Servus!

I re­cently took ad­van­tage of a group of Eng­lish friends spend­ing a UK Bank Hol­i­day week­end in Mu­nich to re­turn to the coun­try I called home for two and a half years many moons ago. In fact, I lived in four sep­a­rate places dur­ing that pe­riod: Kiel in the North, Re­gens­burg and In­gol­stadt in the South, and Düssel­dorf in Ger­many’s heart­land.

My flight to Mu­nich was with Lufthansa, the first time I’d had the plea­sure, and a plea­sure it was too. But aside from the gen­eral im­pres­sion made by the air­line, my first cul­ture shock of com­ing into close con­tact with Ger­man cul­ture again was the board­ing process. There I was, watch­ing the other pas­sen­gers board and an­tic­i­pat­ing the usual com­mo­tion and ner­vous­ness that greets me when I fly one of the low cost air­lines be­tween Barcelona and the UK, only to find Ger­man pas­sen­gers po­litely help­ing each other find room for cases in over­head bins. What? This is un­heard of on any flight I’ve been on for I don’t know how long. When one of the last pas­sen­gers was strug­gling to find room for his case, quite calmly I should add, oth­ers around him of­fered to make space by mov­ing theirs to make best use of the space avail­able. No­tably, the flight at­ten­dant was not even re­quired in this process, she watched on as they ami­ably moved all the cases around to fit every­thing al­most mil­li­met­ri­cally, smiles all round. The usual ten­sion in­volved in this stress­ful so­cial sit­u­a­tion sim­ply wasn’t there. I was im­pressed.

After ar­riv­ing in Mu­nich and meet­ing up with a cou­ple of friends, we headed to a kneipe for lunch. We opted for a tra­di­tional at­mos­phere and food, Rule no. 1 when vis­it­ing an­other coun­try surely. So we found a very typ­i­cal look­ing es­tab­lish­ment near our hotel and headed in­side. As ex­pected and hoped for, we were met with the tra­di­tional greet­ing of “Servus!” from the serv­ing staff, as well as a gen­uine smile of wel­come. What was in­ter­est­ing from the cul­tural per­spec­tive was that when we sat down, the peo­ple at the sur­round­ing ta­bles also greeted us with the same ut­ter­ance and at­ti­tude, in what felt like a very heart­felt re­ac­tion to our ar­rival. I have to say it’s not some­thing I’ve be­come ac­cus­tomed to here or any­where else for that mat­ter. But the most re­mark­able thing about it was that it was re­peated time and again dur­ing my four days in the Bavar­ian cap­i­tal, in what I can only de­scribe as a very pos­i­tive man­i­fes­ta­tion of com­mu­nity spirit, even with peo­ple who don’t live there.

The final oc­cur­rence that made a strong cul­tural im­pres­sion on me came on the Sun­day af­ter­noon, strolling into town. As I walked past a cor­ner café ter­race where the sun­light in­vited passers-by to sit for a spell and enjoy some re­fresh­ments, a young cou­ple were stand­ing in de­lib­er­a­tion, as all the ta­bles were taken. The one on the end was only oc­cu­pied by one mid­dle-aged woman, and as I walked past, the cou­ple turned to her and asked if she would mind if they sat at her table with her. Now Ger­mans, and per­haps Bavar­i­ans even more so, are well known for shar­ing ta­bles, often huge ones in beer halls, but to ask if you can share some­one’s table in the sun­shine seemed the height of au­dac­ity, and it’s hard to imag­ine many peo­ple doing it in today’s anony­mous big cities. How­ever, the woman ac­qui­esced with a chirpy “Of course!” in a Bavar­ian ac­cent.

I was happy to leave Ger­many all those years ago, as it felt like I’d had enough of the ap­par­ent in­flex­i­ble and often cold per­fec­tion I’d been im­mersed in. This visit felt very dif­fer­ent.