A Night at the Movies: The Campaign

After tonight, I've now seen three movies in theaters in Mannheim: "The Dark Knight Rises", "Brave" (or, as the Germans like to call it, "Merida: Legend of the Highlands"), and now "The Campaign". I watched those last two at the local cinema's weekly English Sneak Preview night, when they screen a movie—complete with American trailers and sans German subtitles—that's already out in America but hasn't yet been released in German/y. The twist is that they don't tell you the movie you're going to see until you get there, so there's a chance it will be a bust (they make up for this by charging less—only 5,90), but so far I've had pretty good luck.

I expected the Sneak nights (for some reason Germans like to shorten it to Sneak instead of Preview—don't ask) to be filled with Americans, and there are certainly a conspicuous number of native English speakers there, but I was blown away by the sheer number of Germans who prefer to watch movies in English. (I may have touched on this in an earlier post, but comedies especially are far more entertaining when you can hear the original actors, and most Germans I've talked to like watching movies in English for this reason.) As a matter of fact, I was the only American in my group on both of the Sneak nights I've been to, which has really turned out to be an advantage: when I'm aware that there are cultural references that my friends may not get, it makes me far more conscious of the subtle jokes in the movies that I watch. This wasn't really an issue for "Brave" (the only remarkable quirk of watching that movie with Germans was that they didn't realize that the character with the unintelligible Scottish accent was supposed to be unintelligible—they kept asking me what he was saying), but it certainly enhanced my viewing experience tonight. Here are just a few highlights from seeing "The Campaign" in Germany (there will probably be some spoilers):

- The theater always starts the English Sneak nights with a three-question quiz for prizes (T-shirts, free tickets and the like). The first question was incredibly easy: "Chuck Norris played a ranger in which US state?" But the Germans I was with were totally non-plussed. They've never heard of "Walker, Texas Ranger" here, which in retrospect isn't all that surprising.

- Just for some background on the movie itself: it centers on a Congressional election in North Carolina, with Will Ferrell playing Cam Brady, the incumbent, and Zach Galifianakis playing Marty Huggins, the unlikely challenger. The bad guys are two wealthy brothers in big business/campaign finance (Dan Aykroyd and John Lithgow—seriously, this cast is loaded), and if that's not a clear enough parody, their names are the Motch brothers. Of course, that not-so-subtle dig went over the heads of the audience here, since most Germans have no ideas who the Koch brothers are.

- Speaking of things going over the audience's collective head-space, there were a few jokes that should have gotten much bigger laughs but were either too subtle or too obscure for the German public. At one point Brady's campaign creates an ad that puts a positive spin on his affair by emphasizing the hotness of the girl he screwed and showing pictures of him shaking hands with Bill Clinton and Arnold Schwarzenegger—not sure the Germans got the whole "adulterous politicians" connection. There's also a nice Ted-Nugent-is-a-gun-nut joke that got nary a laugh and a mammy-archetype-subversion that didn't play nearly as well as it could have. But the saddest moment for me was when no one laughed at Huggins's wife's admission that she sometimes touches herself to Drew Carey on "The Price is Right"—I can understand Germans not knowing the show, but I figured that Carey would still be relatively well known in Europe.

- More Germans-are-uncomfortable-with-Jew-jokes goodness: Huggins starts off his first political speech by saying, "my dad taught me two things about making speeches: don't insult the Jews, and tell a good story," and I was quite literally the only person in the theater who laughed. On the plus side, a later scene where Huggins tries to interact with a rabbi in a synagogue went off much better.

- There were a few moments of self-parody that were close enough to German stereotypes of America that they got more slightly uncomfortable "ouch, that hits close to home" laughs than outright "oh, that's really funny" laughs. The most noticeable example came in the scene where Huggins shouts down Brady for writing a picture book in second grade about Rainbow Land, where "everything is free." Huggins then makes a statement to the effect of "distribution of wealth is evil," and the laughs in the theater were accompanied by mild groans that seemed to be asking, "wait a minute, are we sure Americans don't actually believe that?" I got a similar feeling during a scene that shows the Huggins family eating an inordinate amount of junk food and includes a shot of Marty drinking Twinkie filling through a Twizzler. Instead of laughs at the ludicrousness of it all, there were cries of outright disgust and groans that seemed to be asking, "wait a minute, are we sure Americans don't actually eat that?"

I'm sure there are a few more that I'm forgetting, but you get the general idea. Still, the most baffling thing about German movie theaters is the fact that there's assigned seating—it just seems like more of an inconvenience than anything. But on the plus side, I was able to get the American-style "salty" popcorn instead of the typical German sweet stuff this time around, which quenched a long-standing craving—now if only I can get my hands on some of that fake butter I'll be all set.

