés repeated over and over.
R. just missed to mention that Germans stop at red lights! How stupid is that!
Now go and throw a kleenex out your car window on an american highway or stop your car on fifth avenue….
Do German cyclists also stop at red lights? Please send them here to the UK, and they’re welcome to ours!
Not all of them. Cyclists are often much ruder than car drivers.
None of those “blemishes” you list sound all that critical. So what if a group of people like punctuality and cleanliness? So what if they like order and discipline? Perhaps the American diktat that the customer is always right places whim far above knowledge and experience.
None of those characteristics you describe sound all that bad. I think it’s rather nice knowing there’s a culture out there which values all of those traits. And who cares if there’s a flip side? There’s a flip side to everything.
(Sorry for the long quote Dymphna)
Page xxxv
https://archive.org/stream/ArthurBryantUnfinishedVictory1940V1/Arthur+Bryant+-+Unfinished+Victory+%281940%29+-+v1_djvu.txt
“Later, recalling that other racial mood born of the events which this book relates, I visited Germany and spoke very frankly with certain Germans, warning them of the inevitability of war with Britain if they persisted in their impatient and one-sided policy. I was treated with great kindness and consideration — the most so, it struck me, when I spoke most frankly.
I saw too a Germany strangely different from the hysterical land of shadows depicted by the news- papers and even more different from that other Germany -sad, sullen and divided — which I had
seen in the days of the Inflation sixteen years before. For it was a land which, for all the cruel and heart- rending miseries of the minorities tucked out of sight and hearing, appeared at unity with itself and in which the common man felt himself part of a great nation moving, as he supposed, proudly and gladly ‘towards a happier and assured goal. But, knowing what the plain German did not know of the blind, impatient and arrogant resolve of his rulers and the unswerving and inevitable answer to it of my countrymen, I could take little pleasure in the spectacle. For I knew that that goal was the crucifixion of Europe.
I returned to England, with a dying, desperate hope in my heart and none in my mind, seeing again and again in dreams two pictures. One was of a great lake close to the Austrian border where tens of thousands of children from the industrial cities of the north were rowing and swimming in the sunlight or camped beneath the pine trees, their faces gleaming with happiness and health and new-found knowledge of how to live. The other was of the stern face of the
German with whom I had pleaded long and earnestly for patience and understanding and who, carrying my words to his friend and ruler, could bring me back no other answer but that of the closed mind. The
crowds of German sightseers flowed past the windows as we spoke, as ceaselessly as the mountain river beyond, and, watching their faces, I knew that their minds were closed too. For in every one of them lay
the consciousness of the tragic occurrences told in these chapters and an obstinate, unreasoning resolve that never — not even if the course to prevent them made their repetition almost certain — would they
allow them to happen again. This book has been written in the hope and belief that my countrymen will see that they never do. It will not help to bring victory any nearer. But it may help to use that victory aright when it has been won for us by the valour and endurance of others. ”
The “tragic occurrences told in these chapters” he refers to are the events of WWI, the above book written just before the outbreak of WWII .
I am not trying to say one thing or another, just highlight the paradox of :
” An obstinate, unreasoning resolve that never — not even if the course to prevent them made their repetition almost certain — would they allow them to happen again.”
The shift towards multi-kulti after WWII to avoid a repetition of WWII might seem a new facet to that.
Not sure where that leaves us though.
?
Yes, I have witnessed this in France almost 45 years ago. They always talked about those behaviours with an ironic tone to it, like saying: how can they be punctual, disciplined a.o, Look at us,we are much cooler,not to mention our savoir vivre.
The flipside was: in a household of students, I introduced dishwashing with HOT water and detergent. And I politely withheld comments about their obviously nonexisting matinal grooming. Ever asked someone the way in a Paris street?You risk to get looks like you’ re from Mars.
The Germans I’ve had contact with have without exception been very pleasant. I recall a few years ago when on holiday in southern France meeting a lovely German family who helped my son no end practising his German.
After saying that, I recall another instance when I spent a couple of nights at a B and B in Devon. Two of the other guests were a German couple, very friendly, although I had to smile one morning at breakfast at the man’s response to the landlady’s listing of the various breads on offer, “Vot is seeded?” (We have something in Britain called ‘seeded bread’.)
Maybe that’s what troubles Reconquista – the directness of Germans?
@the various flavours of Anonymous, Plum, Manatthepub, etc::
[Personal insults redacted]: what you or I have or have not experienced with Germans is entirely irrelevant.
Because what matters for the fight against Islam is in my last three paras.
That is, the quality of interpersonal relations among ethnic Germans as written about self-critically year in, year out by ethnic Germans themselves in e.g., the FAZ let alone left-liberal sources.
