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Decision Making in Germany

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

1930. 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, born in 1959, 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.

Flying Too High

A DAX30 company. Industry. Engineering and manufacturing. A senior-level manager. German. Let‘s call him Heinrich.

I had done about six months of work for his organization. Several times I sat in on their staff meetings, having been asked to play „fly on the wall“ (or Mäuschen, little mouse, as the Germans would say), to observe the interactions.

Like any team they, too, had their areas of improvement. Heinrich asked me for my recommendations. Since I had only my impressions, I suggested that I do a Check, an audit, which is a series of background interviews with his staff and selected subject-area experts within their respective groups: design engineering, product management, testing, materials, processes, etc.

Listen carefully

Audit, from Latin, means to listen. Which is what I do, asking the right questions, in the right sequence, listening carefully and taking down notes as accurately as possible. I then take time to rewrite my notes, analyze them, in order to then go back to my client to present and propose what could be done to improve things.

As is always the case, if you gain the trust of the folks being interviewed – and there is room for improvement – they open up, especially the Germans. Well, one of those areas concerned the communication between Heinrich and his direct reports.

Both sides, the German and the American reports, stated that Heinrich simply did not take the time, or make the effort, to spell out sufficiently what his strategic thinking was. They felt a bit left in the dark, and asked me to please address this with him.

That the Americans would voice this concern did not surprise me, for the reasons I give in the core content on German leadership. But that the German reports were equally concerned signaled to me that this must be an area of improvement.

„I refuse to spell out . . . . “

Thinking this would be easy to improve, and therefore not requiring any kind of team session or workshop, I raised the topic over lunch with Heinrich. His reaction was not at all what I had expected. Heinrich became impatient, almost a bit angry: „I refuse to spell out my strategic thinking anymore than I currently do. If my folks don‘t understand it, then they‘re not the right people for their positions.“

I was taken aback, but kept Heinrich in the discussion on this topic, looking for ways to get him to see things from the perspective of his team: „But, Dr. Künow (not his real name), you know that you think on several levels at one time, and in very sophisticated ways (which was true. I was not patronizing him). Even very capable people cannot always follow you.“

This did not help. He stuck to his initial reaction, at least in that conversation with me. Later I would find out that he did, indeed, put a bit more effort into making clear what he expected from his organization.

“I might just as well do it myself!“

During our conversation, which had lasted no longer than half an hour, Heinrich said something which over the years I have heard dozens of times from German managers: „If I have to spell out in detail the work (meaning tasks, mandates, missions assigned), I might just as well do it myself!“

This is pure-form German leadership logic. Germans expect the next level down in hierarchy to understand the overall purpose of a generally-formulated task, mandate, or assignment in such a way that they can figure out on their own the details of its tactical execution.

The key terms here are „generally-formulated“, „mandate“ and „ figure out the details.“ Why? Germans in leadership positions, regardless of where they are in the hierarchy, believe that it should not be necessary to „spell out“ the how (tactics). Next level actors – management, subject-area experts, support staff – should have the required training, expertise and self-initiative to spell out the mission for themselves. If they can‘t, or are unwilling, they are not qualified to do the work.

On the flip side of this logic is the desire of the Germans to do that „spelling out.“ This is why they feel uncomfortable – and even reject – tasks, mandates, missions or assignments which include too much information about how the work should be done (tactics).

Too prescriptive, limiting, restrictive

An assignment with not only a description of the overall mission (strategy), but also details about the how (tactics), is considered by Germans to be too prescriptive, limiting, restrictive. They want maximum freedom in interpreting the mission and then executing it as they see best, based on their understanding of the situation. „That‘s what I was trained for, and that‘s what I get paid for. The next level above should not get too involved in my work.“

Dr. Künow and his team were a very high-performing transatlantic organization. In many ways they were the forerunners in their company when it came to addressing how to integrate German and American approaches. Yet, they had their areas of improvement, too.

Heinrich continued to „fly too high“ for his organization, but they learned to adapt to him. For his part, Heinrich found other ways to make more transparent his strategic thinking. It was a dance they would do for several more years.

Fill the Vacuum

I supported Stefan and his team for well over a year, as part of a larger organization. He was in his early 40s, spoke great English, had a clever sense of humor, managed a team with roughly one hundred people in Germany and the U.S. each. His staff of seven managed well the two hundred. Stefan travelled to the U.S. three to four times per quarter.

