When I flew to Germany many years ago, I had a pretty bad fear of flying. An older german lady next to me picked up that I was nervous. "Are you afraid of flying?" she asked me. "Do not vorry. Ve are coming down one vay or another. I haff never heard of a plane just staying up there." I remember being struck by how funny that was, and yet how little I laughed.
This video immediately reached the edge of the cliff between real cultural analysis and satire, and it stayed there for its whole length. Little masterpiece.
I knew it was going off the rails, when it skipped the whole unificaiton of the state with military force in the 1800s, and that thing called the industrial revoluition.
To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand this video. The humor is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of theoretical physics most of the jokes will go over a typical viewer's head. There's also the host's nihilistic outlook, which is deftly woven into his characterisation - his personal philosophy draws heavily from Narodnaya Volya literature, for instance. The fans understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of these jokes, to realize that they're not just funny- they say something deep about LIFE. As a consequence people who dislike this video truly ARE idiots- of course they wouldn't appreciate, for instance, the humour in his existencial catchphrase "PURITY" which itself is a cryptic reference to Turgenev's Russian epic Fathers and Sons. I'm smirking right now just imagining one of those addlepated simpletons scratching their heads in confusion as Carefree Wandering's genius unfolds itself on their television screens. What fools... how I pity them. 😂 And yes by the way, I DO have a Purity tattoo. And no, you cannot see it. It's for the ladies' eyes only- And even they have to demonstrate that they're within 5 IQ points of my own (preferably lower) beforehand.
Reinheit can be summarised thusly: A German spends his entire childhood studying to become a forklift operator, which is his only passion in life. In adulthood, he works as a forklift operator six days a week until he retires. In retirement he spends twelve hours a day playing Forklift Simulator, while splurging an inordinate amount of money on Forklift Simulator DLC. Before he is taken to Forklift Valhalla, his last thoughts are of operating a forklift.
Pure German speech always includes a short, but noticeable reverb. Not too short like you would hear in a house, nor too long like in a catholic church, but a perfect duration of reverb that you will hear from speaking in a *rein* protestant church.
I'm Dutch and have been to Germany many times, and currently live in Japan. I've always said that most of how ww2 went can be predicted just from the fact that citizens in both these countries actually wait for a red light even when there are no cars around.
For myself, as a German person, this was both hilarious and enlightening. As for the fact that we often insist on "saubere Mülltrennung" = clean garbage separation, the fact is that it's not necessarily an obsession with "reiner Wille", but rather the fact that we get punished if we don't fill the different containers in the proper manner. Infact, the garbage collectors send an employee whose sole duty is to check the bins' contents, and they will refuse to empty the latter if they're not filled in the proper manner. This is the source of many neighbourhood disputes.
One can make this argument, but don't forget that half of the country is historically Catholic. In my opinion, what distinguishes Germany is Gründlichkeit -- thoroughness. Which can foster an awareness of, appreciation of, tolerance for details, complexity. Or, put another way, makes it harder for them to take short-cuts, sweep things under the rug, for example, the longer-term consequences of our actions with regard to the environment. I grew up in Canada and have also been following French media for decades, lived in Berlin since 1997. With all the caveats that one could apply, I really do believe that Germans are simply less prone to hypocrisy. This trait has often been remarked upon by non-Germans, that they will do what they say, and say what they do. What frustrates me is their pandering to Anglo-American culture, which results, among other things, in a dramatic lack of appreciation for their own language, which is, in fact, an extraordinary instrument, in my opinion, superior to English as a vehicle for theoretical thought. And, articulated well, it is in no way "harsh". The great French actor, Michel Picolli was enamoured of the sound of German; I could cite many such examples from previous generations. There is a definite issue with low cultural self-esteem.
It's probably hard for them *to* take pride in their culture when they can never forget their past crimes. Nor should they but it doesn't mean they don't have a vibrant culture with value and merit beyond the atrocities committed in its name. It's a tough spot to be in.
I am an expat having expat friends and yes, the German tendency of being outspoken about things, does not always serve me well. Telling the truth is considered to be rude everywhere else it seems.
@@crakhaed You are making a lot of assumptions. Why should I feel pride in culture - it is not mine in the first place. Culture is a means of control, if there is one thing to be learned from German history, then it is that culture is not necessarily in the interest of the people. It certainly works in the interest of the state, the church, big institutions, corporations, etc... Secondly, I don't waste time thinking about crimes that have been done decades before I was born, much less feel guilty about it, - why would I? I am not proud of "my" culture, nor do I take any responsibility for it. Culture is a tool and I use it to my advantage and I work around its limitations (or use other, better tools).
About 30 years ago I was riding the train down the Rhein and was talking to a Spanish teenage girl. She surprised me with her candid view of how young Germans ( after the reunification) seemed to turn away from their strictly moderated language and lean more towards English. In her words - ‘ a language that makes life easier’. I found this half credible as I was a student and researcher on German music from Bach to Berg… and lover of literature from Luther to Thomas Mann. If the French protest so much about Englishisms in their language Germans do feel how?
Sorting recycling also appeals to the British. Maybe not because of purity, but of an obsession with sorting and classifying. "Everything in its right place"
@@dixonhill1108 Aluminium and glass are both highly recyclable but Aluminium costs more to make in the first place. Plastics are a nightmare in most ways. So naturally, sorting what you are buying is better than sorting your recycling.
I think the essence of German thought and conduct in everyday life is to think in terms of the final end or consequence of an action or anything at all. It is deeply teleological and has two main expressions which are opposite of one another but analogous: first, to think in terms of catastrophe ("oh no, if everyone does this/if this gets out of hand, everything will fall apart, there will be some unimaginable catastrophe") and second, to think in terms of perfection ("if everyone did X, the world would be perfect, if everyone were X, there would be no problem"). German thinking and conduct is deeply unpragmatic. It is not "how do we deal with this problem in a way that alleviates the parts of it that can be alleviated without causing new problems", but rather to try and live in a way that such a problem would never occur and be comletely unheard of. The problem with that, ironically, is that problems can never be avoided fully. As a German, what bothers me most about this is that if we did not think so much in terms of catastrophe/perfection (the final consequence of action X or situation Y), then we would realize that the problem we see is not as huge and unbearable as we tend to believe.
“…think in terms of the final end or consequence of an action or anything at all” - very much Kant’ish. “...think so much in terms of catastrophe/perfection” - but in doing so, you, Germans, set an example. We, non-Germans, are (or must be) thankful to you for this. But, please, do not go too-too far.
I don't agree with the analysis of this video, at least, in what regards the historical extrapolation that makes the "jump" from German religious and philosophical search for "purity", to racial exclusion and genocide as a form of reaching national and cultural purity. Sure, iii reich politicians, and especially its leader, wanted and were even obsessed in finding some sort of biological purity, and that's the key word, biological, not spiritual, religious or philosophical. Their inspiration for that endeavour was not found in German culture and history but in the politics of the British Empire and even of the U.S of America. Puritan Calvinist theology was to be created in these countries, not in Lutheran and Catholic Germany. British and American racist segregation, as well as theories of racial imperial charisma and exceptional destiny, were developed within the religious beliefs of these two countries. Therefore, we can also see the later emergence of several biological pseudo-scientific theories, like social Darwinism and Eugenics, all of them more or less derived from Calvinist concepts of predestination. This happened in late 19th century England and America, not in Germany. The German national movement of between wars enthusiastically embraced some of these new theories and started to copying them but the majority of the German people did not like or approved them.
@saschahusenbeth5753 That’s a lot of and exclusively your nonsense. Overblown generalization that say probably a lot more about yourself than the country. I sense some German Inferiority complex usually unconsciuosly fuel by the obvious past, but of course I could be wrong. If one wants to be productive, creative and inventive nobody even Germans do start with a premise of “some unimaginable catastrophe”. Sir Ivan Hurst the British officer who was ordered to organize the restart of Volkswagen in Wolfsburg in 1945 said: the beetle was a far cry from being perfect. It had more bugs than a dog in the early days. But the Germans went on to refine and improve it constantly. The condition of the production lines in Wolfsburg were catastrophic indeed. But the allies had placed an order of 20.000 vehicles to be delivered in a year or two. So, despite all catastrophic prerequisites and challenges VW proceeded very “pragmatically” started what became a global success for more than half a century. If the essence of Germans and Germany actually is deeply theological or philosophical, as Germans like to label themselves sometimes as “the peoples of poets and thinkers” there need to be clarification of what that means. Actual spirituality has nothing to do with feeling good or some sort of wellness. In fact most failed and so called “spiritual people” lack personal strengt and often misuse whatever “teachings” they claim to follow as an excuse for their failures in life. Actual spirituality is an inner necessity. Once one truly tasted it there’s no way back. The more one realizes the clearer it becomes that it’s a constant uphill battle. If you honestly want to get closer to the absolute you’d better be pure yourself. And, it’s somewhat similar in life. Be it engineering, production, arts and sciences. You know very well that perfection is almost impossible but you strive for it nevertheless. Germany had one of the most extrem histories especially during the last 150 years or so. In fact during the 20th century the Germans experienced 3 or 4 total meltdowns of their economy and currencies. 1915/16 during the Kaiserreich when a lot of the private gold possessions where collected to help the bankrupt 2nd Reich. The slogan was: my gold I gave for iron meaning people gave their jewels and (sometimes) received a replica made of iron in return. The hyperinflation in 23/24 when it made no sense to fill a wheelbarrow with absurd high banknotes only to buy a small stack of fire wood that had less calories to burn for heat than the paper of the notes. Another less know event was the Black Friday in New York in oct 1929 and its consequences for Germany. It send schock waves around the globe. But Germany was hit especially hard. The German economy despite all hardship after the hyperinflation had just starte to recover when the Americans began to pull US capital back home to save their own ass’. The result in spring 1930 6 million Germans lost their jobs which meant on average 4 more people depending on one income in total roughly 24 million Germans or almost half the population were facing starvation. Btw. at that time the NSDAP was still a tiny party with votes of around 5%. 1948 brought the new Deutschmark. Ludwig Erhard one of the fathers of the Rhine capitalism = German style Social Democracy was a key figure for the economic miracle. Everyone received 40 new in cash, a huge logistical operation of the allies sending thousands of trucks to thousands of locations across Germany. One of Erhard’s moves was essential. He ordered the end of price controls starting next Monday while the allied officers were at home during the weekend. When he was called on Monday and told that all advisors to the allied governments said this was a very dangerous move he replied: don’t worry, my advisors expressed the exact the same concerns. Shortly after shop windows started fill up again. Prices rose for a while but the wonder at the Rhine was on its way. And, just a few years I think only about 4 or 5 later German companies started to send supplies the South Korea in order to support the anti communist war on the Korean peninsula. In 1956 the old Bundestag in Bonn voted to join NATO. However, there still was a financial problem. People had received a bit of cash to start with. Businesses were able the get credit and financing, the amount of destruction was surprisingly small, as Germany traditionally is not very centralized compared to others like France, England and Spain. Basically another debt based money system restarted But all types of government had no money as it would take some time until taxes would roll in. Solution: houses and real estate became subject to mandatory mortgages. Many owners paid back up until the 1970s. It was labeled “Lastenausgleich = Load balancing, what a joke eary on. Trying to create a meme The world: catastrophic events looming at the horizon? Germany: yes, we can And no, despite what some say we are not necessarily afraid of the consequence
@@Julia-Richter You have confirmed what I was thinking about. "By setting an example", I meant setting a benchmark, too. Of course, you need Brits, but I think, you should not hurry - let them suffer a little bit and repent first about their Brexit mistake.
