https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273979/germany-vs-populist-wave-bruce-bawer
When I was walking around Munich this weekend, it occurred to me that one reason why Germans have such a long-lasting international reputation for being brainy and scholarly and stuff is that all those hours they spend standing at street corners waiting for lights to change give them plenty of time to think. Ever since the first time I set foot in this country, several decades ago now, I’ve been stunned by the willingness of these people – in every city, and of whatever age or social station – to crowd together on curbs, with no moving vehicle in sight for half a mile in either direction, unwilling to hurry across even the narrowest of thoroughfares until a green signal gives them permission to move. My first encounter with this cultural practice was especially striking because I was from America, where individual freedom is taken seriously and where it is hard to quash the impulse to violate trivial regulations if they seem to impinge unnecessarily on one’s freedom of movement and are contrary to one’s personal judgment and/or to simple common sense.
Consider, moreover, that I come from New York, where, as they say, traffic lights are only suggestions.
This whole German standing-at-lights business is, of course, all about obedience – about a fondness, in fact a deep-seated, inborn, and well-nigh ineradicable need, for exceedingly strict order, even in the most meaningless matters, enforced by very strong authority. That, plus an unshakable readiness to obey that authority beyond the point of rationality, in defiance of one’s own reasoning powers, and without ever giving an instant’s thought to the possible illegitimacy, imprudence, or immorality of that authority. It’s this rage for order that explains the insane level of overregulation practiced by the EU – which is, when you come right down to it, a German operation. The other day somebody said that one of the regulations the EU is currently working on is a rule setting the proper lengths for candle wicks. Only a bureaucracy run by Germans could come up with such things.
Americans love freedom. But to Germans – at least Germans with a traditional German temperament –freedom looks terrifyingly like chaos.
That’s what I was reflecting on as I waited at one Munich street light after another on this first weekend after the seventy-fifth anniversary of D-Day – and the first weekend, too, after the announcement of the winners of the latest European Parliament elections. If not for the German fetish for authority, Americans of my parents’ generation wouldn’t have been put through so many (shall we say) inconveniences during the first half of the 1940s, and D-Day would never have had to happen, and those Normandy beaches would still have French names.