Lazy Germans need always holidays :)))

[Seismic Anamoly]

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.....they don't believe deep inside that they have an inalienable right to an idle August....

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As far as I'm concerned, that's right....my inalienable right is to JUNE AND JULY, by God!!



And as soon as I get 25 years of teaching in, I'm RETIRED, baby!! It's gonna be Beach Bum City for me.

[MIKE BURN]

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Modern German duty: the obligation to play



By Richard Bernstein

Wednesday, July 2, 2003 Posted: 7:01 AM EDT (1101 GMT)



(CNN)



BERLIN, Germany -- This capital city, as leafy and uncongested a great world capital as you're likely to find, is like a vast continuous sidewalk cafe these days of summer, when darkness doesn't descend until 10 p.m. or so, and from staid Charlottenburg in the old West to trendy Prenzlauerberg in the East everybody seems to be breakfasting, lunching and dining outdoors.



It's very nice, a great summer pleasure in Berlin, and not only ordinary people enjoy it. The story of this week in Germany was the announcement of the Socialist government of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder that it was moving up by a year a planned tax break aimed at stimulating the country's sluggish economy.



But it was not just the news about the tax cut that was striking. Just as notable was the scene carefully stage-managed for news photographers and reproduced on front-page headlines from Schleswig-Holstein to Bavaria. It showed the men and women who run this country discussing tax reform while sitting under Renoiresque dappled sunlight at a table set, it seemed, more for an alfresco Italian wedding than a serious conversation about the future of Europe's most powerful economy.



The not-so-subliminal message, of course, was the one that cigarette makers learned long ago: it is, in the version that appeared in Germany this week, that your government and the good life are one and the same. But somewhat strangely, that image of the country's leaders mixing business with pleasure comes at a moment when an unaccustomed question is being asked here. Put politely, it is whether the Germans have become too addicted to leisure time for their own good. More rudely expressed, as it has been by some commentators, the question is this: are the Germans lazy?



No less a person that the minister for labor and economics, Wolfgang Clement, seemed to be suggesting a couple of weeks ago that they were; he told journalists from Stern, the picture weekly, that the Germans, who get 6 weeks off each year, plus another 9 to 12 single-day holidays, ought to work more and vacation less.



His remarks prompted gleeful headlines in the German papers like: "Amusement Park Germany" and "Germany in the Hammock," and there was a spate of stories about a survey done by the Institute for German Economics in Cologne showing, surprisingly, that Germans actually work fewer hours per year than anybody else in the advanced industrial world — 1,557 hours a year in the former West Germany, compared with 1,605 for France, 1,693 for Britain and more than 1,900 for the United States, which was at the top of the list.



The Germans are not lazy, of course. Still, the leisure time question does highlight something that is true of Germans and, in fact, of virtually all Europeans. It's not just that they like to have a good time; everybody does, after all. It is more that they experience the idea of vacation with a political and psychological intensity that, at least according to some students of their character, makes not only for a cultural trait but for a difference in attitude with America as big in its way as the recent political disagreement about the war in Iraq.



Every summer, Germans hit the road, exercising what they see as an inalienable right to their six weeks of vacation. "Thorstein Veblen would have had a great time describing the German people conspicuously vacationing," Michael Werz, a philosopher from Hanover University said, referring to the great Amercan economist who saw the link between discretionary spending and social prestige.



Why conspicuously? In many European places, there is an element of class vengeance in vacation, a sense of a victory won over the economic enemy that has, as a matter almost of principle, to be enjoyed. In France, for example, mandatory vacations were among the great victories of the working class in its bitter struggle with capital, finally won when Léon Blum's Popular Front government came to power, briefly, in 1936. The magazines of that era show extraordinary photographs of hundreds of thousands of workers clogging the roads for what might have been the first of that country's monumental vacation-time traffic jams, as they headed off to enjoy the fruits of their political victory.



Vacations in Germany also start with traffic jams that go on for hours but, as Mr. Werz explained, there is a difference from France. In this country, there was no battle for leisure time. Vacation was handed down from above, initially by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck himself in the 19th century. Later it was the Nazis who made vacations for the working class a part of the national program.



The point is that vacation became an integral part of life, ordained by higher authority who wanted everybody to believe that everything was all right, life was good. After World War II, when Germany enjoyed its economic miracle and became a very rich country, vacation took on an element of mass denial of the recent past; it enabled everybody, as Mr. Werz puts it, "to pretend that everything was nice and smooth and great again."



Here, perhaps, is the difference with Americans, who also like their vacations. Many Americans, who have no recent history of labor struggles or national traumas, simply see work as a good in itself; they don't believe deep inside that they have an inalienable right to an idle August and take pride in postponing retirement, or taking on a second career. But for many Europeans, leisure time is not just a break from work; it is the goal of it.

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MIKE

[bbchris]

So does this mean when I come in August there will be no one in Germany?

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