Make me a German

Make me a German is an equally funny and informative BBC documentary. The curiosity for understanding why the German economy is doing so good while the economies of the rest of the European Union are doing so dramatically bad, compels a British family to move to Germany and try to convert themselves in the average German family in an attempt to understand the country from inside.

The experiment is pretty funny, and brings up some interesting points, at least for someone like me, that in spite of having an obsessive fascination for Berlin, having read quite a lot about German history and society and counting some German artists (Caspar David Friedrich) among my all time favorites, has never had a too intense interaction with locals (I've been to Germany quite many times, but as a solitary person with not much significant social skills... I've hardly scratched the surface of the German mind). I'll list below some of their findings:

• Germans really work less hours than most Europeans (at least British and Asturians), but they work so focused and hard that they are much more productive. It's astonishing how outraged one German lady felt when talking about her experience in U.K. in an office where people where checking their personal emails or talking about their private life during the work day. Quite hilarious.
• There seems to be a very strong sense of community at work, and also an identification with the company. You are part of a team and as everyone in the team is working hard you can't fail them. I guess most people will appreciate this, but notice that taking to the extreme this feeling of unity and belonging and the denial of individualism helped set the backdrop for the Nazi regime. I'm a very individualist person, so I'm a bit biased on this point.

• Germans are cautious with money and save more than the rest of Europe. This can be easily traced to the brutal crisis after WWI and WWII. Germans are quite little fond of credit cards (hum, that's a rather Germanic trait of mine). This background also explains something that I pretty enjoy when being there, Supermarkets are cheap, indeed it turns out that German supermarkets have the tightest profit margins in Europe.
• It's easier to be a mother in Germany. Families with kids get enormous fiscal advantages, Kinder Gartens are really cheap, and there's a sense of pride in being a mother that has left her job to take care of her little kids and the house. It's so common that mothers that decide to carry on with their jobs are generally seen with a certain disapproval. What seems odd to me is that having all these advantages the birthrate continues to be so low.
• I'd never noticed that Sundays as a rest day were so important to Germans, well probably it's cause they're not that sacred in Anarchist Berlin as they are in Christian southern Germany. Combine this with that almost genetic obsession with abiding by the rules and civic behaviour, and doing some more noise than expected in a Sunday morning can end up with the Polizei paying you a visit and giving you a fine. On a personal note, the unruly Astur-Gallaecian in me can't help enjoying the bad looks I get there each time I cross a red light :-D (and what to say about travelling without a ticket in Berlin's BVG)

It quite caught my attention that a British family were looking at Germany as a better place. For an Asturian like me, that lives in a place with 27% unemployment, where youngsters are much more ignorant now than they were 100 years ago, having as their main aspiration in life to turn into a TV crap celebrity and partying as hard as possible, where politicians are mainly a bunch of thieves, where "picaresca" (that is, getting whatever you want by means of tricks and cheating rather than by effort) is a chronic illness... it's normal to perceive Germany as a better place and look at it with a certain sense of inferiority (though based on culture, history and geography Asturies is NOT Southern Europe, in the end we share and suffer too many traits with the rest of Southern Europeans), but I also perceive UK as a better place/society, so it seemed funny to me seeing the Brits envious of the Germans. Who knows, maybe Swedes are also envious of Norwegians or Danes... but for us, they're all just "first class countries".