Dear Professor Moeller... I lived in Germany for a quarter century and even became a German. What a lovely Streifen durch die deutsche Reinheitsbesessenheit... I remember some delightful examples of this: 1) Am Samstag vor der Haustür kehren ... I lived in a tiny village, and sometimes had to work hard on weekends to meet Monday deadlines and could not do this job (which is actually very social), so I would do it on Monday. Of course, my neighbors would remark on this, nicely, but in their voice was always an "erhobener Zeigefinger." Sunday was "Ruhetag" of course, which leads me to story number two. One Sunday in winter, I had to chop some wood, because I heated exclusively with Kanonenöfen and cooked on wood as well. And I sometimes ran out of small enough pieces. My ax slipped off a knot in the log I was chopping and planted itself in my leg shaving a bit of my tibia. I went to the hospital for a tetanus shot and to check if the bone was ok, it was very painful. ... My neighbor's reaction: "Das hast du davon, wenn du am Sontag dei Holz hackst." I am writing about the life in this little village in Hessen in my autobiography.
And that is why we do all the stuff on saturday. At 7am the lawnmower and hedge trimmer are running and there is no end until 10pm. Don't forget to do groceries. Especially if monday is a holiday. Because having 2 days closed is usually the end of the world.
And nothing says "green" like ripping up ancient forests and villages to strip mine more coal to burn for energy! As someone of German heritage myself, that's the most German thing of all; missing the point.
There are days where you feel like you haven't done anything, haven't had a meaningful talk with anyone, or didn't even eat anything that taste good. You know it was a waste of a day in life. Then you put a random TH-cam video to fall asleep to and it alone makes your day worthwhile. After leaving 7 years, this is the day I finally grasped why I hated my time in Germany
@@eucitizen78 haha no we are not! especially humour-wise. usually german-humour/comedy is perceived as very tasteless and crude in austria because the germans tend to be too direct and honest. Austrians have a very different relation to the "truth" lol
I would definitely watch more 'Germanology' from you! I remember being surprised by the emphasis my highschool German teacher placed on recycling. There were entire chapters in our textbook devoted to it!
It's an entire culture of people desperate to find something to be pissed off at you for. If you cross the light at the wrong time, if you walk in front of someone's house, if you take a cab in front of an imaginary line of delineation - I have come to conclude that the German simply dislikes everyone and the rest are just excuses. I once stayed at a boutique hotel in Berlin, which was right next to another very similar hotel. In front of both the hotels was a canopy, so that you can stand and wait for a taxi without being rained on. The canopy is connected between the two hotels, they must have paid to have it installed together. And as I waited for the cab, I would pace back and forth just out of boredom. I noticed one of the valets staring at me with a sour look on his face. Then again the following day the same thing. On the third day I finally asked what was the issue. "You are a guest of that hotel," he says while pointing next door. "Our frontage begins here" he points to an imaginary line delineating the frontage of the two hotels, or the sidewalk adjacent each property. "You keep walking past this point."
There is even a law and a fine up to 5000 € max. for not separating/disposing garbage in a proper way! And in a way it all makes sense... I lived and worked half my life in Asia, go and check that filthy garbage dump out!
Always keep in mind that being a planner is german. It's not about working a lot, but working smart. And that requires to properly plan the work. The fact that we have the least annual working hours in the world proves that. Oh, and make jokes about other german regions. German infighting is as old as the country, or rather 1000 years older than that. Long before there was a german nation, the bavarians and hessians and saxons and prussians and hanoverians and rheinlanders have bickered and fought each other. And that has never changed. But the instead of wars we transitioned to stereotype jokes and football. And while there is a "german culture", each area has it's own thing, often in sort of a continuum with neighbouring countries. The badener or saarlander has a tick french, the schlesweger is a bit danish, the frisian is a bit dutch, and so on.
The German penchant for performative moralistic garbage separation goes beyond what you’ve even described here. Many Germans, including my girlfriend, even separate out organic garbage into a yet another bin. Separating plastic and paper wasn’t good enough. We now need to separate organic garbage as though it’s somehow toxic to the normal garbage. Of course this is all a moot point, since (with the occasional exception of paper) the garbage men throw it all into the back of the same truck every week.
I like how this is have both an examplification of German humour and an actually solid explanation of the German contribution to the Western world in general 😂
You might call it purity, but I think 'absolutism' captures more of the sprit of it. It is a obsessive compulsion to pursue something unconditionally until it is achieved without any compromise, be it real or conceivable.
"humour is a mere distraction, impure, ungerman", makes sense. In any case, you forgot the purification of (German) language, which is quite an important one. Thanks, Herder
Fascinating! I find your clip stimulating and instructive, with just a touch of self-deprecation and humour. Bravo! I'm a London-based Frenchman with a love for the German language, I only wish I could speak it better. Ich schäme mich.
Nein, ess gibt keinen Grund zum schaemen. I love the French and British people and if I would be young again I would love to learn the French language. Schoenste Sprache der Welt. I married a Canadian and miss my Country Germany for many years. 💔 Be well Xavier. Cheers! 💖🍀🌍
And that's the reason why the Cannabis debate is so controversial. Solution would be a German Hanf Reinheitsgebot, of course. Why didn't think anyone of this?
I'm intrigued by the socio-linguistical implication of the interchange between "reinheit" and "sauber", suspecting some etymological linkage between "sauber" and the English word "sober", in light of the whole beer-parable. Is beer loosing its power over the people? Probably not, idk, I'm quite drunk. Greetings from Finland!
A lot of comments talk about the humor in this video, but seriously, it's a pretty interesting analysis. What I thought was very close to this, but you also gave a historical perspective, which is very valuable. However, something can be added to this. As the proverb suggests: "水至清则无鱼" (shuǐ zhì qīng zé wú yú), which translates as "If the water is too clear, there are no fish in it", purity is not natural and therefore not fundamental state, but some feature or trend that is interesting to analyze further. With this in mind, purity is also a symbol of totality, in a sense also of dominance, and also the ability to represent a guideline to follow for those who are looking for a guideline. Purity can also be indirectly interpreted as “having more (or less) of something,” as order and a metaphor for will and decision.
We are still attempting to purify the German people. It just has gotten a different Facette. We aren't concerned about racial purity anymore, instead we overemphasize on ideological purity. This summary of the German "Wesen" is the best attempt to summarize our culture, I've encountered to this day. I'm going to reference this going forward
I came to think of the German essence as being somewhere between accuracy and perfectionism. But obviously, the lack of verbal, semantic preciseness here should be enough to illustrate that this is the wrong solution and I wholeheartedly thank Prof. Moeller for purifying my conception of germanness with his superior terminology and proper elaboration!
The examples you have detailed are clearly only steps towards the ultimate purified production of the German spirit, and I personally am very excited for the punchline!
Throughout the video, particularly during the section on the moral imperative of separating one's rubbish, my eye kept drifting towards the lone bottle of beer on the shelf. I kept laughing to myself about that little, niggly loose end. But just like any good Chekhov's gun narrative device, there was the ultimate payoff! Well done!
@@philippmuller9377 Ha! I didn't know that. To be fair though, I think there are a lot of world beers that were founded by Germans or German-owned companies. Thank you for sharing your gift of beer, Germany!
I, as a fellow German, would not call it purity, but idealism. Purity seems more restricted, idealism is more general. Idealism also includes perfectionism, which gets along well with purity, but is not the same. Doing the things in the right way.
Excellent video as always! If I can make honorable mention of the Theologia Germanica and Meister Eckhart which preceded Martin Luther and he was probably heavily influenced by. I have been studying the intersection of Neoplatonism with Christian Mysticism and mainstream Christianity. One point I have been drawn to is that in Dante's poetic representation of his ascent to Paradise, his will is made "free" only after it is purified of all sin or self-will. Dante does not exercise a "free-will" in the colloquial sense but his will is made free only after purification and only because it is aligned with the divine will. Also of note is that for reasons beyond Virgil's control he was not able to enter paradise along with Dante, this can be attributed to his pagan origins but my take-away is that it is not of desire or will alone that one becomes purified, as Dante was, but through grace and election by God. This parallels Eckhart and Luther's view of the Bondage of the Will and the process of Sanctification. Similar views can be found in Augustine and Athanasius. Therefor I do not think they diverted too sharply from traditional Catholicism, rather they mainly rebuked the Church and its capitalization of the unrefined believers who maintained theological perspectives based on their own self-will.
main schism was en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelagius defeated by augustine. according to pelg good deeds can influence fate. catholic praxis was pelagian still despite augustine winning in theo. normal everyday christians were pelagian. the determination concept made no sense for them. devil on one shoulder, schutzengel on the other. cult of maria. you are mixing up theology with religious praxis.
As an architect who lived in Berlin I must say that "Reinheit" is good way to sum up Germanness! Think about Bauhaus which was the purification of space and the beginning of modern architecture and German techno music which similarly has purified dance music to its essential parts. Observing Germans "dancing" to techno music is clearly not very fun or entertaining but it sure is PURE!
Great video! My feelings about us Germans has always been that we are going overboard with just about everything. Seems like there is an idea, the idea is deemed good, and then we are pursuing the idea to the utmost extreme, 110%. And that is what I do not like about us Germans.
From my personal research, that 10% you don't like is precisely what led the Americans to abduct every scientist and every engineer they could lay their hands on. After having plundered the complete scientific, industrial and military data they could find, including blueprints, plans, patents, technology, tons and tons of paperwork, they soon realized that there was a good 10% no one had ever seen before so to achieve the remarkable level of prosperity the Americans had planned and finally achieved not long after the loot had been completed, the only solution, according to the limited possibilities of American vison, was to bring the creators of that advanced technology and put them to work, whether they were willing participants or not. And many were not but upon learning what the only alternative was, most finally agreed to go, after all, rice beer never killed anyone did it? Did it? Therefore, depending on how you analyze that uniquely German 10% margin, you could be correct for the good of everyone, to consider it as a nuisance rather than an asset! : ) Cheers.
