In a YouGov survey of November 2016, three in four Germans said they could tell a close friend that he or she drinks too much. Just as many could tell a friend that they hold a different opinion on an important topic. Other things are harder to say. 52 percent could not tell a female friend that she does not look good. 40 percent could not tell a close friend that he is a bad father. In a YouGov values study of 2011, 60 percent named honesty as a quality especially close to their hearts, more than any other.
friendship
Three Days, Until Sunset
In Friedrich Schiller’s ballad Die Bürgschaft, published in 1799, a man condemned to death asks the tyrant: Ich flehe dich um drei Tage Zeit, I beg you for three days’ time. His friend stays behind as a pledge and will die if he does not return. On the way back, floods and robbers hold him up. He keeps going, because the bloody tyrant must not be able to boast daß der Freund dem Freunde gebrochen die Pflicht, that the friend broke his duty to the friend. Und die Sonne geht unter, da steht er am Tor. And the sun is setting as he stands at the gate. Da bin ich, für den er gebürget! Here I am, the one he stood bail for! The tyrant concludes: Und die Treue, sie ist doch kein leerer Wahn. And loyalty is not an empty illusion after all.
Everyone Has Secrets
In Die Metaphysik der Sitten of 1797, Immanuel Kant writes about friendship. A person feels a strong need to open up to others. But fear of misuse forces him to keep a good part of his judgments, above all about other people, locked inside himself. Ein jeder Mensch hat Geheimnisse und darf sich nicht blindlings Anderen anvertrauen. Every person has secrets and may not confide in others blindly. Moral friendship, Kant writes, ist das völlige Vertrauen zweier Personen in wechselseitiger Eröffnung ihrer geheimen Urteile und Empfindungen, is the complete trust of two persons in opening their secret judgments and feelings to each other. A confidant with these qualities is rare, Kant says, as rare as a black swan. Yet such moral friendship does exist now and then.
A Friendship in Sie
The friendship between Goethe and Schiller is one of the best known in German literature. They addressed each other as Sie. Goethe told Schiller: Sie haben mir eine zweite Jugend verschafft und mich wieder zum Dichter gemacht. You have given me a second youth and made me a poet again. The music writer Graham Johnson notes that Goethe never said du even to Schiller. Goethe did move to du with the composer Carl Friedrich Zelter. This happened in 1812, when Zelter’s stepson had shot himself. In his reply to Zelter’s letter, Goethe addressed him for the first time with the brotherly du.
Stammtisch
der Stammtisch — the regulars’ table. The same group meets at the same pub on a regular day. Duden defines it as a table in a restaurant where a circle of regulars meets regularly, and which is usually reserved for them. Traditionally, a sign on the table marks the reservation. The word also has a dismissive use. Stammtischpolitik, Stammtisch politics, means simplified political talk.
The Office
The hit TV series The Office, which originated in the UK, now exists in nine different versions adapted to the individual languages and tastes of the American, French, German, French Canadian, Chilean, Swedish, and Israeli people as well. The U.S. and German versions are by far the most successful and longest running of the lot.
That a mockumentary show about everyday office life should have to be adapted so many times to fit tastes across cultures, in spite of keeping a similar structure, set of characters, and setting speaks volumes about the importance of minor cultural differences in such a mundane setting.
Here, in broad strokes, are some of the chief differences. In the British version, nobody is working, nobody has a happy relationship, everyone looks terrible, and everybody is depressed.
In the French version, nobody is working but even the idiots look good, and everybody seems possessed of an intriguing private life. In the German version, actual work is visibly being done, and most of the staff is coupled up.
The American version most clearly shows the staff typically working, and places emphasis on their relationships outside of the office, highlighting the reality that many of them have relatively strong relationships outside of the workplace as well. Especially clear are the tactics of Michael Scott to be the best friend of everyone in the office, in spite of being their boss and having to make the tough decisions which don’t make everyone happy.
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUcS4DrExOo[/embedyt]His German counterpart, Berndt Stromberg, also seems to value the attention of his employees over his actual tasks, but clearly does not want to be everybody’s friend.
True Friends
If to consult is to provide advice, then that advice might, perhaps should, include what the customer needs to hear, but does not want to hear. A fine line. How to walk it? To withhold that advice could mean to underserve, or even damage, the customer. To provide that advice, however, could damage the relationship.
If true friends are those who tell you what you need to hear, but surely you do not want to hear, at the risk of damaging or destroying the friendship, aren’t true suppliers-vendors-consultants those who do the same?
Joe Louis and Max Schmeling
Not many people know of the great friendship between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling, at their time the world’s greatest boxers.
