Greed is great — an advertising slogan run by the electronics chain Saturn from 2002, shortly after the discount laws were repealed. It became one of the most argued-about slogans in German advertising history, blamed in public debate for a coarsening of commercial culture. The company eventually dropped it.
A campaign celebrating the pursuit of low prices caused a national argument about what the country had become.
German engineering practice treats the standard as a floor rather than a target, and specifications are commonly written above the required value. The norm states what is sufficient. A German specification states what the engineer was willing to sign.
Begründungspflicht. German courts and authorities are under a duty to give reasons. A judgment carries a Begründung — a grounding — as a mandatory part of the document, not a courtesy.
A decision without adequate reasons is defective as a decision, regardless of whether the outcome was right.
The reasoning is not an explanation of the ruling. It is part of it.
The words Made in Germany were imposed on German goods by the British Merchandise Marks Act of 1887, intended as a warning to consumers that the product was foreign and inferior. Within a generation it had become the opposite. An insult was turned into the most valuable country-of-origin mark in the world.
Berufung means vocation or calling — and the same word is used for the formal appointment of a professor to a chair. The word treats the taking up of a field as something one is called to rather than something one selects.
German bodies from the Bundestag to a works council operate under a written Verfahrensordnung governing who may put items on the agenda, in what order, and how a decision is taken. Control of the rules of procedure is understood as control of what can be decided.
What costs nothing is worth nothing. Said in German about free advice, free offers and heavy discounts. It reverses the usual direction of suspicion. The doubt attaches not to the expensive thing but to the cheap one.
Wertarbeit — value-work. Craftsmanship, but the compound names the value rather than the craft.
Qualitätsarbeit, Wertigkeit, solide, gediegen — four more German words of approval for a made thing, and none of them is about appearance.
Billig und schlecht — cheap and bad, spoken as a single phrase, as though the two were the same observation.
Literally: able to be travelled after. To be nachvollziehbar is to be such that another person can walk the same path and arrive at the same place.
English translates it as understandable or comprehensible, which loses the whole point. Those words describe a state in the listener. Nachvollziehbar describes a property of the reasoning — it can be retraced.
An argument that persuades but cannot be retraced has failed.
The Fachhochschule is a parallel higher education system, oriented to application and practice, with professors required to have years of professional experience outside the university. It is not a lesser university. It is a different route to the same depth, and German employers read the two differently rather than ranking them.