The Town Hall as Advent Calendar, Neustadt an der Weinstraße, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany
Last April, during Holy Week, a Catholic neighbor of mine in Madrid corrected me when I wished him “Happy Easter” in the middle of the week. You don’t say Felices Pascuas until Sunday, he explained, because that’s when Christ was resurrected. That made perfect sense given that the joy of Easter can only be understood in the context of the story of Jesus’ persecution and crucifixion.
It occurred to me that in the U.S. our greetings sometimes lack nuance and squeeze the meaning out of celebrations whose significance are as much about process as they are about outcomes. Public culture in America is deeply secular and, therefore, time is generally seen as linear. Things are assumed either to get better over time or to fall off a cliff like Thelma and Louise.
While European societies have been thoroughly secularized, the memory of ancient, circular liturgical time is still baked into the language and ways of celebration. Their language still implicitly retains the wisdom that Catalán architect Antoni Gaudí articulated so well. “The straight line belongs to man, the curved one to God.”
In Germany, where my wife was raised, Advent, the four-week season leading up to Christmas, is widely observed publicly by media and political figures. In my wife’s hometown, the city hall is turned into a giant Advent calendar with a new window being opened every night to reveal a picture behind it. The final window is opened on Christmas Eve.
That helps explain why each November, wherever we are, I buy my wife an Advent calendar so she can count down the days leading up to Christmas. Ticking off the days and enjoying the calendar’s embedded chocolate treats only enhances her anticipation for the holiday. And that’s the point.
Yet, I still had not fully learned my lesson about the importance of process and anticipation. A few days ago in Madrid, a friend rebuffed me for wishing him a happy new year too early.
In Spain, he told me, we wish people una buena salida y entrada de año (good exit to this year and entrance to the next) in the days leading up to the New Year. That, too, makes sense. Ending this year well helps ensure a good start to the next.
In Germany, where I am today, I’m determined not to make the same mistake. Today, I am wishing people Guten Rutch, a good slide into the new year, another saying that places the meaning in the process of transition rather than merely on the culmination of a story or the start of a new one. Only after midnight on December 31, will I begin to wish folks a Frohes Neues Jahr.
Tomorrow, we’ll fly back to Spain to prepare to celebrate the arrival of the Three Kings, another story whose ultimate meaning can be found in their journey and their search for Jesus.
But the denouement of the story of the Magi also carries tremendous meaning which I’ve always found appealing. Having been warned in a dream of Herod’s desire to have Jesus killed, the Three Wise Men journeyed home by another way to keep the Christ Child’s location secret. Their willingness to make a last-minute change of plans may be the best advice of all on how to approach a new year.
There was a fun article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung earlier this month on immigrant nurses in Germany’s Swabian mountains.1 Germany has a severe nursing shortage and has been recruiting health care workers from around the world. The small town of Markgröningen, about a half hour car ride north from Stuttgart, has welcomed nurses from countries as far away as Kenya, India, and Mexico.
While foreign recruits have long been obliged to take German language classes to prep for their jobs, regional medical authorities have recently added a three-day course in Swabian. That’s because nurses were having a hard time understanding patients who prefer to speak dialect to standard German. And not only do the nurses learn the Swabian words for “to prick” or “to annoy,” they’re also taught local proverbs and sayings that sound ludicrous to the foreign ear.
According to a 2009 study by Mannheim University’s Institute for the German Language, about 60% of Germans speak one regional dialect or the other. (The definition of a dialect, by the way, is a language that doesn’t enjoy the support of an army or navy.) Of those who speak dialect, almost half (45%) say they do so “always” or “often.”2
I love this story, because I’m a big believer in the virtues of localism. I believe expressive freedom is found more in the small places out of sight and reach of national political power. I think the increasing centralization of government in the U.S. has diminished regional distinctiveness and turned the broader culture into the cultural equivalent of a big box store.
Too many cultural dictates originate from the top of the political pyramid and that is exactly where a functioning culture should not be born. A healthy culture has little to do with what Americans tend to obsess over–identity, power, or pride. More fundamentally, culture is about belonging, intimacy, meaning, and enjoying a sense of place, your place, your neck of the woods, your little corner of the world.
One powerful example of a different way of envisioning the relationship between province and nation is that in German the word heimat –“homeland”–generally refers to one’s home region and not to the entire country. The term implies deep attachment and affection. What this tells me is that federalism is not just a way of structuring layers of government, it can also be a model for how to understand the proper relationship between regional and national cultures.
The best way to encapsulate the meaning of federalism is that it “has to do with the need of people and polities to unite for common purposes yet remain separate to preserve their respective integrities. It is rather like wanting to have one’s cake and eat it too.”3
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We’ve all heard of companies that are said to be too big to fail. Well, I think the U.S. is too big to love. Because more and more Americans are giving away their little pieces of cake, they now think American culture is either entirely about abstract ideals or resides in the District of Columbia. In either case, their idea of Americanness is increasingly divorced from the things and people and places with which they are most familiar, the very things that give them comfort and inspiration.
Sadly, the findings of the recent Gallup Poll on patriotism suggest that our affection for our country is dependent on our feelings for the current occupant of the White House. Is that all America is? Politics? A single political regime? That’s a remarkably flimsy basis upon which to base one’s feelings for his homeland.