During dinner after a two-day workshop Stefan turned to me and said: „John, I get the feeling whenever I come to the U.S. that my people here don‘t even know who I am.“ He had a funny kind of smile on his face, perplexed.

I sensed what was going on. „Well, Stefan, when you come over who do you typically meet with?“ He went through the list: his direct reports, senior-level management in other departments, a handful of selected subject-area experts in testing, manufacturing, supply chain, and two or three German delegates to the U.S.

„Am I leaving a vacuum?”

My response: „Remember what we‘ve discussed over the last few months about American leadership logic. If you‘re not present in the eyes and minds of your team here, they will automatically orient themselves towards the strongest of your American direct reports. They won‘t have any other alternative.“

„Am I leaving a vacuum which is being filled?“, Stefan asked. I nodded. Both of us had gotten through our burgers, were eating our fries and drinking our juices. The background music was loud, but we could discuss further, nonetheless. We were in a college town, it was the middle of the Fall semester. Thursday evening. The place was full with students, faculty and university administration types.

„Americans like to know who their team lead is, and the strategic direction“, I said. Visiting as often as Stefan did was good. „But, you have to take the time to visit the troops, as we Americans say.“

“Your organization and people.”

„Town Hall meetings and such?“ I responded with a yes. „And have open office hours at set times and make sure folks know ahead of your visit. If you can fit it into your schedule, got out for lunch and dinner with members of your organization. Give them a chance to interact with you in an informal setting. They‘ll bring up what‘s on their mind if they feel comfortable with you.“

Stefan paused, ate a few more fries, took a sip of his juice and responded: „Yeah, but I don‘t want to get too involved. That could bother my direct reports. I mean, it‘s their organization, their people. I don‘t want to interfere in their work.“

That was pure form German leadership logic. You see it in the German military, where an officer from one level has to formally ask an officer at the next lower level for permission to visit that officer‘s troops. An American manager reserves the right to reach out to anyone in their organization, at anytime, and almost anywhere, with just about any question.

„You determine to what degree you get involved.”

My advice to Stefan was that he would in no way be perceived by his American reports as getting too involved in their work. On the contrary, they would be very happy to have a boss who is involved, who takes the time to become familiar with their teams, their work, the details.

„You determine to what degree you get involved, Stefan. At a minimum be present, ask questions, listen carefully, respond to their questions, observe. Most importantly, take what we are discussing now to your American direct reports and decide together the appropriate level of interaction you should have when you‘re in the U.S.“

I then added: „And while your at it, keep your eyes open for American colleagues in senior-level management who might be applying their leadership logic to their German teams, and possibly causing some irritation by perhaps being too present when they are in Germany.“

Stefan smiled in a mischievous way. „What?“, I asked. „I can think of at least three Americans, all first-rate team leads, who do just that.“ We laughed.

Verzicht. Small skies.

I reflect, try to imagine how it was back then. It is 1944. My mother is fourteen years old. No father at home. Killed in an automobile accident in 1938. My grandmother at the time with seven small children. The oldest was nine. The youngest an infant. My grandmother carrying her eighth child. The coal supplier comes by the house. He informs my grandmother that he can no longer supply her. He demands that she pay the bill. Money was very, very tight. Grandmother is behind in her payments.

It is winter. Unusually cold. My mother is hiding in the corner, hearing for the first time how her mother pleads with the coal supplier to give her more time. He does. My mother has never forgotten that day, that conversation. It put its stamp on her, made a deep impression. Thirty years later, her husband, my father, Frank, would die at the age of forty-four. Heart failure. My mother then, 1974, with six children. His first heart attack was at age thirty-five.

“What does it cost to heat those places?” A question my mother asks spontaneously whenever we drive by oversized houses in suburban Philadelphia. Not just one of those curious questions, but a question of survival. For my mother, back then.

True, not to be compared with the experiences of the German people in terms of limited resources during certain periods of their recent history. Nonetheless, an imprint on my mother, 1944 and the coal-man. A far greater influence on Americans is living in a country of abundance, in many cases over-abundance. Land, natural resources, freedom and opportunity. I’ve never been to the Upper Midwest – Wyoming, the Dakotas, Montana. Big Sky Country it is called. Literally: “Land as far as you can see!”