Five Countries in a Day, a Retro-Diary

Yesterday was one of those days that you can really only experience while traveling in Europe. I’m going Bill Simmons-style and giving you a retro-diary of arguably the best road trip of my life to date:

The Netherlands

08:00—Woke up on the floor of our room in the Jupiter Hotel, a few blocks away from Leidseplein (the clubbing center of Amsterdam, as long as you don’t preface that with the word “strip”). We had been squeezing four people into our two-person hotel room for the weekend, despite the suspicious – and often downright creepy – gaze of the hotel’s owner. I had thought ahead and brought a sleeping bag with me, effectively volunteering myself to sleep on the floor for the whole weekend. Foresight is not always the best thing to have.

9:15—After a hearty continental breakfast in the hotel lobby (all while avoiding eye contact with the owner), we checked out and piled into the rental car. The plan is to drive to Brussels, get some lunch there, and see what the city has to offer. None of us knows what to expect, beyond the fact that there are probably a lot of EU buildings there (for all intents and purposes, it’s the capital of the European Union).

 9:20—Five minutes outside of Amsterdam, and we’re already surrounded by cows. While the German countryside is dotted with a bunch of little towns and relatively little farmland, the Netherlands is all fields. In the hour or so that we drive on the Dutch highways, we go through an endless swarth of cow pastures and get to feast our eyes on some of those windmills this part of the world is so famous for.

Belgium

10:30—Belgium doesn’t look significantly different from the Netherlands, especially because we’re still in the Dutch-speaking (well, technically Flemish) part of Belgium, and thus the road signs pretty much look the same. There are just as many cows, too, but these ones are exceptionally muscular – apparently they’re “Belgian Blues”, which possess a genetic trait that increases the production of new muscle cells rather than simply causing the old cells to grow larger. Wikipedia says their meat is leaner, but all I know is they’re the most intense-looking cows I’ve ever seen.

12:00—After some confusion in the outskirts of Brussels, we find ourselves directly in front of the triumphal arch and, assuming we’ve made it to the city center, we park the car (free parking on Sundays in Holland and Belgium) and check it out. It’s basically Brussels’ version of Berlin’s Brandenburger Tor, except the wings of the monument actually function as museums (free entrance). There’s an awesome park (Parc du Cinquantenaire – we’re in the French part of the country now) on the other side of the arch, and there’s signs up for “La Garden Party”, where they set up a DJ booth, lawn chairs and food and drink vendors every Sunday during the summer. So far, Brussels looks pretty cool.

The triumphal arch, commemorating Belgium's independence.

La Garden Party looked like a pretty solid way to spend a lazy Sunday afternoon.

12:15—Well, maybe not that cool. We got directions to the city center, and for the first 15 minutes of the walk we pass nothing but EU and finance buildings. It looks kind of like downtown L.A., but with a lot less traffic and way more blue flags.

The Berlaymont building in Brussels' European District.

13:00—After we pass the EU buildings, things start looking nicer and nicer. We take a stroll through the Parc de Bruxelles, walk down a nice outdoor staircase, take pictures next to a giant umbrella sculpture, wind our way through some alleyways, and end up at the Grand Place. It’s fantastic. What’s more, they’re in the process of setting up the “Flower Carpet”, which fills the entire square and is only installed for five days every two years. It’ll be there from Wednesday to Sunday, which means I may need to come back to Brussels this weekend.

Town Hall, the centerpiece of Grand Place.

14:00—After refueling at a café overlooking the square, we check out some maps and postcards and realize that Brussels is home to the famous Manneken Pis (a statue of a boy peeing) and head out to look for it.

14:30—The Manneken Pis is easily the most anti-climactic monument I’ve ever seen. It’s tiny, and it is quite literally just a little boy taking a piss. It’s still insanely popular, but it’s kind of like the Mona Lisa in that the crowds dwarf the spectacle itself. In any case, I’m glad we stopped here because there’s a stand selling fresh escargot and a bar with Maredsous on tap. We get some snails and some beer, an underrated and underutilized combination.

It's kind of hard to see, but the Manneken Pis is in the shadows on the right side of the picture, urinating away.

So getting escargot from a street vendor may not have been the most hygienic choice—that big vat of cooked snails was definitely sitting in the sun all day.

Belgium in a nutshell.

