17. Demographics Dōjō: Upper-middle-class women
Historically, German upper-middle-class women, or “UMCW” as they are commonly called, always were a bit hard to understand, especially for German upper-middle-class men. These often are overheard complaining about a certain lack of accountability and unpredictability in the UMCW’s ways. Then again, in Germany, these character traits are desirable and let their bearer appear spontaneous and quirky, and accordingly German UMCW nowadays draw a huge part of their self-esteem from keeping an aura of “quirky spontaneous mystery”.
You see, younger German people (anyone under 43) always favor complicated relationships over easy-going ones because they serve nicely as a never-run-dry source of talking points and enable these German people to effortlessly stay in the center of their peer’s conversations. For Germans, little is more suspect than an eventless, happy relationship, while a guy who is “stuck” in a complicated relationship with a German UMCW automatically becomes a very interesting person, and can easily score with his spouse’s UMCW girlfriends, or at least get a lot of free advice and paid-for cafe trips. You might be asking “so German UMCWs will forever stay a mystery whose ways no one will ever be able to figure out?”
Rejoice, Auslanders, rejoice. Due to a lucky fortuitousness, akin to finding the Rosetta Stone, a person has been found who can be considered the blueprint for all German UMCW today. The biography of this “patient zero” reads like a textbook for today’s German upper-middle-class women behavior: Enter Patty Hearst. For those unfamiliar with Patty’s story, let’s recapitulate and compare it to the typical biography of a German upper-middle-class woman:
Patty Hearst was born as a privileged child into a privileged family. Her grandfather, William Randolph Hearst, invented tabloid journalism and even inspired Orson Welles to write “Citizen Kane”. Patty grew up in a conservative, yet very well off household and became an apolitical, sheltered young woman who earned a ‘best student award’ at a posh high school.
All German UMCW are born into conservative, yet well-off families oflawyers, doctors and bankers. They live an uneventful life, are doing well in school, and are usually pretty dull, naive, and apolitical individuals. Until…
Patty’s life changed irrevocably when she was 19 years old. A group of armed men who called themselves the ‘Symbionese Liberation Army’, some self-proclaimed leftist revolutionists, broke into her apartment and kidnapped her, keeping her at a hideway in southern San Francisco. According to her autobiography, her kidnappers kept her in a dark closet for 57 days.
When a German UMCW reaches age 19, society demands for her to become bored with her sheltered life. Unfortunately, the chance of being kidnapped in Germany is almost zero, so a German UMCW has to find her “edgy, creative revolutionists” all by herself. This is when German UMCW decide to apply for a university in a big German city. Usually, Berlin or even just Hamburg are the biggest cities they can imagine living in. There, for the first time in their lives, they will have to deal with the tragedy of residing in a very confined space (their ‘dark closet’ if you will), swapping the 4,000sqm park-like residence they grew up in for a meagre 120sqm trust-funded Altbau apartment in Berlin-Mitte or Hamburg-Karolinenviertel. And that’s when the magic metamorphosis happens:
According to her own recount of the events, Patty Hearst says she was given the option to be killed or join the ‘SLA’. She agreed to join and took up a new name: ‘Tania’. As Tania, she helped her new revolutionist friends to put out flyers with leftist proclamations and even took part in a bank robbery, where she was caught on surveillance camera, now sporting dark messy hair with bangs and thrift-store clothing. Now under intense pressure from the police, the group was forced to change their location very frequently and many of her co-revolutionists were shot by the police. Somehow, Patty always managed to stay safe until she was finally caught by the FBI. When asked her occupation during fingerprinting, her response was ‘Urban Guerilla’.
A confused, dark-haired girlLike Patty Hearst, German UMCW, upon their arrival in the “big city” of their choice, are also given two options: Either join the “right” people, or, in a symbolical, societal sense, die. Lacking any kind of self-esteem and being impressed by the “big city”, they choose to join the “right people”, dye their hair in a dark colour and take up a new, edgier name, going from “Julia” to “Marusha”, or from “Maria” to “Mrs Cupcakes”. Soon after joining the hip, tattooed leftists, who are often notoriously broke artists and freelancers, a German UMCW suddenly must develop an interest for zany, quirky stuff like “flash mobs”, “guerilla marketing”, or “4 day raves”.
Once their square and boring parents find out about the new life of their daughter, they will usually cut down the funding of her apartment, forcing her to move house to another, cheaper place, preferably several times a year. Don’t be misled though - however wild and edgy that new lifestyle may appear, in reality all German UMCW are eagerly pushing to finish their law or medicine colleges and save up every cent they can spare to later invest into self-owned property or studying a little more abroad. Basically, like Patty, they are at anytime fully aware that the lifestyle of the ‘urban guerilla’ is nothing but a short episode to make themselves appear more interesting and edgy, while taking the freedom to make normal people’s lives harder for their own advancement until they finally grow bored and fall back on the assets of their families.
Patty spent nearly two years in prison until President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence early. Out of prison, she soon married her bodyguard. She went on to live the life of a typical, spoiled, rich heiress and ‘society matron’, publishing an autobiography, writing some soon-forgotten crime novels, starring in some artsy movies, bragging about her family’s riches on the Travel Channel, and breeding Kennel dogs. When asked about the hypocrisy of taking part in a revolutionary cell and not much later living the exact lifestyle of the people she once agitated against, Patty Hearst likes to say she was ‘brainwashed’ into joining those people.
