As a well known aphorism goes: “You are what you read.” Fair enough to suppose that by knowing what newspapers a person is reading, valuable insight into their mindset can be gained. Wouldn’t it be great to converse with your German acquaintances about current affairs and truly know what makes them tick? Just imagine, next time you join your German friends for another eight hour brunch session at a nearby organic cafe, you could finally talk about stuff they actually care about, instead of offending everybody with your boring, mainstream topics such as politics, economics, or fine arts.

In order to get your news fix like a German person would, a few easy steps are necessary. Start off by deleting all your bookmarks to international news websites. That’s right: No more BBC, no more New York Times, and of course no more CNN for you. Those will not be of much help anyway as German people take some pride in being gratuitously conspicuous about anything coming from mainstream news organizations.

You might be tempted to just go ahead and buy the most popular newspaper in Germany, namely Bild. Weak thinking, Auslander. Elite German people have a very delicate and complicated relationship withBild and the rainbow press as a whole. Contrary to, well, any given country, where one day people understood that the best way to handle the (non-)problem of tabloids and the filthy hacks who make them is simply being ignorant and shrug them off as just another plague of modern life, German people so far can’t seem to take their minds off the evils of tabloid journalism for more than 2 minutes. This quirk can be used to your advantage: Even after 40+ years of persistent pointing out the apparent flaws and evils of Bild and its clones by generation after generation of elite German people, you can still safely take this easy shortcut to instantly become recognized as a non-mainstream intellectual who is thinking outside the box by simply listing some of the evils of tabloid journalism.

Erm, you say, what were those again? Here are some hints: Blatant lying, being excessively conservative, controlling the public opinion, and unashamed use of ugly typefaces. This last point is really gaining momentum as all German people are now dabbling around with illegal copies of Photoshop and therefore are experts all matters “design.”

Don’t worry that you might be called out for restating the obvious. Granted, tabloids are crap and whenever one is published, somewhere in the world a puppy cries. Furthermore, the people who write for them surely must have thrown all ideals of journalism overboard and would happily sell their own children for a good story. Feeling sleepy yet? Better brace yourself, because criticizing tabloids and perpetrating conspiracy theories concerning the rainbow press just doesn’t seem to ever get old for elite German people. Quite the contrary: Frequent public repetition of the evils of tabloid journalism and Bild in particular will reinforce their image of you as being an edgy intellectual who’s not afraid to stand up to “the man”.

A word of warning: Sometimes you will discover an abandoned copy ofBild or a similar tabloid on a German train, bus, or at a non-organic cafe, and might be tempted to pick it up to find out why exactly elite German people make such a big deal of it. Resist that urge by all means. Being caught reading Bild or worse, citing from it in public means irreversible instant social death in Germany. No prisoners will be taken. If you still can’t see the friendship-busting potential a tabloid newspaper possesses, it might be helpful to think of a copy of Bild as a carrier of the Ebola virus. Handle accordingly.

No reason to despair, though. Luck has it that there exists one major source in Germany which all elite German people can agree on and is totally different from a tabloid: Enter Spiegel Online.

“Online what” you ask? In good German tradition, the explanation isn’t very straightforward. Let’s try anyway. Essentially, it is the internet spawn of the uberuberimportant weekly news magazine Der Spiegel, which in turn could be described as the German version of Newsweek. With its perfect blend of breaking news, numerous pictorials of questionable relevance, and inane-yet-wordy ramblings about all things adolescent, Spiegel Online has connected to the elite German mind to a degree that wasn’t deemed possible before. Accordingly, the service has won many German awards for excellence in online news. That really sealed the deal for German people, who will happily take any award at face value, because it spares them the considerable effort of making up their own mind.

It is important to differentiate between Spiegel Online (the website) and Der Spiegel (the magazine). Whenever the latter is mentioned, German people will launch into a lengthy rant about how, back in the old days, it used to be a haven for investigative journalism, but now is more irritating than Rupert Murdoch in a jockstrap because it was taken over by radical neoliberals to perpetrate their pro-capitalist, pro-American agenda.

Inexplicably, this critical stance doesn’t keep German people from visiting Spiegel Online religiously, often several times per hour. Sometimes they will send an email to all their friends or, less frequent, work colleagues containing just a link to some new interesting bit they found there. Receipt of such an email means it is crunch time for you: Immediately follow that link and read the story a couple of times to memorize as much as you can. You will need this knowledge later, as elite German people love to assess strangers for their political correctness and ability to adapt to their world-view by engaging them in what may sound like naive small talk about current affairs, but really is a make-or-break situation similar to a job interview at a Sierra Leone diamond mine: Get a tiny detail wrong once, and stay locked out forever, maybe losing a few limbs in the process. To further stiffen the competition, German people love to surprise you by posing the following question without any prior warning:

“Have you read Spiegel Online yet?”

This can only mean some crucial news item has recently been posted toSpiegel Online, and you, in the now following spontaneous trivia quiz, are expected to be able to figure out what exactly is being referred to. As an inexperienced newcomer to Germany you will probably pick the very first thing from the top of the Spiegel Online page, i.e. “New worries about Taliban resurgence in northern Pakistan” or “Unexpectedly steep increase in industry orders for the second fiscal quarter.” BEEP. Wrong answer.

Elite German people, even younger ones, are too widely traveled to ever be bothered much by such mundane things as global politics, international terrorism, or the macroeconomic cycle. In order to blend in with your German acquaintances, you must transcend these worldly levels and understand the true issues affecting elite German people today.

Fortunately, Spiegel Online’s very start page is loaded with hints. The trick is to scroll down just a little bit from that boring “Kim Jong-il launches nuclear warhead” story to the section below, the truly interesting stuff. These sections are given super-quirky names like “Uni-Spiegel”, “Ehrensenf”, or “Mein erstes Mal”. The beauty ofSpiegel Online lies in the fact that stories like “Julia from Berlin-Mitte is too broke to treat her friends at Berghain to more than two cocktails”or “Anna from Hamburg-Schanzenviertel finds out that working in the phone-sex business can wear a person down”, instead of being buried in the back pages out of sheer embarrassment, are given the place and space they deserve, right below of “moon-sized asteroid hits Earth tomorrow at 9am.” These are the kind of news that really put a dent into the elite German person’s universe and appearing constantly wowed by such adolescent fare will really tighten the bond between you and your German acquaintances.