Edward Snowden and the German Sense of Privacy

Below are some Germans demanding protection and asylum for Edward Snowden.  In the United States Snowden's been called "heroic," but he's also been called "dopily self-aggrandizing," "narcissistic," "traitor," and plenty of words this blog prefers not to print.   Ever since Angela Merkel discovered that her cell phone was being monitored, he has become the protector of Germany's national treasure: privacy.

REUTERS

Merkel wasn't using the super-secure cell phone with which she was provided, Die Zeit pointed out, adding that the N.S.A. had done nothing illegal, although it may have done something unintentional.  But the German sense of privacy remains profoundly different from the American one.  Germans keep their office doors shut, and assume that when the door is shut they remain alone.  Germans business colleagues do not like to be called at home, except in an emergency.  One's home is one's fortress.  A glance at American pull-down shades--the kind that snap back up if you tug too far, and which may flap in a    
breeze, revealing light if not action--tells you that the American sense of privacy vastly  differs, even in the age of Facebook.
 

That's your basic roller shade in New York.  If the window's open, it flaps pleasantly, exposing your living room, if not you.  People my age remember a scene in Harriet the Spy, in which Harriet listens to a woman in a restaurant complaining that she "can't even walk around in a slip!"  since they don't have shades yet.  Now this would never happen in Germany.  Every German house comes with these heavy, roll-down shades called Rolladen.  Here's the view from outside, just to confirm that you can't see a dang thing going on in the house: Here's a cross-section of these sturdy gadgets: yes, a feat of German engineering:  Rolladen mean business.  Americans like privacy, sort of, but their sense of privacy has a certain flexibility--it rolls up or pulls down with one gentle tug.  I can tell you from experience that rolling down the Rolladen with the cloth strap built into your window frame can take muscle, especially if you live in an old house and the Rolladen have gotten a little rusty.   And once they're down, it's dark, dark, dark amidst the blaze of noon.  But with American roller shades, you have some sense of what time of day it is.   What Americans don't get is that when Angela Merkel found out her private cell phone conversations were being recorded by the N.S.A., she had one of two reactions: (1) She felt assaulted--raped would probably not be too strong a word to use. (2) She knew perfectly well that she must have been being monitored.  She knew that a technologically advanced terrorist could use a politician's cell phone to detonate a bomb or send a secret message.  A bad guy could exploit anybody's electronic device, and would go for the one not being monitored.  But she also knew that a public relations disaster would ensue if she failed  to announce  that she felt dismayed and that this would NOT do ("das geht gar nicht!") She must find it in exceedingly poor taste to be monitored without a formal meeting announcing that unprotected cell phones were fair game for the N.S.A.   Had she been asked, she might have acceded with alacrity.  And used her super-secure cell for private conversations.   The routine surveillance must impress her as casual, and casual, for a German, is just bad manners.  Formal friendliness remains the rule, unless you are partying with your closest friends whom you've known since kindergarten.  She remembers the days when East Germans who wanted to keep a secret sat writing out conversations, or blasted rock music while whispering in one another's ears.  Go see the award-winning 2006 film, Das Leben Der Anderen (The Lives of Others) about lives broken by surveillance in East Germany, something barely reported by American magazines at the time it was happening.  Life magazine published photos every time someone tried to cross the Berlin wall and died.  It didn't report on, for example, teachers asking elementary school students, "When your Mommy watches the news, is the clock on the right-hand or the left-hand side of the screen?"  And if the child reported the wrong side, the schoolteacher knew the family had access to Western T.V.  Lives got thrown in prison for less than that.  Germans remain reticent.  They don't gush.  They don't spill their guts.  They don't confide unless you've known them for years, and even then, they believe that personal problems are "my problems," as a Bavarian friend told me--she would never dream of burdening her friends, and I believe she'd find it embarrassing to do so.   When I taught a class in psychoanalysis and literature, I asked my university students in a Northwestern Bundesland what they thought of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, and whether they ever considered trying it, or knew people who did.  They seemed scandalized.  Nobody goes, they insisted, or if they do, they don't talk about it, and they only go as a desperate last resort.   Freud seemed interesting because they could read him in German, but his ideas were, well, a little strange.