2010-10-10: Getting along in German

(Pardon my instinctive response to this post’s title; it is heartfelt: Ah hahahahahaha, ha! ha! ho! ho! Heeeeeeee!)

I just now finished a kind of second breakfast with Gisela and Gerald. As I have written elsewhere, my German is pathetic. Gisela’s English is slightly better than my German, Gerald’s English is much better than my German, but not fluent by a long stretch. So having a conversation is challenging, but do-able. They always seem fascinated by the bizarrities and (quite honestly) outright horrors of some of America’s ways, especially in terms of health care and workers’ rights and all. The fact that a long-time American employee can show up at work and find him/herself fired, entitled only to two weeks’ pay, and often escorted to their desk, supervised as they pack up their belongings, and escorted out — without even so much as the chance to say a proper goodbye to one’s coworkers — astounds them. 

They worry that the German safety net, as with the French, is being slowly reshaped to resemble that of the barbaric American system. In Germany as in France, people on unemployment are having to show much more proof that they are actively searching for work, or they will be cut off from support. I don’t know if it’s the same in Germany as in France, but I’ve heard a number of stories about people being penalized for not accepting employment offers, even when the logistics of doing so are completely unworkable. 

I think of the job that I interviewed for with an English-language learning center, supposedly in Manosque, a 45-50-minute one-way  drive from Quinson. Well, for the princely daily rate of 20 euros, it turned out that the job was really in Sisteron, nearly an hour and a quarter away. I was very, very glad not to have been hired, and had they offered me the job, I may well have had to accept it or stop getting unemployment benefits. Such benefits didn’t amount to very much, but better than nothing. Ironically, of course, the gas and time and social charges and so on would have reduced my net earnings to less than the unemployment benefits, especially since I would have only had work a couple of days a week. Yipes.

And yet America is so much more damned bass-ackwards about this sort of thing. When I finally got a job (= when I started my own business, given that at my age, the odds of being hired on a regular contract were practically nil, as the employment office people readily acknowledged), I got a surprisingly large lump sum deposited into our bank account (about 4-5 times the amount of my monthly unemployment sum). My initial reaction was WTF, someone’s made a mistake, I’m going to have to pay this back — but no. Apparently France recognizes that people who have been out of work for a while might need some extra help to re-enter the workforce, such as perhaps needing to pay a deposit on an apartment if they relocated to take a job, or if they have to pay for childcare, or even for work-appropriate clothing.

I was, to use a Britishism, “gobsmacked.” But it is such a sane, humane, sensible, and economically wise thing to do — one would think America would want to follow suit, instead of cutting off support the very damned instant a person is hired (never mind that they may have to wait several weeks before actually getting paid something). America punishes the jobless and poor, and (as Gerald and I discussed this morning) part of it has to do with America’s Calvinistic bent: people are poor because God is punishing them (wealth being interpreted in the American psyche as a sign of God’s approbation — really and truly). 

Well. My object in writing this was not to digress into the politics and social dynamics of European v. American social policy and all, but rather to lament my inability to speak German, and once Gerald had to leave, my inability to completely understand everything that Gisela had to say about dealing with her kids (and me dealing with ours, specifically with Youngest). We both have our stories about unsupervised parties gone awry, we both can share our unhappiness at the cost of living and the cost of paying for kids’ education and training, etc. But I swear to god that if we ever end up living in Germany for any length of time, I am going to make learning German a priority. I now wish that I had taken the time to follow the online courses — but I guess I didn’t expect to find myself here again.