Saturday, October 27, 2012

The concept of 'openness' in Germany and the USA.



We’ve all heard the stereotypes. Something like “Germans are all so closed off and private” or “Americans are such loud and shallow people”… “Germans never smile” or “sometimes Americans seem too ‘friendly’, it can be off putting…”

Our concepts of openness and privacy come off as quite different, and often lead to unfair judgments being made. Yet are our values of openness and privacy really that different? Let’s look at the concept of friendship to help illustrate this comparison.

Friendship. Freundschaft.
Both words have the same dictionary definition, yet what is considered a “freundschaft” in Germany is not the same as its American counterpart.

Here, becoming ‘friends’ with someone is often as simple as knowing the same person, sitting next to each other in class, or even clicking “send request” on facebook. …“My friend knows her!”, “A friend of mine has that-”, “One of my friends posted such-and-such on facebook”…
We call so many of our acquaintances our ‘friends’, yet how well to do we really know them? And where is the line drawn between friendship and acquaintance? In American society, it can often become quite blurred.

In Germany, freundschaft can be much different. It involves a serious investment on both sides. If something stressful happens in your life, your friend is there for you and vice versa. If you need to talk, your friend will make time to listen and if you want to hang out, your your friends will be sure to make time. Friends are very open to and trusting with each other as well and rarely keep anything from each other. It takes a little while to actually become “friends” with someone, but after that you’ll probably be friends for life.

This is not to say either meaning is better, or that Americans are shallow, friendless people to the German eye, just that the word ‘acquaintance’ just doesn’t have much of a place in our society. And again, this is also not to say all Americans have such “friends”­; I’m American and find myself leaning more to the German side of the definition. It is simply, as our instructor Sabine said, a different social code. Just like the notion that Americans can be very superficially friendly and smiley, even to those they don’t know, or the assumption that Germans are cold and closed off.
We’re both closed off to an equal extent, it’s just that Americans keep their personal lives personal through the use of “small talk” (leading to accusations of superficiality) and Germans don’t really use such a social device (leading to accusations of being cold and closed off).

Neither culture should be considered more superficial or closed off than the other, and upon consideration, we’re not that different after all. It just comes down to different social codes.

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