{"id":10873,"date":"2011-08-27T12:30:14","date_gmt":"2011-08-27T16:30:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=10873"},"modified":"2018-01-15T17:47:49","modified_gmt":"2018-01-15T22:47:49","slug":"germany-is-an-intensely-weird-place","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/08\/27\/germany-is-an-intensely-weird-place\/","title":{"rendered":"Germany is an intensely weird place"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michael Lewis<\/a> highlights one of the ways Germany is different from anywhere else on the planet:<\/p>\n

\n

Published in 1984 by a distinguished anthropologist named Alan Dundes, Life Is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder<\/em> set out to describe the German character through the stories that ordinary Germans liked to tell one another. Dundes specialized in folklore, and in German folklore, as he put it, \u201cone finds an inordinate number of texts concerned with anality. Scheisse<\/em> (shit), Dreck<\/em> (dirt), Mist<\/em> (manure), Arsch<\/em> (ass).\u2026 Folksongs, folktales, proverbs, riddles, folk speech — all attest to the Germans\u2019 longstanding special interest in this area of human activity.\u201d<\/p>\n

He then proceeded to pile up a shockingly high stack of evidence to support his theory. There\u2019s a popular German folk character called der Dukatenscheisser<\/em> (\u201cThe Money Shitter\u201d), who is commonly depicted crapping coins from his rear end. Europe\u2019s only museum devoted exclusively to toilets was built in Munich. The German word for \u201cshit\u201d performs a vast number of bizarre linguistic duties — for instance, a common German term of endearment was once \u201cmy little shit bag.\u201d The first thing Gutenberg sought to publish, after the Bible, was a laxative timetable he called a \u201cPurgation-Calendar.\u201d Then there are the astonishing number of anal German folk sayings: \u201cAs the fish lives in water, so does the shit stick to the asshole!,\u201d to select but one of the seemingly endless examples.<\/p>\n

Dundes caused a bit of a stir, for an anthropologist, by tracking this single low national character trait into the most important moments in German history. The fiercely scatological Martin Luther (\u201cI am like ripe shit, and the world is a gigantic asshole,\u201d Luther once explained) had the idea that launched the Protestant Reformation while sitting on the john. Mozart\u2019s letters revealed a mind, as Dundes put it, whose \u201cindulgence in fecal imagery may be virtually unmatched.\u201d One of Hitler\u2019s favorite words was Scheisskerl<\/em> (\u201cshithead\u201d): he apparently used it to describe not only other people but himself as well. After the war, Hitler\u2019s doctors told U.S. intelligence officers that their patient had devoted surprising energy to examining his own feces, and there was pretty strong evidence that one of his favorite things to do with women was to have them poop on him. Perhaps Hitler was so persuasive to Germans, Dundes suggested, because he shared their quintessential trait, a public abhorrence of filth that masked a private obsession. \u201cThe combination of clean and dirty: clean exterior-dirty interior, or clean form and dirty content — is very much a part of the German national character,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael Lewis highlights one of the ways Germany is different from anywhere else on the planet: Published in 1984 by a distinguished anthropologist named Alan Dundes, Life Is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder set out to describe the German character through the stories that ordinary Germans liked to tell one another. Dundes specialized in folklore, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,1118,7,230],"tags":[969,139],"class_list":["post-10873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-germany","category-history","category-ww2","tag-hitler","tag-psychology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-2Pn","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10873","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10873"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10873\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25850,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10873\/revisions\/25850"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}