Wirklich? Really?: White? Or Whiter?

There are some things that are weird about living in an ethnohomogenous culture, or at least a nation that sees itself as ethnohomogenous, despite all evidence to the contrary.
This is from a German women's magazine and if you could read the small print on the right hand side of the page (don't bother trying because my camera doesn't have the resolution), you would see that this photo series is demonstrating makeup techniques on two skin tones.  The girl on the left is for all the ladies with light skin.   The girl on the right has the dark skin.  Which is crazy, because girl number two is barely showing a tan.
I'm not saying that when a North American magazine shows a blonde, a Latina and an African-American girl as the three "looks" of the Americas, they're really doing much better by the in-betweens and the little-bit-of-fusion girls. And a quick look at Elle Canada's Beauty section likewise shows a lot of pale faces.  It's just that white or whiter is definitely, undeniably, absolutely not an accurate representation of what Germany looks like today, and it's pretty disheartening that anyone would think it's okay to not even provide the barest minimum of glossy-magazine lip service to Germany's diversity.
Image from Für Sie

Word Up: die Schultüte

die Schultüte f school cone [cardboard cone filled with treats or small presents]


    You know that point in July where television stations start advertising school supplies and all the newspapers are bursting with bright primary-coloured flyers promising back-to-school sales?  As a kid, it feels like you're barely out of school and already everybody's revving up to put you back in.  Well, here in Germany, they have taken the spoonful-of-sugar philosophy to heart.  So alongside window displays with cartoon-scrawled backpacks and virgin sets of coloured pencils, there are rows of the raw materials for making Schultüte.
  At first glance, the huge stacks of bristol board cones to be found among the school supplies make it seem like the Germans, as part of their commitment to preserving traditional culture and all things old-timey (and postcard-perfect), are preparing to stock up on dunce caps for the school season.  Worry not, Charlie Brown.  Instead, these caps are going to be tipped upside down like an ice cream cone and lovingly filled with pencils, notebooks, and a whole lot of candy, dolled up with ribbons, bows and scrapbooking accessories and doled out by parents on the very first day of primary school.  Sorry, that means you're out of luck, Grade Twos.
To me, this seems like a pretty sweet deal.  There is nothing I would have love more on my first day of school than Gobstoppers and Popeye Sticks.  Instead, I distinctly remember rice pudding and raisins.  On the other hand, I'm sure teachers of Grade One must require some special training day to learn how to deal with kids suffering not only from the emotional strain of being forced to learn the alphabet but also experiencing some major sugar fallout.  Luckily, school in Germany only lasts 4 hours - from 9AM to 1PM - so at least teachers get the satisfaction of handing back still-twitching six-year-olds to their parents before the sugar rush has completely worn off.

Word Up: der Migrationshintergrund

Migrationshintergrund m immigrant heritage.  A person with at least one parent who is not of German heritage has a Migrationshintergrund

 I think it says a lot about German culture and value systems that there is a word to describe the cultural identity of a child for whom one parent is a first-generation German, and it's not just straight up "German."
Strange but true, Germans are really at home with casual racism.  People with Migrationshintergrund are painted with a broad brush in one direction: backward.  A number of Germans I have met - highly-educated, liberal, organic-food-growing and caftan-wearing Germans - seem to have gleaned all of their knowledge of  Turks or Egyptians or South Asians from colourized National Geographic photo editorials circa 1960.  Having read the accompanying descriptions of natives, habits and habitats, penned by whatever minor noble made the trek through the Sahara or Siam, they then stored up this information for future cross-cultural encounters and deemed themselves culturally sensitive.  On a tour of one of Germany's many castles, our tour guide tried to bond with a woman who looked vaguely Southeast Asian over Bollywood movies.  Yesterday my German teacher asked one of the Turkish students at what age Turkish women are expected to marry.  She's a biochemist, by the way, and she said 35.  That was not the answer the teacher was looking for.
When we first started watching TV here in Germany, there were ads for a day of international programming that one of the TV channels dubbed Tolerance Day.  Maybe it was a translation thing (marketing departments, put away your German-English dictionaries!), but to me shelling out cash for an ad campaign about tolerance is like patting yourself on the back for supporting "separate but equal" education or popping the champagne cork for universal male suffrage.  Diversity is not just agreeing to acknowledge that other cultural groups exist within your country, for better or for worse, especially when most people quietly err on the side of worse.  
But, please, Germany, stop assuming that all immigrants were living on the set of Aladdin before they showed up in your sparkling metropolises.  Germans, of all people, should be able to recognize that there are extremes within any culture, although maybe they know only too well how the zeal of the few can hypnotize the many.  Sure, without stereotypes, people seem a lot less orderly, but Germans should think about how nice their vacations to the US would be if waitresses stopped asking if their lederhosen is in the wash.

Image via disneybilder.com

Wirklich? Really?: Milka White and Rice

European brands have replaced both their R&D and their marketing departments with the idiomatic English dictionary.

Word Up: die Wohnung

die Wohnung f apartment, flat

   Apartment hunting in Germany is a different kettle of fish.  First of all, rental ads are written in cryptic acronyms that distill - down to the minimum number of letters - descriptions of how many rooms the apartment has (including bathrooms and kitchen), whether it's in a roof or not (chances are it is - our roof is three stories tall), and if you'll have to bring your own refrigerator.  Hiring a real estate agent to find you a rental and paying them through the nose to do so is pretty common (finally, that scene in Knocked Up where Seth Rogen uses Remax to find a bachelor pad makes sense - it all took place in Germany).  Deposits are insane - we dropped double our monthly rent as a security deposit plus first month in order to rent our place. Also, people are often expected to fit their own kitchen with everything from cabinets to stove - oh yeah, and including the kitchen sink.
    This state of affairs makes for really weird real estate reality TV shows.  Not that they are the best of TV in the first place, but I have enjoyed a good few hours of Property Virgins in my time - there's no better way to spend time that should be used to clean up your basement apartment than critiquing a stranger's impeccably decorated Arts and Crafts beachfront home with 2 bath.  From what I determined from German TV, there in this country there is also no such thing as staging, also known as prettying up an apartment for prospective buyers and any nationally syndicated television program that could possibly be posing as a buyer (If you watched Property Virgins, you'd have this vocab down pat.  That's why it's called The Learning Channel).  So, if you sit down to watch something like Vox's Mieten Wohnen Kaufen (Rent Live Own), you are essentially gearing up for 45 minutes of guided tours around empty, echoing white rooms.  The bathroom is whatever room has a toilet. The kitchen is the one with tile.
   The other thing about German real estate is that all the houses look the same.  For example, it's hard to tell if the stucco house we live in is 400 or 20 years old, or to tell the difference between our neighbourhood and one of the many "quaintly charming" towns Lonely Planet slavers over.  Basically the ideal German home is something that looks like a child's drawing - triangle roof, rectangular body, way too many little windows.  If you're rich, the drawing gets bigger.  There are no suburban Italianate villas or Tudor-style cottages, and rising from the building sites that can somehow still be found in downtown Stuttgart are even more of the same stucco monoliths.  Thus, when you are confronted with a half hour in the life of someone deciding between three essentially interchangeable white-walled apartments in three identical pastel-coloured stucco houses, the idea of real estate television really starts to fall apart at the seams.