15:30—We’re back at the car, and I’ve just eaten a delicious waffle with chocolate sauce at La Garden Party. It takes a bit of a complicated car ride through the city to get there, but we eventually make it over to the Atomium, which the Belgians built for the 1958 World’s Fair, Expo ’58. We were debating whether it has any actual chemical significance, and it happily turns out that it’s a model of an iron crystal’s unit cell. It also produces the opposite effect of the Manneken Pis – it’s way bigger than I expected and dominates the skyline around that area. Apparently there’s a really good view from the top, but we’re in full-blown money-saving mode right now, so we head back to the car and start driving toward Luxembourg.

Belgium in a slightly different nutshell.

Look carefully and you'll see the atomium lurking in the background like some creepy sci-fi mothership.

The atomium in all its chrome-y glory.

17:00—Quick tangent as we drive through Belgium again: I’m really proud of the system I’ve developed for my iPod. Since the rating system tends to stop being useful past four stars, I’ve begun making category-specific smart playlists that take advantage of rating rather than artist or genre. Right now, two stars means Top 40, and I’ve put together a solid playlist for this car ride just by changing the ratings on a bunch of songs. I spend the first 10 minutes of our drive adding 200 new songs to the Top 40 playlist.

France

19:00—It’s debatable whether we actually crossed the border into France at any point—I for one didn’t see any sign, but my friend swears he did—but if we did it was at about this time and only for 15 minutes. It happened while we taking the scenic route to Luxembourg, and regardless of whether we were actually in France at any point, I’m going to just say we were, largely because it’s crazy that we could just take a wrong turn and end up in France.

Luxembourg

19:30—Did you know that Luxembourg the country consists of more than just Luxembourg the city? We’ve been driving in Luxembourg for a few minutes now, and there’s still another 30 km to the city itself. Meanwhile, for a country that’s supposed to have the second-highest GDP per capita in the world (fun bit of trivia: number one is Qatar), Luxembourg sure has a lot of tractors – we’ve already seen five of them driving on the highway.

A Luxembourgish village, taken from the backseat of the car.

 20:00—Luxembourg City isn’t particularly large (at 94,000 inhabitants it’s only a third as large as Mannheim), and for the most part it’s not all that impressive. But the sunset over the gorge in the Old City has to be one of the most beautiful sights I’ve seen this weekend. We do a little bit of snooping around down there, but since it’s now officially getting dark we have to get out and find a place to eat.

Luxembourg is Gorges.

For some reason I can't find the name of this building online. But it overlooks the Pétrusse and looks awesome at sunset.

21:00—After a failed attempt to eat at a bar downtown (we at least got to try some Bofferding, which is a pleasantly non-descript Luxembourgish beer), we had to decide between eating at McDonald’s or Quick (the Belgian McDonald’s). We chose Quick for the novelty factor, and it was actually pretty decent, although the soda machine did have carbonated iced tea for some reason (yes, it’s as bad/weird as it sounds). After dinner we went back to the car and started off on the final leg of the day’s journey.

Some clever wallpaper in the bar's men's bathroom.

Germany

22:00—The rest of the trip is pretty hazy since I was asleep for about 90 percent of it. But at some point we crossed the border into Germany and our GPS started working again. (The rental car was pretty sweet, but for some reason its GPS didn’t work outside Germany. This made getting around Amsterdam and Brussels a little complicated.) I also remember stopping at a gas station and dropping off someone in the nearby town of Limburgerhof. But either way, I made it back to my apartment around 12:30 and promptly passed out.

An Extremely Outdated Update: Worms, Schwetzingen, Speyer

Since I don't have much else to say today (I'm going to Amsterdam in an hour), I'll just leave you with a sampling of some photos I took back in July during my bike trip around Mannheim. I was in Worms on Saturday (stayed the night there) and went down to Schwetzingen and Speyer on Sunday. A lot of very pretty, old towns, as you'll be able to see from the pictures. More updates to come after the weekend (including some more pictures from trips I took a long time ago)!

The dragon seems to be the "city mascot" of Worms (Berlin has a bear, for what that's worth). Oh, and that's just the Cathedral of Worms in the background.



A museum in Worms. And by museum I mean old rich estate where you can pay to go in and look at their fine china.



Worms Cathedral: the interior.

Worms has the most beautiful Jewish cemetery I've seen. It's also the oldest in Europe (graves from the 11th century!)

Oh, just some pigeons sitting on a statue of Martin Luther.



Yeah, there's a Mikvah in Worms. Not that there's anyone there to use it these days...




Again, Worms likes its dragons. And its biergartens, apparently.




It wouldn't be a weekend in Germany without a random Weinfest in front of a giant church.




The view from the Apollo Temple at Schwetzingen's Schlossgarten.



Contemplative-looking statues.




I think this is the Temple of Athena. That or some other Greek goddess.




