Ich werde ein Berliner

Regardless of whatever reason has come up in your life that makes it necessary to leave Berlin, it positively means you have failed miserably at blending in wiz ze Germans — because if you had succeeded, you simply would have no life, and certainly no exciting things happening in it that necessitate moving away. Berlin would have been that final solution to all your ambitions and dreams, as it is for most elite German people, and you would spend your life irately defending its alleged coolness on sad internet comment threads.

Yet, since you gave up on blending in wiz ze Germans, at the very least, you need to confirm to a few basic guidelines and rules on how to quit ruleless, nonconformist Berlin in the universally accepted way. The timespan between the day of your announcement and your actual departure marks a phase of high emotional involvement for your elite German acquaintances. No, not because they are sad to lose a friend, but because it challenges that precious, set-in-stone consensus they once reached with themselves about Berlin being the cultural pinnacle of humankind, which nobody interesting, important, or perpetually adolescent would ever want to abandon.

You will soon learn that there is an easy way, and a hard way to leave Berlin. What’s that about, you ask? It is a distinction made on the place you move to next. Time to share a little secret:  Elite Germans are at all times painfully aware Berlin is actually not the most interesting place in the world. Shhh! You’ve got to keep that voice down, Auslander! You are not supposed to know about the fundamental hurt from which the never ending, passive-aggressive pissing contest better known to its purveyors as cool young Berlin has arisen. Elite German people would rather drink a Müller Milch than ever admit this to anybody, including themselves.

The easy way to leave Berlin is to move to any one of the three places the elite German population of Berlin has sound reason to feel superior to, which are: Wiedenborstel, Kleinbockedra, and Bebra. If you happen to move to one of these three, you can stop reading after this paragraph. Simply tell your friends you’re moving to a rural shithole, and enjoy the many beer-spilling dive bar binges you will get invited to out of pity.

However, it is more likely that you won’t be allowed to leave Berlin the easy way, because you just had to act like a total dick again and choose one of the many cities which make elite German people twitch nervously with population envy.

Just a passing mention of a city with 10 million people will involuntarily trigger a built-in, natural defence mechanism, quite similar to that Malaysian ant which, when attacked, explodes into a venomous fountain of guts: They will explode in a sudden rage at the fact you finally managed to rise above them in that devious little hierarchy they so desperately deny to exist.

Do you even realise what you impose on them? While you are getting ready to leave it all behind, enjoying your last few days in Berlin, wasting not a single electron of brain activity on organising the transport of 15000 rare Detroit-techno vinyls, because, like, you knew better than to get into that sad, phlegmatic hobby of collecting records, they are forced into another episode of DIY trauma therapy, brooding in dimly lit rooms to come up with a line of reasoning that will re-inject sense back into that fragile inner microcosm of unwarranted superiority your announcement so viciously shattered.

Once the cat is out the jute bag about your impending departure, elite German people, even those you barely ever met, are allowed to stop you on the street for a session of authoritative questioning. Your emigration interrogation will always start with an encouraging “I heard you’ll be leaving us…that’s so greeeeat for you”, which is meant to make them appear well-meaning and on your side, like psychologically trained detectives questioning a suspect in another lame episode of Tatort.

Never take them at face value. Because they love little more than gossip, they probably already know the answer to their next question: “Where are you going?”. Answer by stating your destination in a calm and non-threatening way, like so: “I am going to New York”.

Now, let’s take a close look what this sentence triggers in an elite German person. Because this really is a life-or-social-death situation for their self-image, their brain, in the split of a millisecond, switches into survival mode. They are now in a state of elevated cognitive abilities. Their breath quickens. Their rhetorical skills slightly improve. Their memory backlog is extended by at least one decade. It’s like that overdose of Ketamine back in 2008 never happened. An elaborate program, like a piece of software code, is set in motion.

The objective of this program is to neutralise as much as possible of the agonising grandeur that, in their spoiled minds, is awarded to anyone leaving Berlin for a bigger city. A grandeur whose existence you weren’t aware of, and never meant to exude, but is very real and very challenging to every elite German person. It is driving them mad with furious envy, which of course they can’t admit to in public, so they try their hardest to candy-coat it with pushy, dishonest empathy.

“Ohh, Neeeew Yooork…!” they’ll say, “we have a lot of friends there!” Don’t be surprised by this. No matter what city you go to, you can count on your elite German acquaintances to already have an extensive network of uberinteresting people in place. The subtext of course being that they are absolutely unimpressed by you moving there as well, and that any claim of individuality enhancement on your part (which you were never going to make) would be absolutely ridiculous to them. Never ask for details about those friends they are talking about. They’ll lecture you anyway. Better prepare for their next move:

“So, where exactly in New York will you be living?” Because you are probably 8000% less sentimental than the average elite German person about what neighbourhood and type of building you live in, you probably don’t know yet or can’t care enough to remember. Elite German people feel tremendous pressure to cover their conventional upbringing with a fabricated cosmopolitan veneer, and therefore maintain a roughly ten-years-obsolete concept about the cool neighbourhoods of the world’s cities.

This is their chance to catch you off-guard. If you don’t want to open a shallow side argument about what parts of what cities are cool today, just think back 10 years and say “Williamsburg.”

“Ohh, Williamsbuuurg…!” they’ll say, “didn’t Finn, Leni, and Hartmut recently move there, too? We should totally give you their number, so they can show the new guy around.” Likely, a major part of your motivation for going abroad is to get away from elite Germans as far as possible, so you should answer in a non-committing way, like “oh, I will be very busy in my new job so I probably won’t have any free time in the next few…years”

Sensing that they won’t gain much ground in their struggle to make you feel small by pointing out how mainstream your oh-so-special destination really is, they’ll quickly change their focus to the nature of your new occupation:

“A new job? That’s soo great for you! What is it?” If you’re a straightforward person who’s thinking along the lines of “a job is just a job”, “it pays the bills”, “can’t be choosy in this economy”, you might be just naïve enough to say truth, for example “I’ll work at an internet company.”

Notice how your interrogators are becoming more excited now,   sensing a chance to gain the upper hand: “An internet company! Good for you! Well, I guess you won’t click with Hartmut, Leni, and Finn then, because they all work in creative professions!”

For old times sake, you could just engage in one last round of elite German combative communication, and say “Well, my job could be characterised as creative as well, it has to do with photography…”

“Photography! What a coincidence! Leni, Finn, and Hartmut are  photographers! In fact, they are assistants to Ellen von Unwerth, where they meet really exciting and famous people every day! I guess having a connection to Hartmut would be quite exciting for your little, what was it again, web design company? Jürgen, can we give out Hartmuts private number? We just have to bring you two together so he can show you all the cool places in New York, you know!”

At which point you might just stop caring and start to fuck around with them: “Oh, did I say web design company? Sorry, must be the tough weekend in Berghain. Actually, I meant to say I will be the new Director of Art Buying at MoMA, with a side job as Terry Richardson’s new muse, in the case I ever get some time off my frequent mid-day outdoor threesomes with my two new girlfriends Zooey Deschanel and Chloë Sevigny, of course…”, which will make your elite German stare at you in disbelief and finally say in a notably less excited tone: “That’s so…great for you…”

P.S. It is an unwritten, yet absolute certainty that if you ever run into Hartmut, Leni, Finn, or any other elite German person who was described to you as a hip expat god breaking new ground abroad, in the bleak light of day-to-day reality, things look a little less glorious. They might just have planned to go, but never actually left home, or they might have visited the city on vacation, but never lived there, or they did in fact live there for a few months, but only found bar jobs and ran out of money, or they actually were photography interns, but not for Ellen von Unwerth, but Ellen Krapszinsky, alcoholic wedding photographer. Don’t bother to report back to Germany about such tiny, irrelevant particularities, though — you´d look awfully nit-picky and uptight.

by Dolores Overgaard

Puritanism is often defined as the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. Nonconformism, on the other hand, is often haunted by the possibility that someone, somewhere, may be more miserable. Someone in your ungentrified neighbourhood might be in a more open, less gender-specific and less gratuitously abstruse relationship. This applies to both sexes, and any in-between. In Berlin, people have finally broken free from the bourgeoise straightjacket of monogamy, a fact that would make the men of Mitte very happy indeed, if only their full-time brooding commitments allowed them.

