Letters home: May 2004

Hi Friends and loved ones! (well, you friends are also loved)

Here's Jess checking in finally from my Munich outpost. It has been a really, really long time, and there is of course lots to tell. I don't know where to start. (That is the reason that I didn't send the last three or four half-formed group-emails: I didn't know where to start, what to include, where to end.) So I have decided to send the following: first a VERY brief summary of my next few months, because they will be interesting ones, and then some thoughts on consumerism in Germany and in the US. If I get some time later I will add some thoughts about the last few weeks and months. Here goes:

I applied for and was chosen for a position [you know.. the one I have now...]. This job will begin soon, with a three-week orientation session in Chicago during the month of July. Then I will make it home just long enough to throw a baby shower for my sister before heading off again into the wild blue yonder of the Former East Germany, where my job is (in the town that's home of Martin Luther's 95 theses and currently about 10,000 people). The [place], where I will serve as program assistant, offers cultural, historical and academic programs to students, pastors, church workers and tour groups from the US and all over the world. I am very excited to begin! My first project is to organize a conference for women theologians from India. Cool.

So I am wrapping up my Munich life in the next several weeks, taking a final exam at the University, finishing up some big projects (including translating parts of a book of church-historical documents from Asia, Africa and Latin America, spanning 5 centuries) and finding that ever-elusive "closure."

Now, on to the deeper thoughts that needed to be put into words:

Consumerism in the US and in Germany

In Germany, the customer is not always right. I admit it: to the unpracticed (read: US-American) eye, the German commerce system can be, well… downright annoying. Offices have what I have been known to describe in a frustrated voice as “ridiculous” office hours. For example, I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve decided to run into town to buy something somewhere, only to be met with a closed door and a sign proudly displaying “our convenient office hours,” which I would label anything but. Silly me, expecting the post office to be open at 2 PM on Tuesday, or anything at all to be open at any time on Sunday. This wild goose chase becomes even more exasperating when you consider the fact that it’s a half-hour trek to get into town in the first place. For the protection of my own sanity I have started to keep a list of the opening hours of any establishment whose service I regularly consume (Germans business establishments tend to be open somewhere in the range of 9-5, Monday through Friday, but not necessarily that whole time).

If I am applying to have my visa extended, or registering for classes at the University, I am supposed to know everything, have every form filled out before I get there. The excuse “but I didn’t know that” carries absolutely no worth in Germany. The offices are not self-help sessions; they are processing centers and if you don’t have your papers in order, well, better luck next time. If I am shopping in a store whose opening hours are from 12-5 on that given day, I had better be checked out and gone by 4:59, because at 5:00 PM on the dot, the doors close and the employees go home. No exceptions. None of this waiting around patiently for the last customers to straggle to through the check-out lane. You snooze, you lose. If an employee is sick or on vacation, he or she is not replaced by a substitute. The work just waits, and simply doesn’t get done. I miss the casual friendliness of the Midwest and the US standard of customer service (even if it is motivated by the purely consumerist mentality of keeping the customer happy at all costs). Some days I long to hear a polite request of “Can I help you?” when I step into a store arranged according to a confusing logic familiar only to the local populace or perhaps no one at all. But I have stopped holding my breath. That doesn’t happen here in Munich.

For an embarrassingly long time I felt myself a victim of this uncultured, unfair system. I complained about having to do so much work beforehand in order to go spend money at a store, about no one being willing to make an exception for me. I had this instinctive feeling that the employees should be groveling at my feet a little more and ignoring me a little less. After all, I was The Customer. All they did was ring up purchases, for Pete’s sake, when I was standing here in the aisle, clearly unable to locate vacuum cleaner bags of the proper size.