As we see in case of garbage I could propose something different as a german spirit - it is organisation - this is exactly what made Germany powerful. Organisation means also unification and centralization of power. With protestantism came centralization of power - cuius regio, eius religio. Catholic Church seemed to be an independent organisation before, but Germans couldn't tolerate to have 2 captains on board (pope and state). I believe the first public schools, first pension systems, first public hospitals also first appeared in German state, as a process of unification and centralization (Bismarck), giving them hierachical/vertical structure like in the army. Obrigkeitstaat is also this idea which projects Prussian army principles onto the civil life. It always seemed to be endeavour to encompass entire reality into one system, like German philosopher Marks did. It is the same system in german automotive, where everything must be meticulously catalogued and most cars from f.e. VAG shares same components everywhere when they can between the models - make it efficient in production and service - no individualism. Nazi economic system was an effective hybrid between central planning of production and capitalism, with leverage to the former. Then machine industry in Europe uses mostly DIN norm. There is atomic clock in the central Germany which sends radio signal to german electronics in order to unify time precisely. MittelEuropa Deutscheeconomische schule and so on and so forth. The racial idea of III Reich was also in the same spirit - It was basically try to conquer entire world and encompass all the people in the one system, where every race have predetrmined by "big brother" role/function in it. I see it as little control freakish - everything and everybody must be included in some bigger plan and function according to it. No place for freedom understood as a privilege to not be monitored, enlisted, normalized, watched, included, taxed and so on - to be free of some agency which doesn't let something/somebody be without taking a paternal "care" and "watch". It is very arrogant also. Greens are completely arrogant to think they have to somehow care about and protect even the earth and the climate - "We have to organise climate and wildlife (is it wilderness anymore then?)". It is paternalism taken to the absurd. Why they just can't let go?
We lack the one thing that might be considered the essence of being Austrian: Schmäh. For those familiar with this term: Did you notice that it could be paraphrased with - deception - the ability to deceive - trick (you need to know to get something done) - humour - charm - coolness - ... and, maybe, "the will to impurity".
What I've gotten from this is that the purity of beer was a worthwhile and long lasting pursuit of meaning and value that should never end. The pursuit of spiritual/faith, reasonable/mind, and bodily/race, purity was short sighted and ultimately unsatisfactory. Especially when compared to the much more meaningful and productive purification of trash. We here in the southern United States also value beer and being trashy. So this really resonated with me.
I chuckled throughout this and then it got personal... I listened to the video in the background while reading articles on garbage sorting/ recycling because... f***... because I was traveling by train and made the decision to throw some plastic trash in the public wastebin (Restmüll) at the train station because there was no space left in my luggage and would have had to carry an extra bag to throw it away at home in the appropiate bin. It would have been possible but extremely inconvenient. I felt so bad about it that for some reason I decided to read up on recycling. Anyways, gotta go now, convert to Protestantism, cleanse myself of my Rhenish Catholicism and maybe revel in my guilt over that plastic trash somemore...
A little notice on the german purity command for beer: there was a great variety of additives to water and malt, henbane, gail, nightshade and other problematic substances. A cosequence of this, in particular gail beer were bar fights every day, so the german princes decided to only allow hops as an additive because of its calming effect. Greetings!
As an American who studied German and an educated brewer I never heard this. The word adjunct in brewing is defined as other fermentable sugar not derived from the malting process. Your making cheap beer if you don't malt it. That's where beer flavor comes from. Budweiser is not beer.
It's a myth. The German princes could never contrl what people put in their home brew. Gail, henbane etc. are wild herbs which go extinct when an ever growing population collects it for beer, while hops is a cultivated plant grown on fields.
I don't know much of anything about Germany when it comes down to it, but the very fact that this gentleman even believes there is such a thing as an essence to being German sounds very German to me somehow.
I think it makes sense to speak of a German or an American essence or any national essence for that matter. What Wer mean by the term is simply the fundamental premises underpinning a certain culture or cultural mentality over a long period of time.
German mentality is the term I would use. Or group psychopathy of German people. How can you cause a war in which 80 million people die than admit the guilt and feel pride and moral superiority because nobody before was able to admit such an atrocity so easily and so completely. This is very disturbing...
very interesting. two more connections to purification i can think of: 1. esoterics, alternative medicine and antrosophy which are strong in Germany and also found in the ecological movement. 2. Also I thought of Weber's ideal type which is a purification in scentific thinking, kinda at least.
Thanks a lot for this video! I have been living in Germany now for 4 years and finally after watching the video a lot of my observations make a lot of sense. For example, my room mate from Frankfurt does wash the jars of glass before disposing them. However my room mate from Saxony (precisely like myself) do not care at all about it. Do you think this is reflected socially in the former East German and the former West German parts? In other words, is the garbage separation and green movement reflected stronger in the former West German areas than in the former East German areas? I do hope you reply, but nonetheless a great video. I especially love the humour, its very pure German!
In short, yes. But also because it's older in the West. There was more activism, there also is more industry thus more pollution. East Germans are slightly more wary of authoritarian movements and totalitarians like the Greens because of their history. That's another factor.
Obviously and officially cleaning jars and glasses with water and soap is nonsense. The neuroses behind is on a an individual and not a collective one. Officially it's "clean or empty your container with a spoon, that's it.
To elaborate a little bit, the green movement is primarily seen in the more wealthy urban areas, if you look at maps of voting patterns, you'll see green dots in every larger city-center. Even in the East these are often inhabited by people originally from west Germany to the extend of "tötet Schwaben" kill swabians, not being uncommon graffiti during the times of intensified gentrification of Berlin. In more rural areas, the east-west divide is more noticeable, the green party origin is strongly linked to the anti-nuclear movement, witch is related to cold-war propaganda efforts. As this would be seen to a larger extend in the non-communist regions this created a broader basis within the population of former West Germany, as there wasn't even the option for a party and movement of this kind in the east. (historically German general environmentalism and environmentalist policy has some strong links to the 1930s ..) The current green stronghold of Baden-Würtemberg also needs some context, as it is somewhat unusual. Chernobyl created the general seed of fear, but the election in BW creating the first fantastic state turnout (which continued due to voting-tradition) coincided with the Fukushima accident. Both private news sources and and government-run TV of the time had fairly ambiguise headlines along the lines of "tsunami, 10000 dead in japan, nuclear reactor damaged" and it devolved into the tsunami-victims often being seen as victims of radiation rather than water. Even in more recent years "Remembering the over 10000 victims of the Fukushima Nuclear accident" is not uncommon among green party politicians. (e.g. a party-wide social media release in 2021). Given this origin and emphasis on being anti-nuclear to the point of distorting reality it makes quite a lot more sense, psychologically, that a green party politics dominated German energy policy ended up wanting to ban even nuclear research and managed lobbying the EU into labeling gas power plants "green energy".
As an Austrian I can say that some not all of these German values apply here as well, we are also very keen on separating our garbage. For example our municipality(I had to look that word up and oh boy is it a tongue twister and I am glad there is copy and paste) is organizing a bi-weekly garbage collection, where they take the garbage directly from our EINFAHRT. We have only 3 MÜLLTONNEN though, one is for general trash, one is for plastic and one is for paper. That said only paper trash is really recycled, most of the plastic garbage will be burned or stored along with the general trash anyway... By the way, something that wasn't mentioned in the video was the purity of our language, in German we have a very direct language model, we speak almost everything the way we write it, we even went so far as to invent a sharp s, for times when the "s" is spelled short even though the vowel in front of it is spelled long and soft. Like in "Straße" (street) or weiß (spelled like "vice" pretty much, meaning white), even though we call "ß" a "sharp s" it's not as "sharp" as an "ss" would be, it's exactly in between s and ss. That said when speaking the "ß" will naturally sound sharper than a standard s, you can't really spell it wrong at least not in my opinion.
Great video. Educational and entertaining. Since you spoke so eloquently on German obsession with Purity, I'd be interested to hear your take on Shame. I've noticed, cultures that are obsessed with purity, also have an unhealthy obsession with Shame. Is it also true for Germans?
@@kieferngruen Interesting. But I meant to ask, how does it manifest itself in German culture? Assuming it does. Like the pursuit for purity manifested itself in the purity of beer, religion, race and today, nature. For example, in some religious cultures, who obsess over spiritual purity, are on the flipside ashamed of the carnal desires of the body, which they try to suppress by punishing the body through self-denial. The whole idea of celibacy among the men and women of the catholic church stems from it.
Though I don't fully understand this obsession with purity, I feel I understand the German people much better after watching this video. This puts so much into context with regard to German history and national policy. Thank you for this video!
the most german thing about this video is the humor. a lot of not german people often don't get this since it's very dry and sometimes deeply sarcastic.
What a delicious video! You just got me back into learning German, which I did for some years. I have enjoyed it so much. And laughed... hard. I am actually dealing with Kant (PhD) on pure judgement of taste. I would like watching more content on history of the German culture/essence and philosophy so much. Love the channel. Thank you so much!!
Historically speaking claims to moral purity have existed for far longer and led to devastation far more than claims to racial purity. That idea is fairly recent, with the German claim being the most famous example of its corrosiveness. But it's also a far easier claim to undermine, hence why it's already weakened and will weaken ever more as populations comingle. Meanwhile the old claim of being morally pure or morally superior is alive and well and widespread even in the modern day, and as corrosive as ever.
Excellent explanation! Bravo. But I think you missed out one important step: the idea of purification of the Volk came before the purification of the race. While Herder is chiefly responsible for this, an important role was played by the Scot MacPherson and his Ossian forgeries, which were wildly successful in Germany, to the point that his fantasy of a noble warrior aristocracy was Germanized and formed the basis of Wagner's mythology, for instance (though Goethe was also a fan).
I am asking myself as a Czech, a member of a nation that has been always intertwined with German speaking groups (as a great 19th century historian and politician František Palacký said "stýkání a potýkání s německým živlem" - "the intercourse and struggle with the German element" - is a central axis of our history) and always defined ourselves in comparison and in contrast with the Germans, what influence have these concepts on us? We were the first to "purify Christianity" in the form of the utraquist movement but in the end we purified ourselves of christianity, hence a great majority of the country being non-religious. We copied garbage sorting from the Germans and we also guard the purity of beer - we also are very vocal about the fact that American Bud is not only not a beer but a slight on the Czech cultural heritage because they dared to call that piss water after our city (České Budějovice, known as Budweis in German) and our beer made there. But at the same time we would protest very loudly about not being like the Germans at all! I would like to find some nice term that would sum up our national spirit like with "reinheit" and Germany but nothing comes to my mind.
@@Ergeniz Well, professor Moeller talked about Protestant movements as a kind of "purification of Christianity", thus an expression of the German need to purify things. But the Czech Husite movement predates German Protestant movements by a century and even though seeking any kind of continuity between those might be kind of a protestant anachronism, I am sure that Zwingli and Luther knew about Hus and his followers quite well. In this way we were better purifiers than Germans! And what I mean by "purify of christianity", well we got rid of it altogether. Even though pseudo-fascists might talk about "christian heritage" and whatnot, they know very little about it and do not practice it. Czechia is one of the most atheist countries in the world (which doesn't mean that people are super rational or that they don't believe anything supernatural, they just mostly see organised religion with a lot of suspicion and disbelief) and I myself as a christian am a member of a quickly shrinking minority!