This must have been what the multitudes of immigrants to America had imagined, as well as the recently-arrived immigrants who moved west from the cities of the East Coast. But not only they, also the Germans. Yes, the Germans, back then. Many generations grew up reading Karl May, the author of best-selling books of fiction about the American West.

Cowboys and Indians. Germans of today, who travel through the U.S., who live there a few years, who dream of settling in America, see, imagine and experience that abundance. Who in their imagination is not attracted to the idea of no limits?

These days, to have to accept that there are limits, to reorient one’s own thinking, through self-reflection and self-critique, to change deep-seated habits of mind. Who wants to do that? Is able to do that? Painful and disconcerting. Verzicht. To do without. To do with less. To accept limits.

Swim in the Dark

You’re an excellent swimmer. As a child, on the school swim team, as an adult once or twice a week still. Suddenly you find yourself in the water. It’s dark. Not a pool. Neither river nor ocean. A lake. Pitch black.

You swim, call out, listen. Nothing. Just your movement and the water. Remain cool-headed. Swim in one direction. Stop. Dip down. Seek the bottom with your one foot. Nothing. The water is still. Good. You change direction, swim five minutes, felt like an hour. No shore, no beach. Nothing. You change directions. Another five minutes. Nothing. Again and again. Each time your breathing becomes more unsteady. Muscles hint at cramping. Your mind is racing.

You cannot sustain your weight indefinitely. Suddenly light comes. Like a dimmer switch. The sun. In slow motion. Vaguely you see trees, a shoreline. Just a few hundred meters away. The water is clear. No more than five meters deep. Your heart no longer races, breathing becomes steady. Your strokes are powerful and uniform. You make it.

So it is often for Americans working in a team led by a German. Like swimming in the dark.

Allow yourself to be pulled in

The history of Germany, as well as the historical consciousness of the German people, continue to impress and attract me. Today, just as strongly as a quarter century ago. You need only to go into a bookstore in Germany. Their books are not only solid, well bound and have great covers. The Germans have a very special relationship to books. There are always many older and newer publications about history, about their history. For those Germans who want to know their history there will never be a shortage of opportunities.

Every city in Germany, large and small, has museums in which history, but not only theirs, is told, is kept alive and relevant. In my early years in Berlin and Bonn I was astounded by how many fascinating and well-made documentary films were shown on German television. There was never a day without at least one in the evening. The German language is worth learning if only to read their books, to visit their museums, and to watch their documentaries. Although not a documentary, but one with the look and feel of one, was Heimat.

It was the summer of 1992. I watched episode for episode of Heimat. My eyes were glued to the television, my mind racing to understand every word, to pick up on as many nuances as possible. What an opportunity for me to gain insight in Germany of that time period, between the world wars. Time and again I had to turn to my German wife to get the meaning of this or that word, for the dialogue was in the dialect of that region of Germany, the Hunsrück, along the Moselle River, between Trier and Koblenz. After every episode I was in a kind of trance, reflecting about what I had just taken in.

The history of another people

Then another time. I was in the car. Driving through Bonn. Evening. I turned on the radio. Deutschlandfunk. A book review was being read. It was about the immediate post-war years in then West Germany. The first sentences grabbed my attention. They flowed: complex, clear, rich, full of substance, critical, analytical, yet elegant. That feeling had come back, from when I was a student at Georgetown. History. German History. The history of another people. In another part of the world. And when I read the books by John Lukacs. Trance.

The reader continued. I was captured, drove further, but as if on a soft cloud just a few inches above the road. I think of the many war memorials in Germany. When I walk or ride my bicycle down the hill from the Venusberg in Bonn to the former government quarter on the Rhine, I pass through Kessenich where there is such a memorial. It’s round, cement, encircling a lovely oak tree. Six pillars about eight feet high. Plenty of space between them to step in and out. The tops of all eight crowned – or held together – by a cement ring providing the tree with space to stretch out its branches. Just below the top each of the eight the face in cement of a German soldier with the iconic German steel helmet from the World War I.

