Germans don't like Germans - a startling statement by a friend

Germans don't like Germans, I tell you.

Chatting on the telephone with a friend not long ago, that friend suddenly dropped the assertion Germans don't like Germans. Then she reinforced it with an emphatic I tell you.

Did she sense the blogster was startled and confused, was she unsure she had been heard? Whatever her motivation, she then went You don't believe me, do you?

I don't know, an unusually discombobulated blogster responded, wondering how we just got from talking about the weather in California to such a heavy emotional topic.

She took that to be an invitation to explain.

When I'm over there, I always notice. They speak badly of other Germans, but they like foreigners, well, at least me as an American who no longer is German to them. They have no problem spending billions and billions on refugees, now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they should not be helped. But the Germans don't want to spend money helping other Germans because they don't think they deserve it. The government, too, she added. And it was already like this when my mother fled East Germany with my sister and me and they put us in the refugee camp.

The blogster resonded, it* would think about this. To which she in turn responded with something like it is not earth shattering, I'm just pointing out how I see it.

The conversation then went back to weather and travel plans. Afterwards, the blogster tried to parse and explore the sudden Germans don't like Germans. She had obviously been aware that the German political right, or populists, or whatever you call them used the expenditures on refugees in their criticism of the country.

The blogster recalled that she had described starting a new life as a child in West Germany in the 1960s before, and that she had mentioned outright hostility by locals. Some of whom telling her that there no longer was any reason to flee East Germany and be a burden on the state in the West.

This sort of experience may well predispose later views.

With the money spent on refugees, she certainly had a point. The most recent figures say that the federal government spent just under 22 billion Euros on refugees in 2016. This is about one third less than for all of the over 4 million recipients of the basic means tested Hartz IV combined. The latter have seen benefits increases under the inflation rate, and they have seen even more intrusive means testing - which experts liken to stripping naked.

Contrasting the total amounts and largely uncontrolled costs for refugees with the often absurd penny pinching social services bureaucracy does seem to bolster our friend's statement.

What is less clear is how disdain for your fellow countrymen in other countries compares to Germany. Is it even the same kind of antagonism, meaning is it because one is poor, is it because one comes from a certain stereotyped region of the country, because of religion, or a combination of these and maybe other factors. Does her Germans don't like Germans compare at all to, for example, Scots versus English in the UK, Flemish versus Walloon in Belgium?

Let's face it, we have the same kind of disdain for the poor, the unemployed, the less fortunate in the United States. Plus, the American poor still have problems even getting basic healthcare.

Maybe some smart social studies folks and psychologists might want to investigate the issue.

* Gender neutrality is a thing at the K-Landnews.