MerriamWebster online defines ‘to decide’ as: to make a final choice or judgment; to select as a course of action; to infer on the basis of evidence, to conclude; to bring to a definitive end; to induce to come to a choice.
I have always been of the opinion that Germans, in many ways, do not like to make decisions. It makes them feel a bit uncomfortable. Perhaps that is why decision making processes are so important to them. If those processes are well-constructed, are lived exactly, if the decision making options are filtered out stringently, the right decision will rise to the surface, will reveal itself.
We address this logic in the content on Persuasion, for persuasion and decision making are closely linked with one another. Intuition is defined as: quick and ready insight; immediate apprehension or cognition; knowledge or conviction gained by intuition; the power or faculty of attaining to direct knowledge or cognition without evident rational thought and inference. When I read this in MerriamWebster it occurred to me that Germans are very careful about trusting their intuition.
The German people has a different understanding (sense) of risk than the Americans. They aim to hold onto, to make secure. ‘Häusle bauen’ or literally to build their little house, meaning to establish permanence, predictability, security. The Germans purchase insurance policies of every kind.
They are disciplined in ‘putting money on the high shelf’, meaning ‘saving for a rainy day’. I believe that most Germans would prefer to be civil servants as a way of reducing to an absolute minimum risks inherent in life. Civil servant status is the ultimate in professional risk reduction.
Ugly surprises form a people’s sense of risk
When we make these comparisons we make them along a kind of bell, or Gaussian, curve. Of course there are many, very many, risk-taking entrepreneurs and business people, who are moving technology into new and fascinating areas. So there is a certain distribution. We’re interested in a comparison, however, of the two respective bell curves, the German and the American.
I can understand the German understanding of risk very well. It begins with Germany’s geographical situation. The Alps in the south provide a natural border defending them. But in the West, East and in the North the topography is flat. The German people were always surrounded by several countries, who, at different times, were friendly or not so friendly.
German lands were not blessed with opulent resources. War in Europe was commonplace in every century, practically in every generation. At times the Germans were the aggressors, at times the victims. One only need to open up a history book in order to read about insecurity, instability, and sudden change brought on by power struggles. All these have informed and formed the German understanding of risk.
What if my grandmother had been born in Bonn, Germany on April 3, 1900, instead of in Cincinnati, Ohio? She would have grown up in an upper class (bürgerlich) family in Wilhelmine Germany, the age of Kaiser Wilhelm II. The First World War erupted on August 1, 1914. At the end of the Great War in 1918 she would have been eighteen years old. Germany lost that war. Many young men on all sides died. Then hunger broke out in many parts of Germany, possibly in Bonn, also.
Her world came crashing down. The shame of a lost war. The Versailles Treaty and its one-sided, unfair reparations burdened on defeated Germany. Then the Weimar Republic and all of its political instability. The Rhineland, where Bonn is located, is occupied by foreign troops. Then the hyperinflation with workers transporting their weekly pay in wheelbarrows. Savings gone almost overnight. Then, with the economy finally improving, with hope on the horizon, the Wall Street crash of September 1929 ushering in the Great Depression.
Sense of measure gone
My grandmother is then thirty years old with three children. The political and social climate in Germany becomes more and more radicalized. The National Socialists (Nazis) have the say. The unemployed are put to work. The economy takes off. Political repression is plain for all to see, and for many to experience.
The Germans – not all, but most – trade their freedom in a totalitarian state for security. Those who do not go along are brutalized. My grandmother and her husband do their best to avoid any and all kinds of danger, do their best not to be noticed, to “keep their heads down”, not to go along with, but also not be against. A day doesn’t pass without them both having to make careful calculations about what they say and do.
What will all this lead to? What will the future bring? Events develop at a quickening pace. Everyday Germans have difficulty judging and calculating the situation. All sense of measure is gone. No one can speak openly. Prague falls. Austria is annexed. The invasion of Poland in September 1939. France is defeated within six weeks!
Then the invasion of Russia in June 1941. The USA enters the war. Germany is bombed from the air day in and day out. The Germans are defeated at Stalingrad in 1943. Patton and the Americans cross the Rhine at Remagen, just south of Bonn. The Russians take mile for mile of territory in the East. At the end of the war Germany lay in ruins.
My grandmother is forty-five years old. Her husband was killed on the Eastern front. A bombing raid on Bonn, the unimportant university-town on the Rhine, in October 1942 destroys their house. Grandmother and her children stay with relatives in Euskirchen not far away.
Lived in four epochs
Wilhelmine Germany up until and during World War I. The Weimar Republic after the war. Then then National Socialists. Post-1945 occupied again by foreign troops. The first few winters are bitter cold. There is a shortage of everything. But the Spring arrives. The Germans don’t ever give up so quickly. They build a country. A state is established. Their new currency is stable and strong.
They have friends, allies, an alliance which defends and protects their young West German state. People slowly but surely rebuild their lives. “Made in Germany.” My grandmother is fifty-five years old. She can begin to relax a bit. The experiences, the imprint, run deep, however. Four eras she lived in and through.
There would come another. My grandmother dies in March of 1994, after a long and difficult life. But in October 1990 she would experience the unification of the two German states. She, as well as Germans on both sides of the Berlin Wall, survived the Cold War.
For me this is all history, exciting, fascinating, present today. I am an American. I was not a part of this history, not even related to it. No relatives of mine fought in the Second World War. No bombs fell from the sky on the town and cities of my American parents or grandparents. Americans did not experience severe hunger. No foreign troops occupied American soil. No raping of women old and young. None of the terrible things, experieced either as perpetrator or victim.
A people’s understanding of risk (Risikoverständnis) – with that I mean what is in the soul of a people, deep down, linked to concrete experiences, based on concrete decisions – the German understanding of risk I can imagine, I can nachvollziehen (to trace back), I can understand. It is not the American understanding of risk.
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