On Truth and Lying in the Extra German Sense | Hacker News Reader

On Truth and Lying in the Extra German Sense

longreads.com

39 pointssmacktoward52 comments

I really wanted to like this article.

Unfortunately it came across as a pseudo-intellectual free-association of language, culture, stereotypes, history, philosophy, and humor.

It needs to decide if it's Dave Barry or educational. It just came across as a drunken loudmouth at a party with a grandiose theory supported by loosely accurate, loosely related facts.

FWIW, if you want to know whether you gained weight, go to China. People will frequently tell you how much you have gained or lost since they last saw you.

EDIT to add: and the funny thing is, Chinese are very concerned about face and honour, and will lie to protect it. It's just that weight is merely an aspect of your body and health to monitor, not something sacred or potentially shameful.

>Germans couldn’t even begin to imagine why being brutally honest would hurt someone in the first place! If the truth hurts you, isn’t that more your fault than the truth’s?

What? This is simply not true at all, germans aren't emotionless robots, of course they don't go out of their way and hurt the feelings of other people.

Kept reading after that statement and regretted it.

The author seems to have suffered a bad case of misunderstanding the "Berliner Schnauze"...

I, unfortunately, also read the whole linked opinion piece on german humor from the economist [0] which I almost disliked even more. I might just feel insulted (being German) but please: calling out "Instead of a raised eyebrow, we get full-body signals to laugh now." from the country that gave us laugh-tracks...

[0] https://www.1843magazine.com/ideas/the-daily/being-german-is...

maybe the 'humorless germans' are just playing it straight and trying to increase the comedic tension in the situation.

This article would have been better if it had a little more humor. I usually like playing with national stereotypes because if you don’t take them too literally there is a lot of truth in them. But this article isn’t much fun.

As a German living in the US I definitely agree about the paragraph about preferring to be honest vs being liked. I hate listening to a long list of pleasantries before getting to the point. If you think something is wrong just say it.

The “how are you?” habit has also tripped me up. I have had several occasions where somebody asked me something in the hallway and I just said “ fine” and kept walking .

I moved from the UK to Germany over ten years ago. I’ve lived in the South and North, city and countryside.

None of this article really rings true. Germans are just as happy to tell polite lies and make small talk as the British.

Maybe some things are just lost in transliteration.

I am learning High German (in Switzerland) and the writing style and general approach in this article to the words' literal translations and the aggressive cultural characterizations bothered me, for a reason I can't quite put into words. Ich habe keine Ahnung.

Is Switzerland a good place to learn High German? I was wondering about doing that myself.

Switzerland teaches High German (and colloquially - as far as I as a German am aware - refers to it as 'Written German').

If you learn High German in Switzerland you'll be able to speak German perfectly fine. There are regional differences though - Switzerland doesn't have the letter ß, Switzerland has some words that plain don't exist in German (as I know it).

If any Swiss guy is reading: "Widerrechtliches parkieren wird verzeigt" contains two words (in a sentence of four..) that I can understand perfectly fine, but that just don't exist on my side of the border, as far as I can tell.

Duden agrees with you, btw: both parkieren and verzeigen are marked as Swiss.

https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/parkieren https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/verzeigen

Stumbled upon quite some words like that in 'Written German' aka perfectly fine and official German (like the sign text quoted earlier).

'zuegeln' vs 'umziehen', 'grillieren' vs 'grillen', 'wir gehen in den Ausgang' vs 'wir gehen aus' come to mind, but most of the samples aren't in directly accessible memory anymore (and just as above, before you confirmed my suspicions, I'm not sure if the word I'm not familiar with is actually not a thing or just something I didn't encounter)

Yes, it would be "Widerrechtliches Parken wird angezeigt" in German German.

"Widerrechtliches parkieren wird verzeigt" feels so close to Swedish I almost feel pain that I can’t understand it...

Edit: rättsvidrig parkering blir anmäld

(verzeigt = för-täljt, sort of)

You can change the first one (Widerrechtliches, wider -> against, recht -> law) for "Rechtswidriges" (same parts, same meaning) to get closer to yours.

