Culture Clash

The Republic of Texas, which is almost twice the size of Germany, has long been an American hot spot for Germans. They began emigrating there in the 1830s, and they’ve never stopped. In fact, according to the 2000 census, 11 percent of the state’s population claims German ancestry (second to only Mexican), and they have umpteen towns that owe a debt of thanks to German settlers. There’s Fredricksburg where, according to Wikipedia, over a thousand people still sprechen Deutsch zu Hause, although most of them probably speak a Texas-German dialect (seriously). There’s Muenster up on the Oklahoma boarder. There’s Schulenburg, Frelsburg, Weimar, Westphalia, Deutschburg, and New Braunfels. Then there’s my favorite of all, Luckenbach, home to Outlaw Country music. Over the years, I’ve loved hearing my dad spin a sad, but blue-ribbon yarn about how he watched a cowboy-poet friend kill himself on booze in that tiny town (population 3).

And, by my eagle-eye for these types of things, I don’t believe the German love for Texas has slowed much over the past 170 years. One of my guideposts for this observation is the nice, chubby, tall-haired lady at the Neukölln branch of my bank. When she explains banking matters to me in English, it’s with a slightly affected Texas twang that she picked up after visiting her brother who lives somewhere in Texas. And, as if that isn’t enough journalistic proof for you, I read an article yesterday about two German teachers who teach in a dual-language program at a grammar school in the dusty city of Odessa. With all due respect to that city’s inhabitants, if there was such a place as Nowhere, Odessa would be a suburb. Still, if that town’s local paper is to be believed, the German teachers simply love it there.

For the most part, the love goes both ways. This is evidenced by organizations like the German-Texan Heritage Society, which proudly welcomes visitors to it’s website with a “Guten Tag, y’all!” The Austin-based GTHS is celebrating its 30th birthday this year, and claims more than 1400 members. In addition, if you visit the aforementioned Fredricksburg or New Braunfels, your chances of seeing someone in a Dirndl or Lederhosen are much higher than they are here in the Berlin/Brandenburg area. What’s even better is that a few of those traditionally-garbed Texans will also be chewing tobacco, something I wager you’ll never see in a lifetime spent in Germany. Oh, and let’s not forget New Braunfels’ Wurstfest, the city’s annual “10 Day Salute to Sausage.” Yep, there are plenty of chances to get your German on in Texas.

I could go on and on with examples of this enduring love affair, but I think it’s pretty clear that the two places are hot for each other. Instead, what I really want to point out is that, despite it all, there are some German traditions to which certain Texans absolutely won’t kowtow.

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Naturally, this clash of cultures went down not too far from Dallas.

As a young boy, my father would sometimes take the family with him on business trips to the Big D. At the end of the day, if he’d sold enough panties and bras to department stores, he’d take us out to dinner in the big city. Coming from small-town Oklahoma, I thought Dallas was the apex of cosmopolitan living. In retrospect, boy, was I wrong. I think my good buddy Chuck Thompson sums it up best in his recent book Smile When You’re Lying. “Dallas,” he writes, “embodies the worst of L.A. (vanity-plate car culture, general lack of personal integrity, smog, fake tits) without any of the redeeming parts (the beach, nice weather, nine NBA titles, classic Randy Newman theme song)…[It's] largely a city of carpetbaggers and ambitious hacks who have nothing in common with the state’s cow punchers, country outlaws, and salt-of-the-earth types who enunciate all three syllables and pronounce the h in words like ‘vehicle.’”

I’m kind of glad that I didn’t see the city from Chuck’s point of view when I was a kid, but as soon as I could grow a mustache, I knew the real dope about Dallas. I count myself lucky that I didn’t have the misfortune of spending my teenage years in that part of America, but even more, I thank my parents for never moving to the area as they had often discussed. See, the Dallas suburbs are way worse than Dallas itself, and the king stinker is the metropolitan Plano area—especially if you’re between the ages of 13 and 25.

In the early 1980s, Plano, an affluent city of 250,000, earned the reputation of being a suicide town after seven teenagers killed themselves, and a dozen others attempted suicide within a 12-month period. Then, in the mid-to-late 1990s, Plano became Heroin City. Mike Gray wrote a terrific piece in Rolling Stone about the phenomenon entitled Texas Heroin Massacre in which he documents the suburb’s rich-kid predilection for junk, horse, chiva, smack, gravy, etc. At least 18 teenagers died over a three year period, and a lot of them didn’t even realize it was heroin they were snorting. Then, for the first part of this decade, according to the Dallas Morning News, Plano became home to one of the biggest steroid rings in the United States. Before the Feds busted him, local meathead David Jacob’s sold upwards of $30,000 worth of muscle juice each month, and some of it surely went to students like Taylor Hooten, a Plano West High baseball pitcher who killed himself after suffering a terrible depression that resulted from using anabolic steroids.

Now, Allen, TX is just north of Plano. The two towns are close enough that Allen’s city limits extend into the Plano school district. Until yesterday, I had never heard of Allen, but it was only a matter of time before scandal sneaked over the Plano border, and dragged the suburb of a suburb into the headlines.

It seems, you see, that for three years certain students at Allen High School have been infected by insidious German propaganda.

“It’s shocking,” one of the student’s mothers heatedly told Dallas-Ft. Worth’s WFAA-TV. “And you think they’re really careful about what they put in that textbook…You just don’t suspect that’s going to be in there.”

As they earnestly studied their “Deutsch Aktuell” textbooks, probably trying their damndest to remember to use the Akkusativ correctly, some students looked a little too closely at one of the photographs in the book. I wasn’t there, of course, but there must have been snickers, gasps, and moans galore when it was discovered. What was it?

“It was obvious,” the mother told WFAA, “naked women, breasts, right out there in your face.” It seems that one photo in particular depicts a newsstand, and “adult magazines can be seen clear enough to make out their titles.”

As you already know, rampant Freikörperkultur, laser hair removal ads, and public breast feeding have made uncovered breasts in Germany about as ordinary as a portion of Pommes. In North Texas, however, naked alabaster fountains of life, especially when found in an advanced German-language textbook, are envisaged as a gateways that feed potentially offensive fantasies. It could even be argued that this particular textbook, along with its exposed breasts, could lead High School students to experiment sexually.

Shockingly, at least 3,000 copies of the offending book have been floating around Texas High Schools, closely studied in the bedrooms and bathrooms of confused and impressionable students. And this dates back to 2005! School districts across the state are taking panicked steps toward remedying the catastrophe, but I just hope it isn’t too late. I’m predicting that some of the books might even be burned, kind of like in Bebelplatz. Until then, it has been reported that officials in the Plano Independent School District are tearing the offending page from every copy of the book in their district. I just hope they can do it before more impressionable High School juniors and seniors are corrupted.

To be fair, the state of Texas spent good time and money to have the book fact-checked and vetted to avoid such titillating accidents from happening. But we’re all human, and mistakes like these can happen—sometimes you just don’t see the naked breasts as they’re being flaunted right there in front of your face. Still, I just can’t help but to wonder if the fact-checking on this particular textbook was done by someone in a part of Texas that runs on a different value system. Someone, perhaps, in a place like Fredricksburg or New Braunfels.