Introducing Swabians
Scots will be happy to know their repute as a land of penny-pinching misers spreads good over a British Isles.
In Germany a Gaelic appendix ‘Mac’ is shorthand for cheapness. Discounter Mäc-Geiz (Mac-Stingy), gym McFit and still sequence McPaper all use it as formula for stone bottom prices.
The good news though, is that Scots aren’t a people many eminent in Germany for their thriftiness. That endowment goes to a people of Swabia – a segment in a southwest of a nation that includes Stuttgart, state collateral of Baden-Württemberg.
And Swabians are not only indicted of being miserly. They are also seen as overly neat and uptight, nonetheless sedulous and inventive.
Modern-day Swabia (shown in red) bridging a states of Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria. Photo: Quahadi / Wikimedia Commons.
Such is a strength of tension felt opposite them in Berlin, that a term Schwabenhass (hatred for Swabians) has been coined there.
The German collateral is home to around 300,000 Swabians, who are blamed for gentrifying certain neighbourhoods and bringing a bourgeois clarity for sequence to a pell-mell capital.
Germany’s absolute financial minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, who has a well-earned repute for tight-fistedness with open finances, is regularly done fun of for his Swabian roots.
The similarities between Scots and Swabians have mostly been noted. In a mainstay for Deutsche Welle, Peter Zudeick brought adult an aged fun that a Scots were creatively Swabian before being thrown out for being too tractable with their money.
‘An bankrupt society. No doubt’
Now a new muster in Stuttgart is addressing stereotypes about Swabians, both certain and negative.
“Swabians: a parable and a brand”, on arrangement in a Württemberg State Museum until Apr subsequent year, aims to exam these cliches around over 300 objects and artifacts related to a region’s 2,000 year-old culture.
Visitors to Stuttgart’s new Swabian exhibition. Photo: DPA.
Curator Frank Lang conceded that a Swabian repute for thriftiness is not unfounded.
“It was an bankrupt society, there’s no doubt,” he says, arguing that mercantile vigour incited Swabians into careful people, and this mindset eventually led to mercantile success.
Baden-Württemberg is now one of a wealthiest regions in Germany and is substantially best famous as a home of oppulance automobile manufacturer Daimler-Benz.
Swabians are not only famous for being parsimonious with their money. They are generally pronounced to be incompetent to get absolved of anything, in box it becomes useful later.
Eberhard Fritz, conduct of a Württemberg House Archive, identifies a eremite transformation of Pietism, that widespread to a segment in a 17th Century, as a base of this habit. The Lutheran transformation emphasizes modesty, and weakly throwing divided domicile products was deliberate implicitly reprehensible.
Putzwut, literally definition “cleaning rage”, sums adult a stereotypical extreme Swabian affinity for cleaning.
This classify can be visualized best in the Kehrwoche or “cleaning rota”. The tradition emerged in a 19th century as incomparable tenement blocks seemed in Stuttgart. What began as a clearly approved approach to defend community cleanliness, distributing a shortcoming for cleaning a building among a tenants, is now used to poke fun during Swabians for being concerned and spooky with order.
But not all a stereotypes are bad.
The idea of Swabians as committed and sedulous determined itself in a 19th Century, as a people of a segment responded to misery and a Industrial Revolution, Lang explained.
“Hard work is still valued today, generally in a countryside, such as in farming, where people still take on side jobs.”
And like Scotland, Swabia is also deliberate a segment full of canny, inventors. Swabians are deliberate smarter than other German counterparts, formed on a repute for filing lots of obvious applications.
Lang’s response to this? “It is cryptic to pull conclusions about a whole population’s characteristics.”
Fatty dishes and an senseless dialect
But comparisons with Scotland don’t only finish with purported impression traits.
An constituent partial of Swabian enlightenment is a indulgent food, many prominently Spätzle, an egg noodle whose name translates as “little sparrows”.
This plate is traditionally smothered in butter or cheese with roasted onions on top, though can also be eaten with beef and gravy.
Some of a objects on show: Spätzle presses for creation a renouned Swabian dish. Photo: DPA.
Scots, with their adore of cheese lonesome chips, competence good find consanguine culinary spirits in these carbs-covered-in-cheese lovers. Throw in a adore of extreme celebration – a drink festival in Stuttgart this year pulled in scarcely 4 million visitors – and we competence only have a compare done in heaven.
Then there is a chapter so incomprehensible, it would make an American on holiday in Glasgow feel like they were articulate to a Queen.
It’s something a Swabians even have a giggle during themselves. Baden-Württemberg’s sign is “Wir können alles. Außer Hochdeutsch” or “We can do anything, solely pronounce customary German”.
Their weird chapter is maybe best summed adult by a obvious observant “Net bruddelt isch gnug globt” that in customary German would be “Nicht geschimpft ist gelobt genug”. And in standard Swabian fashion, it means “not being criticized is regard enough”.
However, design an concerned acquire from a stingy, Spätzle-eating, contriver behind a museum desk, and don’t design to see any Scottish tourists withdrawal a few pennies in a concession box either.
And for anyone wanting to hear what Swabian sounds like, and some-more importantly, what a US presidential discuss would sound like in Swabian, see a video below:
Article source: https://www.thelocal.de/20161027/new-exhibition-tests-swabian-stereotypes