June 19, 1936. In famed Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. The American Joe Louis versus the German Max Schmeling. Their first of two fights. Louis undefeated 24-0 and never knocked down, hits the canvas in the twelfth round. The fight is over.
Round 12 starts at 27:27. At 29:27 Louis is defenseless. He goes down. The referee ends the fight. Schmeling rushes over to help Joe Louis. Schmeling stays with Louis all the way over to his corner of the ring. Schmeling’s people have to literally pull him away from Joe Louis.
Among the attendees of the fight was Langston Hughes, a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance and a noted literary figure. Hughes described the national reaction to Louis’ defeat in these terms:
“I walked down Seventh Avenue and saw grown men weeping like children, and women sitting in the curbs with their head in their hands. All across the country that night when the news came that Joe was knocked out, people cried.”
Poet and author Maya Angelou, recounted her recollection. A young Angelou had listened to the fight over the radio in her uncle’s country store in rural Arkansas. While Louis was on the ropes,
“My race groaned. It was our people falling. It was another lynching, yet another black man hanging on a tree …. this might be the end of the world. If Joe lost we were back in slavery and beyond help. It would all be true, the accusations that we were lower types of human beings. Only a little higher than the apes.”
June 22, 1938 – two years from the day Louis had won the world heavyweight title – the fighters meet once again in a sold-out Yankee Stadium in New York City.
Louis defeats Schmeling in the very first round. Knowing what a true and loyal friend Schmeling was to become to Joe Louis at the end of Louis’ life, it breaks your heart to see how helpless Max Schmeling was in the final seconds of this first round.
After retiring from the ring, Schmeling purchased a Coca- Cola bottling and distribution franchise in Hamburg in 1948, the first in Germany after World War II.
Schmeling reached out and developed a friendship with Louis after their boxing careers ended and provided financial assistance to his former foe in the 1950s. He also paid for part of the funeral arrangements when Louis died in 1981. Max Schmeling was one of the pallbearers.
“It wasn’t until after World War II that I saw him again,” Louis said in his autobiography. “We hugged each other and we’re real friendly and kept in touch by phone.”
The battles between Louis, a black man, and Schmeling came to symbolize for some the coming struggle between Hitler’s Third Reich and the Allies in World War II. Although Hitler had praised Schmeling after the first fight, Schmeling was not an admirer of the German leader and refused to join the Nazi party.
Schmeling, who served as a German paratrooper in World War II, later received an award from the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation for risking his life to hide two Jewish brothers during the Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938, when Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues were attacked and destroyed by Nazis.
The boys, Henri and Werner Lewin, made their way to the U.S., where Henri became a hotel owner. Schmeling kept his act of courage secret. Henri Lewin revealed it at a dinner honoring the former champion in 1989:
“He risked his life for us. Our lives weren’t worth a penny,” Lewin said in a 2002 interview with the Jewish Bulletin of Northern California. “I said, ‘If this is a Nazi, he’s a good Nazi. But I want you to know one thing: I wouldn’t be sitting here today if it wasn’t for this Nazi.'”
Max Schmeling never joined the Nazi Party.
August 9, 1973. Legendary boxers and great friends, Max Schmeling and Joe Louis meet in New York, as Schmeling arrives for visit.
This History Channel documentary is well worth watching.
You not you
For “you” the German language has both and an informal word: Sie and Du. It is typical for German colleagues, even those who work well together and have known each other for many years to use the Sie-Form. The Knigge – Germany’s best known books on proper behavior, first pubished in 1788 by Baron Adolph Knigge – recommends the Sie-Form in the work context.
Knigge considers it appropriate to reject the offer of the Du-Form from a work colleague if one feels surprised or thrown off balance. For accepting the informal Du is a commitment to a level of personal friendship and trust one may not wish. Knigge recommends a polite response: “Your offer honors me. Thank you. However, I feel more comfortable using the Sie-Form, and prefer to continue using it, also out of respect for you (Sie).“
Maintaining a certain respectful distance to others is considered a sign of respect in the German culture. A famous example is the relationship between two of the best-known soccer tv-commentators, Günter Netzer (a former star German soccer player) and Gerhard Delling (a respected tv sports journalist).
Their conversational-type commentaries during half-time and after games are enjoyed by millions due to both their expert analysis and relaxed interaction. Yet, on camera they address each other with the formal Sie, even though Netzer was a groomsman (witness) in Delling’s.
Colleagues and friends
Differences in the workplace environment can be reflected in the sorts of extra-workplace relationships that develop between co-workers. Company policies aside, of course. Two recent independent surveys of couples in Germany and the U.S. yielded the results that 24.5% of U.S. couples met their partner at work, while in Germany this number lies at only 12%. However, the most common way in which couples met was the same for both countries: through friends.