Nihilistic despair may have been pioneered by French intellectuals as a way of getting the ladies horizontal, but the Mitte Man (Homo Pretentious) has enthusiastically picked up the baton, together with the smoking habit. That they are fashioning themselves after a beat poet half a century after the original movement began might put a slight dent on their revolutionary credentials, but why should recycling be limited to beer bottles when it can be applied to relationships as well? Anyway, the sort of women they are targeting with this reprocessed rhetoric either think that Kerouac is Keanu’s less well-known brother, or the closest they have come the author’s work is to Instagram a second-hand copy of On The Road that they found while perusing a Flohmarkt. It goes without saying that as a woman you should be blown away upon learning that the Mitte Man has freed himself from the shackles of biology. This admiration should ideally translate into uncontrollable sexual magnetism, a completely unintended side effect of being so firmly above the rules of attraction that seem to afflict mainstream men, who are ruled by their sex drive rather than their non-conformist drive. The Mitte Man will tirelessly parade his unwillingness to participate in the “dating charade” through the cafés and bars of Berlin, in the hope that it will have a similar effect on the female population as bathing in Axe deodorant and legally changing his name to Johnny Depp. Sitting in your Stammkneipe, the Mitte Man will fluff up his scarf so as to resemble the neck of a pigeon in heat and demand the same level of attention with his demonstrably nonchalant “over here, laydeeeehs!!!!” pose. Also, the sounds emanating from his turntable will occasionally resemble those of a horny bird, although the similarities will be more marked if he is into freestyle jazz. A successful courtship will emboldened them and the clichés pulled from his Freitag bag will come thick and fast. Let’s take a look at some of the usual suspects and what that they actually mean:

“I totally agree with Houellebecq: humans are just not monogamous creatures” I am certainly not monogamous, and, as my current object of desire, neither should you be. To be honest I have no idea what Houellebecq’s opinion on monogamy is, but I saw Atomised at the Babylon and Franka Potente is hot!  Sleep with me.

“The problem with the establishment is that it asphyxiates the individual and stops them from expressing their true sexuality. I am very open-minded and would never judge anyone” Apart from people who don’t agree with my stupidly narrow worldview. I really don’t like people who get in the way of expressing my true sexuality, particularly women inexplicably oblivious to my obvious charms. Please sleep with me.

“Have you ever considered an open relationship?” I will only respect your opinion as an intelligent woman entitled to hold her own opinions if the answer is “yes”. Otherwise I might have to play the “repressed” card. It worked for Freud. I will still respect your cleavage. Why aren’t you sleeping with me yet?

“At the end of the day, we’re all animals” A very specific animal. I’m picturing myself as a heavily anthropomorphised lion, king of the urban jungle, napping the day away while his harem of lionesses do all the work. The idea of being an imperial penguin who is not only paired for life but who has to sit on a giant egg freezing his beak off in arctic temperatures and star in mainstream documentaries voiced by Morgan Freeman doesn’t appeal to me. And no, the praying mantis is not a good example either.

“I don’t ‘date’. This is a term popularized by restaurants, cinemas, and other commercial enterprises with the aim of maximising their revenues. You can’t put a price on romance” I even burnt you copy of Photoshop! Why won’t you sleep with me?

Additionally the Mitte Man will remind you that Berlin is the city of true romance. This might have eluded you, as the title is, often wrongfully, given to such conventionally beautiful places such as Paris, a town that has trapped less visionary minds in the mainstream matrix with its elegant boulevards and enchanting squares. Berlin, on the other hand, with its communist cement and the postmodern Alexanderplatz, is somehow overlooked. Fear not, you will soon be reminded of the city’s unconventional romanticism with the same unforgiving, implacable enthusiasm displayed when highlighting its hipness.

Berlin is the single most paradigm-bashing, mould-smashing and mind-blowing megalopolitan melting pot in the annals of human history. And while it is still acceptable, nay positively encouraged, to remind everybody of the city’s intense awesomeness during those never-ending borderline arctic winter months, when the only coolness found is firmly located at the bottom of a thermometer, this fades when the temperature creeps above zero. Come spring and Berlin might once more seem positively inviting with its many pleasant parks and placid lakes. Pointing out the city’s attractions might mark you out as a tourist, a summer scenester who is there for the sunny season, when the place is not only habitable, but actually enjoyable. In short, one of those people who don’t get Berlin in all its dank, gloomy, relentlessly harrowing glory. The Mitte Man’s virility is directly proportional to how many winters he has endured. With this he hopes to impress all the new arrivals who will picture him as a sexy fearless Amundsen, and not as a man that has to spend four months of the year wearing long-johns. And when this fails, he will relentlessly promote Berlin as a dystopian Venice of the North by pointing out its higher number of canals.

In short, there is not a single fact or figure, not a single idea, that the Mitte Man won’t shamelessly appropriate to mask his vapid, chronically insecure self. Every morning he will add three extra heaped spoons of delusion to his flat white to pretend that the age old rules of attraction are beneath him, when he is in fact so up his own backside that he could perform his own colonoscopy, and has lost all sense of perspective or self-critique. For somebody so vocally against the bourgeois society of spectacle and status, it is slightly contradictory that he would invest so much time publicly parading his radical credentials like a particularly pretentious peacock. Likewise his tendency to label everything and everyone that enters his field of vision like some kind of OCD-addled librarian following a flimsy counterculture classification. The sad truth is that in his neurotic attempts to appear a free thinker, the Mitte Man comes across as revolutionary as a Grateful Dead tribute band.

The following is a conversation between Farorientalism, the pseudonymous author of the self-titled, utterly brilliant and necessary blog about the image of Far Eastern countries in Germany, and Wash Echte.

Farorientalism’s author is a Berlin-based journalist who prefers to stay anonymous. Make sure to visit his blog at farorientalism.blogspot.com (currently not available).

Wash Echte: The other day, I was thinking about booking a trip to Japan, so I thought, let’s read some German language books about the country. After a few pages, I had to stop reading, as all of these books were basically a sequence of stereotypes and the sort of ethnocentric anecdotes that should have become non-publishable by the year 1867. My irritation rose with each book, until I was so aggravated that I put “orientalism” into Google and your blog turned up. When I first discovered Farorientalism, it was one of those “Thank you, Internet!” moments. There’s comfort in knowing that there’s another person out there who’s as bothered by such a specific, yet extremely irritating phenomenon as yourself. So what was it that triggered your desire to write a blog about this topic?

Farorientalism: I guess it was a number of things I experienced over a span of years. During my university years, out of a diffuse fascination with Japan, I took up learning the language, and also traveled there a couple of times, and later on also stayed there for an extended period of time.

So, along my way, I repeatedly bumped into Germans, who really annoyed me. Like this one time I attended an official presentation for a student exchange program catering to German and Japanese students. Two young Germans, a dyed-blonde woman in a Manga-T-Shirt, and a bearded Gauloises-smoker, were scheduled to report about their experiences. Both were in Japan for the first time, both didn’t speak the language at all. They did this slide show of photos they took during their four-week stay. One slide showed a bunch of six or seven-year-old pupils in school uniform. The blonde woman commented this slide by saying: “What a pity, those poor children all look the same, no sign of individuality, and they don’t even realize their situation! Even on their holidays, their schools made them come in for some kind of sports project, you know, those Japanese and their work-centric life…”

What followed was a dozen or so similar slides spawning similar comments, peaking in the statement, made by our bearded friend, “Individualism - a concept the Japanese have yet to learn.” How convenient, I thought, that the Japanese finally found such competent drill instructors.

Blondy and the Beard might just have been extraordinarily stupid, but generally speaking I found this kind of nonsense to be quite common. Most people I met suffered from projection bias, based on half-truths and clichés, which of course revealed more about them than about the subject matter.

They believe to be in possession of the single correct stance on any given topic, which of course is the “Western” one.

It is just like religion - so I call these kinds of people “the wise men from the occident”. So to go back to your question why I started blogging - I think I was looking for some catharsis from them and situations like the one described. To always be confronted with the same old stereotype can be tiring, but also quite amusing.

Wash Echte: When we agreed to have this conversation about German writing on Japan, neither the earthquake nor tsunami had happened yet.

So, apart from prose, we now have this overwhelming build-up of lousy journalism to talk about. Actually, most of the reporting was of such poor quality that I was close to stop bothering at all.

Farorientalism: I have similar feelings. I haven’t read any newspaper since weeks now. Or rather, I just read the sports section. What I did is check the BBC every morning to see if Japan still exists. And again in the evening. That was it.

Wash Echte: Do you prefer the BBC’s approach to journalism to that of, say, Der Spiegel-type journalism?

Farorientalism: I usually favor the BBC’s style of reporting. The recent developments in Egypt, for example, I watched only on the BBC.

Wash Echte: Might be that the English media is more competent in international reporting. Positive repercussions of having had colonies.

Farorientalism: Also of having more correspondents, and less ideology. I haven’t read Der Spiegel for quite a while now, and only when I have to - for professional reasons. Apart from them, there have been other examples of intolerable journalism in the German media.

Wash Echte: The more drama and hysteria, the better. I’d say there are two types of far-orientalism in popular culture: The first being the orientalism of the everyman who gets his information exclusively from Western sources. And then we have the Western pundit with first-hand experience. Which type is easier to let off?

Farorientalism: Definitely the first type. Because it is less presumptive and can even have an amicable side to. It’s normal to have little information about a faraway country. The second type, the pundit’s orientalism, is the really insufferable one.

Somebody who considers himself or herself an expert, yet hasn’t got the slightest grasp on the subject matter, is infuriating, and also comical.

Wash Echte: Your blog started out with a piece about Christoph Neumann who wrote one of the most commercially successful German-language books about modern Japan, or actually about alleged cultural differences between the Germans and the Japanese. And in fact, I have met quite a few people in Germany who take his book at face value, and cite it as a source whenever they talk about Japan.

Farorientalism: Oh dear god. Where do I start? Have you ever seen a picture of Neumann?