True story: I do the dishes with a dishwasher, mostly because I'm lazy, but also because I believe people who say the dishwasher preserves more water and energy than doing it by hand. Then people tell me to clean trash before recycling. So in order to be green, I put the glass and plastic trash in the dishwasher before throwing it away.
Indeed I think he forgot the whole Romantic as there is as well the knowledge that purity can never be achieved. However you could say he made this point implicitely with his fine sense of irony which was one of the preferred means of expression of the early Romantic
OMG! This was a fantastic explanation. Living in America, I happen to be descended in large part from German stock. You had me at pure beer. I can appreciate that Luther's aim may have been purification, and that Kant was a great philosopher. I can even see where Hitler's philosophy was sold as purification, however misguided that may have been. However, the "green" movement, and opposition to nuclear energy, which is the greenest form of energy that I can imagine, is some how a "purification", is absolutely irrational. I'm going to take you at your word that the Green people actually "think" that they are engaged in purification, when in fact, using reason and logic, they are engaged in the destruction of the human race.
The creepy thing about the green movement is how close it comes to the predating one ideologically when picked further apart. .. in addition to German environmentalism as well as animal protection having a fair amount of its roots in these years. We see the same longing for eternity in "Nachhaltigkeit" (Sustainability) as we did with the 1000 year Reich. As far as impurity is concerned, an aspect largely omitted in the video is seeing a part of the population as impure parasites within the nation, (creating a logical basis for using insecticide later on), this was simply scaled up. Today we are dealing with seeing all humans as impure parasites on the planet, hardliners on the matter even talking about the necessity of adding another "000" to the body-count of their predecessors, oblivious to the similarities. Nuclear energy and Germany is a special case of propaganda, the current strength of the green party is partially due to the effect of the Fukushima accident. (The leaky 50 year old never modernized thing, which wouldn't have created notable fallout if it had been updated to international standards.) German state media used an ambiguous headline on initial reporting, this, based on the general fear of nuclear energy, was misinterpreted as the over 10000 Japanese drowned in the tsunami being killed by the power-plant. The green party ran with this narrative in the ongoing state election campaign, not getting any opposition by the largely green supporting media. This ended up killing off any resistance to ending nuclear power in Germany, as after all, if even a highly modern Japanese high-tech reactor, which Germans would assume by default, can end up murdering 10000 people because it got wet, it could certainly happen over here too. (side-note, also only the press-worthy numbers of iodine radiation were reported, not however the 8 day half-life getting them below the threshold of notability within half a year.) The last attempt of the green party "remembering the tens of thousands of deaths of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe" was the 2021 anniversary. However as time passes this "mistake" gets less common, and also usually pointed out as false by those not following the state religion.
At one point I thought German Guilt Pride would be mentioned as in your explanation of woke. I am British and it occurred to me that we have similar but somewhat different characteristics as a legacy but of course to capture the self deprecating humour of this video it must be done by a British native. A look at our love of German cars reveals some empathy with the German way. There is also a strong puritan ethic as you mentioned which pervaded moral thinking, at least until recently. Then there is the empirical tradition which manifests in a somewhat piecemeal approach to many things. Also, despite links to our US cousins, in many ways we are more European.
Funnily enough, there is a lot of the puritan strains of thinking in the very woke moralizers themselves, gender almost becomes like the ideal image to aspire for ever greater and greater adherence to that idealized self-image
Only the weaker minded Germans confuse the rememberance of our dark Nazi historical legacy and to be responsible this will never happen again in the future as a guilt pride.
This is the best explanation of all! It was always on the tip of my tongue, but I could never gather enough concentration and time to verbalize it. Congratulations and thank you. What wonderful comparisons!
I was wondering if what I saw on his bookshelf was a bottle of Tsingtao, only to see at the end how he pours that vile, rice infested concoction and poisons his Gerrrrman spirit with it. Priceless. Hope he rinsed it properly before recycling, to avoid refuse contamination :)
Assuming essence without looking at historical causation is not a very critical approach. The German history is a history of retardation in development and trying to catch up via force. Angst is a necessary emotion instilled to make everyone comply with these forceful changes. Reinheit describes and ideal. Just like Freiheit it always needs a point of reference. What are you free of? What are you clean of? This video presents a very hollow take that, so I think, was probably made to satisfy a certain audience with a desire to think of national constructs in terms of personifications of archetypes rather than inspire critical thought about historical developments. I know this is hard for philosopher to accept, but not every academic faculty is suited for vague conjectures.
@@buzznovo4779 Academic faculty is not suited for unsanctioned political statements. The essence of philosophy is plain old investigation. An investigator who was taught from childhood to calculate 2+2 as 5 will have an unnecessarily hard time doing math. World history is chock-full of that. And it's full of that for a reason, and good people would like it to remain that way. For example, let's take recent history. You can't academically work on the hypothesis that the Dead Sea Scrolls were fake without making yourself out to be a pariah. So many things are off limits that an investigator is simply not allowed to work seriously. They have to hire midwits to do the work that is essentially equivalent to managing a Star Wars wiki, contributing to providing the best rationalizations that connect different canonical stories like the Dead Sea Scrolls event. As you know, even with Star Wars, which has been the subject of polarizing and public reboots and retcons, there's no shortage of people wanting to do such work, and there's no shortage of people reading and quoting the Star Wars wikis. In the meantime, the Dead Sea Scrolls were a sanctioned geopolitical event that happened on the backdoor of a recently installed state of Israel in the midst of the Cold War. Real politics carry a lot more weight than simple truth-seeking and people will be consulting the Star Wars wikis to learn what is the canonical story right now. I think there's a whole genre of cinema dedicated to the tragedy of an independent investigator, people love it!
As an American craft beer hipster who is convinced we have the greatest concentration of good brewers in the world, I will go even further and say that our Budweiser isn't even a beverage fit for human consumption. Hot, stale piss seems more palatable than any kind of "beer" that has ever been associated with the word lite.
A lot of (not all, but probably most) hipster craft beer has too much hops and tastes like potpourri. This is objective/empirical fact :p And you're right about Budweiser haha.
This is great and fun. I didn't know German humor was so dry. Well done. And you struck a chord, look at the comments, who knew? Cool ending. Represent!
When I was active duty in Germany, we loved to play mind games on the Germans. We crossed in the middle of the street all the time. The public shaming came and we'd laugh and laugh.
When I flew to Germany many years ago, I had a pretty bad fear of flying. An older german lady next to me picked up that I was nervous. "Are you afraid of flying?" she asked me. "Do not vorry. Ve are coming down one vay or another. I haff never heard of a plane just staying up there." I remember being struck by how funny that was, and yet how little I laughed.
Oh yeah this sounds very German 😂 "Runter kommt man immer"
😂
That is the essence of German laughter:
it puts the fear into the souls of everybody else...
I can imagine exactly the way the delivered the joke.
This is where we germans crack. The jokes are fine. The deliverance is where we fail :
HITLER ALSO TALKED ABOUT "REINHEIT", the PURITY of the Arian Race! 50 millions people died because of this "REINHEIT"!
This video immediately reached the edge of the cliff between real cultural analysis and satire, and it stayed there for its whole length. Little masterpiece.
I knew it was going off the rails, when it skipped the whole unificaiton of the state with military force in the 1800s, and that thing called the industrial revoluition.
Careful now, we won't want the world to think us germans could have a sense of humor.
which is german humor. dry, satiric and sometimes mean/dark ^^
I disagree, satire requires intent. I believe Dieter actually believes his own fanatical BS, which is a very German characteristic.
@marioarguello6989 what now?
German humour is no laughing matter.
That ain't funny lol
Get out
The memes about the guy with the funny mustache would disagree.
💀
Gigadad joke
"While people in Germany are often no longer religious, they tend to feel very strongly about separating garbage properly"
What a quote
Germans are deeply religious though. Germany is a woke theocracy, probably the most fundamentalist outside the Anglosphere.
sad but true
@@mistressfreezepeach Defeated, ritually humiliated, parasitized from within. Arguably.
@@codycrawford7842 ethnomasochistic scrupulosity
Well they are still occupied by the Amerikkk4ns.
I like how tongue in cheek this video is. The humor is very dry and not everyone will get it but I found the video amusing.
It was the perfect embodiment of German humor.
the german humour, especially in the north, isn't too far off from dry british humour.
To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand this video. The humor is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of theoretical physics most of the jokes will go over a typical viewer's head. There's also the host's nihilistic outlook, which is deftly woven into his characterisation - his personal philosophy draws heavily from Narodnaya Volya literature, for instance. The fans understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of these jokes, to realize that they're not just funny- they say something deep about LIFE. As a consequence people who dislike this video truly ARE idiots- of course they wouldn't appreciate, for instance, the humour in his existencial catchphrase "PURITY" which itself is a cryptic reference to Turgenev's Russian epic Fathers and Sons. I'm smirking right now just imagining one of those addlepated simpletons scratching their heads in confusion as Carefree Wandering's genius unfolds itself on their television screens. What fools... how I pity them. 😂 And yes by the way, I DO have a Purity tattoo. And no, you cannot see it. It's for the ladies' eyes only- And even they have to demonstrate that they're within 5 IQ points of my own (preferably lower) beforehand.
@@e4arakon Very meta...
I will never not laugh about this copy pasta
Reinheit can be summarised thusly: A German spends his entire childhood studying to become a forklift operator, which is his only passion in life. In adulthood, he works as a forklift operator six days a week until he retires. In retirement he spends twelve hours a day playing Forklift Simulator, while splurging an inordinate amount of money on Forklift Simulator DLC. Before he is taken to Forklift Valhalla, his last thoughts are of operating a forklift.
Sounds like the Eldar 'paths' from Warhammer 40k lol.
😂😂😂😂
Best day of his life: Steam Summer Sale 2023
Even his fantasies are of hot forklift operators playing with knobs
forklift is a passion that consumes you
I love how you purify your German pronunciation by means of sound effects!
Pure German speech always includes a short, but noticeable reverb. Not too short like you would hear in a house, nor too long like in a catholic church, but a perfect duration of reverb that you will hear from speaking in a *rein* protestant church.
@@7th808s That was a "rein Deutsche Erklärung", a pure German explanation
Wtf?😳
Ironically, the "failed attempts at humor" bit is a pretty good joke.
It's a variation on the "all Cretans are liars" paradox.
I'm Dutch and have been to Germany many times, and currently live in Japan. I've always said that most of how ww2 went can be predicted just from the fact that citizens in both these countries actually wait for a red light even when there are no cars around.
but on the other hand japanese ride their bikes wherever they want ignoring every "rule" whatsoever.
Then you will also know that German Müll Trennung has nothing on Japan
@@lindsaywebb1904 yeah...müll-trennung here is insanely annoying
Wait a minute, do you mean to say you Dutch don't? I expected better of you.
Then you go to Italy,and the hypotesis fail.
Being German myself I never thought about it like that but as soon as he said it it made perfectly sense.
Now you can be more proud of yourself....R O F L
Perfectly!