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Over the past several years, I’ve spent a lot of time in the American South and am fascinated by the role their regional identity serves as a prism through which they see their Americaness. Their regional accent, which many see as a sign of their distinctiveness, is not entirely unlike a dialect in Germany. It’s a symbol of home, comfort, rootedness, and, if not class, then of a memory of simpler, premodern times.
I’ve been struck by how many educated people I’ve met at and around the University of Georgia who either hide or only use their accents on certain occasions. Those who hide their accents tend to do so out of fear of drawing the condescension of non-Southerners. Those who use it selectively tend to do so when they’re tired, tipsy, sick, being affectionate, or trying to get out of a speeding ticket.
One young woman I know who grew up in a small farming town in central Georgia made a big effort to lose her thick drawl while she was an undergraduate. Not unlike an upwardly mobile child of immigrants, she sees her unaccented English as a sign of her education, as having become a mainstream middle-class American. Still, like so many, she peppers her speech and text messages with “y’all and “‘ppreciate ya.” There are times she’ll jokingly put on a heavy drawl when saying certain words like “Southern” or “friend.” Her ambivalence about her regional accent is telling. A recent study suggests that in Georgia the Southern accent is fading.
The point I’m making is that there is an idea in the land that 340 million Americans should adhere to a standardized mainstream culture. Even efforts to promote “diversity” or “inclusion” only seek to ensure statistical integration of various groups within a uniform cultural model. They don’t encourage a broader form of pluralism, one that allows institutions to emerge from the distinctive history—and demographic makeup of—a particular region. They promote diversity within organizations, not among them. Frameworks like DEI, for instance, don’t properly respect the significance of, say, non-diverse historically black colleges in the South.
Indeed, whenever I hear the terms Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, I think of that 1960s craze in which college students tried to pile as many people as they could into a Volkswagen. But what about all the Americans who have no desire to squeeze into that Volkswagen? What about those who’d prefer to ride in a Hyundai, a Honda, or a roomier Lincoln Continental?
Standardization stifles creativity. It breeds placelessness and alienation. Most importantly, it doesn’t nurture the kind of community that people need. For a country whose political speak gives a lot of lip service to the importance of choice, America has become a one-size-fits-all culture.
What I’m advocating is not multiculturalism in which distinct cultural or linguistic groups at large are encouraged to stay in their own lanes. To my mind, what America needs is more respect for regional integrity, to allow the people in its many places to nurture and maintain that which is distinctive about their homelands so when newcomers inevitably resettle there, becoming American will also mean learning the ways of the locals.
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Christina Lopinski, “‘Mei Knie tut weh wie d’Sau’; Warum spricht der Patient im Bett von einem Schwein? Viele ausländische Pflegekräfte tun sich schwer mit dem Dialekt Ihrer Patienten. In Markgröningen lernen sie jetzt Schwäbisch,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, July 19, 2025. ↩︎
Ludwig M. Eichinger et al, “Aktuelle Spracheinstellungen in Deutschland: Erste Ergebnisse einer bundesweiten Repräsentativumfrage,” Institute for the German Language, University of Mannheim, 2009. 11,16. ↩︎
Daniel J. Elazar, Exploring Federalism (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1987), 33. ↩︎
Every afternoon–seven days a week–my father-in-law reads the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) from cover to cover. Even with the special Saturday edition, it generally takes him about two and a half hours to read on his living room couch. Since 1960, the paper’s best-known advertising slogan has been “Dahinter steckt immer ein kluger Kopf” or “Behind it you’ll always find a clever mind.” This is our homage to the FAZ’s famous ad campaign.
It’s worth noting that a day before President Biden gives a speech on the fragile state of American democracy, DerSpiegel‘s Washington bureau chief has published a book arguing that the U.S. is a net exporter of ideologies that threaten other democracies across the Western world.
In his new book, whose title translates to One Wrong Word: How a New Leftist Ideology from America threatens Our Freedom of Expression, journalist René Pfister warns that ignoring the seductive dogmatism of identity politics could be a “fatal mistake” for nations like Germany.
Why? Because it “absolutizes” all argument and kills the kind of open dialogue and compromise that democracy requires. It turns intellectuals into scared sheep, promotes a vision of society as being a war between the righteous (and victimized) few versus the cruel “deplorable” many, which invariably depresses support for the political center and sends those who feel vilified into the arms of populist demagogues like Donald Trump.
None of these arguments is particularly new. What’s significant here, however, is that it’s being leveled from abroad against the United States, which likes to see itself as the world’s defender of democracy. It’s also noteworthy that this manifesto has been published by a popular left-of-center newsweekly of an allied nation, one that still lives in the shadow of its terrible 20th-century experience with authoritarianism.
In a magazine essay that teases the book, Pfister bemoans that “something is being lost “ in an America in which 55% of respondents told a New York Times poll that they had kept their mouths shut in the past year for fear of saying the wrong thing. What Pfister sees sweeping the U.S.—and creeping across the Atlantic—is nothing more than a new wave of intolerance that justifies itself by claiming to be rooting out past intolerance. He doesn’t buy it. What he sees is the creation of more acronyms and a growing climate of fear. Just like you can’t bomb Iraq into becoming a liberal democracy, I guess you can’t create a more tolerant world through intimidation and censorship. To trivialize this trend or to pretend it hasn’t leapt beyond the universities where it’s incubated, he argues, is not just a cop out, it’s dangerous.
