WINSEN
It rained all day and I didn‘t go out of the house. That is the great advantage of being in one place for three weeks. I can spend a day doing nothing at all just as I often do at home.
But one of the things that I have been noticing is both the solidity of the German way of life and the attention to detail. Why is it that when I cross the border from France to Germany the shape of the houses changes? Why is it that all German houses look alike and why is it that they are all so solid, so permanent. Houses are built of concrete or brick and built to last. They look solid with white walls and red tiled roofs. Why is it that German houses appear to be built to last 300 years and many Asheville houses look as if a strong wind will carry them away? Why is it that none of the houses in Asheville have red tiled roofs and all of the houses in Winsen have red tiled roofs? Some of them have what looks like shiny ceramic tiled roofs of a darker color. But this is just a variation of the kinds of tiles. All or our roofs including my own house have a kind of tar paper shingles that have the slight appearance of being tilelike. But while it appears to me that tiled German roofs are designed to last for decades, while our tarpaper shingles wear out and have to be replaced every ten of fifteen years. And while it must take days to install a red tiled roof, an Asheville tarpaper shingle roof can be scraped away and replaced by a Mexican crew in a day. Our wooden houses have to be repainted every ten years as well. And the two by four wooden frame of a wall with all the parts standardized can be put up in a day with the insulation tacked in and plaster board walls nailed in very quickly. My wooden floors creak when I walk on them, plywood with thin wooden fitted slats fastened on top, a hardwood floor a half inch thick, while the floors in Elke‘s and Heinrich‘s house are solid and silent when you walk on them. German house are built to last forever, mine is built to last my lifetime or until I sell it and the next person buys it for the lot and the view and replaces it. Even the windows and doors of Elke and Heinrich‘s house have a heavy solidity about them.
In Germany everything seems under control, secure. There are hedges or fences around most people’s small yards and often a gate. Doors are solid and double lock. Yards are small and neatly tended with a wall around them. On his small plot of grass Heinrich has a selfdriving silent battery powered lawnmower, more a vacuum cleaner than a lawnmower, that left on its own crisscrosses his yard and keeps the grass short. On walks on one of the few sunny days in Winsen I saw a number of little lawnmowers silently trimming the grass. I have a roaring riding mower and it takes me an hour to mow my half acre.
Why is it that we do things one way in the United States with a great deal of uniformity across our 3000 miles in various climates and Germans do things another way. It isn‘t the climate or even the availability of construction materials. It is that Germans have developed one way of doing things and Americans another. And this year I have seen that the Greeks build houses in a completely different way as do the Indians and the Sri Lankans and the Uruguayans.
But of course this is true of all of culture. Our languages are different, our religious practices are different even when we profess the same religion, with Christian services varying widely. For a month I have been eating the large hot meal of the day at lunch with various kinds of bread and cheeses and wurst for breakfast and dinner to the point that I have gotten heartburn from so much bread. What suits people‘s digestive systems is different in different countries.
It seems to me that the reason we do things one way in one culture and another way in another culture is that while cultures demand uniformity in order to be a cohesive culture or tribe, that at the same time, very gradually, every tribe and often subtribe experiments with new ways of doing things which makes them go in a different direction and slowly veer away from each other. Of course in the modern world with media tying us together there is the counter force that pushes subgroups toward each other, a form of globalization.
I overheard a number of discussions about how German is corrupted by the substitution of English words. That used to really disturb Kathe. But of course that is how cultures shift and change and go in new directions.
And somehow this process of a culture insisting on uniformity and identity and at the same time shifting to new forms is something that both gives identity and threatens identity and is the cause of much unrest in the world. Immigration is seen as a threat in the United States and equally in Germany and other parts of Europe. It is very difficult for a Turk, who brings her culture with her, to fit into those German ways of doing things that I have been wondering about. The same for Mexicans or Central Americans in the United States. People hold on to their cultures when abroad, the English certainly did in their colonial empire and American expats do the same. Mexicans, Turks and North Africans do the same. So even in a country where everyone has an immigrant history, forced or unforced, once we become homogenized, we resent further immigration because it is a threat. This is probably true of liberals, who don‘t admit it or don‘t deal with it in everyday life, and probably for MAGA true believers who may also not deal with it in everyday life but do admit to being threatened by it.
This is even harder to deal with if we are fundamentalists. A fundamentalist, by inclination or upbringing, feels he has found the right way: the right religion, the right holy book, the right language, the right way of doing everything and feels that any alternate ways are a threat.
And while it is obvious that human invention and variation has led us in all directions and that no direction can be the fundamental one, there is something in each one of us that wants to find what is most fundamental, that makes us feel most alive, and to not be forced into patterns of behavior by cultural norms that seem to block us from being fully alive.
I think we want to have it both ways. We want to find for ourselves what is most fundamental and real, yet we know at the same time that with human variety nothing can be absolutely fundamental and that we are all going in different directions. It could be that we are all partly fundamentalists and all partly liberals open up to all possibilities but to different degrees and have to live with this balance.
All of this is written as ICE 75, a high speed train from Hamburg to Zurich glides across the north German countryside with one village looking exactly like the next, solid and beautiful and very German, written by a person who is as unable to balance fundamentalism and liberalism any better than anyone else.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 