Simon T. Kaye

A learned friend and ally of mine was quick to point out some thoughts which arose from yesterday’s remarks about the politics of embarrassment. Specifically, he pointed out that in public notice there is the politeness common in English signs, but also the constant application of what he terms the “imperative mood”; so that they imply, again in my friend’s words, both “permission and command”. This, clearly, is something which I would have otherwise missed, Germanically illiterate schweine that I am.

Also in the public comments for yesterday’s post, we have the suggestion that my observation is reinventing the wheel- even more than is usual for me- in that psychologists and sociologists have considered ‘uncomfortableness’ as a possible explanatory factor in German social history for some time. I have requested an expansion on this point.

Good lord, I think there’s something of a… dare I say it?… correspondence society in the offing here!

Here are a few more thoughts around the uncomfortableness thing. It should be stressed that tolerance is a tricky word to apply here. Let us say that, while the threshold of tolerable embarrassment may vary generationally, demographically and regionally; may even be, on the whole, higher than that in the UK; the tolerance of embarrassment-causing behaviours above that threshold is sharply lower, both in terms of prescription and warning, as my first friend points out, and in terms of ‘punishment’. Thus we demarcate between sensitivity and tolerance.

After all, nobody who has visited a German city of anything over 100,000 inhabitants can claim that the modern public mood is anything other than eclectic and vibrant. Berlin is now known as the party capital of Europe; German counter-culture is fierce and more widespread than elsewhere. There seems an acceptance here of things that are still, in Britain, tarred by the brush of noncomformity and ridiculousness; videogaming is practically a national passtime, for example; rock music and its subcultural trappings have never gone out of fashion here as they seem to have further west.

So we see an acceptance, a malleability of society to accept aspects of culture and counter-culture that cannot be surmounted, to accept into a greater in-group the subgroups that compose broader German society. This (surely unconscious) mentality of accepting the ‘other’ when it is widespread enough, or well-established enough is simply another solution to the problem of embarrassment.

And perhaps we see the evidence of this solution in the last century of German history. For what else was the success of Nazism than the quick blossoming of a new ‘in-group’? The desperation not to appear alien to the ermergent new order explains how it was the German people, the formerly moderate majority, that made the Third Reich into what it was. By moving the goalposts of normalness and uncomfortableness, Hitler and his friends were manipulating the psychology of the German people.

Apologies if the above seems either too blunt, too circuitous or too obvious; I am suffering from a lack of sleep through a combination of a worsening head cold and the incredible snoring of a 60-year-old Italian architect who slept in the same dorm as me last night. I have never encountered such snoring before. It was almost a relevatory episode; I thought, for a moment, that I detected in that regular, whinging groan of nostril-impelled air a secret code, a demon language happily forgotten by the scholars of mankind. That was at about 4.30 this morning.

Regensburg is a nice city; compact, walkable, somehow exhibiting its own slightly mediterranean atmosphere (never mind that it is nestled in the northern foothills of the alps!) It is also the nothernmost point in the entire course of the river Danube, which is absolutely glorious here: fast, sparkling, split by islets and reflecting the majesty of some of the great architecture here.

Where Bamberg was cute, Regensburg is dramatic.