It takes work.  You have to be patient, and you have to have a lot of resolve.  Nerves of steel actually.  When he says he’s going to have some free time in two weeks to chat with you, what you need to understand is that’s a sign of affection. 

There’s a humorous list going around the web here and there titled, You Know You’re German If…   What’s interesting about this list is that it’s been written, passed around and added to, by Germans.  There are various versions of it floating around, and I would highly recommend anyone aspiring to be friends with a German to study them carefully.  Let it be said they know how to laugh at themselves.  Here’s a few items that absolutely apply to a certain someone I know…

-You feel like a fish out of water in unstructured organizations and foreign countries.

-Being spontaneous is at 3 weeks notice.

-The concept of small talk still puzzles you.

So…two years ago, after almost thirty-five years of searching for him, I finally found my old high school crush again.  This is the guy who is the object of my affections in my comic series A Coming Out Story.  And because I’m still in the middle of telling that story, there are a few major plot points I don’t want to give away (although I guess I just now did give one away…the fact that we haven’t seen each other since my high school days…).  So I have to be vague about some of this.  And also, I don’t want to embarrass him by naming him here.  But just so you know, we’ve been chatting ever since, on the phone, and via email and post cards. 

Post cards, largely because it took me over a year to get him to give me an email address.  And that was because, as he said, he is "more into nature then technology".  Or…according to the list…

-You separate your trash into more than five different bins.

-You have gotten splinters from environmentally friendly toilet paper.

-You’re the only one recycling not just bottles and cans but also light bulbs, water filters, batteries, printer cartridges 

-You complain about people that just sit in their car with the engine running

But most American kids of my baby boomer generation actually don’t use personal computers all that much as adults now either.  A Pew Foundation study some time ago put the figure at somewhat less then fifty percent of my generation who use computers on a regular basis.  His job doesn’t require him to sit down to one everyday, and apparently he hasn’t much use for them in his home life either.  I get the sense he doesn’t much touch one other then for the occasional emails he sends my way.

Thing was…back in high school, when I learned that both his parents were German, I wasn’t sure if that was how he identified himself.  He was born in Brazil actually, and came here to the U.S. when he was still very young.  He spent both his middle school and high school years here, attending the same high school I did.  Back then, he seemed to identify more as Brazilian then German.  For the longest time I thought he was your usual light skinned Brazilian, with a family tree that maybe went back to Portugal or maybe Spain.  In high school he spoke English very well, with only the very slightest hint of an accent that I could never quite place.  I figured his native language was probably Portuguese.  He was also in the Spanish Honor Society back then.  When I found out from one of the other kids about his German heritage I was surprised.  He never told me.  But there may have been a reason for that. 

When I finally located him again, I still wasn’t sure how he identified.  He’s spent most of his life now here in the U.S.  But he still goes by this Brazilian nickname he always did back in high school.  So as he and I began to chat once more after all these years, I kept wondering.  I wasn’t sure how to go about asking him.  The thing about cross-cultural relationships is they’re so damn full of landmines.  The last thing I wanted to do was offend him in some way, or perhaps bring up old memories he didn’t want to revisit.  I knew next to nothing about his family life, because he always politely deflected my attempts to ask him about any of it back when we were kids…which I respected back then despite my intense curiosity, because I was completely twitterpated and if he didn’t want to talk about it I wasn’t going there.

Back when I was a kid, I had this very fragmented view of Germans and Germany.  There was all the World War II history I grew up learning.  The rise of Hitler and fascism in Europe.  When I first saw newsreel footage of a Nazi book burning, it completely shocked me.  I was such a little bookworm back then.  The sight of piles of books burning struck me as an attack on the human identity.  Then came the newsreel footage of the death camps. 

On TV and in the movies, Germans were either cold, calculating, weaselly Nazis who loved to torture people or big fat buffoons with a stereotypical Hollywood German accent.  It was either…

…or…

So that was what my history classes and Hollywood were teaching me about Germans.  But in my day to day world there was all the good stuff that came from Germany.  When I was a teenager one of my uncles came down for a visit driving his new Mercedes-Benz 220D.  I’ve written about that before, and how that car completely blew away everything I thought I understood about what a good car was.  Mercedes-Benz instantly became my new dream car then.  And when I got the camera bug, I quickly learned that some of the best photography equipment came from Germany.  Carl Zeiss lenses…Leica cameras…  When I was 17 I splurged a month’s pay from the burger joint I was working at to buy a lovely Rodenstock lens for my enlarger.  I was both overjoyed and appalled at the results.  Overjoyed because my prints took on an absolutely razor edged sharpness under that lens.  It was magnificent.  Appalled because that damn lens revealed every tiny flaw in my negatives.  That lens told me I wasn’t nearly as good as I thought I was.  But that was okay…it meant I could grow.  And I did.

Back before high school, mom bought an absolutely lovely German made cabinet hi-fi.  It was built from solid mahogany and not only did it sound as good as it looked, it had a radio with FM stations and Shortwave too!  I became utterly fascinated back then with that short wave radio and would listen to it for hours, tuning in BBC, Radio Netherlands, Radio Johannesburg and so on…  This was before there was an Internet…before cell phones…before 24 hour cable news…back in the days when my world effectively ended at the horizon.  With that shortwave radio I could hear the world speaking beyond the horizon.  I never found any English language German broadcasts, but because of that short wave radio I grew up with the knowledge that there was a world out there beyond our boarders, and that it was fun to listen to.