For myself, as a German person, this was both hilarious and enlightening. As for the fact that we often insist on "saubere Mülltrennung" = clean garbage separation, the fact is that it's not necessarily an obsession with "reiner Wille", but rather the fact that we get punished if we don't fill the different containers in the proper manner. Infact, the garbage collectors send an employee whose sole duty is to check the bins' contents, and they will refuse to empty the latter if they're not filled in the proper manner. This is the source of many neighbourhood disputes.
One can make this argument, but don't forget that half of the country is historically Catholic. In my opinion, what distinguishes Germany is Gründlichkeit -- thoroughness. Which can foster an awareness of, appreciation of, tolerance for details, complexity. Or, put another way, makes it harder for them to take short-cuts, sweep things under the rug, for example, the longer-term consequences of our actions with regard to the environment. I grew up in Canada and have also been following French media for decades, lived in Berlin since 1997. With all the caveats that one could apply, I really do believe that Germans are simply less prone to hypocrisy. This trait has often been remarked upon by non-Germans, that they will do what they say, and say what they do. What frustrates me is their pandering to Anglo-American culture, which results, among other things, in a dramatic lack of appreciation for their own language, which is, in fact, an extraordinary instrument, in my opinion, superior to English as a vehicle for theoretical thought. And, articulated well, it is in no way "harsh". The great French actor, Michel Picolli was enamoured of the sound of German; I could cite many such examples from previous generations. There is a definite issue with low cultural self-esteem.
Good point...but the Germans have a linguistic inferiority complex. An interesting thing is that German and French share a vowel system.
It's probably hard for them *to* take pride in their culture when they can never forget their past crimes. Nor should they but it doesn't mean they don't have a vibrant culture with value and merit beyond the atrocities committed in its name. It's a tough spot to be in.
I am an expat having expat friends and yes, the German tendency of being outspoken about things, does not always serve me well. Telling the truth is considered to be rude everywhere else it seems.
@@crakhaed You are making a lot of assumptions.
Why should I feel pride in culture - it is not mine in the first place. Culture is a means of control, if there is one thing to be learned from German history, then it is that culture is not necessarily in the interest of the people. It certainly works in the interest of the state, the church, big institutions, corporations, etc...
Secondly, I don't waste time thinking about crimes that have been done decades before I was born, much less feel guilty about it, - why would I?
I am not proud of "my" culture, nor do I take any responsibility for it. Culture is a tool and I use it to my advantage and I work around its limitations (or use other, better tools).
About 30 years ago I was riding the train down the Rhein and was talking to a Spanish teenage girl. She surprised me with her candid view of how young Germans ( after the reunification) seemed to turn away from their strictly moderated language and lean more towards English. In her words - ‘ a language that makes life easier’. I found this half credible as I was a student and researcher on German music from Bach to Berg… and lover of literature from Luther to Thomas Mann. If the French protest so much about Englishisms in their language Germans do feel how?
Sorting recycling also appeals to the British. Maybe not because of purity, but of an obsession with sorting and classifying. "Everything in its right place"
Ah yes, the Great Chain of Refuse
Of course, but the British are just a Germanic fringe society.
So their efforts are not completely pure. 😜
I'd lose my mind in that environment I'm staunchly against recycling unless it's aluminum/metals.
@@dixonhill1108 Aluminium and glass are both highly recyclable but Aluminium costs more to make in the first place. Plastics are a nightmare in most ways. So naturally, sorting what you are buying is better than sorting your recycling.
As a German teacher with an interest in philosophy, I love this video so much.
I think the essence of German thought and conduct in everyday life is to think in terms of the final end or consequence of an action or anything at all. It is deeply teleological and has two main expressions which are opposite of one another but analogous: first, to think in terms of catastrophe ("oh no, if everyone does this/if this gets out of hand, everything will fall apart, there will be some unimaginable catastrophe") and second, to think in terms of perfection ("if everyone did X, the world would be perfect, if everyone were X, there would be no problem").
German thinking and conduct is deeply unpragmatic. It is not "how do we deal with this problem in a way that alleviates the parts of it that can be alleviated without causing new problems", but rather to try and live in a way that such a problem would never occur and be comletely unheard of. The problem with that, ironically, is that problems can never be avoided fully. As a German, what bothers me most about this is that if we did not think so much in terms of catastrophe/perfection (the final consequence of action X or situation Y), then we would realize that the problem we see is not as huge and unbearable as we tend to believe.
“…think in terms of the final end or consequence of an action or anything at all” - very much Kant’ish. “...think so much in terms of catastrophe/perfection” - but in doing so, you, Germans, set an example. We, non-Germans, are (or must be) thankful to you for this. But, please, do not go too-too far.
I don't agree with the analysis of this video, at least, in what regards the historical extrapolation that makes the "jump" from German religious and philosophical search for "purity", to racial exclusion and genocide as a form of reaching national and cultural purity.
Sure, iii reich politicians, and especially its leader, wanted and were even obsessed in finding some sort of biological purity, and that's the key word, biological, not spiritual, religious or philosophical. Their inspiration for that endeavour was not found in German culture and history but in the politics of the British Empire and even of the U.S of America.
Puritan Calvinist theology was to be created in these countries, not in Lutheran and Catholic Germany.
British and American racist segregation, as well as theories of racial imperial charisma and exceptional destiny,
were developed within the religious beliefs of these two countries. Therefore, we can also see the later emergence of several biological pseudo-scientific theories, like social Darwinism and Eugenics, all of them more or less derived from Calvinist concepts of predestination.
This happened in late 19th century England and America, not in Germany. The German national movement of between wars enthusiastically embraced some of these new theories and started to copying them but the majority of the German people did not like or approved them.
@saschahusenbeth5753
That’s a lot of and exclusively your nonsense.
Overblown generalization that say probably a lot more about yourself than the country.
I sense some German Inferiority complex usually unconsciuosly fuel by the obvious past, but of course I could be wrong.
If one wants to be productive, creative and inventive nobody even Germans do start with a premise of “some unimaginable catastrophe”.
Sir Ivan Hurst the British officer who was ordered to organize the restart of Volkswagen in Wolfsburg in 1945 said: the beetle was a far cry from being perfect. It had more bugs than a dog in the early days. But the Germans went on to refine and improve it constantly. The condition of the production lines in Wolfsburg were catastrophic indeed. But the allies had placed an order of 20.000 vehicles to be delivered in a year or two.
So, despite all catastrophic prerequisites and challenges VW proceeded very “pragmatically” started what became a global success for more than half a century.
If the essence of Germans and Germany actually is deeply theological or philosophical,
as Germans like to label themselves sometimes as “the peoples of poets and thinkers”
there need to be clarification of what that means.
Actual spirituality has nothing to do with feeling good or some sort of wellness. In fact most failed and so called “spiritual people” lack
personal strengt and often misuse whatever “teachings” they claim to follow as an excuse for their failures in life.
Actual spirituality is an inner necessity. Once one truly tasted it there’s no way back.
The more one realizes the clearer it becomes that it’s a constant uphill battle. If you honestly want to get closer to the absolute you’d better be pure yourself.
And, it’s somewhat similar in life. Be it engineering, production, arts and sciences.
You know very well that perfection is almost impossible but you strive for it nevertheless.
Germany had one of the most extrem histories especially during the last 150 years or so.
In fact during the 20th century the Germans experienced 3 or 4 total meltdowns of their economy and currencies.
1915/16 during the Kaiserreich when a lot of the private gold possessions where collected to help the bankrupt 2nd Reich.
The slogan was: my gold I gave for iron meaning people gave their jewels and (sometimes) received a replica made of iron in return.
The hyperinflation in 23/24 when it made no sense to fill a wheelbarrow with absurd high banknotes only to buy a small stack of fire wood that had less calories to burn for heat than the paper of the notes.
Another less know event was the Black Friday in New York in oct 1929 and its consequences for Germany. It send schock waves around the globe. But Germany was hit especially hard. The German economy despite all hardship after the hyperinflation had just starte to recover when the Americans began to pull US capital back home to save their own ass’.
The result in spring 1930 6 million Germans lost their jobs which meant on average 4 more people depending on one income in total roughly 24 million Germans or almost half the population were facing starvation. Btw. at that time the NSDAP was still a tiny party with votes of around 5%.
1948 brought the new Deutschmark. Ludwig Erhard one of the fathers of the Rhine capitalism = German style Social Democracy was a key figure for the economic miracle. Everyone received 40 new in cash, a huge logistical operation of the allies sending thousands of trucks to thousands of locations across Germany.
One of Erhard’s moves was essential. He ordered the end of price controls starting next Monday while the allied officers were at home during the weekend.
When he was called on Monday and told that all advisors to the allied governments said this was a very dangerous move he replied: don’t worry, my advisors expressed the exact the same concerns.
Shortly after shop windows started fill up again. Prices rose for a while but the wonder at the Rhine was on its way.
And, just a few years I think only about 4 or 5 later German companies started to send supplies the South Korea in order to support the anti communist war on the Korean peninsula.
In 1956 the old Bundestag in Bonn voted to join NATO.
However, there still was a financial problem.
People had received a bit of cash to start with.
Businesses were able the get credit and financing, the amount of destruction was surprisingly small, as Germany traditionally is not very centralized compared to others like France, England and Spain.
Basically another debt based money system restarted
But all types of government had no money as it would take some time until taxes would roll in.
Solution: houses and real estate became subject to mandatory mortgages.
Many owners paid back up until the 1970s. It was labeled “Lastenausgleich = Load balancing, what a joke eary on.
Trying to create a meme
The world: catastrophic events looming at the horizon?
Germany: yes, we can
And no, despite what some say we are not necessarily afraid of the consequence
@@mykhayloklen5194 Exactly. That is why we Germans need the EU and the EU needs us.🤝
And why we need the Britains back.
@@Julia-Richter You have confirmed what I was thinking about. "By setting an example", I meant setting a benchmark, too. Of course, you need Brits, but I think, you should not hurry - let them suffer a little bit and repent first about their Brexit mistake.
Dear Professor Moeller... I lived in Germany for a quarter century and even became a German. What a lovely Streifen durch die deutsche Reinheitsbesessenheit... I remember some delightful examples of this: 1) Am Samstag vor der Haustür kehren ... I lived in a tiny village, and sometimes had to work hard on weekends to meet Monday deadlines and could not do this job (which is actually very social), so I would do it on Monday. Of course, my neighbors would remark on this, nicely, but in their voice was always an "erhobener Zeigefinger." Sunday was "Ruhetag" of course, which leads me to story number two. One Sunday in winter, I had to chop some wood, because I heated exclusively with Kanonenöfen and cooked on wood as well. And I sometimes ran out of small enough pieces. My ax slipped off a knot in the log I was chopping and planted itself in my leg shaving a bit of my tibia. I went to the hospital for a tetanus shot and to check if the bone was ok, it was very painful. ... My neighbor's reaction: "Das hast du davon, wenn du am Sontag dei Holz hackst."
I am writing about the life in this little village in Hessen in my autobiography.
And that is why we do all the stuff on saturday. At 7am the lawnmower and hedge trimmer are running and there is no end until 10pm. Don't forget to do groceries. Especially if monday is a holiday. Because having 2 days closed is usually the end of the world.
