Strangers in a Strange Land

The first leg of our journey, the flight into Frankfurt Germany, was moderately comfortable. The plane was amazingly un-crowded. Everyone had a row of seats to themselves. I was able to doze lightly. After landing in Frankfurt we immediately took the train to Baden Baden where we spent four nights working off our jet-lag and getting acculturated to a foreign culture.

Traveling through foreign places without the cultural buffer zone of a tour group one stands naked to the surrounding culture. This causes one’s own culture to stand starkly before you. I experience this as a sort of self-consciousness; of not being able to blend in because there is no greater context to blend in to. I become acutely aware of my cultural self as an individual; aware of being an American. This, in fact, is one of the main objectives of this trip; to see more clearly the sort of cloaks that we have been wearing.

Many of us Americans find the Germans a bit cold-blooded. But there is a spiritual quality about a country that has suffered through war and defeat on its own turf and of horrible dictatorships and political unrest. Such afflictions have chipped away at the granite exterior to find a sort of stoic grandeur within.

In contrast German psychologist Erik Erikson has described the American character as “tentative.” I never really understood this until I came to Germany. To be sure I have only a very small sampling of German culture; but what I have notice, particularly in the Rhineland, is a deep sense of community. Families have lived in the same area and run the same businesses for centuries. There is a harmony of place. What Linn has discovered as she has painted pictures of some of the architecture is that she can use the same techniques as with landscapes such as mountains. Manmade structures and nature seem to be all of one fabric. The streets and plazas follow the contour of the land. There was no excavating or leveling off.

I think this communal settled-ness is what seems to make the German people seem cold. They are not pretentiously polite. Waiters and waitresses do not fawn over you in restaurants. Yet there is child-like warmness underneath; a staid sense of inner personage; that is to say, of resting in one’s own being with no need to make an external impression to be accepted. In a climate without the fawning service people and superficial politeness I began to feel a bit unsure within myself. I rely so much on that external affirmation.

I think this is what Erikson meant. We hold ourselves attentive to our environment; like chameleons always ready to change our color to blend in and win acceptance. We do not tend to live within ourselves but in the glow that we look for in the acceptance of others. For all our supposed independence we are so very dependent on the affirmation that we give and receive. We shape ourselves around it.

I believe there is a spiritual message in this. We do this with our religion. We are so intent in our church communities on affirming and being affirmed that we do not really love. That is to say we do not really love the center of a person, but a whitewashed façade. We love to be loved; or, better put, affirm to be affirmed. We believe this to be warmth but it is really alienation. It is what keeps us from relating at deeper levels, beyond the whitewash, where we may need to dig through layers of corrosion before we come to the solid core of a God-created person. I think German architecture teaches this lesson. In the ancient buildings much of the exterior façade has worn away exposing the granite foundation that has kept these buildings standing for centuries.