I’ve attended German school for roughly three months now, and the base of every opinion I have ever considered to be true has been questioned. In my study abroad applications, I wrote about how I was trapped in a bubble and I wanted to escape it. Now that I have, I’m coming to realize the extent to which my bubble encompassed everything around me. Back home, it is a well-known fact that my state and my school are incredibly diverse in comparison to some other American communities, with a minority percentage of 49 to 50 percent. I thought I had an understanding of diverse perspectives, both because my own background is not that of the typical American, and I had generally interacted with primarily minority-classified individuals. But coming to Germany, I’m realizing just how atypical my experience has been in the eyes of the rest of the world.
In my project course at my German school, my project course teacher asked me about American work-life balance. After I embarrassedly describing the general 9-5 and enduring gasps of shock and horror from my classmates, she cut me off mid-sentence to ask, “So why is American fast food so supersized? Why do you all eat so much unhealthy food?”
I could admit to myself that the American work-life balance isn’t something to be proud of, with employees frequently being expected to work overtime, but the rate at which we churn out deeply impactful inventions far surpasses that of many other countries with a better work-life balance. I couldn’t help but wonder, shouldn’t that count for something? And unlike in Germany, fast food in America is cheaper than groceries. For those who struggle to make ends meet, fast food is simply the only option. But I bit my tongue.
One of my classmates, while preparing for her next exam, peered at me over her stack of notebooks and asked, “Why do you all have so many school shootings? We have gun control laws here.” I stammered back a response agreeing that the school shooting problem in the United States is horribly unparalleled. “But also,” I added hastily. “I’ve never held a gun before.”
With the incessant questions I was asked about guns, sometimes I think that my classmates wouldn’t have been surprised if I pulled out a pistol from my backpack. When I heard statements from my teachers like “this only happens because you guys don’t have control laws” I couldn’t help but say “That’s not all of America—in my state, we have strict gun control laws.” My teacher shook her head and responded, “Well, you and your state are clearly the exception.”
A German friend told a story about how her brother landed himself in the hospital three times in a week, adding that Germany’s universal healthcare system allowed her family to seek treatment for him without financial burden. I let out a puff of air through my nose, but thought back to all the complaints I heard from my parents about the current tax levels in America. Compared to that, the amount of taxes required for universal healthcare are practically unimaginable.
When my project teacher brought up America’s lack of universal healthcare for the third time in the hour-long class period, I suggested that increasing taxes for such policies on top of already high costs of living would cause uproar and more financial problems in America. But she merely responded, “I guess in Germany we have a bigger focus on the common good.”
In my English class, the teacher tells her class about how America has a terrible racism problem, far worse than what Germany could ever have. In speaking about workplace discrimination, she leaned on her desk and declared with what felt like suppressed glee, “In America, if you are a woman or a person of color, you are guaranteed to experience discrimination. But that doesn’t happen in Germany. Here in Germany, we have protections.” She looked directly at me, raised her eyebrows, and shrugged her shoulders.
In the first several weeks, in an effort to fit in, I gave them the answers they wanted to hear. Yes, the American work-life balance is terrible. Yes, the healthcare system is awful—why are these verdammte medical costs so high? But I couldn’t bring myself to agree with the claims I heard about America‘s racism problem in comparison with that of Germany.
The discrimination problem is terrible in America, but isn’t it unfair to purely criticize America for these problems when many other countries, Germany included, struggle with the same issues? Besides, America is regarded as the cultural melting pot, and there are several regions in America with high diversity—such as my own state—where such problems aren’t necessarily as prominent as they are in regions of Germany. I thought back to the time my German language teacher warned me, the only non-white person in the room, to stay inside because the AFD—a German party with policies reminiscent of the Nazi regime—was protesting outside. That would never have happened where I live in America, I muttered under my breath.
Besides, only within five months in Germany, I’ve had to defend my Americanness to several German individuals who refused to believe me the fact that I wasn’t born in India, wince at generalized “your people” statements, and debunk claims that Indian women can’t divorce or that everyone in India is poor. In the States, I was certainly in a privileged position to live in a community with such a high minority percentage, but before now, I had only faced these strange interactions in Maryland when volunteering in a local rehabilitation center, where the majority of patients were white and elderly.
And evidently, the microaggressions do not stop there: accompanying my American identity is an overwhelming onslaught of stereotyping that I didn’t even know existed. I have never felt so embarrassed to be American. With each almost daily incident, I often merely laugh awkwardly and offer up an explanation to defend myself, but not too strongly for fear of coming off as egotistical. But my irritation grew along with my list of carefully curated defensive explanations. I spent several weeks being irritated, internally sighing whenever America was brought up, my heart rate inclining slightly when the teacher invited the class to ask me questions about America. Often, these were questions that my fellow students and teachers already felt they knew the answer to, but they were simply looking for confirmation.
I experienced an epiphany when, at a party, a German girl approached me and asked, „Are American parties as crazy as they are in films?“
Many of the Germans I had met had such fixed unilateral impressions of Americans. To many of them, their only taste of America comes from its politics, which often involves hotly contested debates between candidates on political extremes, which is strange considering the German political system, and its films. Many of my American friends and myself included enjoy classic American films like Mean Girls because it is ludicrous and dramatic. But many Germans in school have no way of knowing that these depictions are exaggerated for the sake of a good story. As my German friend sheepishly told me, „When I heard an American student was coming here for three months, I thought it would be someone who only cares about makeup and how many boys like her,“ which, considering the depiction of American high school or college aged girls in American films, is a pretty fair perception.
If the majority of the German view of America comes from its entertainment industry, it’s no wonder that all Americans are stereotyped in the exact same way, with no regard to the different regions and backgrounds that makes America the melting pot that it is. And haven’t we as Americans also done the same thing? The moment I told my friends about Germany, I was almost immediately asked, „Why do you want to go there? Aren’t you afraid of Nazis?“
I’ve discovered that by trying to prove that I am „the exception“ for Americans, as my teacher put it, or by providing explanations to defend America as best as I can, I am not addressing the underlying problems. In fact, I’m only addressing the symptoms of the real issue: confirmation bias. If one is proud of their country, they take the information around them to support that pride. Without taking the time to seriously delve into the biases of the information around them, many of my German classmates have, out of pride for their country, seen the decidedly un-American January 6th insurrection or the embarrassing presidential debates, and chosen to form a viewpoint from that. And don’t Americans, too, suffer from the same competitive urge to put our country above others? When we think of Germany, we think of the Holocaust, and nothing of the beautifully unifying Christmas culture, which pervades every household regardless of religion. We may say that America, at the cost of work life balance, is more innovative, but isn’t it kind of beautiful that Germany puts the welfare of its people above the competitive cutthroat atmosphere that accompanies America‘s astounding inventiveness?
Sometimes I do still get upset at the generalizations made by my classes. But I‘ve slowly come to realize that my frustration shouldn’t be directed at my peers, but rather at the systems that set us at odds with each other.
Last modified on 2024-12-18