They Teach "the American Dream" in German High Schools!

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I sat next to a pretty young woman on a bench in Madison Square Park in New York City the other day and saw she was reading a guidebook of the city. To practice being on the road and striking up conversations with strangers, I asked her if she was a visitor to the city.


Her lovely brown eyes lit up, and she smiled. It turns out that she was born in Germany of Turkish immigrant parents and that her dark brown hair and eyes still cause the fair-haired, blue-eyed German majority to look at her a bit longer, walking down the street. She loves the diversity of this city.


I learned that “the American dream” is taught in German high schools! As I questioned her about it, it seemed that the course covers something more like “the American experience.” The course teaches the European immigrants’ dream of owning land and the subsequent conquering of the frontier. It teaches the reverse of that coin, the herding of the original inhabitants into reservations. The African-American experience is taught, from slavery to emancipation to institutionalized discrimination to Langston Hughes and his dream drying up “like a raisin in the sun” in Renaissance Harlem.


Germans do not have an equivalent “German dream,” though people do want to make enough money to live. Is it possible that Hitler’s disastrous dream of “Lebensraum,” the conquering of adjacent countries to give Germans “living space,” makes Germans today cautious of entertaining dreams that they are afraid might be too ambitious?


This young woman, Feruzan, married to a professor of economics who hopes to teach at Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey, said Germans have more of a community mindset and are less individualistic than Americans about making huge financial gains. The ideal, she said, would be for individuals to make their economic dreams come true and then share it with individuals who were not as lucky in achieving their American dream.


She asked if something that’s not economic might replace the old American dream. A value besides making lots of money.