That is such a typical response. A bit of satire, schadenfreude and tadel mixed together :D That makes up a lot of our humour :P
And nothing says "green" like ripping up ancient forests and villages to strip mine more coal to burn for energy!
As someone of German heritage myself, that's the most German thing of all; missing the point.
Als katholisch erzogener Bayer - ich war Ministrant und auch Internatszögling in der Benediktinerabtei Ettal! - ist sogar mein Atheismus katholisch.
Amen.
There are days where you feel like you haven't done anything, haven't had a meaningful talk with anyone, or didn't even eat anything that taste good. You know it was a waste of a day in life. Then you put a random TH-cam video to fall asleep to and it alone makes your day worthwhile. After leaving 7 years, this is the day I finally grasped why I hated my time in Germany
Wow! Sometimes I am homesick for Germany, but having been gone for 45 years, I probably wouldn't fit in.🤣
The comedic quality of this material is, paradoxically, also very German. In a good way. Great stuff.
Als Österreicher selten so gelacht über deutschen Humor! Chapeau!
same lmao
Well, as Österreicher you are a lot like Germans 😉
@@eucitizen78 haha no we are not! especially humour-wise. usually german-humour/comedy is perceived as very tasteless and crude in austria because the germans tend to be too direct and honest. Austrians have a very different relation to the "truth" lol
Gelacht? Das hätte lustig sein sollen? - Ich (auch aus Österreich) hab es sehr interessant gefunden, aber nicht lustig.
@@ladyalexandra2980 wir haben zum glück nicht alle den selben humor.
I would definitely watch more 'Germanology' from you! I remember being surprised by the emphasis my highschool German teacher placed on recycling. There were entire chapters in our textbook devoted to it!
Recycling is a religious cult. Paying 30% more for a product that has a „Bio“ label is a sacrifice to nature that reliefs the sinners.
"Being German means doing a thing for its own sake." (Richard Wagner)
It's an entire culture of people desperate to find something to be pissed off at you for. If you cross the light at the wrong time, if you walk in front of someone's house, if you take a cab in front of an imaginary line of delineation - I have come to conclude that the German simply dislikes everyone and the rest are just excuses. I once stayed at a boutique hotel in Berlin, which was right next to another very similar hotel. In front of both the hotels was a canopy, so that you can stand and wait for a taxi without being rained on. The canopy is connected between the two hotels, they must have paid to have it installed together. And as I waited for the cab, I would pace back and forth just out of boredom. I noticed one of the valets staring at me with a sour look on his face. Then again the following day the same thing. On the third day I finally asked what was the issue. "You are a guest of that hotel," he says while pointing next door. "Our frontage begins here" he points to an imaginary line delineating the frontage of the two hotels, or the sidewalk adjacent each property. "You keep walking past this point."
There is even a law and a fine up to 5000 € max. for not separating/disposing garbage in a proper way! And in a way it all makes sense... I lived and worked half my life in Asia, go and check that filthy garbage dump out!
Always keep in mind that being a planner is german. It's not about working a lot, but working smart. And that requires to properly plan the work. The fact that we have the least annual working hours in the world proves that.
Oh, and make jokes about other german regions. German infighting is as old as the country, or rather 1000 years older than that. Long before there was a german nation, the bavarians and hessians and saxons and prussians and hanoverians and rheinlanders have bickered and fought each other. And that has never changed. But the instead of wars we transitioned to stereotype jokes and football.
And while there is a "german culture", each area has it's own thing, often in sort of a continuum with neighbouring countries.
The badener or saarlander has a tick french, the schlesweger is a bit danish, the frisian is a bit dutch, and so on.
The German penchant for performative moralistic garbage separation goes beyond what you’ve even described here. Many Germans, including my girlfriend, even separate out organic garbage into a yet another bin. Separating plastic and paper wasn’t good enough. We now need to separate organic garbage as though it’s somehow toxic to the normal garbage.
Of course this is all a moot point, since (with the occasional exception of paper) the garbage men throw it all into the back of the same truck every week.
It kills me how Budweiser brands itself as The King of Beers. I hate Budweiser with the heat of a thousand suns.
Bad Walter is like sex on the beach f****** close to water
Who cares about budweiser? Irrelevant
I like how this is have both an examplification of German humour and an actually solid explanation of the German contribution to the Western world in general 😂
"please allow me to pronounce the name here [Kant] in it's pure German form" 😎
[ʔɪ.ˈmaː.nu.ʔɛl. | ˈkant.]
You might call it purity, but I think 'absolutism' captures more of the sprit of it. It is a obsessive compulsion to pursue something unconditionally until it is achieved without any compromise, be it real or conceivable.
absolut!
"humour is a mere distraction, impure, ungerman", makes sense. In any case, you forgot the purification of (German) language, which is quite an important one. Thanks, Herder
i never thought of reverb as essential to correct German pronunciation. I'm going to have to work on that.
What is German?
I was seeing my friend for the weekend once and he insisted we spend about an hour making a plan for the whole thing. That is German.
Let me guess...and then he asked you to go for a beer (or 10 beers) ?
@@mandelish actually doesn't drink, I think it's because he's only half German (half south African)
Fascinating! I find your clip stimulating and instructive, with just a touch of self-deprecation and humour. Bravo!
I'm a London-based Frenchman with a love for the German language, I only wish I could speak it better. Ich schäme mich.
Nein, ess gibt keinen Grund zum schaemen. I love the French and British people and if I would be young again I would love to learn the French language. Schoenste Sprache der Welt. I married a Canadian and miss my Country Germany for many years. 💔
Be well Xavier. Cheers! 💖🍀🌍
Und Sie auch, chère amie! Alles gute !
And that's the reason why the Cannabis debate is so controversial. Solution would be a German Hanf Reinheitsgebot, of course. Why didn't think anyone of this?
I'm intrigued by the socio-linguistical implication of the interchange between "reinheit" and "sauber", suspecting some etymological linkage between "sauber" and the English word "sober", in light of the whole beer-parable. Is beer loosing its power over the people? Probably not, idk, I'm quite drunk. Greetings from Finland!
A lot of comments talk about the humor in this video, but seriously, it's a pretty interesting analysis. What I thought was very close to this, but you also gave a historical perspective, which is very valuable. However, something can be added to this. As the proverb suggests: "水至清则无鱼" (shuǐ zhì qīng zé wú yú), which translates as "If the water is too clear, there are no fish in it", purity is not natural and therefore not fundamental state, but some feature or trend that is interesting to analyze further. With this in mind, purity is also a symbol of totality, in a sense also of dominance, and also the ability to represent a guideline to follow for those who are looking for a guideline. Purity can also be indirectly interpreted as “having more (or less) of something,” as order and a metaphor for will and decision.
As a German I have to say this is probably one the best and ways to describe the essence of being German.
We are still attempting to purify the German people. It just has gotten a different Facette. We aren't concerned about racial purity anymore, instead we overemphasize on ideological purity.
This summary of the German "Wesen" is the best attempt to summarize our culture, I've encountered to this day. I'm going to reference this going forward
"Es ist kein Bier" is my favorite part.
Those R's had my worrying that my phone was going to drive off. 😂
And don't forget Hans Kelsen's "Reine Rechtslehre" or Pure Theory of law!
I came to think of the German essence as being somewhere between accuracy and perfectionism. But obviously, the lack of verbal, semantic preciseness here should be enough to illustrate that this is the wrong solution and I wholeheartedly thank Prof. Moeller for purifying my conception of germanness with his superior terminology and proper elaboration!
That was so meta.
I love it.
This is really one of the best videos out there explaining Germany and also why Germans are so vulnerable to ideologies which go beyond reason
Really gives context to all things within the history of Germany
The examples you have detailed are clearly only steps towards the ultimate purified production of the German spirit, and I personally am very excited for the punchline!
Throughout the video, particularly during the section on the moral imperative of separating one's rubbish, my eye kept drifting towards the lone bottle of beer on the shelf. I kept laughing to myself about that little, niggly loose end. But just like any good Chekhov's gun narrative device, there was the ultimate payoff! Well done!
What's really funny is that it is a bottle of Tsing Tao, a Chinese beer... Not exactly pure German beer pride!
@@djn48 Tsingtao brewery was founded by German settlers ;-)
@@philippmuller9377 Ha! I didn't know that. To be fair though, I think there are a lot of world beers that were founded by Germans or German-owned companies. Thank you for sharing your gift of beer, Germany!
I, as a fellow German, would not call it purity, but idealism. Purity seems more restricted, idealism is more general. Idealism also includes perfectionism, which gets along well with purity, but is not the same. Doing the things in the right way.
Excellent video as always!
If I can make honorable mention of the Theologia Germanica and Meister Eckhart which preceded Martin Luther and he was probably heavily influenced by.
I have been studying the intersection of Neoplatonism with Christian Mysticism and mainstream Christianity. One point I have been drawn to is that in Dante's poetic representation of his ascent to Paradise, his will is made "free" only after it is purified of all sin or self-will. Dante does not exercise a "free-will" in the colloquial sense but his will is made free only after purification and only because it is aligned with the divine will. Also of note is that for reasons beyond Virgil's control he was not able to enter paradise along with Dante, this can be attributed to his pagan origins but my take-away is that it is not of desire or will alone that one becomes purified, as Dante was, but through grace and election by God. This parallels Eckhart and Luther's view of the Bondage of the Will and the process of Sanctification. Similar views can be found in Augustine and Athanasius. Therefor I do not think they diverted too sharply from traditional Catholicism, rather they mainly rebuked the Church and its capitalization of the unrefined believers who maintained theological perspectives based on their own self-will.
main schism was en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelagius defeated by augustine. according to pelg good deeds can influence fate. catholic praxis was pelagian still despite augustine winning in theo. normal everyday christians were pelagian. the determination concept made no sense for them. devil on one shoulder, schutzengel on the other. cult of maria. you are mixing up theology with religious praxis.
As an architect who lived in Berlin I must say that "Reinheit" is good way to sum up Germanness! Think about Bauhaus which was the purification of space and the beginning of modern architecture and German techno music which similarly has purified dance music to its essential parts. Observing Germans "dancing" to techno music is clearly not very fun or entertaining but it sure is PURE!
Pure insanity
I think this also partly explains why German bread is so good.
Great video! My feelings about us Germans has always been that we are going overboard with just about everything. Seems like there is an idea, the idea is deemed good, and then we are pursuing the idea to the utmost extreme, 110%. And that is what I do not like about us Germans.
From my personal research, that 10% you don't like is precisely what led the Americans to abduct every scientist and every engineer they could lay their hands on. After having plundered the complete scientific, industrial and military data they could find, including blueprints, plans, patents, technology, tons and tons of paperwork, they soon realized that there was a good 10% no one had ever seen before so to achieve the remarkable level of prosperity the Americans had planned and finally achieved not long after the loot had been completed, the only solution, according to the limited possibilities of American vison, was to bring the creators of that advanced technology and put them to work, whether they were willing participants or not. And many were not but upon learning what the only alternative was, most finally agreed to go, after all, rice beer never killed anyone did it? Did it? Therefore, depending on how you analyze that uniquely German 10% margin, you could be correct for the good of everyone, to consider it as a nuisance rather than an asset! : ) Cheers.
