The Two Germanys

There are two Germanys. I’m not talking east and west, either. They were allegedly reunited a quarter century ago.  I’m also not talking about the old and the young Germany – the ticking time bomb due to explode in about another 25 years when the last of the boomers is unable to look after themselves.

I’m talking about the heretofore unacknowledged two Germanys. There is the pedestrian, the perambulant Germany in which one is free to roam the hillsides, the forests, the valleys, the fields in peace and relative tranquility where one often meets with the environment-friend, the bio-disposer, the bird watcher, the walking stick trekker, the cyclist even. Everything is slow, neat, low-impact. People have patience. They smile and say “Guten Morgen” or “Gruss Gott”. They let their dogs wander through flower stands and piss on tree trunks. 

Then there is the other Germany. The one that happens only inside of automobiles. 

People are vicious, brutal, impatient. They are bullies and brutes. They hassle you, worry you this way and that. They urge you, jeer at you to make some manouvre that would risk not only your life but theirs as well. If it were possible they would make you disappear, disintegrate. 

Truth be known you are not their problem. 

They are their own problem but because you are in front of them they bounce their frustrations off of you. 

They are unable to figure things out. How the world works. How the laws of physics operate. They don’t understand that driving at ever faster speeds will only ever get you to the ass of the next car ahead, and then the next and the next. And at every stress-filled union there exist the seeds of both tragedy and traffic jam. They don’t understand that driving at ever faster speeds requires ever more space to operate in in which unforeseen situations are unable to occur. They do not account or accommodate anyone or anything else that is not them. 

If you are not actually them you are therefore part of the problem. 

It is a singular way to view the world and in fact it excludes the world. 

In truth it is a way of ensuring that since everyone and everything who isn’t you is somehow wrong then you must be therefore somehow infallible, supra-heroic, preternatural, godlike. 

But it is when the two Germanys meet, when they coalesce, in a matter of seconds, of microseconds, that one begins to feel deeply ill at ease. 

Because the calm mountain trekkers, the spaced-out flower-pickers, the dog huggers are one and the same as the car-driving maniacs. Only in the act of opening or closing the door of a parked car is there any semblance of balance, of sanity, of sense while they morph from one extreme to its polar opposite.