Being an expat is all about trying to figure out the culture in which you live. You are continually trying to generalise from the limited source data of experience, trying to figure out why things happen the way they do and how you can avoid having people shout at you when you break some rule you never knew existed.

After one month of marriage, I am discovering that the process of learning about yourself and your partner is not all that different. (Except S would never shout at me, of course.)

The fact that S and I are both English speakers living in Germany can lull us into a false sense of security about our cultural differences. Faced with the linguistic barrier and the fact that we are both swimming in the same sea of unknown German culture references, it is tempting to believe that we think the same way. We both grew up on Kellogg's Corn Flakes, the Hardy Boys and the A-Team, not to mention the Care Bears and My Little Pony (not that as a red-blooded young male I was interested in such girly fare, of course). Today we both enjoy Seinfeld, The New Yorker and Dickens.

But of course culture is not just popular culture, and in terms of how we view the world there are, it turns out, differences in the ways we see things. And like the expat trying to generalise and produce rules from the raw material of experience, it is not clear if any specific difference is caused by the fact that I am British and she is American, the fact that I am a man and she is a woman, or just differences in our personalities, vagaries attributable to the unique specifics of our respective formative experiences (should you believe that personality is formed by experience). But from where I'm standing these differences often look suspiciously similar to popular stereotypes of our respective national cultures: Gentle Reader, you be the judge.

The dimension of culture (to use the jargon of the intercultural pundit) thrown into focus this week could be summed up as Degree To Which You Believe Your External Environment Can Be Controlled, or, in layperson's terms, Must Broken Things Be Tolerated Or Can They Be Fixed?

Of course these attitudes do not come from nowhere, and I willingly admit the debt I owe to my parents. Please allow me a small Proustian digression. I grew up in a house where the light in the corridor outside my bedroom door didn't work (meaning frantic dashes from the barely lit top of the stairs through the demon-invested dark into my room). The coal-fire powered radiators gave out a weak heat not quite as warm as that emitted by, say, your television set, meaning the house was freezing the whole winter (literally freezing--I would wake in the morning to find ice on the inside of my bedroom window). The hoses on the washing machine were not plumbed in and had to be laboriously attached to the kitchen taps every time the washing machine was to be used.

We were tenants (the farm was rented), and so we presumably had the right to get these things fixed. (Actually we were tenants of the Queen--we lived on one of the Crown Estates--so you might have expected a better standard of service. Or perhaps Her Majesty was too busy carrying out her international engagements to pay much attention to her tenants.)

However my parents were happy enough to accept the status quo and never took the steps to get these and other defects rectified. They accepted these problems as inalterable facts of nature, things which had to be tolerated and worked around the same way as the harsh Scottish climate or our farm's poor soil. Perhaps this is a peculiarly Scottish trait, inspired by the Calvinist doctrine of pre-destination and the fatalism that is its corollary: things were always meant to be this way and there is no point trying to change them.

And so I am my father and mother's son. This became clear when S moved into my apartment and began to notice the things that were wrong. These included the fact that the door handles on the balcony door were not actually attached to the shaft thing and so were liable to fall off when you pulled them. Similarly, the bedroom door was not aligned properly with the doorframe and would not shut unless you slammed it.

I had been living happily with these defects for over a year before S moved in. In fact I had developed special techniques to work around them. The balcony door handles could be opened easily without anything falling off if you applied pressure in a certain direction. Pushing and pulling the bedroom door in a certain way meant it could be shut without slamming. These techniques I had internalised as part of my body memory, part of my reparatory of ways of interacting with the world.

It did not occur to me that I could actually get the Hausverwaltung (rental agency) to fix these things until S moved in and began agitating for change. It was then that I learned that for S problems are things to be solved, not worked around. Broken door handles and doors can be fixed, not just endured.

Of course it took several weeks of gentle reminders before I got around to calling the Hausverwaltung. I only mentioned the door handles at this stage, convinced that the bedroom door was a hopeless case. That was just the way God created it, after all. The door handles had however been whole at some point and could be repaired, even though such a repair was not strictly necessary if you were ready to apply yourself a little to learn a new way of opening the door.

Incredibly the Hausverwaltung lady showed herself to have the same foolhardy willingness to recklessly tamper with the very fabric of the universe (I have just finished reading a biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer and know only too well where such Faustian hubris can lead) and blithely noted my request in a manner that suggested she gets such outlandish requests every day.

Accordingly this week two burly men showed up to my door, each carrying a large toolbox. This seemed like overkill considering all they had to do was insert a pin in each door handle, but they didn't seem to be bothered. (Perhaps union rules specified one person per door handle.) I said my usual completely redundant line about "just let me know if you need anything" and then sat down at my computer.

I had barely had time to tap earnestly at my keyboard in an attempt to persuade the men that I was also a working man engaged in hard labour when they packed up their tool boxes and announced they were finished. I felt obliged to kick the tyres, so to speak, and cast what I hoped looked like an expert eye over their handiwork and tugged knowledgeably on the handles, which of course were now completely secure.

The men were just going out the door when I was seized by a sudden reckless impulse and asked them if they could look at the bedroom door. Of course I knew they would just shake their heads at the tragic folly of my idea, like surgeons confronted with a patient who has no hope of living. But to my amazement they deftly lifted the door out of its frame, banged at the hinges with a hammer in what looked like a suspiciously non-technical way and replaced it. Lo and behold, it now opened and closed as smooth as you like, with no slamming necessary.

I could not believe it, but the evidence was right there in front of me. All my cultural assumptions lay shattered around me. I felt like I had just discovered slitting chickens' throats was a more effective cure for cancer than chemotherapy. I immediately rushed to phone S and tell her about the miracle I had witnessed and concede that she had been completely right all along and I was wrong (information which came as no surprise to her).

So now, like the expat who has come to a richer way of experiencing the world through their encounter with a foreign culture, the world seems like a different place and I am ready to believe that I can change undesirable states of affairs if I want to. Of course you have to draw the line somewhere--there's still no way we're going to get the neighbour downstairs to watch TV at midnight at less than full volume.

Still, maybe I'll give the Hausverwaltung a call. You never know.

David Gordon Smith
Editor-in-chief
Expatica Germany
www.expatica.com/germany
david.gordon.smith@expatica.com

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