a pie called humble

After living back in Germany for over one year, you realize that something is different about the people. It is something I couldn’t put into words. When you live in another country and take interest in other cultures…and observe their society, their way of life and interaction with each other…then you slowly forget what your ‘own’ people are like.

It has always been difficult for me to embrace my ‘German-ness’ – whatever significance that may or may not carry. The German, however, for all his strengths, also keeps plenty of weaknesses tucked under his bed. From what I have experienced, the German does not like to appear ‘weak’. This thought occurred to me the other day when my lovely wife pointed out that German women seemed so self-assured…so determined and driven. Outright. Direct. To the point. Independent. From A to B. Don’t bother looking past B, taking a peak at what C could be.

We came to the conclusion that there is a distinct lack of a certain attribute in the German (man). Personally, I took an interest in the matter and researched it.

The German has his roots steeped in the barbarism of the Germanian Man, a people made up of several tribes and dialects – ruthlessly cruel in the eyes of the Romans during their empirical expansion. The Germanic people were mainly pagans until the Medieval period and the Christianization. It was a polytheistic worldview, much like that of the early Greeks.

Therefore it’s fitting (or ironic) that hundreds of years later, in 1517, it would be a German who opposed and defied the Highest Religious Order of the time, the Roman Catholic Church under Pope Leo X and Emperor Charles V. Supposedly it was due to Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible, that the word ‘Demut’ was born into the German language.

‘Demut’ is the equivalent to ‘humility’, but the actual work has Germanic roots. It means the ‘conscience of a servant or someone who serves’. Thus, being humble means to take the status of a servant, consciously – choosing to serve. At the same time, there is the verb ‘demütigen’, which is the equivalent of ‘humiliate’. In German, the noun ‘Demütigung’ is not a positive word. Neither is it in English. ‘Mut’ also means ‘Courage’, so ‘demütigen’ is to discourage somebody…take away his courage. Moreover, ‘Demütigung’ is about forcing somebody into the embarrassing situation of misunderstanding his place…to put someone in his ‘right’ place would be the better expression here.

This is because to humble oneself one often needs an experience of some sort. The fault in man (or humanity) lies in his arrogance to think that one individual stands higher than another. Jesus, the son of God, came down to earth as a servant-king. Not a king-servant. David served Jerusalem as a king-servant. Jesus didn’t need to all the typical things associated with the status of a king in those days. It was his presence and the words he spoke. He showed that man requires humility to feel the full extent of love. When we love, we give of ourselves…we serve our heart on a platter and it becomes vulnerable.

Never did I think I would put Jesus and Hitler in an essay, but here it goes:

There is a famous picture of Hitler shaking hands with President Paul von Hindenburg in 1933. It shows a short-figured Adolf Hitler slightly bowing down to a great war-veteran, his uniform full of medals. Hitler appears to be full of ‘Demut’. But this was the turning point in German politics and we know what happened next.

In my research, I read that Hitler dealt with failure in a peculiar way. He was rejected by an arts academy and became “not only a victim of his failure, but a victim of the analysis of this failure”. He didn’t know how to cope with it and therefore gave the whole thing his own interpretation: that he must be an unrecognized genius. Too good to be an artist. It gave him his first ‘paranoid push’ into the direction of the madman he ended up as.

Hitler declared ‘Demut’ (or humility) as the greatest evil for the German Nation…a weak attribute in man that must be eliminated. Why serve anybody if you are the superior Aryan race?

Well, I can’t stop picturing Martin Luther having a meeting with Adolf Hitler, explaining to him that even if you do descend from God, He is still your maker. And if God didn’t exist, then who do we answer to? Atheism, in a roundabout way justifies Hitler’s moral code and the decisions he made.

Even if you don’t believe in Jesus or his existence – his is the only story of God incarnate consciously acting as a servant-king in the form of a teacher (Rabbi). If he could humble himself before others, then who the hell are we not to?

The German still suffers from the moral sickness that swept over his land 70 years ago. He doesn’t like to embrace failure and fears humility.

Time can change a society. But the soul of an abused people does not transform without conscious effort, and the grace and redemption of the one true God.