Wash Echte: Yes…

Farorientalism: In his book, he styles himself as some kind of Don Juan. Which I think is a big giveaway. Yet, much of the stuff he writes isn’t factually wrong, as I described in my blog. He simply shares the general view on Japan found in Germany or the western hemisphere. But he completely fails to reflect that his view isn’t the only one. He’s so self-assured about himself being the bearer of the universal truth.

Wash Echte: You call him “Würstchen”, which I thought was interesting. Is this simply another case of low self-esteem, someone pulling himself up on the alleged superiority of their own culture?

Farorientalism: Right. Japan has a strange attraction to these people, because there, they aren’t as easily typecast as they are in their home countries.

Wash Echte: So the source of this way of thinking is really an inferiority complex.

Farorientalism: Hmm. Suffer in Germany - heal in Japan? I doubt that works. All I do know is I felt a lot of embarrassment-by-proxy while reading that book. In order to avoid portentous terms such as “racism”. Then again, to ponder the thought if a book like this had been written about African people or Jews…that would be unthinkable.

Wash Echte: To slag off most of what you find in a foreign country as “worse than home” and “ridiculous” points to the possibility that this person must have felt even less accepted there, than back home, so he sought out a way to make up for the hurt he suffered.

Farorientalism: I am all for making fun of stuff. But please, be classy about it. Something that Neumann’s writing seems to be lacking in every aspect.

German publishers have found out there’s a market for books like his. The concept being “German people report about the foreign country they chose to live in”. You can find such books about Sweden, Finland, Great Britain, France, Italy, and Greece…so of course, some guy at some publisher one day said, “let’s do one on Japan”. What all these books have in common is that they try to be amusing. And what country is more apt to be made fun of for it’s alleged whimsicality than Japan? The buyer of such books expects to read amusing anecdotes.

Wash Echte: So, Germans like books about foreign countries, but only as long as those books don’t threaten the idea that the German way of life is superior and closest to the “natural state”.

Farorientalism: Exactly. They are daft, but ultimately harmless books. Where they become problematic, is in the reader’s domain. The type of reader who takes these books at face value, who even forms their image of a country based on them, just can’t be helped.

Wash Echte: Is it really all the reader’s fault? I think the marketing of such books is often misleading. I have never once seen them advertised as, “A jolly potpourri of lies, stereotypes, and personal bias to pad the self-esteem of the author”, but always as “authentic, insightful, inside information from the inside!”

Farorientalism: I’d like to differentiate here. That depends on the author. Take this book about China by Christian Y. Schmidt, “Bliefe von dlüben”. There’s no real “need” for this book either, but it is certainly less irritating than Neumann’s.

Wash Echte: You said that writing the way Neumann did about Japanese people would be unthinkable if the subject matter were Africans or Jews. Am I right to suppose that the German audience also would disapprove of such blatant stereotyping and generalizing of individuals if the target group were, say, Americans? Have Germans come around to think of Americans as individuals rather than as a homogenous, faceless group, and if so, is it due to the ubiquity of American culture in Germany?

Farorientalism: Yes, that surely is true. This lack of familiarity also has a role in the current reporting about the Fukushima nuclear plant. In German media’s editorial offices, you will be hard pressed to find anyone with a sound knowledge about Japan. We do know American writers, musicians, geography, and cities - our image of America is manifold. Japan is also a manifold country. Take the conflict between East Japan and West Japan, for instance. In Germany, is anyone is aware of it?

Talking about the French affection for nuclear energy, just yesterday a Japanese friend from Fukuoka wrote me: “Paris-Berlin: 876 km Fukushima-Fukuoka: 1084 km. Good luck with that!”

Again, the fact that a reactor leak in Fukushima doesn’t mean that instantly, all of Japan is contaminated requires only basic geographic knowledge, but even that seems to be too much to ask.

Wash Echte: Every conversation with people here in Germany about the disaster in Japan seems to follow this exact script: German person: “Isn’t it horrible what happened in Japan?” Me: “It sure is, more than 12000 deaths caused by the Tsunami.” German person: “What? What are you talking about…I was referring to the radiation! Isn’t it just horrible?”

Farorientalism: Exactly. The catastrophe that really happened stopped being of interest to Germans since day two. By the way, this wasn’t the case in the BBC’s reporting. In Germany, the only two aspects that are still of interest are nuclear energy and exploration of the “Japanese national character”: Why the hell aren’t they panicking yet? I am not aware if anything like this has happened before - people responding with pure hysteria to a dangerous situation happening more than 9000 km away.

Wash Echte: Me neither. And Germans don’t seem to fathom out why the Japanese aren’t interested in being “educated” by the much more liberal, nonpartisan western media.

Farorientalism: Exactly. Have you read this interview with Kenichi Mishima in Frankfurter Rundschau?

Wash Echte: I did, yes.

Farorientalism: What stood out for me was one of comment left by a reader below the interview: “The true feelings of Mishima are revealed when he talks about the desired response of the West to the Japan crisis: Send money, don’t ask questions.” This guy seems to think he should be awarded a seat in the Japanese parliament before he gives one Euro to charity.

Wash Echte: I can’t shake the feeling that we Europeans have grown to see our society and our way of life and thinking as the “natural state”. As the optimum any living person should ever strive for.

Farorientalism: And most importantly: That you can only feel happiness as a European person. Happiness being the crucial term here, because since it’s been proven that the Japanese are the more commercially successful nation, the image of the “inferior Asian” can’t be held up anymore.

Wash Echte: That’s where we’re hurting.

Farorientalism: Yes, so luckily, we can now play the happiness trump: “Maybe they’re more successful, but look at the miserable lives they are living.” I just wonder then why life expectancy is higher and Japanese people are healthier. I have never got the impression that they’re especially miserable looking.

Wash Echte: That may be the reason why a European person, expecting to see only miserable, overworked people, is driven into an inferiority complex once confronted with the reality there.

Farorientalism: Or, in a misguided attempt to make reality go away, the European person will then argue that the Japanese just haven’t realized yet how miserable they should really feel, if only they knew. Anything goes to coerce reality into the narrative of the “inferior Asian”.

Wash Echte: That’s what your blog is about, isn’t it - describing all those defense mechanisms people come up with to reassure themselves of their hypothetical superiority.

Farorientalism: Yes. I think this European attitude, or at least that of many Germans, has totalitarian qualities to it: There is only this one way to think and live, and, one day, the whole world has to become like us.

Wash Echte: Totalitarian thought-patterns, imposed on subjectively positive values such as those held up by the students of 1968, who were fighting totalitarianism.

Farorientalism: The same old story, in a new packaging - with a bit of added philanthropy.

Wash Echte: Let’s go back to writers. There are less blatant examples than Christoph Neumann. Have you read “Zehn” by Franka Potente?

Farorientalism: I sort of skipped over it.

Wash Echte: One of the ten stories is about this emotionally inhibited Japanese man, who fails to grasp the opportunity when an outgoing, impulsive Scandinavian woman he met tries to start a relationship with him.

Farorientalism: …that outgoing Scandinavian women of course being Potente’s Alter Ego.

Wash Echte: Probably.

Farorientalism: Sexuality is a fitting topic. About 150 years ago, the Europeans started to go to Japan, and found it to be demoralized, mainly because homosexuals were left alone over there. Today of course, Europeans go to Japan to fight for same-sex marriage rights. Isn’t it ironic?

Wash Echte: Today, it is automatically assumed that homosexuals have it better here than in the Far East.

Farorientalism: Which isn’t an easy call to make. But it makes it obvious that the Japanese don’t need any reeducation from the Europeans.

Wash Echte: That Japanese guy in Potente’s story…isn’t he going against human nature in rejecting that impulsive Scandinavian party-animal?

Farorientalism: Yes, even more so as the Scandinavian, from the classic left-wing point of view, portrays the noblest specimen of mankind: Ecologically correct, socially secured, emancipated, and Arian. Oops, strike Arian, that’s the opposite school of thought. Anyway, the world will never be like Scandinavia, which can be called a blessing for climatical reasons alone.

Wash Echte: Why then, despite presenting us with such shallow, ethnocentric character sketches, does the German feuilleton still praise Potente’s punditry on the Japanese?

Farorientalism: Those guys often don’t care about facts or life outside of their offices anyway. Feuilleton mostly is introspection.

Wash Echte: It’s not like there’s only one example. The book is full of such ideas.

Farorientalism: Tell me more.

Wash Echte: Okay, so this Japanese person comes to California as part of a student exchange program. But when it’s time to go home again, the student, in a change of mind which must have been so obvious to Potente she’s doesn’t even try to explore it, decides to not want to go back to Japan, because compared to life in the US, it now feels like going back to prison.

Farorientalism: Wow.

Wash Echte: So, is this book maybe less of an insight into the Japanese character than into the projection bias of its author?

Farorientalism: I’m speechless. I’d like to ask her why we haven’t seen a mass exodus from Japan yet. I sense oblivion.

Wash Echte: She said she lived with real Japanese people who gave her access to the “inside” of Japan.

Farorientalism: Maybe she really did? Like that one week where I stayed with the Schmidt family in Bergisch-Gladbach and suddenly had this epiphany about Germany ;-)

Wash Echte: I wonder what authentic Japanese people agreed to have this severely tattooed German actress stay with them.

