Actually I like Germany because...

I’ve always been one of the least patriotic people one can imagine. Not because of the great history and politics, I just could never really identify with the country I happened to be born in. I always felt like an underdog. So, in sports, I could always identify of the underdogs but since German TV only shows those sports where Germans are winning, I never cheered for the Germans. Germany just seemed a country too big for a small person like me, Belgium seemed more fitting, or Estonia, or Slovenia.

I didn’t find myself in German literature either: Goethe was boring, Fontane was too uptight and Grass too perverted.

I didn’t feel so much ashamed of German history. That is because I can identify more with the victims than with the perpetrators. A German-Jewish academic from Berlin seems much closer to me than a painter from Vienna. But the German virtues never seemed to apply to me either: I’m not a very punctual person, I grew up in an anti-authoritarian way, so discipline is a foreign word to me, my flat is always in a mess.

I had always felt lost in the German society in a way, so I moved to abroad. And I had been to Spain for about four month when I found myself uttering the following “I actually like Germany because....”

That day, I had just tried to book a flight from Spain to Finland, bad idea – I had a connection via Germany and Estonia, taking first a bus, then an airplane, another airplane, a ferry, and then a train. 

That night I was out with my international friends and I told them: “I actually like Germany because it’s so easy to get everywhere from there.” There was no sarcasm on my voice. My international friends told me: “Come on, don’t be so cynical, it’s nothing wrong with loving your country.”

But I meant it. That is why I like Germany – because it’s so central in Europe and it’s so well connected with flights and international train. I love travelling and therefore, I like Germany, because it’s so easy to travel from Germany. Maybe, that is my sense of postmodern patriotism in a way.

...and in the end, it turned out that the Spanish ALSA was more reliable that the Deutsche Bahn.