Chiseled into the pillars, from the top to just about the bottom, are the names of the men who died in the two world wars. Six pillars, three sides each. Longs lists. Names. Of men, and boys, from that part of Bonn, from the neighborhood. Yes, boys, many no older than seventeen or eighteen years old. Sad. Especially sad for me, as one of five Magee boys, to read the same last names. Meyer. Schmitz. Leyendecker. Two, three, sometimes four of the same last names. Brothers. Cousins. Imagine the deep, deep sadness of the mothers and fathers who saw their boys go off to war only to kill and be killed. 1914. 1915. 1916. 1917. 1918. Four long years for an entire continent. Then on the other sides of the pillars. 1939. 1940. 1941. 1942. 1943. 1944. 1945. Many of the same names. The sons and nephews of those fallen between 1914 and 1918. The Germans suffered, too.

Tiled Stoves

Tiled Stoves: in apartments and homes, to burn coal, in order to produce heat.

Use resources respectfully, protect the environment. I recall the debates in Germany years ago about recycling. At that time the Social Democrats and the Greens were in power. Jürgen Trittin was Umweltminister, literally Secretary of the Environment.

German business was against any recycling laws. It’s been reality for years now, though. How could there have been a debate at all? Quite the contrary. Protecting the environment should be foundational to the politics of the Christian Democratic Party in Germany (CDU). They and their sister party in Bavaria (CSU – Christian Social Union) were clearly on the wrong side of that debate.

I’ll never forget the smell of coal back then in West Berlin. Late Fall of 1988. I live in a boathouse in Konradshöhe, on the Havel River, on the other side the DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik, German Democratic Republic). No wall between, just the river. On the other side a strange stillness. Just a road along the bank and streetlights giving off a weak, halfhearted yellow-orange glow. Evenings and mornings the smell was strong. A weird feel to it, somehow historical.

My girlfriend then lived in the Schöneberg section of West Berlin. On the fifth or sixth floor of an apartment house built in the early 1900s. Back then I was reading Sebastian Haffner’s Deutsche Revolution 1918. Dry cold days in Berlin, the smell of coal smoke from the houses ever-present, Rosa Luxemburg murdered and thrown into the Spree River, Stahlhelm, Rätherrepublik in Munich. I think of my grandmother who back then was eighteen years old and living in Cincinnati.

I imagine what Berlin was like in 1918 and 1919. I, the grandson and great-grandson of coal merchants in Philadelphia. Our great-grandfather, Alexander Magee, started out with a horse-pulled wagon, going from house to house. Years later his sons, Frank and Alex, would join the business. I see the images in my mind’s eye. The coalyard in the Kensington section of Philadelphia located right next to the train line.

The war over, but experiences continue to form us.

The coal was delivered from Northeast Pennsylvania. The Allegheny Mountains cut through the state from the northeast to the southwest, continuing into West Virginia. The business grows a bit, two trucks, a handful of employees. They’re not wealthy, will never become so. They pay the bills and have more than enough left over.

After the Second World War they convert to oil. Magee Coal & Oil. During my father’s freshman year at Amherst College in Massachusetts his father dies of a heart attack. His younger brother, Ken, uncle to my father, takes over the business. My father does not go into the heating fuel business, instead becoming a business consultant.

We six children of Frank and Laura Magee growing up in suburban Philadelphia have no connection to Magee Coal & Oil. But the constant coal odor in Berlin during those winter months of 1988-89, the dirt in my nose, cleaning it out a few times a day, brought me back into contact with the days when my recent ancestors lived from coal. And today? I, management consultant, put food on the table by supporting those who build coal-fired power plants.

Use resources respectfully, protect the environment, yes, the Germans do that better than the Americans. The war ended more than seventy years ago, but those experiences continue to inform and form us. During a long walk through Bonn with my son I try to describe to him what the town looked like in 1945. I repeat the stories of his German great-grandmother – my ex-wife’s grandmother. And why we are taking a walking and not driving tour by car or bus. Besides, walking is healthy.

Self-reflection, a strength of the Germans

I remain standing ten or fifteen minutes. I imagine as best I can a summer day back during one of those years. What was life like in any of the houses, the homes, in that neighborhood? Just around the corner is the Karthäuserplatz, a small square, where I lived from 1991-95. In a three-room apartment on the third floor.

On the first two floors lived three sisters, all in their 80’s, never married. Born in the early 1910’s they would remember the last years of the First World War, and most certainly all too well the entire Second World War. I imagine what it was like for them. Did they have brothers? Did those men/boys fight, kill, die? Catholics in the German Rhineland.

