It is very rare to find a German who will break rank and go against other Germans. It’s just not their way. I only saw it personally twice.
Once I saw a young guy trying to ride a bike down the sidewalk, but an older man was holding the seat from underneath. At first I thought the old man was assisting the guy in learning how to ride a bike, but the guy was too old for that, it didn’t add up. Then I realized the old guy was making a citizen’s arrest of the younger man for breaking the law/rules (rules are more popular in Germany than almost anywhere, with the possible exception of Singapore) and cycling on the sidewalk. It looked like they were muttering at each other.
Suddenly, the young man broke free from the old man’s grip and yelled back over his shoulder angrily as he sped away from the humiliating scene: “Du alter Wichser!” (“You old jerkoff!”)
Instead of telling you my second firsthand story, I’ll tell you a thirdhand one I heard from my friend Linda, who was herself retelling it.
Her favorite professor in college was named Fabelhaft. Now, Professor Fabelhaft had fled the Nazis and come to America to build a new life. Germans are often good at teaching German, since they speak it natively, so that’s what he did. But with a measure of ambivalence, for obvious reasons. He expatriated himself from Germany because it had become a genocidal authoritarian state (again). He probably got some comfort out of teaching foreigners the great literature of a once-great culture, his own lost one.
Being a German professor meant that, unfortunately, he had to travel to Germany sometimes (once the coast was clear, of course, and we had won the war). Once while Professor Fabelhaft was visiting his homeland, decades after having left, he found himself waiting at a crosswalk with some other people. The signal was “do-not-walk” red. Rot, auf Deutsch.
Looking to the left then the right, he ascertained for himself that no cars were coming. So he did as he would normally do back home in the United States, and started to cross the street. No one followed his lead…
The picture of a group of adult Germans standing on a corner staring straight ahead with no car traffic anywhere as far as the eye can see is jarring, because you are looking at something like a “street-theater” enacting the meaning of Blind Obedience. The non-self-trusting adults you see before you are the traces left over from the last dictatorship. So you get an uncanny feeling when you see them standing there not unlike penguins on an ice floe. But these penguins’ faces betray a smoldering resentment. Somewhere inside they know it is absurd to trust the electric sign over their own eyes, but they don’t have the wherewithal to do anything about it. They’re trapped.
A rule-breaker in their midst is intolerable to them. “Können Sie nicht sehen, dass es rot ist?” yelled a woman from the curb, repeating the exact question the Germans use every time on someone who dares to disobey the crosswalk signal. “Can’t you see it’s red?”
Professor Fabelhaft whipped his head around and yelled back at her: “Können Sie nicht sehen, dass ich kein bescheuerter Deutscher bin, wie Sie?”
“Can’t you see that I’m not a stupid German like you?”
And then he completed his self-approved crossing of the street.
