To no one but a German is Hamburg an obvious place to spend a vacation, but it happened to be a German holiday, and Hamburg was overrun by German tourists. When I asked the hotel concierge what there was to see in his city, he had to think for a few seconds before he said, “Most people just go to the Reeperbahn.” The Reeperbahn is Hamburg’s red-light district, the largest red-light district in the world, according to one guidebook, though you have to wonder how anyone figured that out. And the Reeperbahn, as it happens, was why I was there.
Perhaps because they have such a gift for creating difficulties with non-Germans, the Germans have been on the receiving end of many scholarly attempts to understand their collective behavior. In this vast and growing enterprise a small book with a funny title towers over many larger, more ponderous ones. Written in the early 1980s by a distinguished American anthropologist named Alan Dundes, Life Is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder set out to describe the German character through the stories that ordinary Germans liked to tell one another. Dundes specialized in folklore, and in German folklore, as he put it, “one finds an inordinate number of texts concerning Scheisse (shit), Dreck (dirt), Mist (manure), Arsch (ass). . . . Folksongs, folktales, proverbs, riddles, folk speech—all attest to the Germans’ longstanding special interest in this area of human activity.”
He proceeded to pile up a shockingly high stack of evidence to support his theory. There’s a popular German folk character called der Dukatenscheisser (The Money Shitter), who is commonly depicted crapping coins from his rear end. The world’s first museum devoted exclusively to toilets is in Munich. (A second has opened in New Delhi.) The German word for “shit” performs a vast number of bizarre linguistic duties—for instance, a common German term of endearment once was “my little shitbag.” The first thing Gutenberg sought to publish, after the Bible, was a laxative timetable he called a “Purgation-Calendar.” Then there is the astonishing number of anal German folk sayings. “As the fish lives in water, so does the shit stick to the asshole!,” to select but one of the seemingly endless examples.
Dundes caused a bit of a stir, for an anthropologist, by tracking this single low national character trait into the most important moments in German history. The fiercely scatological Martin Luther (“I am like ripe shit and the world is a gigantic ass-hole,” Luther once explained) had the idea that launched the Protestant Reformation while sitting on the john. Mozart’s letters revealed a mind, as Dundes put it, whose “indulgence in fecal imagery may be virtually unmatched.” Hitler’s favorite word was Scheisskerl (shithead): he apparently used it to describe not only other people but himself as well. After the war Hitler’s doctors told U.S. intelligence officers that their patient had devoted surprising energy to examining his own feces; and there was pretty strong evidence that one of his favorite things to do with women was to have them poop on him. Perhaps Hitler was so persuasive to Germans, Dundes suggested, because he shared their quintessential trait, a public abhorrence of filth that masked a private obsession. “The combination of clean and dirty: clean exterior–dirty interior, or clean form and dirty content—is very much a part of the German national character,” he wrote.
Dundes confined himself mainly to the study of low German culture. (For those hoping to examine coprophilia in German high culture he recommended another book, by a pair of German scholars, called The Call of Human Nature: The Role of Scatology in Modern German Literature.) Still, it was hard to come away from his treatise without the strong sense that all Germans, high and low, were a bit different from you and me—a point he made in the introduction to the paperback version of his book. “The American wife of a German-born colleague confessed to me that she understood her husband much better after reading the book,” he wrote. “Prior to that time, she had wrongly assumed that he must have some kind of peculiar psychological hang-up inasmuch as he insisted upon discussing at great length the state of his latest bowel movement.”
The Hamburg red-light district had caught Dundes’s eye because the locals made such a big deal of mud wrestling. Naked women fought in a ring of filth while the spectators wore plastic caps, a sort of head condom, to avoid being splattered. “Thus,” wrote Dundes, “the audience can remain clean while enjoying dirt!” Germans longed to be near the shit, but not in it. This, as it turns out, is an excellent description of their role in the current financial crisis.
A WEEK EARLIER, in Berlin, I had gone to see Germany’s deputy minister of finance, a forty-four-year-old career government official named Jörg Asmussen. The Germans now are in possession of the only Finance Ministry in the big-time developed world whose leaders don’t need to worry whether their economy will collapse the moment investors stop buying their bonds. As unemployment in Greece climbs to the highest on record (16.2 percent, at last count), it falls in Germany to twenty-year lows (6.9 percent). Germany appears to have experienced a financial crisis without economic consequences. They’d donned head condoms in the presence of their bankers, and avoided being splattered by their mud. As a result, for the past year or so the financial markets have been trying and failing to get a read on the German people: they can obviously afford to pay off the debts of their fellow Europeans, but will they actually do it? Are they now Europeans, or are they still Germans? Any utterance or gesture by any German official anywhere near this decision for the past eighteen months has been a market-moving headline, and there have been plenty of them, most of them echoing German public opinion, and expressing incomprehension and outrage that other people can behave so irresponsibly. Asmussen is one of the Germans now being obsessively watched. Along with his boss, Wolfgang Schäuble, he’s one of two German officials present in every conversation between the German government and the deadbeats.
The Finance Ministry, built in the mid-1930s, is a monument to both the Nazis’ ambition and their taste. A faceless butte, it is so big that if you circle it in the wrong direction it can take you twenty minutes to find the front door. I circle it in the wrong direction, then sweat and huff to make up for lost time, all the while wondering if provincial Nazis in from the sticks had the same experience, wandering outside these forbidding stone walls trying to figure out how to get in. At length I find a familiar-looking courtyard: the only difference between its appearance now and in famous old photographs is that Hitler is no longer marching in and out of the entryway, and the statue of the eagle perched atop the swastika has been removed. “It was built for Göring’s Air Ministry,” says the waiting Finance Ministry public relations man, who is, oddly enough, French. “You can tell from the cheerful architecture.” He explains that the building is so big because Hermann Göring wanted to be able to land planes on its roof.