Germany Archives - understand-culture

No Fear of the Closing Question

The sales trainer Martin Limbeck teaches what he calls hardselling. His book Das neue Hardselling has the subtitle Verkaufen heißt verkaufen – So kommen Sie zum Abschluss, selling means selling: this is how you get to the close. Its seventh edition appeared in 2023.

In 2015 his column in the financial magazine cash. ran under the headline Keine Angst vor der Abschlussfrage, no fear of the closing question. In his view, more deals are missed than closed. Der Durchschnittsverkäufer möchte auf keinen Fall ein „Nein“ von seinem potenziellen Kunden hören. The average salesperson does not want to hear a no from a potential customer at any price.

Limbeck urges salespeople to ask for the close because he sees them put the question off for fear of a no.

Psychological Pressure to Buy

German competition law long recognized the idea of a psychologischer Kaufzwang, a psychological compulsion to buy. A seller acted unfairly when gifts or the sales situation made customers believe that they had to buy something so as not to look ungrateful. The Chamber of Industry and Commerce in Frankfurt names an example: a prize draw for which the customer must enter the shop and ask a salesperson or the cashier for an entry card.

The idea has since lost ground. In 2017 the Higher Regional Court in Frankfurt held that psychological pressure to buy makes a sales practice unlawful allenfalls in besonders gelagerten Ausnahmefällen, at most in exceptional cases with special circumstances.

Advice That Sells Nothing

Each of Germany’s 16 states has a Verbraucherzentrale, a consumer advice center. Together they run about 200 local advice offices. They describe themselves as unabhängige, überwiegend öffentlich finanzierte, gemeinnützige Organisationen, independent, mainly publicly funded, non-profit organizations.

In its annual report for 2010, the center in Baden-Württemberg called its advice anbieterunabhängig, independent of any provider. One case in the report is a couple of doctors from Tübingen who came for advice on financing. They wanted to be advised independently. Die beiden möchten sich unabhängig beraten lassen.

The Vocabulary of Selling

jemandem etwas aufschwatzen
To chatter something onto someone. Duden: to talk someone into buying or accepting something. One of its examples is a magazine subscription bought at the front door from a sales representative.

jemandem etwas andrehen
To turn something onto someone. Duden: to talk someone into buying something, often something inferior or unnecessary. Its example is a vacuum cleaner.

der Klinkenputzer
The door-handle polisher. In its first meaning in Duden: a man who offers something for sale at the front door.

die Drückerkolonne
A gang of pushers. Duden defines a Drücker as a man who goes from door to door to sell something, especially magazine subscriptions. A Drückerkolonne is a crew of them. In 1998 the taz called the trade die organisierte Verantwortungslosigkeit, organized irresponsibility.

Es besteht kein Zwang, etwas zu kaufen.
There is no obligation to buy anything. Duden uses this sentence as its example for the word Zwang, compulsion.

Find the Ending Yourself

Bertolt Brecht wrote Der gute Mensch von Sezuan, The Good Person of Szechwan, between 1938 and 1941. It premiered at the Schauspielhaus in Zurich on 4 February 1943. The play ends with an epilogue spoken to the audience. Wir stehen selbst enttäuscht und sehn betroffen / Den Vorhang zu und alle Fragen offen. We stand here disappointed ourselves and see, dismayed, the curtain closed and all the questions open.

The only way out, the epilogue says, would be for the audience to think at once about how a good person can be helped to a good end. Verehrtes Publikum, los, such dir selbst den Schluß! Dear audience, go on, find the ending yourself!

The Spectator Must Decide

In his notes of 1930 on the opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, Bertolt Brecht set two forms of theater side by side in a table. In the dramatic form, the spectator is drawn into the action. In the epic form, er wird ihr gegenübergesetzt, he is set opposite it.

The epic form macht ihn zum Betrachter, makes him an observer. Where the dramatic form gives him experiences, the epic form vermittelt ihm Kenntnisse, gives him knowledge. Where the dramatic form allows him feelings, the epic form erzwingt von ihm Entscheidungen, forces decisions from him.

Historical Fever

In 1874 Friedrich Nietzsche published Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben, On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life. In the preface he writes daß wir alle an einem verzehrenden historischen Fieber leiden, that we all suffer from a consuming historical fever. He calls the historical sense of his time eine hypertrophische Tugend, an overgrown virtue.

Nur soweit die Historie dem Leben dient, wollen wir ihr dienen. We will serve history only as far as it serves life.

He expects most readers to object that his view is unworthy of the powerful historical trend of the age. That trend, he adds, had been noticeable seit zwei Menschenaltern unter den Deutschen namentlich, for two generations, especially among the Germans.

History and Consequences

On 12 March 1992 the Bundestag set up a commission of inquiry on the Aufarbeitung von Geschichte und Folgen der SED-Diktatur in Deutschland, the working through of the history and consequences of the SED dictatorship in Germany. It focused on analyzing the past and setting out the connections within the dictatorship. Its results and those of a second commission fill 32 volumes with about 30,000 printed pages.

On 10 July 2025 the Bundestag set up a commission of inquiry on the coronavirus pandemic. It is to produce ein Gesamtbild der Pandemie, ihrer Ursachen, Verläufe und Folgen, an overall picture of the pandemic, its causes, its course and its consequences. Its final report is due by 30 June 2027.

How the Present World Came to Be

The core curriculum for history at the Realschule, one type of secondary school, in North Rhine-Westphalia, in force since 2020, says what pupils gain from the subject. They perceive die historischen Wurzeln der Gegenwart, the historical roots of the present. They grasp das Gewordensein der gegenwärtigen Welt, the way the present world has come to be. In this way they learn sich in der Gegenwart zu orientieren, to find their way in the present.

There is no single English word for Gewordensein, the state of having become. The curriculum calls a reflected historical consciousness the central task of history teaching.

Heimat

In 1984 the ARD broadcast Heimat – Eine deutsche Chronik, Heimat: A German Chronicle, by Edgar Reitz. The work has eleven parts. It follows people from Schabbach, an invented village in the Hunsrück, from 1919 to 1982.

Reitz wanted to set authentic scenes against the American series Holocaust, which he found lacking in artistic truth. In 2022 Uwe Kammann, writing in epd medien, called the Schabbach chronicle eine kluge Reflexion über deutsche Geschichte von universeller Botschaft, a wise reflection on German history with a universal message.

The story ends in 1982, two years before the broadcast.