A Complete Analysis of German Dining Culture: Food and Eating Habits
"This is really……. so stinky……. I really don't know how the herders of ancient times carried this stinky cheese around."
"Aha………the stench of a thousand years." C clapped his hands and chuckled. "When we were young, that's how we all described the grown-ups of that time."
"The stench of a thousand years?"
"Deep down, Germans are loyal soldiers and diligent farmers. Obedience is duty. Duty is obedience. Even pressing the button of the gas chamber was like working on an assembly line; they worshipped authority, worshipped the heroic leader. The rise of the Nazis was no accident; the people were like rats that follow the sound of a flute and jump into the river."
C took another bite of stinky cheese, chewed and swallowed, and said: "So when we were young, we often described this blindly obedient mindset of the grown-ups as having rotted and stunk for a thousand years, something beyond further endurance."
I said: "After World War I, the Weimar Republic tottered in the wind and rain; even if it hadn't been the far-right Hitler, someone from the far left might have emerged."
"Exactly right. Compared with Britain and America, iron-blooded Germany had no deep democratic tradition, and in the end it actually legally elected a great demon."
"In that case, your national character of obedience and law-abidingness is very far from modern civic consciousness. Aha……. we in Taiwan, China, after all, have barren mountains and treacherous waters, and produce nothing but troublemakers."
"But then again, German law today, along with its dual executive system, has become a model that Europe and America draw on for democracy and the rule of law."
C said that after World War II ended, many remnants of the Nazis escaped punishment and went on living well, with a developed economy, while the whole society, like a sealed pot, guarded secrets and taboos, just like martial law. In the end, only the postwar baby boomers, unburdened by the past, dared to lift the lid of that pot, reflect on history, criticize current affairs, young and willful.
The old thieves in power gnashed their teeth in hatred, sharply accusing these little brats of having never suffered hardship, of living too freely and too comfortably, of being rice weevils ignorant of the world's hardships who, having eaten too full, took the lead in stirring up trouble and creating chaos, rebelling against the way, defying the classics, cheating their teachers and destroying their ancestors.
Since there was no hope for reform within the system, they set to work from outside the system. To sweep away the stench of a thousand years, students were not merely lacking in manners; for a full ten years, Molotov cocktails, iron bars, saws, bricks, and baseball bats all came out, and they confronted the military and police in the streets on a large scale across barbed-wire entanglements and barricades and riot-control vehicles. Students were dispersed by water cannons and tear gas and then regrouped. Of course, big labels like "rioters," "manipulated by political parties," and "professional political students" were pinned on their heads one after another.
It is true that West German students of the Cold War era harbored unrealistic longings for the mysterious Communist iron curtain, but this left-leaning sentiment was later transferred to a insistence on social justice, setting up an unbreakable Maginot Line to resist the capitalist hell in which the rich devour the poor in the free-market economy.
From facing history squarely to discussing current affairs, the student movement generation went on to make passionate proposals for the country's future. No longer blindly following authority, no longer silent, daring to think critically and act independently. Now that the students have become old people, the tradition of political concern irrigated by the hot blood of those years still has strong recoil, each generation more creative and sharper than the last.
Forty years ago, this group of wildly imaginative little brats around C no longer wanted to smell the "stench of a thousand years." A hundred schools of thought contended, thinking what the people thought. Their anti-authority stormy youth blossomed and bore fruit, laying the foundation for today's pluralistic German society.
The environmental movement, the women's liberation movement, the gay rights movement, the peace movement, the citizens' spontaneous initiative movement, the housing justice movement, leftists and rightists: the greatest common denominator of all these forces was to coalesce into a pragmatic, environmentally minded Green Party.
After the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the Green Party further reaped anti-nuclear public opinion, greatly increased its strength, and took power in Baden-Wurttemberg. The Green Party regards small farmers as guardians of environmentally sustainable development and cares about local culture and traditional life.
With the countryside prosperous, the cheesemakers can live and work in peace, without having to change careers and go to the big cities to sell hot dogs, passing down from generation to generation the craft of the stinky cheese that C loves to eat. The stench continues to spread for miles; amid the lake and mountain scenery, it makes my head swim, but there is no longer the "stench of a thousand years."