Parkering? CH German (afaict) uses parkieren, German uses parken.

Wird is 'will (be)', guess blir

Anmäld: While my sample used a CH German word ("verzeigt") vs the normal German ("angezeigt"), you arguably _could_ go with "gemeldet" (officially reported).

So understandable German _could_ be "Rechtswidriges Parken wird gemeldet". Understandable, perfectly fine, just not .. the way it's commonly used, I'd say.

And there you go, Swedish and German separated by a couple of thousand years (not counting heavy influence from the Hansa), yet almost intelligible :-D

This reads like a high school essay composed of random factoids about Germany and its history. Eloquent but border line incoherent.

This article may be interesting as trivia, but the nuance of many of the words mentioned is so different from the literal translation that it doesn't make much sense.

I find the connotations captured reasonably well here:

> ehrlich (“sincere”), aufrichtig (“straightforward”), rechtschaffen (“right-doing”), redlich (“true to one’s word”), anständig (“decorous”), brav (“well-behaved”), ehrenwert (“worthy of honor”), and bieder (“upright”).

(which incidentally is at odds with the claim that German and English are fundamentally different there...)

I'd translate "rechtschaffen" as lawful ... because Lawful Good is officially Rechtschaffen Gut of course.

(Sorry, this German is missing his Pathfinder group)

On a more serious note: I assume you could pick different translations for most of these words and I'm not convinced that the article makes any sort of generally applicable point.

What I do want to say is that the little exposure I had to the US culture ("How are you doiiiing? Are you alriiiight? That's SOOOOO nice!") is impossible to digest and feels .. fake.

I also have to admit that - living in Asia for the last 2 years - my tone and direct (or is it blunt?) communication leads to misunderstandings sometimes.

I don’t agree with some :

Rechtschaffen -> righteous

Anständig -> decent

Aufrichtig is not straightforward. Can’t think of a good word but “honest” is closer.

But that’s just me. It shows that direct translation of words is risky and often impossible. There is way too much subtlety.

here isn’t even a single long word in German for “hurt feelings,” they just translate the English directly (verletzte Gefühle)

> Beleidigt

"Beleidigt" is quite negative, implying a sense of hurt feelings where none is expected. I don't think this is an adequate general translation for "hurt feelings". Just "verletzt" might work, depending on context.

i agree, "verletzt" fits quite well. Especially if, like in english, you pair it with "Gefühle".

I don't agree with the translation (see sibling), but also don't understand the point. There isn't a single word for this in English either (It's .. two words) and while we're at it: English is a lot of German(ic) with a big chunk of French. Who copied whom for hurt feelings/verletzte Gefuehle is something I can't say.

But .. why derive any sort of meaning from the fact that there's not a one word term for this?

"German has super precise, single words for almost all concepts" is a very popular meme with people who don't know a lot about German.

Absoluter Internetbenutzerfalscheindruck natuerlich.

Beleidigt means upset, and frankly you can be upset without beeing emotionally hurt, e.g. you are beleidigt about someone behaving in a bad manner that you had a high opinion off.

Beleidigt is more than beeing hurt emotionally, it is also means the person who is beleidigt has to act beleidigt (e.g. by actively punishing the person you are beleidigt at with avoiding them).

This means you can only be beleidigt at soemone if you care about them or what they represent in some way, while beeing emotionally hurt doesn’t require any such connection.

> e.g. you are beleidigt about someone behaving in a bad manner that you had a high opinion off.

Are you German? Or did you learn it as a foreign language? If it's the former, I'd love to know what region you are from because that is never how I would use that word (I'm from SH).

"Beleidigt" for me is absolutely "hurt feeling".

I am from Austria, but live in Northern Germany for ~10 years and it seems to work in both contexts.

It is close to hurt feelings but not the same..

> Lügengespenst

he, it should be Lügengespinst - from "gespinst", which means web. Not "Gespenst", which means ghost. Although funnily it would also fit.

