German people aren’t very good at being indifferent towards any given thing. One particular topic they just can’t seem to keep their minds off is America. Actually, the last recorded incident of a German person asking the question:

Hey, what’s up with the USA?

and another German person answering this with:

Eh? Dunno, why are you asking?

is dating back over 230 years ago. Since that point in time, German people are required to have a strong opinion about the US of A, and that opinion must be negative. Granted, you probably already knew that the majority of German people are idiosyncratic regarding all things American, especially the US foreign policy since June 6th 1944, so in order to not stick out too much and earn invitations to dinner parties where the host only cooks stuff from the latest “Tim Mälzer” cookbook, you might think it is a good idea to join in the chant and pretend to be full-on anti-American when it is mingle time with the Germans.

Not so fast, Auslander. While that approach will work fine with 90% of German people, you might get into a situation where you need help from a professional, like a doctor, lawyer, banker, business consultant, or basically any profession Tom Cruise had in one of his 80s Hollywood blockbuster movies. Dealing with this kind of German will require a completely different strategy. First, you have to wrap your head around the fact that these German people love the USA and act like US citizens to a degree that often even surpasses Americans themselves. It is almost like they want to compensate for the other 90%…

These German people all have something in common - they were teenagers in West Germany during the 1980s, a time and place when it was okay, or better, “cool”, to like the USA. Hence, many of them went to the US for a 1-year student exchange, where they had to live with painstakingly normal families in Newark or Arkansas, playing a little baseball and learning to speak (American) English like a native speaker. The most rewarding aspect for them though was their return to Germany. Once they got back, they suddenly weren’t regarded as “that boring, stuck-up lawyer kid” anymore, but became popular and interesting to other German teenagers. They were able to live on telling the same stories “from America” for years to come, and the wide-eyed enthusiasm received whenever they spoke that twangy exchange-student English with the needless over-pronounciation burned itself so deep into their Nucleus accumbens, that they were hooked on “acting American” for the rest of their lives.

From that point on, they were mainly driven by the challenge to be a more realistic American than their peers. So, they started to style their lives to match the current top-ranking mainstream US-Sitcom, like “Friends” in the 90s, or “Sex and the City” in the 00s. They dabbled at founding a local softball team that broke up after a month “because those stupid Germans taking part didn’t get the rules” and ate at McDonald’s whenever they could, pointing out how much more diversified the menu at McDonald’s in the US was compared to the “watered-down German version - they don’t even have home fries over here!”.

Later on, they pulled all the strings to be able to study “abroad” for a few years, not thinking twice about the destination of their dreams: New York City. Going to law school or working for Deutsche Bank there, to them was akin to winning the career lottery, a move that made them go straight to No. 1 on the “interesting” chart kept among their circle of friends. While in the beginning, German professional people might have dreamt about staying in the US and becoming fully-fledged American citizens, they usually quickly realized that this would be drastically less rewarding than returning to Germany and show their freshwater fellow Germans how to live the American way. Surprisingly, this Teutonic-American lifestyle consists of relatively few key recurring elements:

1. Drive an American brand SUV
2. Put up an American flag on your front porch / balcony
3. Regularly point out that there is no “truly conservative” political party in Germany
4. In your free time, wear Docker’s pants with pleats, polo shirts, baseball caps, loafers, and your school’s vintage varsity sweatshirt
5. Every other year, before Christmas, take your family on a shopping trip to New York City, to stock up on the above mentioned clothing items, iPhones, iPods, plus all that other luxury stuff your wife spotted on one of the “Sex and the City” actresses
6. For the rest of the year, tell anyone you know “how great New York looks at Christmas time”, and how you struck a really good deal on a Juicy Couture hoodie at Saks 5th Avenue, but upon your return to “over-regulated” Germany had to pay a small fortune at the customs office because the customs officer was “jealous” on your shopping

You are probably wondering what the take-away is for someone trying to get good service from a German professional person? The good news is, you will have to work less hard than a normal German person. German professionals like to see themselves as super-tolerant towards other cultures than their own, “like I learned to be during my time in the Apple”, so they will go out of the way to show off that tolerance by constantly patronizing you and telling stories of having a lot of close friends “from your country” when they “did an internship at Goldman”.

Now, if you are American yourself, you just drew a wildcard. While German professionals usually treat their fellow Germans like shit, they will instantly suck up to you and ask you lots of personal questions, interrupting you constantly to show off their insider knowledge about the US. You will then be treated to a little tour to their office wall photo gallery where they keep several photos from their time in America. On these photos, the German person wears a NY Yankees baseball cap, a yellow Polo Ralph Lauren sweater, faded jeans with pleats, and loafers. Moreover, the German person will be depicted at one of the following activities: Eating at a US-fast food chain not available in Germany, i.e. Arby’s, holding a football, or posing on deck of a small Yacht as the middle man of a three-person group photo with two of his American acquaintances, arms on shoulders.

You should use this newly discovered power wisely, though. You might be able to get a rebate on law counseling or some free dental treatment, but if you become too friendly with the German professional person, he will try to use the situation to his advantage, and brag to his peers about his new “friend from the US”. Quickly, you might find yourself in a situation where you have to make up reasons to turn down invitations to some really boring events, such as going on a fishing trip with some of his “lawyer buddies”, attending his wife’s “Sex and the City” birthday party, or being asked to join an “bi-weekly English debate club at the local Starbucks” where a group of German professional people are meeting to freshen up their English grammar while speaking in a very braggadocio, needlessly over-pronounced way.