So on the one hand, there was Hollywood’s German, and the German of my history class lessons…and on the other there was the Germany that made the best cars and radios and hi-fi and camera equipment.  I’d heard they drink their beer warm, but I never liked beer to begin with.  I heard they were obsessive about organization and record keeping.  I heard there was this really neat highway over in Germany where there were no speed limits.  But I never really thought about or questioned any of what I knew, or thought I knew, about Germans.  It was all just floating there in the background.  And then there was the guy I massively crushed on back in high school.  He was so damn beautiful.  But also hard working, decent, good-hearted.  But he always accentuated his Brazilian birthplace.  So maybe he really wasn’t all that much German.  For years I wondered about it, never really thinking about what I actually did and did not know about Germans.

So I found him again, and annoyingly, the completely twitterpated high school boy came rushing back out of me, like I was still 17, and I found I Still couldn’t ask him so many things I’d wished I had over the years.  But we talked and talked over the months, and as we did I began to get the sense that his German heritage had come more to the foreground over the intervening years.  Then last Christmas he sent me a card with a lovely handwritten Christmas greeting…first in German and then in English. 

You have to picture this: There I am, sitting down reading this lovely little Christmas card he sent me, and suddenly every stupid, ignorant German stereotype I ever grew up with came rushing back to me and laughed in my face.  All the stupid Nazi jokes…all the cardboard Hollywood Germans I ever saw on TV…  I felt so embarrassed. 

And I had an idea then why he presented more as Brazilian then German back in school.  He probably got teased a lot for being German back then.  The more I pictured it, the more I heard myself as a kid laughing and re-telling all the German jokes I learned from the other kids and I just felt so ashamed.

Is this how straight folks feel when someone close to them comes out as gay?  Now I can’t even watch my all time favorite movie, Casablanca, without cringing the moment Major Strasser comes on screen. 

So I’ve been making an effort to learn more about the German folk and their culture.  But mostly their ways.  I pay attention to what English language German newspapers and magazines there are online.  Spiegel ran a series a couple years back, The Germans Explained, for Americans and other foreigners visiting Germany for the 2006 winter Olympics.  It’s an interesting read.  This from the article titled, Brutally Honest, Have You Gained Weight?

Personal invitations of all kinds are to be taken at face value. "We’re having a party, please do come," means "We’re having a party, please do come," and not "We feel rude not inviting you in front of these other people, but surely you’ll have the grace not to show up." Similarly, "Come over to my house and we’ll have tea," means that you should start planning a date and time for that pleasant event. It is not to be confused with the Anglo-American "We should get together sometime," which means "I hope I never see you again."

Yes means yes and no means no. If you ask whether you can share someone’s table (or borrow a pen, or get a ride) and that person says yes, that’s the end of it. Even if the person does not smile or tell you to go right ahead, you do not have to ask again. Germans will be perplexed when you insist: "Are you sure? I won’t be bothering you, will I? I’ll just take this little corner and be done in a minute." For heavens sakes, they said yes already, and it’s not like you’re asking them to donate a kidney. Just sit down. 

And this from German Men: Hunky, Handsome, Wimpy and Weak…

“I never, ever got involved in sport,” said Winston Churchill wisely. Not so, Sporty German Male. Oh no, he loves it. Running around Hamburg’s Alster when you fancy going shoe shopping, or forcing you to go Nordic Walking on a Sunday morning when you’d still rather be under your duvet stuffing yourself with scrambled eggs, Sporty German Male laughs in the face of blubber, Wiener Schnitzel and chips.

My one brief encounter with Sporty German Male included a doomed mini-break to Mallorca. Stretched out by the swimming pool in my bikini, I asked: “Do I look fat in this?” Sporty German Male looked confused. “Of course not, Liebling,” he said. “If you were fat, my sweetness, you would not be here!"

I browse the online forums here and there where they gather, and at least a little English is spoken.  And I’m finding that I’m actually coming to like them.  I’m making a few tentative steps at learning German…mostly so I can read it.  I doubt I’ll ever be in a place where I hear it spoken a lot, and without that there’s just about no possibility of me really learning the language very well.  If I can just learn it a bit I’ll be satisfied.  Then I can hear them speaking in their own voices.

-You call an afternoon stroll "Nordic Walking".

-You always fold your Tetra Pak before you throw it in the appropriate bin.

-You eat a cold dinner at 6pm.

-You can tell at least one Manta joke.

-Your childhood diet consisted of Alete and Zwieback. Your college diet consisted of Miracoli and Döner.

-You have your ‘feierabend’ at 1730hrs – the world can burn down.

-You expect chocolate in your shoes on December 6th.

In the meantime I am trying hard to be the friend to him I was too shy to be back when we were both kids (there goes another plot point…).  If he was another American kid, and he told me that in two weeks he’d have time for a chat, I’d think what he was really telling me was to bug off.  But he’s German, he has always called when he said he would, and what you have to see in that isn’t that he’s pushing me off for two weeks but that he’s making time for me.  Over and over again in the past two years I’ve run smack into his "time management", and no kidding, that’s exactly how he refers to it.  I’ve found in conversation with him that he’s got his life organized in a way I would find absolutely suffocating.  But that seems to be a German thing, it’s where his comfort zone is, and if I want to be his friend I have to adjust to it.  It’s work.  I have to be patient.  But I have a lot of resolve.  And the signs look good.  Very good actually.  Here I am after three and a half decades crashing back into his well organized world and he makes time for me. 

[Edited a bit since this morning…]