You may be an extraordinarily wealthy German nobleman, but does your palace have a totally impractical and out-of-place mosque on its grounds? Didn't think so.




The actual schloss at Schwetzingen is actually kind of underwhelming after walking around the gardens there. Nice artsy photo, though, right?




I wish I could remember which artist this is, but he had a pretty cool exhibit in the orangerie at Schwetzingen.



The Speyer Dom, overlooking the Rhein in all its glory.



Speyer's got some nice old buildings.




Like I said...



The Jewish quarter in Speyer.



Speyer's synagogue: the hipster monument of German atrocities against the Jews -- this baby got burnt down during a progrom in the 1200s. Take that, Worms's still-standing synagogue that was abandoned during World War II.



This is like the fourth-most-famous church in Speyer.



A New Roommate (Whoa!) and the Kobe Show

After living alone in a giant apartment for almost two months, one of my roommates finally showed up last week. She’s one of about 20 North Carolinians studying abroad at the University of Mannheim this semester (there’s some sort of partnership between the state and the school), and despite her non-Germanity I like living with her so far.

The toughest thing about having a roommate is that it puts your own lifestyle in bas relief. She’s still in the throes of I-just-got-to-Germany-and-I-want-to-do-everything craziness, but even so she’s been putting me to shame on the sleeping front. She consistently gets home at about 2 or 3 a.m. and is out the door before I wake up in the morning. I, on the other hand, can barely make it to work by 9 unless I go to sleep before 11 (this is a hypothetical number – I still haven’t actually tried it). And by German standards, 9 is a pretty late start – most of the other interns I know start at 8, although in their labs everyone leaves at 4 and they’re not allowed to touch anything when they’re alone (whereas I had the distinct honor of closing up shop at 7 p.m. yesterday).

Still, there are perks to having a roommate, especially one who plays house in a decidedly Southern way: she refuses to let me help her cook or clean, she makes huge dinners and “forces” me to eat them, and this week she’s making biscuits – I just hope I don’t fall in love. We’ve even developed a Married-With-Children-style routine when I get home from work: I lay on the couch, put on some jazz and watch the Olympics while she tells me about her day and starts preparing dinner. I know I should be wary about assuming such stereotypical gender roles, but when the opportunity is presented to you it’s very hard not to be the man of the house.

But oh, the Olympics. The energy in Germany may not be quite as exciting as the Euro Cup, but I’m loving the Olympics just as much. While the Euro Cup was more a let’s-go-to-the-bars-and-watch kind of event, the Olympics is the ultimate background show. There’s usually news on the TV in the break room at work, which means that I get my hot chocolate (no decaf coffee in either machine – it’s a damn shame) and leave. But for the last two weeks I’ve been able to take a 15-minute break to drink two cups of hot chocolate and watch Croatian kayakers, Honduran handballers and a slew of other deliciously alliterative and obscure athletes. Likewise, the pre-gaming activities at our apartment have occurred against the constant backdrop of the London Aquatics Centre and Basketball Arena.

Last night London (that’s the roommate’s name) had some friends over for dinner while I ventured off to my weekly Stammtisch (I think the direct translation is regulars’ table – it’s just a meet-up at a bar) with the other BASF interns. When I got back home at 11:30 (again, early by their standards), the more inebriated of the bunch were heading off to a club, and a couple guys hung around to watch the second half of the US-Australia game before heading home.

There were four of us hanging out during the game – London, me, a German, and a guy from Scotland – and for the most part we just nibbled on breadsticks, drank wine and hung out. I was paying fairly close attention to the game, and the German guy also seemed to care (he’s actually a Celtics fan, for the same reason that I like Marseilles and Atletico Madrid: he chose them for Career Mode in NBA 2K6).

The best moment of the game, by far, was a two-minute stretch in the fourth quarter when Kobe went off. I love the Olympics because it gives me opportunities to view Kobe in the way Laker fans do – and I understand why this is their guy. Kobe hit a spot-up three, realized he was feeling it, and after a steal drained another one. Then he got back on D, took the ball off an Australian’s head, found his spot, and hit another. On the next play, he jacked up what looked like a 30-footer and proceeded to basically tackle an Australian player while going for a steal after the rebound. Three 3-pointers, a steal, a horrible brick and a horrible foul – it was a quintessential Kobe moment, and it left me smiling and shaking my head.

