Acceptable foreigners

It happened again, when we were out walking the other day. We ran into a neighbor we hadn't yet met, and got talking. When she heard my accent in German, she asked me if I was English, and when she heard I was Canadian, she entered into a typical enthusiastic discussion about the usual things: Vancouver is very nice, the Rocky Mountains are beautiful, I liked Montreal, etc. (frankly I can't remember which). She then turned to G. and asked where she was from. The answer came: "Original from Novi Sad in Yugoslavia", and you could see our neighbors face drop in disappointment, and all she could utter was a mild "oh".

Once again, I must emphasise that this wan't a one-off (see Not Speaking Your Mother Tongue), but was the latest of many examples where it becomes apparent that certain kind of foreigners are preferred over others here (as elsewhere). The fact that G speaks perfect, though mildly accented German, has lead to some comic situations. For instance, people often guess wrongly, and then ask expectantly and enthusiastically if she is, perhaps, Swedish, only to be again visibly disappointed when she turns out to be something else.

As to the preferences here, broadly speaking: Italian, French, Scandinavian, Swiss, British, Irish, American, Canadian are in the good camp; Russian, Polish, Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, Turkish are not. The first group can come to Germany, work at whatever they were originally trained to do, speak appalling German, while having an accent typically considered to be charming, and live in your neighborhood. The second group are generally to be avoided unless they clean your house, or do any number of less desirable jobs, and if they should move into your street, the typical grumblings about There goes the neighborhood are uttered, and gradually, as numbers increase, that part of town starts to be considered dangerous.

I don't particularly want to have a go at Germany. The other countries where I've lived have been exactly like this. Certainly all over North America there are race issues, and this aside, most people would be much more interested to have somebody from New York, London, Paris or Rome as a neighbor than one (say) from Novosibirsk, Guayaquil or Podgorica, this mostly being a question of who would be the more glamorous. The English, as a very general rule, often dislike, or at least avoid, foreigners, but probably have particular unfavorites, including (alas) Germans. I think the tendency to (metaphorically) round up a group of foreigners and consider them inferior, or at least project some stereotypes on them is sadly one of those things that all humans do. And inevitably this comes with some kind of ranking scheme as to who is better than whom.

There isn't a happy ending to this, at least not yet. But I was uplifted somewhat when we visited G's brother's student digs in Mannheim for his birthday party. Apart from the usual quaint student goings on - I honestly, truly, not-making-it-up, kid you not, there was a guy with a goatee in a Che Guevara T-shirt playing a didgeridoo - I was encouraged to see several couplings across the desired/undesired groups - German/Polish, German/Uzbek, etc. I often forget that Heidelberg, where we live, is the archetype of old Germany as clearly opposed to Mannheim, which is very much the new. And moreover, the new generation of people is much more open to multiculturalism than the old. Give it ten or twenty years, and perhaps all of this will become moot, here and elsewhere.