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Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

I totally get that she feels unwelcome in a small village. I think even Germans from a large city may feel it? I'm from the Netherlands and recently moved from a middle to large city in the Netherlands (here that's about 120K inhabitants) to a village of 2000 inhabitants. People here generally don't speak any English, and are much more conservative in their opinions (i.e. blackface must be black, you outsiders uncomfortable with our 100 years old traditions should just stay away from here), imagine her moving here...

I think there are probably towns in the US where she will feel the same btw. Is it really about Germany as the title suggests? Feels like a generalization.

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Not only a small village in Germany, which would by itself be already pretty hard to feel welcomed if you don't speak the language, but a village that has the nuisance of a foreign military base nearby.

The villagers probably have been dealing with all sorts of issues from that, then comes a new American, same as all the old ones, wanting to chit-chat and talk about the weather... Newsflash: Germans might not be into that kind of small talk.

Can definitely agree on that.

We germans publicly joke about the fact that visiting the older part of your family in those "nice small villages" is always one hell of a culture shock, to put it friendly. Which starts with not saying anything about what they have for political opinions and questions regarding your choice of clothes, sexuality and job.

They probably even have their own town slang. Not any "high german". This is 100% comparable to the political landscape that you have in America (city vs farms outside).

"We germans publicly joke about the fact that visiting the older part of your family in those "nice small villages" is always one hell of a culture shock"

I recently heard a term for this, forgot what it was. It happens when young people move into a large city, live there for a while, become quite liberal (what else is there to do, when so many very different people live close together, than to respect everyone's differences) and then interact with their very conservative parents. It is indeed a culture shock, some conversation topics become so sensitive they are best avoided. I guess it happens everywhere.

Small, rural towns are pretty much the same everywhere - America, Germany, wherever. They don't like modernity too much, they tend to be very conservative, they tend to keep to themselves and they don't like outsiders.

Maybe she's never been stationed near a small town in the United States? I used to be stationed at Camp Lejeune, which is located in Jacksonville, North Carolina. The locals are downright hostile to the Marines. One day I lost it on a shop owner who treated me like dirt and muttered some comment about those goddamned marines upon which I spun around on my heel and pointed out he sure doesn't mind taking their money! When I got back to base I told the NCO authorizing leave passes about it and they put up a sign warning Marines to not visit that store. After losing a substantial amount of business the guy started singing a different tune.

Anyway, all that is to say small towns are different and they're not as accepting of outsiders. Even in the United States.

While I generally agree that small cities with elderly population are more problematic, and Otterberg might be an instance of that, I found it interesting, that they definitely vote left-leaning[1]. The red "SPD" are the social democrats, "CDU" are more conservative christian democrats.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otterberg#Politik

German politics really can't be broken down into simple left versus right honestly.

There's an entire demographic who votes green simply because they want nicer forests to drive their BMW through, and if you want to go for the oversimplification route, die Linke are boomers who want the USSR back and AFD are zoomers who want the third reich back.

They don't have first past the post so they're not tied into an us vs them dichotomy

While local politics are difficult to judge from afar, I generally wouldn't consider the SPD left for a long time now. I'd recommend not putting too much weight on the (local) voting results.

I felt very welcome in small villages in Germany as a Brit.

I'm not left wing though, that's probably 90% of it. There are reasons that these people choose to live far away from metropolitan centres, it feels completely reasonable to respect that.

Is Zwarte Piet still common there?

Last i saw the government would no longer subsidize any sinterklaas (NL version of xmas) event or parade where the traditional Piet costume was used. They now dress as "Soot Piet" and instead of blackface it's more of a coal-worker-after-a-long-day look.

Definitely he or she is still very black here.

In many places zwarte piet now has charcoal smudges over the face, because she or he climbs in and out of chimneys to deliver presents to kids.

Strange fact, on Curacao zwarte Piet is painted extra black and Sinterklaas is painted white [0], at least on some occasions.

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=curacao+zwarte+piet&iax=ima...

Original black face will go away (which makes me happy), but not over night.

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