Despite living in Germany collectively for 3+ year and speaking fluently, I hadn't fully connected the PMC of America and Germany. I could feel it for sure though. The longing to be as "creative" as the American tech bros "Why can't we do things like Facebook?" - I heard that a lot. I was much more impressed with their high tech Engineering incl. trains, solar, wind, chemistry which they are rapidly losing ground in. (Math hard?)
I can say I have experienced the scorn they have for working people. In the 80s, my Lufthansa-employed home-stay family referred to the working locals all as Bauern (peasants/farmers) and made fun of the southern automechanic's Bayerisch accent.
And the sophisticated West Germans really do call the East Germans deplorable and backwards. They think they are all ignorant and it's a mark against you if you come from there. Well, guess what? That's the home of the AfD.
You’ll enjoy this story. Every Xmas holiday I travel from SF to visit family in London, and so a few weeks ago I was in “The Antelope” in Chelsea and there is a guy in there I immediately clock as a Bay Area Tech Bro … he’s wearing a fleece pullover and holding forth in classic Private Equity Tech Bro fashion at a great and interrupted length. It’s a scene straight out of “Silicon Valley”. He’s got three guys from the London office held hostage, but they’re all well-brought-up Sloaney boys and they’re all too polite to tell him to shut up. But the looks on their faces perfectly communicated the sentiment of “Dude it’s AFTER WORK, now is the time we discuss football, or skiing in Verbier, or literally ANYTHING else and your behavior is gauche beyond words”. Which our autistic Tech Bro interpreted as “you are FASCINATING … do please go on”.
People are so worried about the Bay Area’s technology taking over the world they haven’t noticed the menace posed by Patagonia fleece pullovers and boring conversation.
You’ve made a convincing argument for the popularity of “Kevin” as a given name in Germany coming from Kevin Bacon's performance in “Footloose”—but what about “Chantal”? I’m assuming it’s not because of a mid-eighties craze for Chantal Mouffe (or a resurgence in interest in Ste. Jeanne de Chantal). Was there a TV character or pop singer by this name?
Ouais, bien sur! My mother told me that my older sisters were thrilled, as members of that rare tribe (Franco-Hiberno-Americans) when Jackie Kennedy became first lady and started a wave of Franco-mania. All of a sudden the inability to pronounce our last name became a problem for the other person, who was now an obvious philistine.
My mother also liked to point out that until November 1963 the Irish were not really white nor were they really Americans. She knew this because while she was Irish and Catholic as can be she nevertheless had an (Irish) last name that seemed to be Norwegian and so she grew up “passing” as a mainline Protestant listening to what they had to say about "those" people.
But all of these fine sociological distinctions (between low and high Protestants, between German and Russian Jews, between Lace Curtain and Shanty Irish and so on) have gone the way of bakelite telephones. Now in our moronic lumpy system of taxonomy all of these groups are imagined to live in harmony as “whites”.
One final fun fact about names: Jackie Kennedy’s father was a famously rich Wall-Streeter named “Black” Jack Bouvier and once he had made his fortune he hired a genealogist (as one does) who duly uncovered some distant aristocratic ancestor. That’s right, despite being named “Cowherd” the Bouviers were in fact secret royalty!
As an American painter (Vietnamese descent, grandfather was an imperial PMC or as they called them in the 19th century “mandarins”) who dropped out of American school to go to Frankfurt and started working and showing there from 2012-15 you have described something powerfully that I felt in those odd interregnum years
What would be the American equivalent of a family with two siblings named “Kevin” and “Chantal”? The Irish-French juxtaposition of the two, it has to be said, sounds ridiculous in American English, to my ear ... Like Beldar and Prymaat Conehead naming their daughter “Connie” (or John Cleese’s Merlin-like Wizard named “Tim”). I assume it must sound less ridiculous in German?
