“Swabians do buy luxury clothes and other goods, but they don’t like to show off. You might see a Swabian housewife enter a luxury boutique who is dressed like her cleaner. You won’t see amazing hats in the street either or jewellery – people only show them to each other in private.”
Swabians even have an expression for this – hälinge reich, which means “secretly rich”.
.. Southern Germany’s frugality has its roots in the 19th century, when the area was very poor. Another influence was Pietism, a movement within Lutheranism that emphasised hard work and shunned worldly amusements.
.. Today the south is Germany’s wealthiest region.
In It To Win It
From the Kremlin’s point of view, western power in Europe rests on two platforms. There is the global American hegemony, and then there is Germany, which has emerged as America’s sub-hegemon in Europe. Putin thinks that the Germans aren’t wise enough to rule Europe well, strong enough to rule it by force, or rich enough to rule it through economics and that Washington doesn’t understand that or, if it does, that Washington itself is too distracted or too weak to care. Either way, from Putin’s point of view, Germany’s position is much, much weaker than either Berlin or Washington understands.
.. The key to Putin’s thinking is that he is betting less on Russian strength than on German and therefore Western weakness. In opposing the consolidation of a German Europe, he is betting on German failure more than he is betting on Russian success. The goal of Russian policy in Ukraine, for example, is not to create a new Ukraine in Russia’s image. It is not to conquer Ukraine–but to demonstrate that the East is indigestible.
.. Putin doesn’t see his job as one of building up a powerful force to counter a rising Germany. He sees his job as being able to take advantage of the coming failures and catastrophes of what he believes to be the grandiose and unsustainable Western project in Europe.
.. With Merkel in Napoleon’s place, Putin may see Europe today looking much as Alexander I must have seen it as Napoleon retreated from Moscow.
The Berlin Wall’s great human experiment
Want to know exactly how ideology and economics shape society? Split a nation in half. Twenty-five years later, what we’re still learning
West Germans all had access to Western television networks, including one that was American-controlled; they watched uncensored newscasts, shows like “Dallas” and “Dynasty,” and commercials for everything from Corn Flakes to Volkswagens. Most East Germans could get those broadcasts too, but a significant proportion of them—between 10 and 15 percent—lived in areas the signal didn’t reach. These people, concentrated mainly in Dresden and the surrounding Elbe Valley, were sometimes referred to as “the valley of the clueless,” forced to watch “political propaganda and Soviet-produced movies,” wrote Leonardo Bursztyn, a management professor at UCLA, and his German coauthor Davide Cantoni.
The Merkel Effect: What Today’s Germany Owes to Its Once-Communist East
A dictatorship fears open discourse and conflict, and it thrives on the fiction of unity. The ruler or the ruling party claims that it is executing the will of the people, and because that will is supposed to be uniform, everyone is under forced consensus. Silence in the country is treated as approval. Merkel grew up in this system.
Elements of it are reflected in her political style. She despises open dispute, she does not initiate discourse and she feels comfortable when silence prevails. She prefers to govern within a grand coalition, because it enables her to create broad consensus within small groups. Things have become quieter in Germany.