Farorientalism: Good question. Maybe she stayed with a Yakuza family.

Wash Echte: As she isn’t known to speak Japanese, not only the statement to have gotten to know the “inside” Japan, but this whole background story to me sounds quite far-fetched.

Farorientalism: Good point. Yet, the ARD correspondent in Japan doesn’t speak the language either.

Wash Echte: Hetkämper?

Farorientalism: What a spectacle, that guy.

Wash Echte: A caricature.

Farorientalism: He’s really one of a kind. The old school of Far East correspondents - the guys with the straw hats. Whenever I see his documentations on Phoenix, waddling his way through some arbitrary Vietnamese village, I am always looking for a rickshaw in the background, already waiting for him - that’s like Scholl-Latour’s idea of journalism, minus the insight.

Wash Echte: That doesn’t keep them from writing book after book about the topic.

Farorientalism: Like “Tokyo Tango” by the former FAZ-Correspondent Uwe Schmitt. You can find him in my blog as well. Basically, what he writes is vain blabber, with the pretension to write beautiful prose. The Berliner Morgenpost gave him a full page to open up about his feelings on the earthquake. Funny, I thought, as in the meantime, he had been sent to work in Washington. I quite like the idea to not just ask the people in Japan who were directly affected by the quake, but a correspondent sitting in Washington.

Wash Echte: Is it lack of money, or carelessness to fail to come up with a journalist that speaks the language of the country he has to report on?

Farorientalism: I think the German media is really bad at networking. Also, most journalists are now too scared to go to Japan, for their fear of radiation. But I was speaking about “Tokyo Tango”. What a sad piece of writing.

Wash Echte: Sad for presenting the same old half-truths and stereotypes instead of depicting everyday reality there, which might turn out to be more livable than ours?

Farorientalism: Well, Schmitt did dutifully read much of the Western standard literature about Japan, especially the outdated and the highly critical, without questioning the information he got from these books. Then, for example, he came to the conclusion that the Japanese “salary men” (people following a conservative career path, the ed.) must live a miserable life. He took that idea and ran it through some kind of “lets-write-like-Thomas-Mann-if-he-had-been-a-journalist” - machine, and the result was “Tokyo Tango”, a book that has earned much praise from the Feuilleton.

Wash Echte: Apparently, the Germans have a problem with people who dedicate their life to their workplace. So next time I go to a German bakery half an hour before they close shop and ask to buy something despite all the displays already having been emptied, should I take the rude retort they’ll certainly give me as a symbol for the freedom and superior quality of life of the German working class?

Farorientalism: Germans mainly see work as a means of self-realization. Which wouldn’t be such a bad idea, if it weren’t for the fact that 80% of work that needs to be done - working in a bakery, delivering parcels, being a janitor - will hardly leave room for self-realization.

Wash Echte: On the contrary, if you think about the people working in Japan’s supermarkets, who are usually friendly and helpful even at late hours, should you be worried that these people lie awake at night to grieve about the sour grapes life dealt them?

Farorientalism: Definitely! It’s normal for the Japanese to cry themselves to sleep every night because they weren’t born Europeans ;-)
The general image of the Japanese, for the regular German, is that of an odd, often whimsical, yet kamikaze-grade disciplined person.

Wash Echte: And obedient to authority.

Farorientalism: Correct. The “hardworking member of the ant colony” stereotype.

Wash Echte: So we talked about the image of Japanese people among the insecure and uninformed, but what about the group of people I like to call “elite Germans”, who consider themselves to be progressives. Take alternative, globetrotting, young actress Franka Potente, for example. To me, what she writes about Japan is simply kitsch, akin to those yodeling Africans in Lederhosen you can see on ARD. Yet, nobody seems to be bothered much by it.

Farorientalism: Part of the problem is that the Japanese seems to represent a concept from which we Germans have long struggled to distance ourselves. We consider ourselves as not being obedient to authority anymore at all, as individualistic free thinkers - yet we all have the same basic opinion, as we can currently see in regard to nuclear energy. The Japanese doesn’t have the best standing in our hip communities.

Wash Echte: Which is China’s chance to take its place there.

Farorientalism: Yes. But the Chinese trigger new, different anxieties. Do you know this book by Amy Chua?

Wash Echte: Oh, that woman in the US with her rigid ideas of how to bring up children?

Farorientalism: Yes, the so-called Tiger mum. Granted, she’s quite a nut-job. A majority of Chinese people would probably never raise their kids like her.

Wash Echte: Nonetheless, the “rigid Chinese mother” stereotype has already been consolidated…

Farorientalism: It is highly provocative of her, an intelligent woman, to boldly say, “I will raise my kids the Asian way”. The only thing the West is worried about is whether they now have to adopt her ideas to stay afloat. That scares people. Until recently, the West was calling the shots on this planet. And now, god forbid, a new age has broken where things are vice-versa? This, I think, is interesting to observe.

Wash Echte: The one straw we clutch to being “creativity”. To make ourselves feel better, we entertain this idea of a spiritual, mysterious creativity, which “cannot be learned”. At the same time, we deny “the Asian” any creative potential - even if they ever had any when they were children, it is erased by the “harsh” drill they “all have to go through”.

Farorientalism: There’s this well-meaning article in Die Zeit, which seemingly speaks against an exoticism-riddled view on Japan, only to go back to that same exoticism a few paragraphs later.

The author talks about negative aspects of Japanese culture, and in that context makes a statement like, “creativity is repressed in Japan”.

Seriously - I know many Japanese people from varying backgrounds, and I never once got the impression that they were less creative than the Germans I know. If anything, the opposite is true. But I do know where this stereotype is coming from.

Wash Echte: Because Japanese people don’t live in Altbau apartments in Berlin-Mitte?

Farorientalism: That’s it. But that doesn’t explain how someone who knows a few Japanese people, let’s say outside a business context, can come around to believe this stereotype to hold any water.

Wash Echte: Like the person who wrote that article for Die Zeit.

Farorientalism: If you read that article, it becomes clear that he has read the odd book about Japan, and may even have visited the country. Also, he definitely is well meaning. I fully understand how journalism must generalize. Still, why articles like this one are greenlighted, escapes me.

Wash Echte: Concerning Japan, apparently negative aspects of its culture are generalized and persist, while positive ones usually fall through the cracks. Back to your blog, Farorientalism - did you get any negative reactions to it?

Farorientalism: Not many. The other day, someone wrote: “Much of your criticism I’ve heard before - coming from the Japanese themselves. They miss the sort of enlightenment which would enable them to question the status quo and voice their opinion (…) there’s no point in turning a blind eye towards the problems of the people there out of sympathy for their country (…)”

Wash Echte: This sounds like one of those German people who love to cite critical opinions on Israel voiced by Jews. Which coincidentally are the only Jewish opinions they usually cite.

Farorientalism: “My Jewish friends say…” ;-)

Wash Echte: Thank god for the whistleblowers.

Farorientalism: Right. But something else I found to be even more remarkable: The allegation that I turn a blind eye on the “problems of the Japanese”. I don’t want to sound mean, but if there are such problems, then the Japanese must solve them themselves. There is no need - and this the exact point I am trying to make - for us Germans to pose as “super-nannies” who help the Japanese solve their problems. I’m not so stupid as to think of Japan as a perfect place. During my trips there, I rather had the feeling that we Europeans haven’t even realized our problems. I doubt that becoming like Germany should be a goal for any country.

Wash Echte: Is it fair to say that this E-Mail by Der Spiegel journalist Nora Reinhardt to Kenichi Mishima is a good indicator for the quality of reporting about Japan?

Farorientalism: To give a fair answer: No, it isn’t that bad everywhere. But generally, it is pretty awful. Ms Reinhard may not even be the worst example.

Wash Echte: Well, she didn’t even know that there was a time difference between Germany and Japan, so she called him on the phone late at night in his time zone, and had to apologize for it later.

Farorientalism: I thought the actual Manga-related article that apparently was the result of this research wasn’t that bad after all. It was definitely better than this story in “Stern” which was basically a potpourri of all known stereotypes mixed together: Kamikaze, Samurai etc..

Wash Echte: I didn’t read it.

Farorientalism: To understand how bad that piece is, imagine this catastrophe had taken place in Germany and the foreign media would illustrate their reports with SS troops and spiked helmets. To quote that article: “(…) there are stories like that of this old woman who is rescued from a car wreck and apologizes to have caused an inconvenience for the rescue workers. Or that of people who were evacuated, but didn’t dare to enter the gym (which was set up as a shelter) without taking off their shoes first (…)” What’s wrong with this description? First of all, this woman simply used the most common Japanese idiom for saying, “Thank you”. Nothing else. And second, the people who take off their shoes before entering the gym do the most common thing imaginable. Why would they want to “dare” something different in the first place? Where did the author get this idea that they “do not dare”?

Wash Echte: A good example.

Farorientalism: …that suggests that all Japanese, deep down, have a heartfelt desire to not to take off their shoes when entering a living place. But they just don’t “dare”, because they will be shunned by “the group”.

Wash Echte: So, leaving your shoes on when you walk into a place other people live in, should be understood as the “natural state of human existence”.

