Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What Germans Are Reading

the-american-interest.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 131 posts

Re: What Germans Are Reading

#101

Post by em-bee »

ekianjo wrote: post #37

My German is rusty but: > Toleranz: Einfach Schwer (Tolerance Isn’t Easy) is an improper translation. That's "Tolerance: Simply Difficult" and that translates fine in English too since you can keep the same style while being accurate.

the direct literal translation would be: tolerance: just difficult. einfach in german is used frequently when in english you would use just: just do it -> mach einfach

i do believe that in english simply can always be used in place of just, it's just less common so tolerance: simply difficult has the same meaning and sounds better as a book title.

Re: What Germans Are Reading

#102

Post by romaaeterna »

_delirium wrote: post #95
romaaeterna wrote: post #65

I can't stand reading modern Germans. They generally read and think just like English, for one thing, so that you can barely tell you've entered another language. It is pleasant, however to retreat to the 19th-century Germans, and bathe in their erudition and learning, from the period before the world went sour.

There is still a fairly regular stream of German-language "serious" monographs coming out, written by philosophers, media theorists, etc. Not usually found on the Spiegel bestseller list, though.

Indeed, the Germans remain good at "serious". It's just much more English-language derivative than it was pre-WWII. Today, I'd call their academic thought 5 years behind English-language academic thought instead of 5 years ahead of like it used to be.

Re: What Germans Are Reading

#103

Post by luckylion »

hef19898 wrote: post #99
luckylion wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not an expert on that since I'm self-employed, but imho that's not completely accurate. Most contributions aren't completely tax deductible (pensions: 86/88%), and many of them share a max deduction limit of 1900 Euros, so you'll quickly get above that if you're earning an average salary.

Public pensions and all the other stuff is usually directly deducted from your monthly pay, private insurance is where the deductibles come in. Not an issue for you standard stuff as an employee.

Yeah, not an "I need to pay this" issue, but I was talking about tax implications. Whether the money makes a stop in your account is one thing, whether it gets taxed as if it did is another, which I understand it is.

Re: What Germans Are Reading

#104

Post by segmondy »

WA wrote: post #5

There has been at least one book about how "Germany/Germans are getting dumber", "The Big Crash is Coming" or something similar on the Spiegel Bestseller list at all times. So far, the big crash didn't come yet. These books don't talk about a market correction or a financial crisis like in 2008, but a total economic crash, because "a finite world can't have unlimited growth", because "capitalism", because "climate ch…

Bank interest rates are 0 and negative, so people can't leave their money in the bank. They either have to spend it, driving up house prices or invest in the market to get better return. With bank rates being so low, folks are paranoid and with all their nest eggs in the market, they pay more attention to it.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-08-06/how-th...

Re: What Germans Are Reading

#105

Post by magpi3 »

Kaiyou wrote: post #73
RandomBookmarks wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please be accurate. Correct would be: They removed a book they consider anti-semitic. That is quite different from what you stated. But great to include the source.

It's the same thing, isn't it?

No. Have you ever hard a joke that is racist or sexist but still made you laugh in spite of yourself?

Re: What Germans Are Reading

#106

Post by freeflight »

ekianjo wrote: post #42

> Since then, the entire eastern half of the country has been brought into the fold of Western liberal capitalism—but not entirely successfully. Unemployment is still higher in the east, and brain drain to the west remains common. Not sure how to understand this. I have traveled to the DDR and to East Germany after the reunification many times, and by far and large life is much better than it ever was. People can act…

Ostalgie [0] is a very real thing, particularly for older generations who actually lived and worked in the GDR, without ever conflicting with the government. Because not everything East was bad, and not everything in the West was perfect either. There was actually quite a bit of economic symbiosis [1] going on between both sides back then.

That's why for many, the GDR also meant stability and progress. I can still remember my grandmother living in a house with wood ovens for heating, no running warm water, and a literal drop toilet on the second floor where you had to manually rinse with a big water pitcher.

She then got moved to an apartment inside a newly built Plattenbau [2], offering quite some comforts that were previously reserved to only very few households.

After the wall fell, she moved out to another flat, but by now is back to living in one of those Plattenbau apartments. Guess how negative her opinions on the GDR time are?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostalgie

[1] https://www.dw.com/de/ddr-als-billiglohnland-f%C3%BCr-den-we...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plattenbau

Re: What Germans Are Reading

#107

Post by freeflight »

dgellow wrote: post #45
ekianjo wrote: post #42

> Since then, the entire eastern half of the country has been brought into the fold of Western liberal capitalism—but not entirely successfully. Unemployment is still higher in the east, and brain drain to the west remains common. Not sure how to understand this. I have traveled to the DDR and to East Germany after the reunification many times, and by far and large life is much better than it ever was. People can act…

Successful industries and top universities are in majority in the Western side of the country, thus people looking for higher salaries or more job opportunities leave the Eastern side. Over time that results in important disparities. I don’t believe that the article is saying that the situation was better during DDR time.

> I don’t believe that the article is saying that the situation was better during DDR time.

It was actually way better during DDR time, a whole lot of stuff was manufactured there was then sold in the West trough catalog order.

Didn't happen out of anywhere that even companies like IKEA had stuff manufactured there [0], back then the DDR was a bit what China is nowadays to the Western world.

Sadly a lot of those industries were simply sold off and liquidated, sending millions of people into unemployment, by the Treuhandanstalt [1]. With nobody really investing much to replace these lost jobs, only plenty of money for infrastructure trough the Soli.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/nov/16/ikea-regret...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treuhandanstalt

Re: What Germans Are Reading

#108

Post by freeflight »

ekianjo wrote: post #46
dgellow wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Successful industries and top universities are in majority in the Western side of the country, thus people looking for higher salaries or more job opportunities leave the Eastern side. Over time that results in important disparities. I don’t believe that the article is saying that the situation was better during DDR time.

My point is simply that this kind of adjustment is likely to take a century or even more. Look at the long lasting impact of economic disparities in the US between the South and the North as another example. Also, we would need to check in the economic History of Germany if the Eastern Lander of Germany were not always poorer compared to the Western Lander. The large economic output of the Rhur should already have ti…

There's also the fact that the Berlin split forced a whole lot of rather successful German companies to relocate from East to somewhere else in the West.

Siemens was originally started and HQ'ed in Berlin, until the wall split happened, making them relocate to the south.

Afaik this is the case for a couple of other rather successfull Western German companies.

Re: What Germans Are Reading

#109

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

ekianjo wrote: post #40

Besides the obvious sampling issue (The Spiegel as a reference), not sure there anything interesting in that list, because it's a reflection of: - What is published in the German language (much smaller than in the English corpus) - What is published at all (choices from local publishers) - What matches the political/media agenda of the day/year: people are well known to read about the topics that is being talked abou…

Whenever i'm walking into a german bookstore nowadays, and see the Spiegel Bestseller display, anything in it is discarded as trash until further notice. Wasn't always that way for me, but since at least 20 years now.
Post reply on HN