Boomerang_ Travels in the New Third World - Michael D. Lewis [68]
But then how did people who seem as intelligent and successful and honest and well organized as the Germans allow themselves to be drawn into such a mess? In their financial affairs they’d ticked all the little boxes to ensure that the contents of the bigger box were not rotten, and yet ignored the overpowering stench wafting from the big box. Nölling felt the problem had its roots in German national character. “We entered Maastricht because they had these rules,” he says, as we move off to his kitchen and plates heaped with the white asparagus Germans take such pride in growing. “We were talked into this under false pretenses. Germans are, by and large, gullible people. They trust and believe. They like to trust. They like to believe.”
If the deputy finance minister has a sign on his wall reminding him to see the point of view of others, here is perhaps why. Others do not behave as Germans do: others lie. In this financial world of deceit Germans are natives on a protected island who have not been inoculated against the virus carried by visitors. The same instincts that allowed them to trust Wall Street bond salesmen also allowed them to trust the French, when they promised there would be no bailouts, and the Greeks, when they swore that their budget was balanced. That is one theory. Another is that they trusted so easily because they didn’t care enough about the cost of being wrong, as it came with certain benefits. For the Germans the euro isn’t just a currency. It’s a device for flushing away the past. It’s another Holocaust Memorial. The Greeks may have German public opinion polls running against them, but deeper forces run in their favor.
In any case, if you are obsessed with cleanliness and order yet harbor a secret fascination with filth and chaos, you are bound to get into some kind of trouble. There is no such thing as clean without dirt. There is no such thing as purity without impurity. The interest in one implies an interest in the other. The young German woman who had driven me back and forth across Germany exhibits interest in neither, and it’s hard to say whether she is an exception or a new rule. Still, she marches dutifully into the world’s largest red-light district, seeking out a lot of seedy-looking German men to ask them where she might find a female mud wrestling show. Even now she continues to find new and surprising ways in which Germans find meaning in filth. “Scheisse glänzt nicht, wenn man sie poliert: Shit won’t shine, even if you polish it,” she says, as we pass the Funky Pussy Club. “Scheissegal: it just means ‘I don’t give a shit.’” She laughs. “That’s an oxymoron in Germany, right?”
The night is young and the Reeperbahn is hopping: it’s the closest thing I’ve seen in Germany to a mob scene. Hawkers lean against sex clubs and sift likely customers from the passing crowds. Women who are almost pretty beckon men who are clearly tempted. We pass several times the same corporate logo, of a pair of stick figures engaged in anal sex. Charlotte spots it and remembers that a German band, Rammstein, was arrested in the United States for simulating anal sex on stage while performing a song called “Bück Dich” (Bend Over). But on she charges, asking old German men where to find the dirt. At length she finds a definitive answer, from a German who has worked here for decades. “The last one shut down years ago,” he says. “It was too expensive.”
V
TOO FAT TO FLY
On August 5, 2011, moments after the U.S. government watched a rating agency lower its credit rating for the first time in American history, the market for U.S. Treasury bonds soared. Four days later, the interest rates paid by the U.S. government on its new ten-year bonds had fallen to the lowest level