As we see in case of garbage I could propose something different as a german spirit - it is organisation - this is exactly what made Germany powerful.
Organisation means also unification and centralization of power.
With protestantism came centralization of power - cuius regio, eius religio. Catholic Church seemed to be an independent organisation before, but Germans couldn't tolerate to have 2 captains on board (pope and state).
I believe the first public schools, first pension systems, first public hospitals also first appeared in German state, as a process of unification and centralization (Bismarck), giving them hierachical/vertical structure like in the army.
Obrigkeitstaat is also this idea which projects Prussian army principles onto the civil life.
It always seemed to be endeavour to encompass entire reality into one system, like German philosopher Marks did.
It is the same system in german automotive, where everything must be meticulously catalogued and most cars from f.e. VAG shares same components everywhere when they can between the models - make it efficient in production and service - no individualism.
Nazi economic system was an effective hybrid between central planning of production and capitalism, with leverage to the former.
Then machine industry in Europe uses mostly DIN norm.
There is atomic clock in the central Germany which sends radio signal to german electronics in order to unify time precisely.
MittelEuropa
Deutscheeconomische schule
and so on and so forth.
The racial idea of III Reich was also in the same spirit - It was basically try to conquer entire world and encompass all the people in the one system, where every race have predetrmined by "big brother" role/function in it.
I see it as little control freakish - everything and everybody must be included in some bigger plan and function according to it.
No place for freedom understood as a privilege to not be monitored, enlisted, normalized, watched, included, taxed and so on - to be free of some agency which doesn't let something/somebody be without taking a paternal "care" and "watch".
It is very arrogant also.
Greens are completely arrogant to think they have to somehow care about and protect even the earth and the climate - "We have to organise climate and wildlife (is it wilderness anymore then?)". It is paternalism taken to the absurd.
Why they just can't let go?
We lack the one thing that might be considered the essence of being Austrian: Schmäh. For those familiar with this term: Did you notice that it could be paraphrased with
- deception
- the ability to deceive
- trick (you need to know to get something done)
- humour
- charm
- coolness
- ...
and, maybe, "the will to impurity".
this guy really just made a 15 minute meme and cited his sources
You say that you make mistakes in English. But I never heard a single one. Your English is excellent.
Am a German teacher; will be showing this video on the first day of every new school year.
What I've gotten from this is that the purity of beer was a worthwhile and long lasting pursuit of meaning and value that should never end.
The pursuit of spiritual/faith, reasonable/mind, and bodily/race, purity was short sighted and ultimately unsatisfactory.
Especially when compared to the much more meaningful and productive purification of trash.
We here in the southern United States also value beer and being trashy. So this really resonated with me.
purification of trash is more important than the purification of the mind and the self?!
Loved this, especially since I've begun learning German!
I chuckled throughout this and then it got personal...
I listened to the video in the background while reading articles on garbage sorting/ recycling because... f***... because I was traveling by train and made the decision to throw some plastic trash in the public wastebin (Restmüll) at the train station because there was no space left in my luggage and would have had to carry an extra bag to throw it away at home in the appropiate bin. It would have been possible but extremely inconvenient. I felt so bad about it that for some reason I decided to read up on recycling.
Anyways, gotta go now, convert to Protestantism, cleanse myself of my Rhenish Catholicism and maybe revel in my guilt over that plastic trash somemore...
as a swedish person i feel like this video applies reasonably well to our society as well
Really? Every Swedish person are able to feel and manage feelings. Autis, sorry I mean Germans can not.
As a Dane I can relate as well. It's probably cultural leftovers from the reformation 500 years ago.
@@patrikefternamn281
scandinavians are about as close to being germans as you can get temperamentally without being german
As a German, Sweden came to my mind immediately. It's because of the concept of social democracy and the strong desire for consent in society.
Germans (Germanic) as well
Dass wir das noch erleben dürfen. 👌✨
A little notice on the german purity command for beer: there was a great variety of additives to water and malt, henbane, gail, nightshade and other problematic substances. A cosequence of this, in particular gail beer were bar fights every day, so the german princes decided to only allow hops as an additive because of its calming effect. Greetings!
As an American who studied German and an educated brewer I never heard this. The word adjunct in brewing is defined as other fermentable sugar not derived from the malting process. Your making cheap beer if you don't malt it. That's where beer flavor comes from. Budweiser is not beer.
It's a myth. The German princes could never contrl what people put in their home brew.
Gail, henbane etc. are wild herbs which go extinct when an ever growing population collects it for beer, while hops is a cultivated plant grown on fields.
I don't know much of anything about Germany when it comes down to it, but the very fact that this gentleman even believes there is such a thing as an essence to being German sounds very German to me somehow.
I think it makes sense to speak of a German or an American essence or any national essence for that matter. What Wer mean by the term is simply the fundamental premises underpinning a certain culture or cultural mentality over a long period of time.
German mentality is the term I would use. Or group psychopathy of German people. How can you cause a war in which 80 million people die than admit the guilt and feel pride and moral superiority because nobody before was able to admit such an atrocity so easily and so completely. This is very disturbing...
very interesting. two more connections to purification i can think of: 1. esoterics, alternative medicine and antrosophy which are strong in Germany and also found in the ecological movement. 2. Also I thought of Weber's ideal type which is a purification in scentific thinking, kinda at least.
Yes! A lot in this video reminded me of Waldorf, which is the essence of the german hilbilly.
First thing that got purified was beer. Priorities, son, priorities....
I am spanish. Wonderful video. But now I think we need Germanexit. Germany are turning living in EU in a painful thing.
Thanks a lot for this video! I have been living in Germany now for 4 years and finally after watching the video a lot of my observations make a lot of sense. For example, my room mate from Frankfurt does wash the jars of glass before disposing them. However my room mate from Saxony (precisely like myself) do not care at all about it. Do you think this is reflected socially in the former East German and the former West German parts? In other words, is the garbage separation and green movement reflected stronger in the former West German areas than in the former East German areas?
I do hope you reply, but nonetheless a great video. I especially love the humour, its very pure German!
In short, yes. But also because it's older in the West. There was more activism, there also is more industry thus more pollution.
East Germans are slightly more wary of authoritarian movements and totalitarians like the Greens because of their history. That's another factor.
Thanks. Short answer: Yes.
@@hans-georgmoeller7027 Thanks for the reply. I would definitely like a video for the long answer :)
Obviously and officially cleaning jars and glasses with water and soap is nonsense. The neuroses behind is on a an individual and not a collective one. Officially it's "clean or empty your container with a spoon, that's it.
To elaborate a little bit, the green movement is primarily seen in the more wealthy urban areas, if you look at maps of voting patterns, you'll see green dots in every larger city-center.
Even in the East these are often inhabited by people originally from west Germany to the extend of "tötet Schwaben" kill swabians, not being uncommon graffiti during the times of intensified gentrification of Berlin.
In more rural areas, the east-west divide is more noticeable, the green party origin is strongly linked to the anti-nuclear movement, witch is related to cold-war propaganda efforts.
As this would be seen to a larger extend in the non-communist regions this created a broader basis within the population of former West Germany, as there wasn't even the option for a party and movement of this kind in the east.
(historically German general environmentalism and environmentalist policy has some strong links to the 1930s ..)
The current green stronghold of Baden-Würtemberg also needs some context, as it is somewhat unusual. Chernobyl created the general seed of fear, but the election in BW creating the first fantastic state turnout (which continued due to voting-tradition) coincided with the Fukushima accident.
Both private news sources and and government-run TV of the time had fairly ambiguise headlines along the lines of "tsunami, 10000 dead in japan, nuclear reactor damaged" and it devolved into the tsunami-victims often being seen as victims of radiation rather than water.
Even in more recent years "Remembering the over 10000 victims of the Fukushima Nuclear accident" is not uncommon among green party politicians. (e.g. a party-wide social media release in 2021).
Given this origin and emphasis on being anti-nuclear to the point of distorting reality it makes quite a lot more sense, psychologically, that a green party politics dominated German energy policy ended up wanting to ban even nuclear research and managed lobbying the EU into labeling gas power plants "green energy".
As an Austrian I can say that some not all of these German values apply here as well, we are also very keen on separating our garbage. For example our municipality(I had to look that word up and oh boy is it a tongue twister and I am glad there is copy and paste) is organizing a bi-weekly garbage collection, where they take the garbage directly from our EINFAHRT. We have only 3 MÜLLTONNEN though, one is for general trash, one is for plastic and one is for paper. That said only paper trash is really recycled, most of the plastic garbage will be burned or stored along with the general trash anyway...
By the way, something that wasn't mentioned in the video was the purity of our language, in German we have a very direct language model, we speak almost everything the way we write it, we even went so far as to invent a sharp s, for times when the "s" is spelled short even though the vowel in front of it is spelled long and soft. Like in "Straße" (street) or weiß (spelled like "vice" pretty much, meaning white), even though we call "ß" a "sharp s" it's not as "sharp" as an "ss" would be, it's exactly in between s and ss. That said when speaking the "ß" will naturally sound sharper than a standard s, you can't really spell it wrong at least not in my opinion.
Great video. Educational and entertaining. Since you spoke so eloquently on German obsession with Purity, I'd be interested to hear your take on Shame. I've noticed, cultures that are obsessed with purity, also have an unhealthy obsession with Shame. Is it also true for Germans?
Absolutely! We all grow up being ashamed of what we did in the past. To this day I can’t say that I’m German without a little apologetic smirk.
@@kieferngruen Interesting. But I meant to ask, how does it manifest itself in German culture? Assuming it does. Like the pursuit for purity manifested itself in the purity of beer, religion, race and today, nature. For example, in some religious cultures, who obsess over spiritual purity, are on the flipside ashamed of the carnal desires of the body, which they try to suppress by punishing the body through self-denial. The whole idea of celibacy among the men and women of the catholic church stems from it.
I wouldn't call it unhealthy because our past is so shocking that shame is actually the right emotion for it.
You could have mentioned the "Erinnerungskultur" as "Purification of Politics" because that was honestly my thought.
Though I don't fully understand this obsession with purity, I feel I understand the German people much better after watching this video. This puts so much into context with regard to German history and national policy. Thank you for this video!
the most german thing about this video is the humor. a lot of not german people often don't get this since it's very dry and sometimes deeply sarcastic.
What a delicious video! You just got me back into learning German, which I did for some years. I have enjoyed it so much. And laughed... hard. I am actually dealing with Kant (PhD) on pure judgement of taste. I would like watching more content on history of the German culture/essence and philosophy so much. Love the channel. Thank you so much!!
German and purity in the same sentence sounds scary. Historically speaking.
We must restore the Purity Law. The abolishment of Reinheitsgebot was a historic mistake!