I think the essay would have been better served getting to what appears to be the point much more directly:

- The VW scandal was so shocking because executives and engineers exploited a societal taboo against lying

- Was sustained for so long by exploiting another taboo against placing personal advantage over honesty

- Signs of fraud were dismissed because people assumed successful executives would never violate these taboos, leading them to accept misleading explanations and discounting the possibility of a cover-up.

thought for you: Can i as a German contradict this article without setting an example for it?

Haha. I always feel the same way about these types of statements on "the german nature". Such a catch-22.

"Yet there is but one contemporary direct translation from the German for to lie."

> 1. Lügen > 2. Schwindeln

You would find many more translations for "to lie" in a broader sense.

especially if you reach out to slang, you will find words like Bescheissen, Verarschen, and so on. But still, mutual trust is indeed an important thing to the Germans, and what's more important, it applies to society in general, not just your peers or connections.

common online tool for german synonyms: 461 synonyms in 24 groups for "lügen" "to lie"

That's what I said:

You would find many more translations for "to lie" in a broader sense.

The article is kinda racist.

We do jaywalk all the time and not everyone as direct as described in the article. "Love of order" has long been lost. Half of Europe is more orderly than Germany.

I laughed especially hard at this: "It is more important to a German to be honest than liked, honest than professionally successful, honest than rich."

You're living 50 years in the past. Modern Germany has adapted to the American life style and the article is a collection of stereotypes.

I find it frustrating that any kind of stereotype is now considered "racist", as if there were no cultures anymore, only a uniform global distribution of individuals. At the same time, how is it better to claim that all Germans have become less focused on honesty in the last 50 years?

I agree that the stereotype is not wholly accurate. German youngsters spend a lot of time maintaining their thoroughly fake Instagram/YouTube personas. Nobody with a love of order would tolerate our terrible trains. But the culture shock I got from visiting Australia and California somewhat resembles the stereotypes in the article.

Yes, I had this thought.

Would HN carry a similar article about Nigerians, or Mexicans, or the people of some other country?

I think not. So I guess it is sort of racist. Still, I think the world has become too PC, so I don't complain. (And yes, my ancestry is German.) I just wish the non-PC flavor was a little more wide-spread.

It reminds me of Mark Twain - The Awful German Language.

It combines anecdotes of an English speaker about Germans and German and makes for an amusing read for everyone. But .. please don't use any of these works as any sort of hard truth or reference.

this kind of stuff belongs into #iam14andthisisdeep

"Grab 80 million people and claim they have some psyche in common, people love reading this stuff"

Of course they do, it's obvious the moment you step across the border. It doesn't mean the author is correct, or that there isn't variance.

I find the issue with candour is mostly with casual conversation or casual issues. The 'big lies' I think happen just the same.

What do you mean by ‘big lies’?

Corruption, corporate messaging lies, political lies etc..

Corruption in UK is about the same as Germany.

UK is super deferential and not candid, i.e. 'it's not polite to point out ugly things', but this might be perceived as duplicitous in 'candid' countries.

An English person might say 'that's interesting' instead of saying 'it's shit', to be polite.

But in terms of how it breaks into level of civility, it's just the same really. 'Transparency International' ranks them the same in terms of corruption.

So I think it's more a matter of immediate, interpersonal communication than anything.

TL;DR in a country where everyone is obsessed with adhering to truth and order lies do have long(er) legs.

In the US, for example, it works a bit differently: everyone lies, and everyone knows it, but nobody wants to offend or confront anyone, so the results are mostly the same. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This is a succession of prejeduces, historic and contemporary events.

And some things are wrong. I don't know. Maybe you should travel there without trying to search for situations in which your prejeduces become real. I don't know. Im German and Im really tired of all these articles

I mean: relotius, VW, Hitler and Goethe. If I would write an article about American culture in this way you would call me xenophobic. You are the opposite of polite. You are racist.

Spiel mal nicht die beleidigte Leberwurst. Spend a little time abroad, and you will notice the same things. Furthermore, the poor woman lives in Berlin, a city where being a rude asshole is being romanticized as an endearing local tradition.

> If I would write an article about American culture

What culture?

> racist

We should go back to the original definition where it was reserved for people thinking themselves superior because of their ethnicity. Attributing racism to the author is a lie, Hans.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com