Bill Simmons talks about “irrational confidence” guys: basketball players like Robert Horry and Jason Terry who suddenly get hot and start playing at a level above their actual skill set. Well, if it’s possible for one of the 10 best players of all time to be an irrational confidence guy, then Kobe certainly comes close. He looked amazing for that one-minute stretch, and after the last three everyone in my living room – even the Scottish guy who didn’t give a shit about basketball – was mesmerized. If he had made that last three it would have brought the house down, and you can bet Kobe knew that when he put it up. The Celtics fan in me wanted to criticize the guy – this is the Lakers’ franchise player, after all – but the USA fan took over. I loved watching Kobe dominate. I loved the last shot. I loved the stupid foul to cap it all off. I loved being able to sit in a room with Europeans – and not even serious basketball fans – and watch them marvel at my country’s star player. I love Kobe, at least for the next week.

Americans on America

I don't know if it's the Olympics, the traveling or some latent form of home-sickness, but I've had nationalism on my mind quite a bit these days. The real impetus for me writing this post is this article, which has been making its way around the interwebs of late. It's an entertaining piece, but the way it's written made me start thinking about the way we process our time abroad.

The “most Americans” that this article addresses are of the same type that Europeans typically think of: brash, egocentric, ignorant and insular. My Roman CouchSurfing host outlined the typical influx of American university students during prime study-abroad time: they never leave the city center, party constantly, always frequent the same bars (including one that lets you play beer pong inside), and don’t learn a word of Italian. These are the “bad” American tourists – the ones that bring the US to Europe and refuse to interact with, let alone assimilate, any foreign cultures.

Manson, by contrast, is one of the “good” ones. Not only has he lived abroad, but he has actually made friends from other countries and learned other languages. He has talked to enough Europeans to understand some of the many cultural differences between their societies and ours. Most Europeans would have you believe that these types are exceedingly rare – one of the most common and frustratingly back-handed compliments I’ve received is that I’m “not the typical American,” the implication being that “typical” equates to “bad”.

The duality proposed by Manson’s article is an easy one to embrace because it gives you a clearly defined rule of thumb for visiting other countries: don’t be that guy, be this one. But the reality is that these stereotypes are just that: unrealistic and oversimplified to the point of insult. I’ve met Europeans (and Americans) who refuse to look past these two groups, and that prejudice can poison a cross-cultural exchange as severely as an American behaving “badly”.

What draws us to the “good” type as outlined in Manson’s article is its apparent espousal of a stance of infinite openness. We aspire to learn all of the nuances of another culture in a purely objective way, and this model seems to present that ideal. But in reality it’s not that simple. The very act of cross-cultural comparison requires a judgment, and we should stop fooling ourselves into thinking that it’s possible to avoid the subjective.

Manson's duality is thus not really about openness, but rather the extent to which an individual’s values conform to an “American” or “European” viewpoint. For a European who insists on holding to these stereotypes, a “good” American is only open-minded insofar as he agrees with European values. In Rome, I got the “not a typical American” compliment while discussing poverty and income disparity in the United States. But when I maintained that I still believe in the American Dream, I only received a condescending smirk.

The point here is that close-mindedness is not unique to Americans. Take this passage from a fantastic New Yorker piece about Chinese tourists in Europe for example:

[The tour guide] Li made a great show of acting out a Mediterranean life style: “Wake up slowly, brush teeth, make a cup of espresso, take in the aroma.” The crowd laughed. “With a pace like that, how can their economies keep growing? It’s impossible.” He added, “In this world, only when you have diligent, hardworking people will the nation’s economy grow.”

The Chinese tourists in this picture fully embody the "bad" type: they refuse to see the benefits of a Mediterranean lifestyle because they are too caught up in their own values, and it's easier to pass that judgment because these tourists are on a 10-day bus trip where they only speak Mandarin and go to Chinese restaurants. But if a Chinese tourist hangs out with Italians for six months and comes to the same conclusion, is that really a problem?

I’m worried that Americans who read Manson's article will react in one of two polarized ways when they go to Europe – either by rejecting instinctively an attack on American values or ingratiating themselves to a European way of thinking without serious reflection. For some reason, “Europe” (which really means Northern Europe) seems to be a trendy, pseudo-Utopian place for young American liberals. But there are problems with Germany, just as there are problems with the United States and every other country on Earth. I have to pay taxes for that awesome universal health care system they have here, even though I’m already covered by a better, private insurer through my program. For most Germans this is just part of the social contract, but for me it’s redundant and wasteful, and understanding that helped me realize why American healthcare reform had to pass in the way it did.

These are the kinds of discussions that we need to have while we’re abroad. If you’re going to blindly accept the values of the country you’re in, then you’re not going to develop as an individual any more than you would if you didn't expose yourself to those values. To get the most out of your time abroad, it helps to straddle that line and not worry about being “bad”.

