Die Zeit, the German highbrow weekly, recently published a special supplement on refugees. I am a new subscriber and I read it open-mouthed. Die Zeit presented refugees not as helpless mute victims on sinking boats, but as grown-up humans with insights into their adopted country. Germany has psychologists, marvelled a traumatised Afghan woman. German high schools teach conflict resolution, remarked a Syrian schoolboy. Germans even plan their weekends! The refugees were maddened by German bureaucracy but, above all, they were grateful. One Kosovar woman said simply: “Coming here was my family’s salvation.”
Reading Die Zeit ahead of the European Council’s summit on migration on Friday, I thought: The global debate needs more Germans (and Poles, Indonesians, Brazilians, etc). Anglophones have too much of the world’s mindshare.
When I was at school in the 1980s, I had a blinding insight: German was going to oust English as Europe’s dominant language. So I took a university degree in History and German. I spent many happy student days in bed reading Franz Kafka. But I bet on the wrong language. Today, German barely exists outside Europe’s 100-million-person Germansphere. It is almost nobody’s second language. In fact, educated Germans in international settings now often insist on speaking English. Gradually, I drifted away from German. It was to try to rectify this that I began reading Die Zeit.
Perversely, while the German language has been shedding global status, Germany has only gained it. The country is now the West’s lead decision-maker on matters such as Russia, the European economy or migration into Europe. Still, the global debate is conducted overwhelmingly in English, very often on British-owned platforms. No matter that hardly anyone abroad listens to the British government any more. The BBC and Britain’s Guardian and Daily Mail newspapers run some of the world’s most-visited news sites. The global 1 per cent prefers the Economist. Germany, Russia, China and possibly even the US look on in envy.
Because Germans are seldom heard outside Germany, the German take on events often gets simplified and parodied. Many anglophone pundits believe, for instance, that Germans push extreme anti-inflationary policies on the European Central Bank out of an atavistic fear of returning to Nazism. In the dispute over Greece, Germany is regularly depicted as pushing mad, needlessly destructive policies. The German elite is not that dumb. However, it does not get much chance to explain itself abroad. Few foreigners know of anything that Germans have thought or said since 1945.
Even when anglophone media want a German view, they usually ask a German who can comment in good English that same day. So Josef Joffe, publisher of Die Zeit, alumnus of East Grand Rapids High School in Michigan and various US universities, has outsize influence. Joffe is not the sharpest German commentator, but he is a proven English-speaker.
The exclusion of Germans deprives us of unique German insights. Take the topic of migration: a sense of responsibility for Nazism makes Germans hesitant to demonise migrants. Moreover, many Germans have family memories of their own mass migrations in 1945. Consequently, lots of volunteers around Germany now help migrants settle. This sometimes produces cultural clashes. A kindly Syrian man, put up in the attic room of a German single mother, eventually plucked up the courage to chastise her for living alone. But often, people are just people. Die Zeit tells the story of a Guinean refugee who grew so close to an older German woman that when the Guinean was about to give birth she asked the German to be present.
How to rebalance the global debate towards Germans? The pious response is that anglophones in particular should learn foreign languages. However, that will not happen, largely because half the world now learns English. Ever fewer Britons study languages at university. Only 615 nationwide started German degrees in 2013. That same year, David Cameron, the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister, urged schoolchildren to learn Mandarin rather than “traditional” French or German.
Neglect of German extends beyond monolingual Britain. France just decided to teach less German in schools. Even many Dutch people — whose own language is Germanic — now speak English to Germans. It does not help that German has three genders and five cases.
Germans therefore need to enter the global debate in English. Der Spiegel magazine already does: It has a large English-language website. Die Zeit — and every other serious publication from Chile to Japan — should follow suit. This is doable even for penniless newspapers. Google Translate can convert an article into serviceable English in a second, whereupon a human translator can finesse it. Die Zeit’s refugee supplement appeared in German and Arabic, which is a start. A global elite that reads Die Zeit as well as the Economist may choose different actions.
Germans are frequently wrong, but if anglophones had listened to them, they could have avoided the pre-2008 push for home ownership, the creation of exciting new derivatives, extreme inequality and the war in Iraq. We need German thinking.
— Financial Times