But then you all have direct multiyear experience of Germany and monitor its media:-))
So migrants are something like compensation, towards which the emotions wound up under stricter social protocol can finally be released, because they aren’t Germans and so the more open approach is allowed ?
It is hard for foreigners to judge a different society because foreigners are almost always treated differently from how locals treat each other. Not necessarily better or worse, just differently. You would have to pretty much be German to really understand fully how it is to be German, the rest is impressions but only as we interpret them.
I am quite fast at discerning nationality of people by their aura alone, so will just add that the few Germans I have met ABROAD go from the traditional cliché you present (particularly older and proffessionals), through to younger families who are not far off having the air of middle class English. They almost all have a slightly different point of attention to their manner to say the English though. Hard to describe but very visible to me…sort of sharper and more demanding in a neutral sense (as in without judgement) but also with its own kind of clarity.
Who knows, but personally I do notice the gap of sentiment you are talking of. Going back to older (ancient) descriptions of German people, it was noted they seemed to act as if one. So maybe there is no gap really, maybe they are so close we miss the communication or it is taken for granted and not expressed much ?
Anyway, sorry to Germans for openly studying and scrutinising you like this…in English (but maybe not German) manners that is considered rude.
yes ,I do. Seven decades here and abroad.
Goodness me ,I have never yet met a German who fits your description.
I have met quite a few rude Swiss however and many tactless Englishmen.
“2000 years ago, my people’s ancestors defended me against the Romans.”
That’s an unfortunate start to the video. The tribes then living in Germany may have fought heroically against the Romans, but they also collaborated and cohabited peacefully; many became legionnaires themselves. Today the Roman ruins are preserved and carefully maintained. Reconstructions show the high level of civilization that the Romans introduced: interior plumbing, health care, social organization. Far from being looked on as a dark chapter of history, the period of Roman occupation is recognized as having provided important stimuli to the development of civilization in what is now Germany. As well, the Romans left a genetic imprint, too, so in a sense today’s Germans share in their biological as well as cultural ancestry.
What is now Germany was mostly not conquered by Rome
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borders_of_the_Roman_Empire
but there were migrations of northern tribes to Roman territory, some worked ok but others not.
The goths for example, who distantly originated in Sweden I think, but who were a germanic people. The Franks were also a germanic tribe, the southern half of France celts and others. It can be said that these northern tribes were instrumental in the fragmentation and loss of the western empire.
So there is definitely a different mindset, visible as north/south nowadays, between these peoples. The germanic tribes were understood as a teutonic people by Romans, disciplined natural warriors who abstained from indulgence. There are contemporary descriptions of the time which underline this reality.
Without denying the kind of civilisation Rome brought , the Romans also caused a lot of trouble, decimating the previous tribal format of much of Europe, they set the stage for understanding Europe as a single identity, which it is/isn’t and might be. The history of the time from before and to after the Roman period was one of battle and conquest ( though not continuous, certainly not infrequent) , the Romans just were better organised and were more bigly about it all.
But it is funny how she underlines her separateness from the south by mentioning Romans, I wonder how much other Germans have a sentiment like that.
Nice film by Alternative for Germany. Democratic in spirit and realistic about the enemies of European civilization.
This is a marvelous video, but I think it’s a shame that it’s even necessary. Haven’t Germans learned their history? Do they not know their own culture?
The invasion of Islam represents the replacement of vibrancy for a black hole, a gaping chasm of nothingness.
It’s not just the Germans, too few Westerners know their history.
That’s progress for you, sounds like everyone is trying to reach a triumphal timeless perfection… Marx had dabs on something like that… maybe he should be forgotten first ? Else last words before reaching a state of ignorant bliss “Thanks Marx”… very clever really because when it all goes to wherever he doesn’t get the blame and can be rediscovered all over again.
Maybe we should just remain ignorant and avoid learning that we don’t learn,we might actually come up with an original idea in the then spare time…. I had an idea for a circular object to help things move more easily, I think I will call it a whule.
The film could have also mentioned:
Winning world cups
Mastering everything, from making cars to winning penalty shootouts
The Klinsmann dive (forerunner of the Neymar roll)
Etc
A bit like “I am Israel”, although imo a bit less catchy.
Ich bin weiss, I am white…
https://youtu.be/i-iYBt9P6uo
A useful video. The Left want’s to destroy national pride, love for country and culture. And turn these successful developed countries into a melting pot of diversity, with as much warmth and camaraderie as a waiting room at any international airport.
Beautiful video! A marvel that should be shown to kids in schools, so that they at least get a whiff on how nice their country was until the recent years. And it can hardly be considered propaganda, as it mentions the bad things too, it’s raw facts really.
The one sided presentation of Hitler was historically false and omissive.