Germany and Us: Deutschland

    We all live in our respective lands, but whether we live in Europe, the United States, China, or any other part of the earth, we all have a relationship with Germany. Some of us are more connected than others. Germany and its influences of money, ideas, and culture, percolate or saturate all of us across the globe. 

    What is your connection or influences leading to and from this place, people, culture, economy? How are you linked to this land, the language, the arts and ideas? Is it a philosopher, or a scientist. We all mutually benefit from each others' innovations and ideas. Language has a big place, too.

    In the Midwest, or other parts of the United States, many of us say gesundheit when people sneeze. There are those that teach German, those who studied it, those that possibly came from there, like Hein Tlustek who lived 30 minutes south in rural Bedford, Indiana, or Robert's mother Mrs. Calder from East Germany. In Chile I went to visit a German colony that sold very cheap wine and had floral gardens, and a woman of German origin who seemed rather standoffish to me. 

    Austria and Switzerland are German-speaking countries, and are not Germany, but the cultures cross over and overlap with Germany, the motherland, which in many ways is the engine and heart of the western world of Europe. They are industrial, economically dynamic, moving and shaking; their history with arts and ideas and theories are powerful and far reaching.

    Hegel, Heidegger, Jung, Freud, and on, including musicians and writers, theoreticians and planners, like Marx and Engels. We have had German political and military leaders, most of us have heard of the most notorious, which we do not have to mention here...

    But the reverberations of the those times and people still affect us today. Modern day Israel and the Arab issues, particularly but not only the Palestinians, as we talk of Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, over to Iran (not Arabs), and on to Iraq and Turkey, and us, the West, all of us dealing with modern political realities and economic trends and markets.

    My mother has her mother from southern Germany, from Swabia of Bavaria, or Schwabe of Bayern. I have potentially a quarter blood of German heritage. My wife, too.

    What do have to do with Germany? 

    You tell me.

    Some of us worked with German engineers, or other German professionals. Others have seen films, or heard music, or read novels or been impacted by other German thinkers over the ages. There was a German Pope, Joseph Ratzinger. Germany has a place in sports, like football (soccer), and other world events. There is the food, the historical and current music influences.

    How much of what we are is German? I would say it is disproportionately a part of who we are today in 2025. Millions of immigrants have channeled through Germany and speak it. They are partners in the international crime and military scenes of global intelligence and might. 

    Are they growing enough in native population? Do the foreign immigrants enculturate enough to carry on German traditions and knowledge, foremost being the language itself?

    I think that time will prove the German people, and its influence, will continue to be formidable. Austria and Swiss speakers may grown closer to its northern bigger, neighbor, perhaps. Or that might prove immaterial. Regardless. Germany is a part of who we are.

    Danke schoen, for what you are, Deutschland.

    Aufwiedersain.