If a text from #AiWeiwei is rejected by #DieZeit it is probably worth reading:
“Was ich gern früher über Deutschland gewusst hätte”
What I Wish I Had Known About Germany Earlier:
https://hyperallergic.com/1050197/what-i-wish-i-had-known-about-germany-earlier/
Not wrong as such, but incomplete.
Ai Weiwei admits that he can't speak German, and can you really understand a country if you do not understand the language?
@juergen_hubert
Not wrong as such, but incomplete ;-)
Speaking the language is helpful. But do I myself understand the country even if I know German?
And: sometimes it is helpful to come from outside to see the patterns of a society more clearly, I suppose.
Sure, an outside perspective is helpful. But you need data to perform a proper analysis, and without linguistic knowledge, the dataset you can access is extremely limited.
very german to demand a proper analysis and data before acknowledging an outsiders observations, is there also approval from a government official missing to make his points valid enough? /s
the only point where language skills would be needed is the one about german humor, everything else is perfectly fine without understanding a lick of german
Sorry, but I have the firm conviction that you cannot really understand a culture if you don't understand that culture's language.
language is a medium thru which culture is transfered, but culture cares little about the language it is transfered via
one can gain a good understanding of german culture thru pure observation, but then again, when did someone from academia care about the observations from the people beneath them?