Another Extremely Brief Update: Dresden and Prague

I want to keep putting up posts on a daily basis, so here's some pictures from a couple weekends ago just to keep you all sated. I was in Dresden from Thursday to Saturday then Prague from Saturday to Sunday. Both exceedingly beautiful cities, but you can see for yourself:

Dresden is a classy looking city.

Dresden's Frauenkirche from the outside...

...And from the inside.

Dresden's Zwinger. August der Stark built this baby for his daughter's wedding. If nothing else, he was definitely an extravagant guy. 

Sunset over Prague.

Just some people taking pictures of each other from Vysehrad's fortifications.

And this is why they were taking pictures from there.

All these people are looking at a clock in Prague's main square. Yeah, it was a nice clock, but still.

It's almost impossible to get a good full-building picture of the Jerusalem Synagogue thanks to its location in the middle of a narrow street. Still pretty awesome, though.

More updates to come in the next few days, including pictures from my trip to Rome and some more general reflections on various things.

A Meta-Analysis of Pat-Down Methods at Various European Institutions

In the realm of airport security, I am what they (and by they, I mean me) call an "opt-in" pat-downee. Due to my body's, ahem, disagreement with metal detectors and my mind's inherent distrust of scatter-back X-rays, I find myself at the receiving end of quite a few pairs of probing hands, which makes me something like a pat-down connoisseur, if that were actually thing.

This past weekend I flew from Hahn Airport (RyanAir insists on calling it Frankfurt-Hahn, which is like calling PVD Airport Providence-Boston if Providence were an empty field) to Rome-Ciampino, which gave me the opportunity to experience airport security in two fully new places and led me to realize that the pat-down is in fact a remarkable predictor/reflector of a country's culture.

Prior to this year, I had only had to avoid metal detectors in the United States and Israel. Strangely—either despite or because of the added security—I had never been patted down in Israel: apparently if you look skinny, white and Jewish enough saying you have a pacemaker gives you a free pass. (I had the same experience on this trip when I entered the Vatican. Had I the foresight and ambition, I could have easily smuggled a bomb into St. Peter's Basilica. Twice.) I did get a pat-down on my layover in Dublin, but it must have been unremarkable, since I have no recollection of the event.

In any case, if you've ever been patted down in an American airport you're familiar with some of the pageantry. As the TSA has come under more scrutiny, it has become more and more rigorous in its pat-down protocol. From the standardized summons ("male assist!") to the well-rehearsed spiel ("I'm going to run my hands up your leg until I feel resistance, then back down"), the pre-meditated nature of the ritual makes you realize how many boring seminars and team-building exercises must have been required to perfect it.

In retrospect, two things make the TSA pat-down quintessentially American. For one, Americans are the only pat-downers I've seen that will actually tell you what they're going to do to you. It makes sense, though—for an American, communication is the essential ingredient for any successful relationship, be it professional, romantic, or just with a man who is about to feel you up in a totally non-sexual way. We're expressive and emotive, and we can deal with most things as long as we have a verbal warning beforehand, even if it is the totally bizarre and seemingly unnecessary finger-along-the-inside-of-your-waistline. Germans and Italians, on the other hand, are not as communication-obsessed. They're not really into small talk, and the Italians especially aren't going to give you any warning when they're about to go for your genitals.

And on the note of genital contact, you can get a fascinating amount of insight into the sexual nature of a society just based on how comfortable its security agents are patting down your crotch region. The Italians have very little respect for personal space and will admit to you without much thought that they are lecherous and immature and proud of it. So, not surprisingly, the Italian pat-down consists of a cursory brush down the front of the shirt followed by a rub-down-and-tug-up in the front and back crotchal regions. The pat-down stops there, too—they don't go past the knee and certainly have no interest in making you take off your shoes.

The Germans, on the other hand, are the exact opposite. They're as uncomfortable discussing sex as the most conservative American, and they are the only Europeans I've met so far (although I've heard this is similar throughout Northern Europe) that greet members of the opposite sex with a handshake rather than a kiss. Thus, the German pat-down conspicuously avoids the genital area. The security officials there put a lot of effort into the rest of the body, putting pressure on the back and squeezing the feet to the point of foot-rub-intimacy, but when it comes to the pants they back off, starting at an arbitrary spot slightly above the knee and then just going down from there. It's a startling moment, because after getting a pat-down in America you realize how much the Germans are leaving on the table from an efficiency/invasion-of-personal-space standpoint.