Farorientalism: Like you are supposed to say, “Guten Tag” when entering a store, even if you actually couldn’t care less if they have a good day.

The people who wrote that article are probably not stupid. But they lack all intercultural intelligence. Or they switched if off for professional reasons.

Wash Echte: Does Germany need a complete overhaul of the way journalism is taught here?

Farorientalism: I don’t think so. A more critical audience would be nice.

Wash Echte: Then again, if you take a look at Stern, you immediately know what kind of journalism to expect. But Der Spiegel on the other hand claims to be Germany’s number one source of “quality journalism”. With the reporting of the past few weeks, I rather get the impression that those questions from Nora Reinhard to Mishima are the better indicator for the quality to expect from Der Spiegel.

Farorientalism: Like I said - I tend to categorize Spiegel Online as a tabloid anyway.

Wash Echte: They are more insidious than your usual tabloid…

Farorientalism: Everything is a “Eilmeldung”. Also that unfortunate “liveticker”. As if the situation in Fukushima was a football match and they’re waiting for the first goal. Hyperventilating the news in hope to manufacture a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we took the reporting in Der Spiegel at face value, it’d be a miracle that anyone in Tokyo is still alive and the city not in ruins.

Wash Echte: What Der Spiegel excels at are cunning headlines. Maximized shock value disguised as factual information.

Farorientalism: It’s just speculative, badly researched, and unethical journalism. What they aim for, of course, is attention and eventually “page impressions”.

Wash Echte: The “Let’s turn everything into a slideshow” school of online media.

Farorientalism: Right. To say it like Sarah Kuttner or Nora Tschirner “Spiegel Online - Das geht gar nicht.”

Wash Echte: I thought it was “Ich glaube es hackt”?

Farorientalism: That’s by Judith Holofernes, our trusty old Bild-boycotter. You don’t like her very much, do you?

Wash Echte: I haven’t really formed an opinion about her, but I do find the uniformity of her audience a bit suspicious. Isn’t it tragic that you will find a huge crowd of Germans who will rally behind such lazy rebellion while at the same time they seem to be completely uncritical of what Der Spiegel feeds them?

Farorientalism: To take Bild seriously is nobody’s fault but your own. For example, saying, “es hackt” about Bild just strikes me as old thinking. It’s common knowledge in Germany that the Japanese allegedly trust their media “blindly”. But look at the Germans - they are the ones who fit this description as much.

Wash Echte: I think they are even worse.

Farorientalism: In Germany, the easiest way to position yourself outside of society is to say: “I am in favor of nuclear energy”. Of course there are good arguments against nuclear energy. But the level of uniformity in opinion is scary. It reminds me of the citation of Kaiser Wilhelm II, “I recognize parties no more; I recognize only anti-nuclear activists!”

Wash Echte: Do you think that freedom of speech still exists, meaning that one is able to openly be in favor of nuclear energy without having to fear bodily harm?

Farorientalism: I wouldn’t go so far as to say freedom of speech is in danger, apart from certain areas of Berlin maybe. I’m amused by Germans who call the Japanese a “group-oriented” society who always adapt the group’s opinion as their own - the very same thing the Germans do.

Wash Echte: I again suspect that it’s 100% projection bias and Japanese are actually less group-oriented than Germans.

Farorientalism: To prepare this conversation, I re-read a couple of newspaper articles, and got the impression that the Germans are almost as angry with the Japanese “not learning their lessons from Hiroshima” as they are angry with the Jews “not learning their lessons from Auschwitz”.

Wash Echte: :-) Can the performances of people like Hetkämper or Reinhard serve as evidence for the provincialism of modern Germany? After all, Hetkämper works for Germany’s biggest and most important TV network, ARD.

Farorientalism: What else could it be? But to differentiate a bit, in the case of Hetkämper, I believe his mishaps to be sheer incompetence paired with lack of motivation and the convenience of being a veteran foreign correspondent for a large public TV network. He simply can’t be bothered. Reinhard, on the other hand, is proof that not only the Japanese have trouble with the English language ;-)

Wash Echte: So if they ever do a German version of Ricky Gervais’ “An Idiot Abroad”, the best place to look for a German Karl Pilkington would be in the editor’s offices of the self-appointed German quality media?

Farorientalism: :-)

Wash Echte: As a consequence, isn’t it preferable for Germany to not play a major role in international politics? The general public seems to lack basic knowledge of foreign countries, and worse, still accepts stereotypes and ethnocentric pseudo-journalism at face value.

Farorientalism: That’s a hard question. You can find that sort of bad journalism in the US as well. I never understood the reasoning behind why Germany strives to play a bigger international role, anyway. Germany does export loads of weaponry to who knows what countries to. Japan doesn’t, at least not to the same extent. Yet, we Germans like to think of ourselves as a refined, thoroughly peaceful nation: “We learned our lessons from history, you know - unlike those Yasukuni-visiting Japanese”. The troublesome aspect of this ethnocentricity and lack of knowledge is that we aren’t aware of it.

Wash Echte: I fear this conversation is quite pessimistic. There surely must be exceptions to the rule. Germans who are able to competently write about Japan?

Farorientalism: Hmm. Let me see. I like Petra Kolonko of FAZ, who earlier worked as a correspondent from China and now from Tokyo. She’s fair and balanced, yet critical, and rarely falls back on cultural criticism. She is able to categorize aspects of Japanese culture in a way that signals: Everything is relative and can be found, to another extent, elsewhere. By the way, I also like the guy who does China for FAZ, Mark Siemons. He is definitely competent. Also, what you can find in Die Zeit about the Far East is usually not too far off the mark.

Wash Echte: Interesting, because I thought they rank among the worst. Their flaunting of the whimsical is unmatched. The number of articles like “in Japan, robots are caring for the elderly” you can find in Die Zeit in sum means a distortion of reality, because it creates a false image of homogeneity that fails to do justice to the complexity which is inherent not only in the Japanese, but any modern society.

Farorientalism: It’s true that you can find awful writing there. Sometimes though, a really good one also makes it into print. I remember one about Japan’s foreign policies. It’s hit-or-miss with Die Zeit.

Wash Echte: Would you like your blog to help change the status quo of reporting on the Far East?

Farorientalism: The main motivation for writing is to catalog my own thoughts in a “just for fun” way. Having said that, I’d of course be happy if my blog leads some of the “ants” from this “ant colony” called Germany, which to me looks quite uniform, to reconsider their thinking about the Far East and not blindly trust what the media feeds them, I’d be happy.

Spring 2011. A catastrophe of apocalyptic dimensions has hit Japan, an ongoing tragedy that reveals the inability of a whole commercial sector, whose underlying structure of misinformation, lies, and blatant manipulation of facts for the sole purpose of profit, is suddenly brought to light. The incompetence of those involved proves itself to be so profound, that no one in their right mind can ever be able to trust these people with anything ever again.

What’s that? No, I’m not talking about Fukushima, radiation, or anything happening in faraway countries, but about the tragic and complete meltdown of journalistic ethos, methodology, and human dignity of most of the German media in the face of the current events. The sheer amount of ethnocentric vitriol and small-minded idiocy concerning Japan found in the German media has rendered any satirical approach useless. So let’s take a shot at some entirely amateur gonzo journalism. Or as the Germans call it, journalism.

Surely there must be at least some people in Germany who can write about Japan without mentioning vending machines for used knickers or the “contrast of tradition and modernism”? After looking really hard, I found something. This text, Stadt der Träume for taz is such a good read that I just had to talk to the guy who wrote it. Turns out the author, Dr. Roberto Lalli, an Italian playwright living in Germany, has a very interesting view on why the German reporting about Japan is in such poor state.

WE: What was your motivation for writing about Japan?

RL: I have to admit that Japanese culture fascinated me since I was a little kid. Probably very early in my life I realized that European art was not as modern and revolutionary as it seemed to be at first glance. Jugendstil or Art Deco, as it is called outside Germany and Austria, had been influenced heavily by Japanese minimalism or purism, a perspective on life as well as on art that came up in Japan hundreds of years before it struck artists like Van Gogh and later Picasso like lightning. I remember the effect the preparatory drawings of Van Gogh had on me - he was not at all the wild, irrational painter many believe him to be: ‘Wow, I thought, this is pure Japanese reduction to the essential!”

I will never forget the first time I went to a German “Völkerkundemuseum”. At some point I entered the Japanese section and noticed a glass shrine with black, shiny, ultra modern teacups, and I wondered if someone had put their brand new IKEA cups in there. Well, I approached the cups to read the tags, which said, “Japanese manufacturer, 12th century”. Oh dear, that was like a kick up the arse. Real fun. Later I read a lot of Japanese literature, ancient and modern, and among the modern writers especially Kenzaburo Oe fascinated me because of his essential, sometimes crude, and still touching language. So, that was the beginning of my passion for Japan, no, not for Japan, but for Japanese art, cinema, architecture, philosophy and economy. Maybe the movie “Lost in Translation” reminded me at somehow, that there was not only Japanese culture as a way to deal with life over here, but also a living Japan, waiting to be discovered. So I took a plane and went there.