I imagine, see the pictures move by in my mind‘s eye. Three brothers. Second World War. Wehrmacht. The one dies in the early days of the invasion of Poland in September 1939. The second survives the 1944 Ardennenoffensive – what Americans call the Battle of the Bulge – only to then die in Vienna in early 1945, not long before the end of the war.

The third brother survives the war, including several years as a prisoner in Russia. Their mother (the father had died in 1918 on the Western Front of WWI) and the three sisters pick him up one summer day in 1949 upon his arrival in Bonn by train via Berlin. Within a year and a half he would die of gangrene.

I am fifty-five years old. All of my brothers – two older, two younger – are still alive. None of us has killed or been killed. My son, Daniel, was born in May 1998. His mother is German. He is a German-American boy, more German than American. A school project in History. The fourth grade.

The children are asked to find in Bonn the evidence, indications, the signs that once, many centuries ago, the Romans had lived in what became Bonn. He and his mother take a long walking tour. Bonn is a small town. Daniel is excited. He soaks it all in. My son, by boy, is growing up in Germany. He is learning to think historically. He is learning to understand his present. He is being prepared to deal with the future.

No Limes. No Irmensul.

Americans are, indeed, a young and often impatient people. But not all that young, for they are descendents primarily of Europeans. And the Americans of German descent are the largest ethnic group in the U.S., when separating out the British, Scottish and Irish.

In other words, an American, especially an American of German descent, who plays the piano well, including the most difficult works of German composers such as Beethoven (the child of Dutch immigrants to Germany), is just as much, if not more, an heir and descendent of that famous citizen of Bonn as those living in Bonn today who aren’t interested in classical music, who have never visited the house Beethoven’s was born and raised in, who prefer listening to heavy metal music on the MP3-players while sitting on the #61 tram from Dottendorf into the center of town. Americans and Germans are cousins, sharing to a large part the same history.

Here’s a story I heard a while back from a German woman I knew during my graduate studies in Berlin. She was on a flight to North Africa. Morocco or Tunesia. Sitting next to an American: jeans, sweatshirt, baseball cap on his head. One of those seemingly naive, carefree, smiling, overly-friendly Americans who Germans identify immediately.

She wondered what a guy like that – provincial, unsophisticated – was doing on an airplane to North Africa. Did he get on the wrong plane in Frankfurt? After a few minutes of small talk she realized that the “country bumpkin” was a tenured professor at an elite university on the East Coast of the U.S., spoke fluent Arabic, had high-level contacts in Egyptian politics, academics and culture. “Never judge a book by its cover.”

Another story. Similar. November 1995. In Washington, D.C. Watergate Hotel. Evening. We’re sitting in the lounge drinking a beer, after more than a handful of meetings in the American capital. The Majority Leader, his wife, his Chief of Staff, the Head of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Washington. I had been asked by the Majority Leader to accompany him to the U.S. To advise him, and to play “fly on the wall”, to observe, then provide him with my analysis afterwards, on what my Americans eyes see, and American ears hear.

No Cologne Cathedral, but not country hicks.

Before the trip I rewrote his speeches. They had been translated from German into English by the language experts in the Bundestag. A bit wooden, overly structured, not how he speaks. I was also able to arrange for him to give a major foreign policy speech at Georgetown University, my alma mater. Pure coincidence. My uncle was, and is still, a Jesuit and professor of Theology at Georgetown. The university president – a close friend of my uncle – had done his Ph.D. in Theology in the late 1960s in Münster, on the great German theologian, Karl Rahner.

He spoke fluent German and had had several conversations with Chancellor Helmut Kohl, a Catholic from Rhineland Palatinate. Kohl was known to be in close contact with Rome. The CDU (Christian Democratic Union – Kohl’s party) connection to Georgetown goes back to the days of Konrad Adenauer’s chancellorship, 1949-63. One of Adenauer’s sons had studied at Georgetown during the Second World War.

In any case, I felt very comfortable in Washington, having studied at Georgetown just around the corner from the Watergate. That evening a member of the CDU in the German Bundestag walks in, their spokesperson on economic issues, also in Washington for meetings. He pulls a chair up next to the Majority Leader and says: “Wolfgang, it’s astonishing. The Americans are totally informed about our fiscal and economic plans, ours in Germany and in the EU!” Weeks after the trip it occurred to me: “Hey, wait a minute. Why is this guy so astonished?”

