Beyond the Oder, Asia begins. – Konrad Adenauer.

I visited Germany in 2003, going through Aachen, Cologne, Worms, and Heidelberg on a road trip that also took in Belgium and ended up in Paris. I lived in Berlin in 2024 for Zelar City, and visited Leipzig.

Overall, I greatly enjoyed my couple of months in Berlin. Read that post for more extensive observations and commentary.

Sadly, I don’t have much recollection of the 2003 trip beyond Heidelberg Castle scenic views and a few other historic monuments, and an unusually helpful and Anglophone punk who helped out at a gas station. However, much as I can admire elements of the German character, such as its high function and deadpan humor, I don’t particularly need a contemporary visit that Germany to ascertain that I will not thrive living there. The German normie strikes me as a sanctimonious authoritarian, autistically obsessed with “privacy” but ready to snitch for not disposing of garbage in the proper bin. This German normie might cargo cult Western liberalism, but never truly internalized freedom of speech and the argumentative tradition like his Anglo counterpart, but just adopted the surface ideology as he once did Nazism and then socialism in the GDR.