It was a great day: starting with a trip to the farmers market (expect pictures) to buy cookies and Beef Jerky in the morning followed by watching my first football game live at the Neyland stadium in Knoxville (expect more pictures). I just wanted to spend the evening with a cold beer listening to some Jazz music at a bar...
What started as small talk with an American woman about the game eventually ruined my night. She happily told me that she lived in Bavaria for ten years with her husband serving the US army. They had a nice house in Augsburg and were paid by the US government (including the house). She went on telling me how bright her daughter is, studying at Troy University. (In essence, she forced her to go there because it is so small, there are no parties to distract her from studying hard. I feel sorry for her.)
Next, she told me that she wants to go back for a visit and that she is quite picky about where to go. Now it got suspicious... It turned out that during her time in Germany the wall came down. What followed was probably the worst thing I have heard so far during my time being here. She told me that she likes Bavarians (which is ok, everyone has his idiosyncrasies) and she does not like people from East Germany. Why? Well, West Germans really worked "their butt off" and have really made it, rebuilt their cities after the war and so on. On the other hand, East Germans all came to the west and simply wanted to have what they had (sic! she used the inclusive "we") and being really lazy and simply dump compared to West Germans.
Wow, I had to let this settle for a while before I could ask her what makes her believe that. She told me that she had a housekeeper, described her as lazy (not going into any details) and dump, because she "even didn't know how to handle a vacuum cleaner". She acknowledged that the east "suffered under communism" (sic!), but in the western part they simply worked harder and earned their share. Finally, she went on telling me that she really likes Prague and how industrialized, hard working, and clean Bohemians are (her grandmother was Bohemian).
I was not able to have a real discussion with her, partly because I lost my voice today, partly because I was simply stunned. However, even if I wanted to fight an intellectual duel, she seemed to be (almost) unarmed and resistant to opposing ideas. I suspect that she did not work during her time in Germany, mostly because she hardly learned any German in ten years and did not mention a word about what she did there. That fact alone makes her attitudes seem even worse. Who is she to judge the people of an area she has never been to, without knowing anything about it's history, and from where she probably met only one individual, which she presumably faced with all the prejudices she had learned during the cold war?
So far, I have mostly met open-minded and really nice people here. However, she seems to be a perfect and sad example of how ignorant, narcissistic and prejudiced (some) Americans are said to be (thereby sadly confirming many of the prejudices people in the rest of the world are having). I really want to believe that she is only part of a minority here, but I certainly have a hard time getting over this conversation...
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