WE: Before visiting Japan, did you have in mind any stereotypes about modern Japan? Did you experience affirmation for any of them?

RL: The only thing I anticipated was a particular kind of foreignness that it was going to be very difficult to communicate with the Japanese. Not because of the language barrier, but because of an impenetrable seriousness, which shields most emotion, and I found that to be true. What took me by surprise was the fact that Japanese people, when communicating with strangers, barely exchange any subtext at all. This particularly European mess of hidden desire, shame, and constant searching for the other’s soul, this constant judgment, eyeballing, and competing, in Japan simply doesn’t exist between strangers. The individual there feels no need to reflect itself in others, because outside of work or family, it isn’t on a constant quest to self-discovery. When a Japanese person is among other Japanese people who are strangers to him, he in a way ceases to exist, but reappears once he interacts with peers known to him. I found it to be amusing that the stereotype of “losing face” has some truth to it. When I was lost and asked a Japanese person, who didn’t speak English, for directions, he just passed me with a fixed stare, simply to avoid embarrassment for both him and me.

WE: Is it natural for a European to feel “alienated” by Japan and the Japanese, or is this feeling of alienation more like a self-fulfilling prophecy?

RL: I’d say: Both. Asia and Europe are fundamentally different, under objective criteria, and this is no illusion. On the other hand, there will always be a sense of alienation once one delves into another culture. We Europeans are mainly defining ourselves through the people around us - to a much greater extent than we happen to be aware about in our natural “habitat”. An example: If you’re a handsome man or woman, when you’re walking around Tokyo, or when you’re riding the subway there, you will soon find out that no one seems to notice your good looks, let alone react to them even in any non-verbal way, so it may appear to you like you’re a time traveling, invisible man. Our ego, in the Freudian sense of the word, is a reflected projection. When that reflection ceases to exist, part of the ego also fades away. Accordingly, the meaning of “travel” is to become aware of the fact that whatever we think our ego is, actually isn’t our ego. So, what is the ego then, I ask.

WE: In your piece for taz, you oppose the usual clichés of the Japanese as whimsical “others”, caught in an eternal conflict of traditions and modern life with a unique, favorable view on the Japanese society. In your piece for taz, Tokyo for once isn’t the hypermodern, inhuman place it usually is stylized as in western media, but rather an actually existing utopia of a fairer, more livable capitalism. Isn’t the do-or-die, psychopathic society of loners, that western media purports Japan to be, closer to reality?

RL: Make no mistake: Capitalism by nature is just that, an at all times inhuman system - not only during the time of crisis, when the whining about “degenerated capitalism” is at its loudest. Which to me is really just laughable. People should read what Rosa Luxemburg said a hundred years ago about the capitalistic tendency of increasingly radical accumulation. Japan is different to Europe in that people, in return for submitting themselves to this logic of capitalism, at least receive some kind of compensation. They get a better deal than the Europeans - on all levels. The Japanese capitalism is not necessarily more human than the European one, but the participants receive a greater share. In Europe, the corporations can get rid of 150 years worth of social standards and comforts without anyone in the media complaining much. At the same time, they receive tax break after tax break from governments, regardless of their political orientation. In Japan, companies pay a higher price to the country and society for being allowed to participate in the market. Having said that, the capitalistic pressure on people, even the youngest, is enormous in Japan as well. Suicides rates are high, even among 10-year-olds, and adolescents rather try to make a living by selling T-Shirts than do like their fathers and dedicate their lives to a corporation.

WE: Is this fairer type of capitalism in any way caused by the same traditional morals and values that are often mocked as being antiquated and limiting in comparison to the hedonist western lifestyle?

RL: No, this is a trait of the Asian capitalism in general, the most important trait of the “Tokyo model,” which differs from the “Washington model.” Refer to any given history book: All countries that have succeeded at implementing industrialization and produce goods which can compete on a global scale, have in fact started out in seclusion, meaning that they used protective taxes to make their economies immune to cheap imports. Japan is still keeping up this way of regulation, especially in the agricultural sector. This effectively prevented a rural exodus and helped stabilize society after the Second World War. Had Japan, at that time, followed the absurd ideas of the IWF, like so many countries in Africa in South America, who are still being told that an unconditional opening of their markets will strengthen their economies, it would probably have become another “developing” nation. The Japanese were much too clever to be led astray as the Washington model only serves Washington and its industrialized allies.

WE: Would it be a fair assessment to call Berlin, due to its absence of most of capitalism’s landmarks, like skyscrapers, and its wide-spread suspicion of even the feeblest forms of consumerism, and on the other hand its decadent nightlife and skepticism towards conservative forms of employment the exact opposite of Tokyo? Is Berlin after all the more modern city of the two, where ones’ ego hurts particularly bad?

RL: Surely the ego hurts a lot more in Berlin than in Tokyo, because here in Germany we’ve traded in all those conservative elements of society for a certain kind of freedom. The kind of freedom which at heart is merely just a consumer’s freedom, limited to those with money to spend. Japan, in many aspects, is still a conservative, and in some aspects even authoritarian country, which to a great extent resembles the German empire of Bismarck. Its values, though, have never been filtered through such an epic identity crisis like the one that came over Europe (Ed. note: The revolts of 1968), which, as the lowest common denominator, lead to nothing but materialism. Japan’s values did suffer by their defeat in WWII, but the Japanese still do believe in and lead their lives after certain, century-old values such as loyalty, personal dedication, integrity, and readiness to sacrifice. Voiced in Berlin, such vocabulary would earn you nothing but laughs, and rightfully so once you consider the significant abuse of these values by the Nazis. In Japan on the other hand, they do live on.

The good news for us Europeans is that we’ve been atomized to an extent that we’ve come to a more radical concept of the ego than any other place on earth. This opens a view to change, a new spirituality, and a new definition of the “persona” in the context of others, which we had to re-learn. This is something which seems to be lacking in Japan on an objective level, yet not on the subjective level. For these collective-oriented societies, it is easier to create sense for the individual, which seems like a paradox but really isn’t.

WE: Is Japan especially alienating to somebody who lost his innocence, naiveté, and faith in the goodness of this world?

RL: A good question, to which the answer I believe to be “yes”. We Europeans basically do not believe in anything anymore. This will actually be the crucial factor in the ongoing competition of who is going to run the world. What is it exactly that we can do so much better than China, India, and Japan? That we do not believe in anything at all. And what is the biggest advantage of those countries over us? The fact that we don’t believe in anything anymore. I do not even dare to start contemplating the extent of catastrophes we’d have to face to become open again to rediscover the humanism of early European capitalism, which I personally think is the greatest accomplishment of the Europeans. The belief that every single person is precious from the moment they enter this world, and that nobody can be happy alone because love and personal fulfillment can only be experienced together with others. It is exactly this heritage, which we lost and sold out for the sort of “promise” that you can carry home in a plastic bag. A promise never kept.

WE: In Germany, there seems to be huge demand for writers who claim to have a stereotype-free insight into the cultural differences of Japan and Germany. I found it especially remarkable how publishers go out of their way to attest these writers a deep knowledge of Japanese culture, yet after a few pages, it becomes clear that despite all the reputed insight, you’ll always find the same patronizing, ethnocentric European viewpoint. You, to the contrary, were able to avoid it. What makes it so hard for German writers to see what you have seen?

RL: I am not an oracle, god beware. A point where I, and many other somewhat well read people might differ from those authors is that I believe in knowing a countries’ history helps to understand its people. The history, the dynamics of power, the economical structure. It doesn’t matter how much time you have spent in Japan. You will only see what you’re capable to understand. Whatever you don’t know, will escape you. This is the benefit of education. It makes you see how things relate.

WE: In German literature about Japan, take German Franka Potentes’ book “Zehn” for a recent example, one is often startled by this inherent, knee-jerk assumption that any Japanese person having lived in a Western country will automatically come to prefer the Western lifestyle to that of Japan, mainly because the Western world is allegedly more in favor of individualism. I often get the impression that these books aren’t actually about exploring a foreign culture, but about manufacturing proof for the superiority of ones own, “western-alternative” lifestyle. Would you say German writers make a valid point by claiming that the stereotypical Japanese “salary man” is secretly hoping to be liberated by an alternative Western Uebermensch?

RL: First of all, I don’t think of Nietzsche as a figurehead of a philosophy that puts the freedom of man first. Quite the contrary. His idea of “eternal recurrence” is a rejection of the struggle for freedom as for Nietzsche, man cannot escape fate, but only has the choice to radically accept or not accept it. Yet, to answer your question, if a Japanese person, having lived in a foreign country, can ever go back to see the Japanese lifestyle as the “default”, or if he’ll from then on long for the “alternative” Western lifestyle…I’d like to answer this with the words of Ernst Bloch, who in contrast to Nietzsche, said that utopia is a function of human spirit, because that is what’s waiting for us in the future. So we bear a certain idea of it, which pushes us forward on the time axis, in the direction of utopia, with the intent to eventually make it reality. Utopia in this case being another, more fitting, more human existence in harmony with ourselves, nature, and all other forms of life. And this very longing for a different, utopian, yet in principle possible existence, is felt all the same by Japanese students, Italian managers, or Spanish accountants.