And that's the other thing about American pat-downers: these guys don't slack off. Like any other job in the US, you have to take yourself seriously when you're working airport security. Not only is the TSA thorough to the point of paranoia (I still have no idea what those glove-scanning machines are for), but it seems to have drilled its employees enough that you will never get a lackluster pat-down from a TSA official. For all of our talk of German bureaucracy and efficiency, we Americans really underestimate our own excellence in those departments. The Germans take themselves seriously, but they back off when it comes to an uncomfortable area such as the penis or the Holocaust—they're still too proper and dignified to offend people's sensibilities. Americans, on the other hand, don't give a flying fuck about sensibilities. Even though we take our privacy very seriously, when a job needs to get done we are willing to sacrifice almost anything in order to make it the best, and I am willing to state that the American pat-down is without a doubt the best I've had. It's got the full-body grope, the foot rub, the unexplainable technology, and even the uncomfortable genital contact. And unlike the Italian pat-down, I can say with confidence that that awkward contact comes from a place of national security rather than sexually charged curiosity. USA! indeed.

A Much More Benign Invasion of Dresden

You make be asking yourself, 'how is it that Nathan came to Germany in the first place?' Well, despite my refusal to write about it (more on that later), I'm working as an intern at BASF, also known as the largest chemical company in the world. My internship is provided for and partially funded by the DAAD, which is the German governmental bureau overseeing all of the country's academic exchange programs. As a (mandatory) token of my appreciation for the scholarship they gave me, I attended a DAAD conference in Dresden last weekend to give them an opportunity to convince me to work and study in Germany.

I arrived in Dresden at 8 a.m. on Thursday after a four-hour (yes, we left at 4 in the morning) Mitfahrgelegenheit from Mannheim. The city itself is very beautiful, but I think I'll leave that discussion for another post. Because I'm sure you're way more interested in hearing about this conference, anyways. And what a conference it was! DAAD is providing funding for about 500 students and recent graduates this summer (including 100 who are working in industry like myself), and it splits those people between two conferences in Germany. In the past, there was only one (in Heidelberg), but they decided to tack on another this year because we've got record participation numbers. So about 250 of us wound up in Dresden for the three-day-two-night affair.

These official conferences tend to have a relatively conspicuous agenda, and this one was no different. I would say there were two main reasons DAAD brought us to Dresden:

1. To pump us up and get us really excited about being in Germany.
2. To shove a bunch of pamphlets about graduate school/internships in Germany down our throats

That second one is not all that surprising. Like I said, DAAD oversees all of the academic exchanges in Germany, and that includes way more than a program for college kids to work in an academic lab for a summer or graduates to work in an industry lab for six months. Add to that the fact that the Technical University of Dresden got co-sponsoring credit for the weekend, and we were in for a good deal of career fairing and presentations. It wasn't too bad, though: I did get a pack of mints and two BASF tote bags out of the weekend.

But the DAAD's attempts to make us excited about Germany were a little strange. It's not that they weren't effective -- three former DAAD participants all gave talks about their time here, and it made me want to do nothing but hang out with Germans -- but that it came so late in the game. I'm in Germany for six months, which makes me one of the outliers of this program. All of the undergraduates are only here for the summer, and a lot of industry interns are going back to grad school in August, which means that a meeting during the last weekend of July meant a meeting at the tail end of most people's programs. One of my friends from here finished work the day before the conference. So while I appreciated the presentations about how awesome it is to be living in Germany and how much we need to take advantage of it, for the most part it was just an awkward reminder of the fact that people were leaving in less than a month. If I had been leaving earlier, I might have even been pissed.

In any case, for my purposes the weekend was a success. In addition to the meetings and presentations, we got a walking tour of the city, a chance to meet people working all over Germany, a lot of free time and an awesome four-course dinner complete with spit-roasted whole suckling pigs and maßes that were shaped like giant Stella Artois glasses (rather than the usual liter mug). I also got to present my research, which was pretty cool, especially considering I got a free DAAD flash drive out of it.

So all in all a good time. I'll put up some pictures and details of my trip next time.

Reading Nietzsche in Germany: The Antichrist

A few weeks ago I scoured the Kindle library and downloaded every free, copyright-expired book I could find. That collection included several works by Nietzsche, who's one of those guys that I've always wanted to read but never got around to. Well, a nine-hour train ride from Prague to Mannheim gave me a nice excuse to give it a shot. The Antichrist is probably not the best book to start with, but it's short, which is often as good a reason as any. There's really no reason for me to be posting this to my blog, but I wanted to process the book in writing after finishing it, and since I haven't posted on here for a while I figured you guys will probably read anything, even my boring summary of a German philosopher's diatribe against Paul. And on a more serious note, I typically like to talk through books a bit when I finish them, so maybe some of you have read The Antichrist and can give me your thoughts. Anywho:

The Antichrist is, as the title would suggest, a critique of Christianity through a quasi-historical lens. Now, I don't know all that much about Nietzsche's philosophy, but if I had to sum up the bit I do know, I would use the phrase 'life-affirming.' Nietzsche is at heart a Classicist with an inflated sense of chivalry and derring-do, which means that he disdains any form of thought that deemphasizes or weakens glory, power and any other sign of a strong nation or individual. Nietzsche is often interpreted as an über White Male racist, but his arguments are a bit more nuanced than that -- he believes in helping the poor (this is included in his concept of real manliness), but he openly despises the concept that 'the meek shall inherit,' which gets into his critique of Christianity.

