Kapitel 2 Kultur-Texte Sarah

In reading the articles for this blog post, I found it really interesting that Germans admit to their complaining tendencies!  It said in the article, "Interestingly, though, if you bring this to a German's attention, they'll immediately agree that they complain too much. And then will defend their point of view. They'll start telling you why they see everything so negatively. There's no convincing them otherwise."


I decided to look a little more in-depth into the complaint problem, and found many articles on the web which supported the point. One article gave bullet-point reasons why Germans are so opinionated!
1. Germans pride themselves as truth seekers.
2. Continuous improvement is a core to their business and personal lives.  Never satisfied, Germans are verbal what needs to be better.
3. (The one I found most interesting) A Berkeley anthropologist, George Foster, theorized German complaining as the image of limited good.  Unlike Americans, the Deutsche see limits to tangibles, like minerals, and intangibles, like happiness.   Limited good is part of the ongoing Deutsche dialog.
4. The German culture demands modesty and understatement about accomplishments and successes.
5. Germans tend to be self-conscious about their health, and worried about potential illnesses.  


While Americans are known to put everything on a pedestal, and typically try to see things in a positive light, the Germans (ironically) use their negativity to improve their quality of life, or see the limits to their problems. I wonder if children in schools are taught to be more realistic in their goals and ambitions than children in the U.S. In the past, I have worked at retail/customer service jobs with employees from various countries. My coworkers from Germany, Swizerland, Hungary, and Serbia were undoubtedly the most brutally honest, and had the most negative attitudes. However, when someone would ask them to lighten up, they would look at us like we were crazy- they were just being realistic! I also thought it was interesting that the author (German) says that now that he lives in the United States, he would hate being back in the midst of all of the negativity.


Incidentally, I complained all year about the Red Sox progressively becoming the worst team in the MLB, and they sure did come through with a horrible season.

AMD 2

Hallo classmates!

For the AMD 2, I decided to blog about an opera that I am learning. Richard Strauss was an opera composer born in Munich, Germany (1864-1949). He is considered one of the greatest composers of the Romantic Era in music, and was a prolific opera composer (although he was notoriously self-deprecating, and supposedly described himself as such: "I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer.") One of his most incredible operas is called Ariadne auf Naxos. I borrowed a DVD video of this opera from the Music Library on campus (an awesome source for hundreds of CDs and DVDs!) and watched it this weekend.

This opera tells the story of an evening at the home of the richest man in Vienna; he has planned for an opera to be performed in the same evening as a performance from a burlesque troupe. Conflict arises when the performances need to be combined; the burlesque troop, for lack of a better phrase, rolls with the punches, but the pretentious Komponist (composer) of the opera is shocked, and doesn't want his "heilige Kunst" (holy art) to be corrupted by their "low art" performance. The opera is fun because it still has luscious, beautiful music, but also uses fun, bawdy characters and comedy to lighten the mood. I already knew one piece from the opera, an aria called "Sein wir wieder gut". I am going to learn the entire role of the Komponist to put on my resume.

German is my favorite language to sing in because of the incredible consonants. It is such a fricative language, and the text is naturally expressive, so a singer only needs to focus on exact pronunciation to be expressive and communicative. The Komponist aria has amazing text such as "anderen Augen," "tiefen des daseins," "messlich," "jedoch," etc. The words are so fun to say, and it is easy to have fun singing!

Here is a video of me singing the aria from the opera:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2HMwvAiQE0