Despite living in Germany collectively for 3+ year and speaking fluently, I hadn't fully connected the PMC of America and Germany. I could feel it for sure though. The longing to be as "creative" as the American tech bros "Why can't we do things like Facebook?" - I heard that a lot. I was much more impressed with their high tech Engineering incl. trains, solar, wind, chemistry which they are rapidly losing ground in. (Math hard?)
I can say I have experienced the scorn they have for working people. In the 80s, my Lufthansa-employed home-stay family referred to the working locals all as Bauern (peasants/farmers) and made fun of the southern automechanic's Bayerisch accent.
And the sophisticated West Germans really do call the East Germans deplorable and backwards. They think they are all ignorant and it's a mark against you if you come from there. Well, guess what? That's the home of the AfD.
You’ll enjoy this story. Every Xmas holiday I travel from SF to visit family in London, and so a few weeks ago I was in “The Antelope” in Chelsea and there is a guy in there I immediately clock as a Bay Area Tech Bro … he’s wearing a fleece pullover and holding forth in classic Private Equity Tech Bro fashion at a great and interrupted length. It’s a scene straight out of “Silicon Valley”. He’s got three guys from the London office held hostage, but they’re all well-brought-up Sloaney boys and they’re all too polite to tell him to shut up. But the looks on their faces perfectly communicated the sentiment of “Dude it’s AFTER WORK, now is the time we discuss football, or skiing in Verbier, or literally ANYTHING else and your behavior is gauche beyond words”. Which our autistic Tech Bro interpreted as “you are FASCINATING … do please go on”.
People are so worried about the Bay Area’s technology taking over the world they haven’t noticed the menace posed by Patagonia fleece pullovers and boring conversation.
"the menace posed by Patagonia fleece pullovers" I'm stealing that.
You’ve made a convincing argument for the popularity of “Kevin” as a given name in Germany coming from Kevin Bacon's performance in “Footloose”—but what about “Chantal”? I’m assuming it’s not because of a mid-eighties craze for Chantal Mouffe (or a resurgence in interest in Ste. Jeanne de Chantal). Was there a TV character or pop singer by this name?
Coco Chantal, I don't know. It's just French. Remember when France was glamorous?
Ouais, bien sur! My mother told me that my older sisters were thrilled, as members of that rare tribe (Franco-Hiberno-Americans) when Jackie Kennedy became first lady and started a wave of Franco-mania. All of a sudden the inability to pronounce our last name became a problem for the other person, who was now an obvious philistine.
My mother also liked to point out that until November 1963 the Irish were not really white nor were they really Americans. She knew this because while she was Irish and Catholic as can be she nevertheless had an (Irish) last name that seemed to be Norwegian and so she grew up “passing” as a mainline Protestant listening to what they had to say about "those" people.
But all of these fine sociological distinctions (between low and high Protestants, between German and Russian Jews, between Lace Curtain and Shanty Irish and so on) have gone the way of bakelite telephones. Now in our moronic lumpy system of taxonomy all of these groups are imagined to live in harmony as “whites”.
One final fun fact about names: Jackie Kennedy’s father was a famously rich Wall-Streeter named “Black” Jack Bouvier and once he had made his fortune he hired a genealogist (as one does) who duly uncovered some distant aristocratic ancestor. That’s right, despite being named “Cowherd” the Bouviers were in fact secret royalty!
The EU leader Von der Leyen comes to mind.
As an American painter (Vietnamese descent, grandfather was an imperial PMC or as they called them in the 19th century “mandarins”) who dropped out of American school to go to Frankfurt and started working and showing there from 2012-15 you have described something powerfully that I felt in those odd interregnum years
What would be the American equivalent of a family with two siblings named “Kevin” and “Chantal”? The Irish-French juxtaposition of the two, it has to be said, sounds ridiculous in American English, to my ear ... Like Beldar and Prymaat Conehead naming their daughter “Connie” (or John Cleese’s Merlin-like Wizard named “Tim”). I assume it must sound less ridiculous in German?