Nietzsche begins his discussion of Christianity with a glance at ancient religions. The long-and-short of it is that nations in Greco-Roman times had gods whose deeds and miracles were a direct consequence of their peoples' power -- any strong nation by consequence had a strong god. This meant that, in the conquestatorial ancient world, nations that were conquered would typically give up their own gods to honor those that were powerful enough to subdue them. But there was one exception: those pesky Jews. When the Romans conquered the Israelites, the Jews refused to acknowledge that their god had been defeated and instead invented a system whereby reality was inverted: the Israelite god was still strong, even omnipotent, but political reality no longer reflected that fact. Devotion to the now-capital-G God became an act of subversion and a denial of the reality of the Israelites' weakness. Jewish 'reality' sees its conquering nations as transient and weak, and the continued survival of Jews (even in a constantly subjugated class) as a sign of their own power. The problem with this view for Nietzsche is not even so much that it's a lie, but that it's a lie born from ressentiment (the French for resentment). That is to say that the Jewish ego refuses to acknowledge its subordinate fate and sets up a whole system in which Judaism becomes morally superior to its conquerors, allowing Jews to freely judge, hate and condemn non-believers. The bottom line is that, to give power to the weak, one must make use of a moral system that lies outside of political reality, and this action will necessarily breed tension and outright hate between different subsets of society.

Jesus attempts to undo the evil of Jewish morality by adopting a stance of infinite openness -- he rejects the invented power of the Israelite priesthood (for Nietzsche, who can be quite the conspiracy theorist, Jewish morals were invented solely to keep power in the hands of the Kohanim) and instead advocates a philosophy based on innocence. Jesus does not seek to redefine reality, he is simply ignorant of it. He does not care about Jews and Romans, right and wrong, good and evil. He approaches life with a childlike openness and curiosity, and Nietzsche has some respect for his Buddha-like actions, especially because they so deeply angers the Jewish establishment. Thus, Christianity as a phenomenon outside of politics -- as an approach to life that is universal -- is for Nietzsche an acceptable and perhaps even laudable idea. But for the average early Christian (a member of the lower castes), it is not easy to completely ignore political reality at all times.

Things go from strained to impossible when Paul comes on the scene: by shifting Jesus from 'righteous man to emulate' to 'untouchable divine ideal,' Paul makes the poor even more conscious of their struggles. When Jesus enters into the godhead, when he dies for the world's sins, he is now beholden to the people -- in a just world, the oppressed believer cannot be truly oppressed. Thus, the need arises for another revision of reality, and Paul's theodicy is much more earth-shattering than that of the Jews. While the Jews responded to their subjugation by developing a subversive and insular morality, Paul wants Christianity to appeal universally, and rather than inverting the world he develops an entirely new one -- the afterlife. Through a system of heavenly rewards and punishments, material reality is deemed meaningless, and devotion to God(and thereby to the Christian priesthood) will earn you a host of benefits that you will never see in this lifetime. Even worse for Nietzsche, the fact that you suffer (and even cause yourself to suffer) is actually a good omen for this heavenly world to come. Christianity embraces and elevates suffering while resenting and rejecting strength, and thus presents itself as a religion of 'world-rejection' completely contrary to Nietzsche.

Nietzsche goes on to say that, during the Renaissance, Christianity briefly threw off its shackles of pity to bask in some of its own glory. Of course, Martin Luther comes along to rein things in, attacking the 'excesses' of the Church and making German Protestantism as the true successor of Paulian Christianity (leading to Nietzsche's utter loathing of his home country).

The Antichrist is, if nothing else, an entertaining read -- Nietzsche is incredibly adept at getting his points across in an engaging way. And I think there's something to be said for the fact that, unlike Freud, who simply attacks religion because it is built on an illusion, Nietzsche has something to say about why Christianity in particular deserves to be attacked. Now, whether belief in an afterlife genuinely impairs your ability to live in the world is another question, and one that I should probably put to some Christians.

I'll probably move onto Beyond Good & Evil next. In fact, now that I think about it it may be a good idea for me to write about all the books I finish while I'm here, just so I can indulge myself as much as possible.