The Germans have defeated the English and now Argentina too against the zeitgeist. Why are Germans a favourite of mine? It has slowly but surely crept into me and like all lone wolf adventures it has reasons other than the subject, in this case football.
The first of the encounters with Germany is when we studied history around standard IX or X. The horrors of the wars loomed large at that impressionable time. It is unimaginable to have someone like Hitler but it did not end up in a false conclusion that all Germans are like Hitler. This is particularly distinct since Cruch and Krechfield cites in their social sychology passages on perception, the very same example of Germany and Hitler to cite an example in generalizing the behavior of one to the group.
The second is perhaps Anne Frank, the diary of a young girl with references to the brutalities of the Germans. The eagle has landed by jack Higgins where Hitler and Himmler plots to kidnap Churchill comes thereafter. The numerous references to and pictures of Auschwitz accentuates the horror of anything brutal but never holds the Germans as a people accountable. Nietzsche and his ideas may have been contributive to impressions of Germany but nevertheless it is more as an aberration than the rule.
My neighbor Baby Olickal who was in Germany for many years brings back stories of the Germans; of hourly wages, precision in living sort of proved in his own calculated life in spite of scandals. His was the idea that our ancestral home should not be rebuilt but retained, still not heeded by my father.
My friend Thomas K V’s brother Mathew who later migrated to Canada also referred to Germany. He said in a visit to Germany where his elder brother was a priest, he concluded that India would never reach the sophistication of the Germans. He said about the sound or the lack of it made by the car tyres on the road would never be replicated in India.
Linguistics widened the idea of the languages when the German word heimat which means ‘a place where you feel at home’, was said not to have an equivalent in English. The stories of the Tamil Brahmins learning German in the second world war as the news of their reaching the Brahmaputra through the submarines was an aside. The Max Muller Bhavan in Chennai stands as a tribute to the famous German Indologist.
But the German Railway system with its aberrant accident at the village of Eschede may have proved it again. The accident was not the issue but how the precision engineered German system could fail was more in highlight in the analyses. Slowly SIEMENS and ABB brought in newer views of Germany.
And then came Hofstede. The country metaphor that he uses for the Germans or the German organization is ‘the well oiled machine’. That was what the German football team was all about! Many of the passes of Argentina unintentionally reached the Germans. Or was it the well oiled Teutonic machine tuned to receive the passes?
More importantly the WOTAN the dark side of it, akin to the zeitgeist that pervaded Germany during the period between the wars as mentioned by Jung was a temporary phenomena not entirely characteristic of the Germans, but was a result of the relegation of the Christian religion to the background replacing it with the secular Weberian bureaucracy, that directed it all away from God and to the human made machinery and away from Christ and suffering to the vicarious revenge to the Jews.
Nevertheless it looks like the Germans are aware of their short misfortune and the aberrations in history and are trying silently to forget the collective guilt and doing a good job of it in everything that they do.
I like the Germans for that and look forward to their winning the World Cup 2010.
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