Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
mentioned the one example--I think the Germans have fairly strict noise regulations, don't
they?
A:
Yes, they do.
Q:
Sort of working the rough edges and maybe the cross-cultural conflicts, things perhaps that
Americans aren't used to that the Germans would be more sensitive to, or vice versa.
A:
I guess I'd have to answer that yes and no. Certainly the example I gave was on the rough
edge of where we were doing something that was counter to not only their noise standards
but their culture that Sunday afternoon's a quiet afternoon. They felt that not only were we
violating that, but that we were insensitive to their sovereignty because we wouldn't do
something about it. That's the situation that I found myself.
Not everything was on the rough edge. What we tried to do in the community business from
the top at USAREUR on down was to be proactive. General Blanchard started the German
American clubs and pushed the interactions. He started all commanders going to the Defense
Language School at Monterey, taking German before they went over to take command. Every
soldier that came in took a "gateway" class in German language within the first month or so
of arrival. Everyone would have a better understanding of culture, a general familiarity with
language, and an ability to be sensitive to things about Germany.
We had GermanAmerican clubs, and GermanAmerican youth clubs. Part of our
community structure would have a person who was the facilitator for GermanAmerican
youth clubs, and he would try to pull people together, go to meetings, work up transportation
to make positive interactions happen.
Then we'd have our fests. We, together with the local communities, put on a German
American folksfest. We would have certain booths and they'd have booths, and we'd hire a
carnival and try to bring German citizens and American citizens together to this fest, so we
would be doing things together. We weren't one community and they another community--
we tried to pull them together. We tried to be very proactive in articulating these kinds of
things so as to avoid the rough edges. When things were coming up, we'd be very sensitive
to them. They would warn us if a certain holiday was coming up and they felt a certain
element might be out--and then we would acquaint our populace.
If something happened, like a group of soldiers who came out of a bar one night and broke
car antennas and so forth, we'd get on to that quickly and try to figure out who it was so we
could get them to pay back the people whose cars were damaged. If we couldn't do that, then
we would send a U.S. claims person down to process their claims to get them hands-on
service so they felt that we weren't pushing them away--insensitive to their needs. Yes, it
happened. Yes, Americans did it. We're sorry about that. I can't correct it but I can address it
from the perspective of the claim relatively quickly.
So, there was a lot of work on avoiding rough spots, and then we had to address them when
they came up.
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