I'm here in this tiny town, a senior at a tiny high school of 400 people. Though we're small, we still always have a few foreign exchange students. They have come from all over in the past few years; Korea, Russia, Denmark, and this year, Germany.
I have a couple classes with Ronja. She's about 5'8 with blonde hair and blue eyes. She's very skinny and very beautiful, the typical German stereotype I guess. She's fluent in English and speaks with a fairly thick German accent. She's in choir with us. She told us that she took voice lessons in Germany, and she sings as if she has been taking them for several years. I don't know if I've ever heard that good of a soprano voice.
There's a tenor in our choir, and he's all the time trying to be funny, when he really isn't. He doesn't think before he speaks and he usually offends people instead of making them laugh. On Ronja's second or third day in choir with us, he and another tenor were discussing the middle school principal. She's mean. She's hateful. She's a tyrant and a dictator. This guy decides to refer to her as Hitler. Ronja is in ear shot. This guy looks at Ronja and goes, "Yeah, you know who Hitler is right?". My head snaps around because I cannot even believe he just said that. I mean, yes, the entire world knows that Hitler killed millions of innocent Jewish people and was horrible to his own country, but that was tactless.
Ronja looks to him and says, "Yes. That wasn't a very good time for Germany". And I look at her and I say "Ronja, don't listen to him. He's not funny and that principal isn't that evil. Nobody here is that evil." The guy is once again laughing about some other stupid topic with his friends. Ronja handled it with such grace. I wanted to punch him in the jaw.
The next morning, I was in AP English with this guy, and me and a friend called to him, he came to us, and my friend orders him to turn around. He goes, "okay." and does it. She kicked him right in the butt. He turned back to us and said, "What was that for?" and laughed as if we were just playing. We both started in on him and I told him that he needed to not talk like that and say stuff like that to the foreign exchange students, number one because it's probably not very nice and number two, because we don't know how they teach history in the rest of the world, and we have to be respectful. I told him that if everybody acted like him, there would be no foreign exchange students. He looked at me and at my friend, and said, "You're right. I'll talk to her." He did. Ronja is okay with him, he's okay with Ronja.
Why don't people THINK before they speak?
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this was an interesting experience to read about. Ronja handled herself very well and probably was taught to not be hateful toward what went on in her country and critisism towards it.
I'd love to ask her how they teach history in Germany, but I'll wait until I know her better. I'm sure that the German people are still suffering for what went on before alot of them were born. She could have said any number of things to this guy, but instead she was just polite about it. I was absolutley amazed.
I have a German forgien exchange student in my Senior English class. Most Germans are actually dark haired with brown or hazel eyes and a tan but white skin color. Alan(the exchange student) falls under this discription. I'm mostly German and I have dark brown hair and hazel eyes(although I have lighter skin since I'm not full German).
What makes me wonder is Ronja being blond and blue eyed. It makes me wonder if she is treated differantly still because her older family members made it through that time without a problem....
My boyfriend is German - we met when he was an exchange student at my school and have been together for almost seventeen months. This summer I stayed with him at his house in the small town of Hameln.
I would like to point out that, for the most part, Germans look exactly like Americans. They have differing hair colors and eye colors and when comparing photographs from his high school to the one I went to, you wouldn't be able to say which people were which.
Being German and being hated on for Hitler and Nazism feels exactly like being American and being hated on for the Iraq war and Bush. The Holocaust was obviously much worse, but since it's history it's not like anything new to the Germans when someone says, "Oh, your country was where the Nazis came from."
It can get annoying when the subject is repeatedly brought up, especially by people who don't know that much about it and are just saying it because someone is from that country. The misuse of that person's native language is also irritating - when my boyfriend was in America several boys knew a German word that is derogatory to women and called me it often as a kind of joke - they only said it because it was the only Geman word they knew. This went on for a long time (my boyfriend is very patient and tolerable) until finally he snapped and yelled at them.
What happened to you and Ronja is, unfortunately, a common issue. It is important to recognize that people are people no matter where they come from and they are not responsible for the history of their country and their language and heritage should be respected.
good job for calling him on it. Its not cool when people pull that type of thing. Im glad it all worked out though.
My fiancé is from Germany and I've spent some time there -- I know several other Germans as well. Germans do look, for the most part, like Americans, with the same proportion of dark or light hair and eye colors, etc. -- although they do tend to be taller on average (and you'll notice this when you're out in a public place there.)
The younger generations of people there (middle aged on down) learned about the Nazi era in school in far greater detail than we Americans do, and, judging from those I know, it looms pretty large in their minds. Germans seem pretty quick to suspect each other of harboring neo-Nazi tendencies, for instance, if they seem a little too patriotic. Far from being something hushed up, it seems very close to the surface -- of course, this is now. For a while after the war it was hushed up -- older middle aged people would remember that. People under 45ish, though, are pretty used to talking about it. It isn't the way Americans tend to think of it, as a taboo topic which will upset them terribly -- Americans who treat it that way (like the tenor) probably make themselves look like idiots more than anything else. At any rate, it's probably more disconcerting to German people when you praise their country than when you criticise it -- there is a strong tendency to self-criticism in their culture today and you might find them arguing against you in that case. ;)