Historically speaking claims to moral purity have existed for far longer and led to devastation far more than claims to racial purity. That idea is fairly recent, with the German claim being the most famous example of its corrosiveness. But it's also a far easier claim to undermine, hence why it's already weakened and will weaken ever more as populations comingle. Meanwhile the old claim of being morally pure or morally superior is alive and well and widespread even in the modern day, and as corrosive as ever.
That’s the whole idea!
U sound like u didn’t watch the vid
@@rumination2399 Yeah he does talk about it in the vid, but the vid is kinda tongue in cheek anyway, so why not? 😋
The sequence of german purity is as follows: food (bier), spirit (Luther), mind (Kant), body (h*tl*r), environment (Greens).
Excellent explanation! Bravo. But I think you missed out one important step: the idea of purification of the Volk came before the purification of the race. While Herder is chiefly responsible for this, an important role was played by the Scot MacPherson and his Ossian forgeries, which were wildly successful in Germany, to the point that his fantasy of a noble warrior aristocracy was Germanized and formed the basis of Wagner's mythology, for instance (though Goethe was also a fan).
I am asking myself as a Czech, a member of a nation that has been always intertwined with German speaking groups (as a great 19th century historian and politician František Palacký said "stýkání a potýkání s německým živlem" - "the intercourse and struggle with the German element" - is a central axis of our history) and always defined ourselves in comparison and in contrast with the Germans, what influence have these concepts on us? We were the first to "purify Christianity" in the form of the utraquist movement but in the end we purified ourselves of christianity, hence a great majority of the country being non-religious. We copied garbage sorting from the Germans and we also guard the purity of beer - we also are very vocal about the fact that American Bud is not only not a beer but a slight on the Czech cultural heritage because they dared to call that piss water after our city (České Budějovice, known as Budweis in German) and our beer made there. But at the same time we would protest very loudly about not being like the Germans at all! I would like to find some nice term that would sum up our national spirit like with "reinheit" and Germany but nothing comes to my mind.
What do you mean by the purification of Christianity?
@@Ergeniz Well, professor Moeller talked about Protestant movements as a kind of "purification of Christianity", thus an expression of the German need to purify things. But the Czech Husite movement predates German Protestant movements by a century and even though seeking any kind of continuity between those might be kind of a protestant anachronism, I am sure that Zwingli and Luther knew about Hus and his followers quite well. In this way we were better purifiers than Germans!
And what I mean by "purify of christianity", well we got rid of it altogether. Even though pseudo-fascists might talk about "christian heritage" and whatnot, they know very little about it and do not practice it. Czechia is one of the most atheist countries in the world (which doesn't mean that people are super rational or that they don't believe anything supernatural, they just mostly see organised religion with a lot of suspicion and disbelief) and I myself as a christian am a member of a quickly shrinking minority!
True story: I do the dishes with a dishwasher, mostly because I'm lazy, but also because I believe people who say the dishwasher preserves more water and energy than doing it by hand. Then people tell me to clean trash before recycling. So in order to be green, I put the glass and plastic trash in the dishwasher before throwing it away.
Never thought of it this way, but yes... it all makes sense now. Danke for this.
Wickedly clever, but I wonder if it is only half the story. I am remembering Goethe's Faust: "Zwei Seelen, ach, in meiner Brust!"
Indeed I think he forgot the whole Romantic as there is as well the knowledge that purity can never be achieved. However you could say he made this point implicitely with his fine sense of irony which was one of the preferred means of expression of the early Romantic
OMG! This was a fantastic explanation. Living in America, I happen to be descended in large part from German stock. You had me at pure beer. I can appreciate that Luther's aim may have been purification, and that Kant was a great philosopher. I can even see where Hitler's philosophy was sold as purification, however misguided that may have been. However, the "green" movement, and opposition to nuclear energy, which is the greenest form of energy that I can imagine, is some how a "purification", is absolutely irrational. I'm going to take you at your word that the Green people actually "think" that they are engaged in purification, when in fact, using reason and logic, they are engaged in the destruction of the human race.
The creepy thing about the green movement is how close it comes to the predating one ideologically when picked further apart. .. in addition to German environmentalism as well as animal protection having a fair amount of its roots in these years.
We see the same longing for eternity in "Nachhaltigkeit" (Sustainability) as we did with the 1000 year Reich.
As far as impurity is concerned, an aspect largely omitted in the video is seeing a part of the population as impure parasites within the nation, (creating a logical basis for using insecticide later on), this was simply scaled up. Today we are dealing with seeing all humans as impure parasites on the planet, hardliners on the matter even talking about the necessity of adding another "000" to the body-count of their predecessors, oblivious to the similarities.
Nuclear energy and Germany is a special case of propaganda, the current strength of the green party is partially due to the effect of the Fukushima accident. (The leaky 50 year old never modernized thing, which wouldn't have created notable fallout if it had been updated to international standards.)
German state media used an ambiguous headline on initial reporting, this, based on the general fear of nuclear energy, was misinterpreted as the over 10000 Japanese drowned in the tsunami being killed by the power-plant.
The green party ran with this narrative in the ongoing state election campaign, not getting any opposition by the largely green supporting media.
This ended up killing off any resistance to ending nuclear power in Germany, as after all, if even a highly modern Japanese high-tech reactor, which Germans would assume by default, can end up murdering 10000 people because it got wet, it could certainly happen over here too.
(side-note, also only the press-worthy numbers of iodine radiation were reported, not however the 8 day half-life getting them below the threshold of notability within half a year.)
The last attempt of the green party "remembering the tens of thousands of deaths of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe" was the 2021 anniversary.
However as time passes this "mistake" gets less common, and also usually pointed out as false by those not following the state religion.
"Pure will to Mülltrennung" I laughed so hard!
This was different for your normal content!
But i liked it, I've learned somethings about my own people.
Thank you!
Your pronunciation german "r" has some real 1930s vibes
I laughed out loud at this. Hilarious!
WTF?
I'm an American living in Germany for over a year now, and this is probably my new favorite channel
At one point I thought German Guilt Pride would be mentioned as in your explanation of woke.
I am British and it occurred to me that we have similar but somewhat different characteristics as a legacy but of course to capture the self deprecating humour of this video it must be done by a British native. A look at our love of German cars reveals some empathy with the German way. There is also a strong puritan ethic as you mentioned which pervaded moral thinking, at least until recently. Then there is the empirical tradition which manifests in a somewhat piecemeal approach to many things. Also, despite links to our US cousins, in many ways we are more European.
Funnily enough, there is a lot of the puritan strains of thinking in the very woke moralizers themselves, gender almost becomes like the ideal image to aspire for ever greater and greater adherence to that idealized self-image
Only the weaker minded Germans confuse the rememberance of our dark Nazi historical legacy and to be responsible this will never happen again in the future as a guilt pride.
this is one of the most clever analysis I have watched or listened to, in a long time. I guess many people will have no clue what is about.
You should turn this video into a book of German cultural history under the lens of Reinheitsdiskurs.
This is the best explanation of all! It was always on the tip of my tongue, but I could never gather enough concentration and time to verbalize it. Congratulations and thank you. What wonderful comparisons!
I am british living in germany. Spiessigkeit, not fascism, is the true end-stadion of the Deutsche Reinheits erstrebungen.
I can confirm that
Fascism is so spicy and Italian. Spiessigkeit is truly bland and pure
I always feel weird rinsing plastic, in the states, especially.
Thank you this episod was "rein" gold as always.
I was wondering if what I saw on his bookshelf was a bottle of Tsingtao, only to see at the end how he pours that vile, rice infested concoction and poisons his Gerrrrman spirit with it. Priceless. Hope he rinsed it properly before recycling, to avoid refuse contamination :)
At first, I'd have said the essence of being German is Angst, but now I tend to agree that Reinheit is also one of our core obsessions.
We're very good at letting "parasitic stress" escalate and hypertrophy, which is about both Angst and Reinheit.
Assuming essence without looking at historical causation is not a very critical approach. The German history is a history of retardation in development and trying to catch up via force. Angst is a necessary emotion instilled to make everyone comply with these forceful changes. Reinheit describes and ideal. Just like Freiheit it always needs a point of reference. What are you free of? What are you clean of? This video presents a very hollow take that, so I think, was probably made to satisfy a certain audience with a desire to think of national constructs in terms of personifications of archetypes rather than inspire critical thought about historical developments. I know this is hard for philosopher to accept, but not every academic faculty is suited for vague conjectures.
Grauzone agrees: th-cam.com/video/GgpAp6lR87g/w-d-xo.html
Unless you are a reactionary Green.
@@buzznovo4779 Academic faculty is not suited for unsanctioned political statements. The essence of philosophy is plain old investigation. An investigator who was taught from childhood to calculate 2+2 as 5 will have an unnecessarily hard time doing math. World history is chock-full of that. And it's full of that for a reason, and good people would like it to remain that way. For example, let's take recent history. You can't academically work on the hypothesis that the Dead Sea Scrolls were fake without making yourself out to be a pariah. So many things are off limits that an investigator is simply not allowed to work seriously. They have to hire midwits to do the work that is essentially equivalent to managing a Star Wars wiki, contributing to providing the best rationalizations that connect different canonical stories like the Dead Sea Scrolls event. As you know, even with Star Wars, which has been the subject of polarizing and public reboots and retcons, there's no shortage of people wanting to do such work, and there's no shortage of people reading and quoting the Star Wars wikis. In the meantime, the Dead Sea Scrolls were a sanctioned geopolitical event that happened on the backdoor of a recently installed state of Israel in the midst of the Cold War. Real politics carry a lot more weight than simple truth-seeking and people will be consulting the Star Wars wikis to learn what is the canonical story right now. I think there's a whole genre of cinema dedicated to the tragedy of an independent investigator, people love it!
As an American craft beer hipster who is convinced we have the greatest concentration of good brewers in the world, I will go even further and say that our Budweiser isn't even a beverage fit for human consumption. Hot, stale piss seems more palatable than any kind of "beer" that has ever been associated with the word lite.
A lot of (not all, but probably most) hipster craft beer has too much hops and tastes like potpourri. This is objective/empirical fact :p
And you're right about Budweiser haha.
French living in Germany for 10 years here. I clean the glasses before putting them in the trash.
Am I German now?
Only if you report others if they don't.
This video is an incredible rollercoaster. Love it.
This is great and fun. I didn't know German humor was so dry. Well done. And you struck a chord, look at the comments, who knew?
Cool ending. Represent!
I don't know about you, but my humor isn't affected by humidity
German humor gets better when it's dry ;)
Grossartiger Channel, sehr sympathisch, mega interessant... beste Grüße aus Osnabrück ❤
When I was active duty in Germany, we loved to play mind games on the Germans. We crossed in the middle of the street all the time. The public shaming came and we'd laugh and laugh.
Right on the bleeding edge of reality with this one here; so very entertaining.
Überragende Analyse! 😁
Hans Kelsen's seminal legal theory book was named "Reine Rechtslehre". Never thought of that
I love this guy