Eventually, thank heavens, I realized that I was importing a customer service mentality from an entirely inappropriate place (somewhere else) into this German cultural situation. So I decided to keep my eyes and ears wide open and try to decipher the logic of the system for myself. With a shock, I realized that it is indeed of relatively little importance in Germany to protect the customer’s right to spend money as comfortably and expediently as possible. Instead the emphasis is placed on protecting the worker’s right to decent pay, fair treatment, good working conditions and a generous amount of vacation time (the legal standard is 25 work days per year, plus the 15-odd national work holidays). Shops close for the noon hour so workers can go home and have lunch with their families, run errands and tank up for the afternoon’s work. Vacationing workers or women on maternity leave are not replaced with temps, a practice that perhaps slows down the work pace but also keeps costs down and job stability up. The standard work week clocks in at about 37.5 hours for full-time employees.

This is a huge paradigm shift for me: from the consumer-centered universe, where purchasing power measures worth, to this worker-centered universe where the great emphasis is placed upon getting, enjoying and keeping a steady, well-paid job. In its pure form, this system would have absolutely no success in the US. A company that paid fair wages, gave generous benefits and vacation time, expected only a 40-hour workweek (or less), didn’t substitute for its vacationing workers and (oh heavens!) closed for lunch would go belly-up faster than you can say “slaves to consumerism.” But those are our ideals: higher, faster, better, stronger, more. In Germany, moderation is key. So you wait in line a little longer, pay a little less, linger over that afternoon cup of coffee and rest assured that your tax dollars are being used to assure proper care and attention to the society’s most vulnerable: children, elderly, those with disabilities and workers.

For a seminar on globalization and church history, I am reading an article by Latin American theologian José Comblin in which he describes the process of globalization from a Latin American perspective. Translated from Spanish into German and now into English, this is what he says: (bear with me; it’s long but worthwhile reading)

"The United States considers it an historical calling to spread its models of lifestyle and society worldwide. They consider this responsibility an act of pure brotherly love, and believe that they have at their disposal the means to fulfill this task. This US model includes democracy, the free market, radical individualism and the profit-oriented commercialization of all areas of human life. They want to push their model on others even though they themselves fulfill it only very imperfectly. This model does not take into consideration that the majority of the people of the United States doesn’t participate in elections and that the political institutions only represent the highest stratum of society. They also overlook the many forms of governmental meddling in the economy, for example the huge military budget as well as the countless restrictions and subsidies. The rate of criminality, one of the highest in the world, in not mentioned, nor are the two million prison inmates, the escalating drug problem and the vain attempts to quell it, nor the problems experienced by African Americans and other minority groups. Nevertheless this vision of the quintessential world democracy and the universal societal model continues to be spread to non-US-Americans."

This is how a Latin American theologian views the reality of globalization. For me, this statement cuts like a knife. It accuses the US very directly and unabashedly of hypocrisy, complacency and poor self-government besides. I can’t much say I disagree. I have talked to enough people from countries outside of North American to realize that how we see ourselves (officially) and how we are seen by the rest of the world differ drastically. I have watched and read enough news outside the US to realize that ours reports things from a very different angle than the news programs in the rest of the world do. And I have lived and absorbed enough of the realities of German life to see that the ideals of human dignity and worker’s rights can be more nearly attained in systems that don’t look just like ours. “New Europe,” my eye. Every land that joins the European Union must fulfill strict standards of working conditions and human rights. The European Union is doing quite an efficient job of ensuring that human needs are met and that European societies are just, and not “just like.”

Even if the German bureaucracy remains a little baffling (my health insurance company sent me a letter the other day regarding my request to terminate my health insurance when I leave Germany. The letter said I should call a representative at my earliest possible convenience to discuss my request. I called, just to be told that everything was fine, they were sending the official termination papers and they should arrive in my mailbox the next day. The whole letter-telephone exchange seemed utterly pointless to me, and guess who was charged for the stamp?), I can treasure it a bit more when I remember that it is this very bureaucracy that allows me to live in this country where every full-time worker receives health benefits and about five weeks’ vacation, where I feel safe alone on the streets of the country’s third-largest city, and where no one has to work two or three jobs to feed their kids. I guess I’ll pay for the postage stamp.

So, that's all I've got to report right now... do write back, I'd love to hear from you. ("And that's the way it is...")

Jess :-)