The paintings and sculptures in our museums are nothing but a window to this very utopia, and what else do we read about in the myriad of Dante’s, Goethe’s, or Scott Fitzgerald’s words if not about the longing for a more human life, where we and everything else will finally stop being nothing but wares.

That feeling of life we sometimes grasp in those rare moments yet is impossible to achieve in our globalized capitalism, and probably lifetime. This longing, and the unbearable pain that comes with it, isn’t European or Asian, but human, because the souls of man and their thirst for liberation of their inherent possibilities and love are universal. This is what I believe.

Then, apart from this universal longing, there is a practical, personal longing for change. An example: I live in Mannheim, and for years I’ve pondered the thought to move to another place. To the seaside, back home to Tuscany, or to Spain. Why? Because there are aspects to these places that I think of as better, more beautiful, or simply more fitting to my needs. And - who wouldn’t think this way after having set out foot in the world? Who doesn’t dream about waking up somewhere in Provence, or fall asleep in Mali, breathing in the musky odor of its soil, under the brightest firmament ever seen? The Japanese students who return from their University studies in Europe might feel the same way, but not because Germany or Italy are such awesome countries, or because we Europeans excel the Japanese in any way.

What we find in foreign countries is an inkling of wholeness: Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could live in a mixed existence of French, Italian, Chinese, American, and African influences, instead of everybody simply bumbling about their own Starbucks, whether it is in Tokyo or Auckland.

You know, I am really struggling with the term “individualism”. In the sense of a mature, self-determined life in relation to other people, “Individualism” isn’t a word I am able to take serious before capitalism and the objectification of our existence is overcome. As long as individualism merely means that I can buy a BMW in 16 different colors, but otherwise lead a hollow, lonesome, inauthentic life among the masses of the disaffected, I’d prefer any tribe of the Brazilian rainforest, or any Japanese family with their rituals and collective rules to the “great freedom” we live in.

WE: Is Japan such an easy target of clichéd and subjective observations because both the distance, and language barriers are very hard to overcome for the average western person? Would it be met with the same acceptance to publish similarly misguided views and factually wrong information about a country like the USA?

RL: See, in Germany culture and “Kulturkritik” is a function of the currently ruling commercial interests and strategic alliances. Everything American is good, everything French is good, everything Russian is evil, and everything Japanese is ridiculous, or simply “inferior”. If you’d like to learn about how a certain country is stereotyped in Germany’s cultural circles, you should study our current foreign trade balances and military alliances. What we have in Germany is a synchrony of the press, which in this aspect defies all description.

WE: This makes me wonder if trade balances are a sufficient explanation for the ethnocentric and subconsciously arrogant view on Japan these writers can’t seem to overcome – especially writers who are part of a so called counter-culture? I guess most of them would vehemently protest any claim they are taking sides in capitalist rivalries.

RL: The term “counter culture” makes me laugh. What is it supposed to mean anyway? It reminds me of the German movie “Berliner Ballade” starring Gert Fröbe, from 1948, where at one point, the “Lied vom Kampf” (Song of the battle) is performed to mock the specifically German trait of constantly having to campaign against something.

Even if we give that term counter culture the benefit of doubt: The true protagonists of German counter culture do not write articles or paint pictures, because they’re dead buried, and for the most part, forgotten. Whoever seriously rebelled against the status quo has been murdered, driven into exile, or put into jail, which is as good as death. Remember the German peasant’s war (1524-1526, the ed.), Heine, Dutschke, Einstein, Rosa Luxemburg, and Karl Liebknecht, all those who were part of the resistance in WWII, like the Delp, Scholl, or the unknown soldiers who refused to take part in the murdering only to become victims of murderous obedience themselves. Where are the monuments reminding us of these people? Where in Germany is this counter culture who stands in this very tradition and builds on its strength to plan cities differently, speak differently, love differently, debate differently, and decides to work, eat, and learn differently, hence practically live a different culture? What I do see is a culture of change. People who want to raise their kids sort of differently, leave their car in the garage now and then, eat mostly vegetarian, and dutifully vote for green parties - a kind of change that safely stays inside certain limits but never questions the distribution of power to the few. This culture of change does work, no doubt about it, and Germany did in fact change for the better over the course of the last 30 years. I was born in 1963 and who knows what would have happened if back then the German minister of foreign affairs decided to come out about his homosexuality? Which is a good example to demonstrate the limits of this culture of change. It has been very successful in the private realm, and partly successful in parliamentarian politics, but it couldn’t and wouldn’t at all touch the basic structure of a society where the few own almost everything and get to decide, while the majority remains powerless and unheard.

When the minister of foreign affairs wears trainers, but engages in super nationalist, imperialist foreign politics, which again only serve very few people, but hurts a majority, then that is not counter culture. Counter culture would mean to raise taxes for corporations, and to prioritize the concerns of common people instead of theirs, to demand the same on an international level, and to lower the reliance on imported energy through the development of own resources, instead of securing them internationally by military means. This would have brought forth very different, historically significant effects compared to the laudable, but less fundamental changes to our daily, so-called “private” lives.

You know, it has become very hard to understand international politics, capitalism, and globalization. I tried, and it took me the better part of 20 years to publish even a thin, yet hopefully enlightening book that I titled “Diktatur als Demokratie”. Therefore, it doesn’t really come as a surprise, and can be forgiven, that many Germans, Italians, and French people who write about Japan and the Japanese do from a middle-of-the-road “Gutmenschen” (do-gooder, the ed.) point of view, which in a way reminds me of Marie Antoinette’s motto “Let them eat cake”, which probably is a misquote. But the basic idea to save galley slaves with cigarette breaks and six weeks of holidays can be easily transferred over to Japan: Capitalism as a brilliant concept, which merely needs some cosmetic changes here and there. Japan is suited very well for the European “Gutmensch” who argues from this point of view, because at first sight its capitalist organization looks much more archaic than that of Germany or Italy. Salary raises by age, discipline, hierarchies, mandatory drinking binges after work - wow, don’t we have it better here in Germany! Over here, a young, trendy, cool “head of the agency” comes to work at 2 a.m. with free Pizza for the poor souls who work all night to meet next days’ deadline – isn’t life great? No, you know, it’s just crap, simple exploitation under the disguise of the latest aesthetical fashion.

Like the guys on that ship in that “Beck’s” advertisement, who 20 years ago had to look like career-driven mods, while today they look like career-driven, 18 year old hobos. To that I’d prefer a less cozy, Marxist analysis. I am quite sure that Marx would see the current German capitalism as much more encompassing than the Japanese one, just by looking at the relationship of the government to corporations, and vice-versa. Engels, on the other hand, would simply ask what a Japanese worker’s salary is, how many hours he’s working, and under what conditions, and after how many years can he buy his own house. How about the public health care system, or the pensions? I am not an expert in these areas, but I bet that the Japanese system would look good compared to the German, Italian, or French one.

If there was one newspaper, magazine, or TV network in Germany who published the actual figure of how many taxes German corporations have to pay, then we’d have a chance to compare it to the amount of money that Japanese corporations pay for public wealth. I am quite sure: It is less.

WE: In your opinion, why do most Western writers seem to be unable to meet modern Japan on eye level, accepting it as an autonomous model, and walk straight into the trap of evaluating it as a deviance, if not even perversion, of their own, Western “Leitkultur”?

RL: But then I pose the question: Who still buys into the concept of Western “Leitkultur”? It has never existed, at least not outside of the Western world. What we Europeans refuse to accept is that this world is a sphere. Take one look on a map - what is right in the center: Europe. Our world maps are even proportionally incorrect (they scale up the north and scale down the south). But for most people on this planet, Europe isn’t the center of the world. The first humanoids lived in Africa, and most of what mankind has discovered and invented was discovered and invented in Assyrian territory, China, or Persia. On a Chinese world map, of course China is in the center. Did you know there has never been a Chinese “Foreign minister”? That is because, with some justification, China considers all other countries to be inferior to China.

Sure, we have had a good run with ancient Greece and the Roman empire, Dante, Shakespeare, and Mozart, Kant, Einstein, Beethoven, and Hemingway, but all this isn’t singular and could be found in the respective heydays of past empires and cultures, with the only difference being us not remembering or simply never having heard of them.

Persians or Arabs have invented all modern European math, pharmacology, medicine, and astronomy, yet nobody seems to care much about it. The Sumerians, at 2000 BC had cities that in large parts were similar to our cities of today, yet we think of ourselves as God’s gift to science.

But we are not. What we Europeans did rule are those 500 years between the 15th century and today, which in the grand scheme of things is nothing, a thing of the past. The next 500 years of human history will be shaped by China, India, and maybe Japan, regardless of what the US will undertake to prevent it.

WE: Are you planning to write about Japan again? What projects are you currently working on?

RL: I’d like to spend half a year in Japan, or live there for a longer period of time to better get to know the remote areas. My colleague Garr Reynolds, the “Presentation Guru” is an associate professor in Osaka and I’d like to visit him there for an interview. And to study Japanese fairy tales - I love fairy tales.