It’s true. Americans don’t have a Cologne Cathedral. They don’t have a Limes. No Teutoburger Forest. No Bavarian Purity Laws for brewing beer. No Irmensul. But are Americans, therefore, country hicks? Maybe it’s a tactical advantage to be considered such.

“We choose freedom!“

Americans learn at a very early age, in grammar school, that intelligence is the ability to simplify complexity, to break it down into segments, in order to understand and deal with it. Americans are pragmatic. Knowledge has true value when you can do something with it. Knowledge is of no value if it is not actionable. In English composition in school young Americans learn to construct short, clear and logical sentences. This is the pattern, the foundation, for just about all forms of written communication.

I remember all too well an at first surprisingly – but earned – poor grade I received for a paper I wrote on the Prussian King, Frederick the Great. I was a student of History at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. It was the Fall semester of 1980, my senior year, the last of four years. It was a beautiful October day, warm and sunny. Indian Summer. I attended a two semester course on German History, the beginning of my fascination with Germany. I simply could not get enough of it, about Germany and the Germans, articles, books, including Gerhard Ritter’s classic.

Apparently my fascination and excitement got away from me. I produced a ten-page paper of complicated confusion – unstructured and unclear. My professor, Michael Foley, one of the greats at Georgetown, took a knife to it. Red all over it. His commentary at the end: “Magee, what kind of nonsense is this. You write like a German!”

Professor Foley most surely did not mean that Germans can’t think, read or write. As an historian he was quite aware that the German people had produced many of the greatest historians of the modern era, and that the methods of historians originated in Germany. Instead he wanted to convey: “Dear John, first get clarity on what it is you wish to communicate. Then do so in simple, clear and straightforward sentences.”

Keep it simple, stupid!

And he was right! It is part of the American national cultural hard-wiring to believe (and say) that one has truly understood something if and when they can communicate it. “If you can’t explain it, you don’t understand it.” It’s an assumption which every American operates on: “If you can’t explain it to the average Joe, you don’t understand it.” It’s considered a high art form in the U.S. to be able to explain complex matters to the “man on the street.” It’s been said many times that Konrad Adenauer was a master of this art form.

I understood this about Adenauer many years later, during research on my Master‘s thesis about the disagreements between the Kennedy and Adenauer administrations during the Second Berlin Crisis, 1961-63. Through my studies I had become quite familiar with Chancellor Adenauer. His extraordinary ability to communicate with the “average Joe” was particularly effective in the early post-War years in West Germany. During one of the great national debates in the Bundestag about West German foreign policy Adenauer contrasts starkly his policy to that of the opposition Social Democrats by shouting: “Und wir wählen die Freiheit!” (We choose freedom!).

In the U.S. business context people speak of KISS: ‘Keep it simple, stupid!’ There, again, is the American logic about how to deal with complexity: “If you are truly intelligent, then you know how to make it simple, so that simple folks can understand it.” Perhaps this has to do with democracy and market economics. For what use is it to politicians to formulate complex arguments which are not understood by voters? Is it any different with companies marketing their products and services?

Story-telling activates the human imagination

This is also a reason why it is anecdotes, if well-told and -timed, are enormously persuasive in the American cultural context. For Americans anecdotes are empirical. They are reality experienced, the opposite of theory, which is often seen as abstract and unrealistic, separated from reality. An anecdote says: “I know what I’m talking about. I was there. I saw it with my own eyes. This is no theory, it’s reality!” Any American politician, for example, speaking in their legislative district or in the media about a difficult issue, such as the war in Iraq, will come across as especially convincing if they can claim to have visited that region.

Like aphorisms, anecdotes transport deeper-lying wisdom. Isn’t that what the Bible – Old and New Testament – does via one story after the other, communicate the deepest-felt, and therefore most complex, beliefs of a people, of Jews and Christians? Isn’t story-telling the highest, the most sophisticated, form of activating (speaking) to human imagination? Truly persuasive communicators in the U.S. plan very carefully when they draw on anecdotes. This is why we all listen so carefully when our grandparents tell their stories. They have the years of human experience.