Dr. Roberto Lalli has published the book “Diktatur als Demokratie” for Edition Fatal, which can be purchased here. You can visit his personal website at www.robertolalli.de

Prepare yourself to spend a few hours each day to answer the requests from your friends, distant acquaintances, and random substance abusers that some idiot passed your email address on to at a party, asking you for advice and information on the many different things that make Berlin so irresistible to them. Which are parties, clubs, drugs, parties, casual sex, and parties.

Despite their loudmouthed claims to be widely traveled cosmopolitans, you’ll be surprised to learn about your friends’ dire need to make perfectly sure they’ll enjoy their trip to Berlin before they even consider spending a single unit of their respective currency to go there. Which puts you in the unfortunate position to take most of the liability for their staycation to live up to the infamous Berlin hype, which you had no part in perpetuating but plenty of opportunity to grow unimpressed with.

So how do you protect yourself from your auslandish friend’s inevitable complaints that you misrepresented Berlin (which you didn’t) and haven’t warned them to not believe everything they’ve heard about it (which you did)? Despair not. Because, you know, there is a failsafe, fun method to safely guide any Berlin novice through their own decision process to find out if Berlin would be the right place for them: The Kanye West analogy.

It works like this: Because Kanye West is an uberfamous rapper with a Nobel-prize worthy ego and manic dedication to direct all attention to him, every single person in the world has a well-developed opinion about the guy. As will be demonstrated in a moment, through what can only be caused by a quirk in the space-time continuum, it just so happens that Kanye West and the part of Berlin “that matters” are so similar in the way they are endlessly impressive to imbeciles, that it is perfectly safe to assume anyone who likes, or even can be arsed to still pay attention to, Kanye West, will likely also have a heck of a time in Berlin.

Not sold on the idea yet? Consider this, Auslander:

• Kanye started out as a promising hip hop artist and talented producer who was able to land a few hit records in the musical genre called Hip-Hop. But after having barely survived a car accident, something in Kanye’s brain snapped, and since that day he opted to continue his career as the autotune-abusing cyberpop muppet we know him as today, or in his own words, “the voice of this generation.”

Get it? Berlin and its people had the reputation to be a promising, if a bit unambitious new player on the circuit of world capitals, until one day, by accident, the Berlin wall came down, and Berlin’s elite, in a lazy pose of self-grandeur, felt that their city could now be whatever it wants to be and decided that the result of this awkward, forced epiphany was to proclaim that Berlin is now the “new New York” and the best place for young people to follow their dreams at.

• Kanye West mainly made himself a name for having an ostentatious, if a bit predictable fashion sense, and signed responsible for so many mediocrity-ridden, auto-tuned cyberpop crapfests that you start to wonder how anyone could come to the conclusion that Kanye is still a hip-hop artist.

Like Berlin: Apparently, for a city widely claimed to be the “new New York”, Berlin has to work off quite a backlog of attributes that make a city big. Like, you know, tall buildings. Busy streets. Non-white people. A proper airport. A wide variety of scenes and cultures. 24/7 grocery shopping. Hell, 24/7 anything, for that matter. Somehow this new New York didn’t get old New York’s memo about it being “the city that never sleeps,” and not “the city that sleeps in until around noon, skips the shower, and wastes the day in a nearby cafe passing smug judgement on normal people.”

• Kanye is infamous for stating he “wants to win every award,” and is known to throw temper tantrums whenever someone else is awarded instead. From which can only be deducted that he a) is one of the few people left on this planet who still gives a damn about awards and b) he is such a deeply insecure person that he constantly needs affirmation from external entities in order to feel any self worth.

Enter Berlin: Once you mention even the slightest matter which you think isn’t absolutely perfect about it, or god forbid, some tiny thing that you liked better in another place, then be prepared for the conversation to rapidly turn into an awkward, passive-aggressive pissing contest during which the Berlin fiend will, without fail, launch into a pedantic diatribe to shoot down the unthinkable thought that any other place in the world could be in any way better than Berlin. Just like Kanye’s egomaniac approach to awards, anytime Berlin loses, it is never its own fault but always some hater holding Berlin down, probably because this hater is simply too mainstream to grasp Berlin’s paradigm-changing role in the world of clubs, amateur fashion design, or the invention of euphemisms for unemployment.

• Even if, after all of the above, you’re inclined to give Kanye the benefit of doubt, because, so you argue, it’s a thin line between genius and insanity, and the jury’s still out on which side of that line he’s on, then that sort of ill-fated genuflection must come to an abrupt halt once you have the misfortune to witness the utterly misguided, preposterously imbecile, and ludicrously idiotic way in which the guy deifies himself in, like, every single interview he gives. Still in doubt? Then watch this short press conference in which Kanye, during the course of a few minutes, manages to make a fool of himself by saying he is just like the “kid in front of the tank in Tianmen square“, that he’d like Michael Jackson to twitter his reasons for dangling a toddler out of a window, and what an utterly selfless thing it was when he took the mic from Taylor Swift to engage in some faux activism in favour of poor Beyoncé and her video director.

Likewise Berlin. Even in the most favourable, indulgent and tolerant people, contentment trades places with red-hot aggravation against elite Berliners once exposed to a tiny dose of the trademark self-congratulatory haranguing those hoards of daft, insecure, Berlin-as-an-ego-crutch using wannabe-artists-with-a-mortgage are busy secreting into every verbal exchange they succeed to get wind of, online or offline. If you like to think of yourself as a person who’s quite tolerant towards these rants, I challenge you to read this gem without gnashing your teeth to fine dust.

There you have it: The synchrony of Kanye and Berlin is such a peculiar gift to marketing, it’d be a shame if it couldn’t be used to either party’s financial gain. A total win-win situation: Every true rapper needs a city to represent. New York is repped by Nas, The Game represents LA, Too Short reps Oakland. Kanye has yet to name a city which is a match to his alleged creative genius and determination to annoy the hell out of mankind. Also, just look at him - he could instantly blend into any Neukölln flat share of wide-eyed Scandinavian fashion students. Everything about Kanye just screams Berlin.

So here’s some free advice for the Berlin tourism board: Hire Kanye West as your city’s new mascot. While you’re at it, why not update the Berlin coat of arms in the process? Sure, that body-popping bear was an incredibly forward thinking character in its day inasmuch it foreshadowed both the clientele which Berghain became famous for AND their favourite dance move, but you can’t live off that forever. So hurry up and replace the bear with a picture of Kanye West, and you’ve got the most perfect visual summarisation of what Berlin stands for today.

This entry is exclusive to the book: Ich werde ein Berliner by Wash Echte. Available now from most major bookstores and Amazon.

Published by Random House / Goldmann
ISBN: 978-3442156474
 

This entry is exclusive to the book: Ich werde ein Berliner by Wash Echte. Available now from most major bookstores and Amazon.

Published by Random House / Goldmann
ISBN: 978-3442156474
 

This entry is exclusive to the book: Ich werde ein Berliner by Wash Echte. Available now from most major bookstores and Amazon.

Published by Random House / Goldmann
ISBN: 978-3442156474
 

This entry is exclusive to the book: Ich werde ein Berliner by Wash Echte. Available now from most major bookstores and Amazon.

Published by Random House / Goldmann
ISBN: 978-3442156474
 

This entry is exclusive to the book: Ich werde ein Berliner by Wash Echte. Available now from most major bookstores and Amazon.

Published by Random House / Goldmann
ISBN: 978-3442156474
 

This entry is exclusive to the book: Ich werde ein Berliner by Wash Echte. Available now from most major bookstores and Amazon.

Published by Random House / Goldmann
ISBN: 978-3442156474
 

This entry is exclusive to the book: Ich werde ein Berliner by Wash Echte. Available now from most major bookstores and Amazon.

Published by Random House / Goldmann
ISBN: 978-3442156474
 

This entry is exclusive to the book: Ich werde ein Berliner by Wash Echte. Available now from most major bookstores and Amazon.

Published by Random House / Goldmann
ISBN: 978-3442156474
 

This entry is exclusive to the book: Ich werde ein Berliner by Wash Echte. Available now from most major bookstores and Amazon.

Published by Random House / Goldmann
ISBN: 978-3442156474
 

This entry is exclusive to the book: Ich werde ein Berliner by Wash Echte. Available now from most major bookstores and Amazon.

Published by Random House / Goldmann
ISBN: 978-3442156474
 

This entry is exclusive to the book: Ich werde ein Berliner by Wash Echte. Available now from most major bookstores and Amazon.

Published by Random House / Goldmann
ISBN: 978-3442156474
 

This entry is exclusive to the book: Ich werde ein Berliner by Wash Echte. Available now from most major bookstores and Amazon.

Published by Random House / Goldmann
ISBN: 978-3442156474
 

This entry is exclusive to the book: Ich werde ein Berliner by Wash Echte. Available now from most major bookstores and Amazon.

Published by Random House / Goldmann
ISBN: 978-3442156474
 

This entry is exclusive to the book: Ich werde ein Berliner by Wash Echte. Available now from most major bookstores and Amazon.

Published by Random House / Goldmann
ISBN: 978-3442156474
 

This entry is exclusive to the book: Ich werde ein Berliner by Wash Echte. Available now from most major bookstores and Amazon.

Published by Random House / Goldmann
ISBN: 978-3442156474